SHOP LOCAL. You see it on signs and in emails, encouraging you to keep your dollars in the community where you live, support small businesses, and (what’s not said) contribute to state and local sales tax collections. And truly, I’ve thought about this a lot over the past twenty years because I realize what a difference it can make for just one person to buy a pound of coffee from DoubleShot instead of at the grocery store. You might not think so, but each and every pound of coffee we sell is crucial and notable to our continued existence. But what’s going on at DoubleShot is a little different than other places around town.

When you shop for trinkets or for things produced by huge corporations, you have options. I might see a cool chess board at a local shop, but it’s easy to search that brand online and find a better price or a different model I like more. (If you know me at all, you are aware that I’d most likely take the idea to my wood shop and build my own chess board. If I played chess.) I might go to a big hardware store and see a drill I want, and it’s easy for me to shop online to find out if I can get it cheaper. This sort of thing happened to me in the Panama City airport. I had some time, so I was looking at wristwatches, and I tried one on that I really liked. But it was $450. Too much. I pulled out my phone and opened my amazon app and found it for $300.

Conversely, the last time I was in Flagstaff for an ultramarathon, I walked around the downtown, bouncing in and out of the shops, where I found a beautiful ceramic cup decorated with cherry blossoms, made by a local potter. They had four of them and each one was slightly different in its shape and coloration, so I picked out the one I liked best and bought it. It’s not something I could find online. And because I knew the artist’s name (Natalie Reed), I had somewhat of a personal connection to the piece, and I didn’t want to pay less than the asking price. I wanted to honor the potter’s work, and today I drink coffee from that cup and think of that story.

You can certainly shop coffee online, but if you want DoubleShot coffee, there are basically only two ways to get it, and both of them are directly from me. You might like a Java natural coffee I have from Montelin in Nicaragua. So you go online and search and find out that this is the only place you can get it. Or maybe you’re enjoying La Minita, so you do a Google search for that and find it all over the place. Some places cheaper than what I sell it for. But if you buy it, you’re going to find out how important the hand of the roaster is in the taste of the coffee. There’s only one DoubleShot, and you’ll never find coffee like ours anywhere else.

That being said, there are a lot of other reasons to consider how you spend your coffee money. When you purchase from local businesses, you’re supporting local employment. Do you appreciate the baristas at DoubleShot? You can help them keep their jobs by purchasing coffee and related coffee gear here. It may look like we’re rich and don’t need your dollars, but we absolutely do. This is a hard business, and when you’re like us and have uncompromising values, it’s even harder.

You think we’re a stalwart in Tulsa and the industry at large, and that we will be around forever after. But that’s not guaranteed. Any number of events could destroy this business. It could be eroding beneath our feet right now. There could be things happening behind the scenes that you don’t know about that could eventually mean the end of this thing you’ve come to accept as a part of your daily life. That means you should take every opportunity to buy and consume coffee from here while it’s available. And you should support the business whenever you have a need for coffee or coffee gear, because another dollar spent here instead of on Amazon or at Williams Sonoma will go further in helping us survive another year and keep that seat available to you another day.

You could walk through our shop and see a grinder you want. Pull out your phone and find it online cheaper (with free shipping, of course), and buy it from a faceless company that probably is having it drop shipped from the manufacturer instead of keeping it in stock like we do. But when you receive it and don’t know the best way to use it for our coffee, don’t know how to keep it clean and maintained, or have a warranty issue, make sure you go back to that faceless company online and ask them. Buy from me, and if you have a problem, we’ll fix it or replace it with no hassle. We’ll show you how to clean it and dial it in properly for whatever brewing methods you’re using at home. It’s called support, and it’s reciprocal.

What type of businesses do you want to support? A lot of companies are started by rich kids who don’t really have to learn how to do anything because they can hire people to do whatever needs to be done. A lot of those people aren’t in it for the love of the product, but rather investing in a company to try and increase their wealth. Are you looking to help a rich kid increase his wealth? Or do you invest in the idea of the American Dream? The DoubleShot was built one dollar at a time, one coffee bean at a time, with the hours and sweat and learning required to do everything you know us for. When I started the business in 2004, I didn’t know how to do anything. But I couldn’t hire someone to work on the espresso machine or coffee brewer when it broke down. I couldn’t pay someone to do marketing and graphic design and website development. I didn’t have the resources to seek out an interior designer or carpenter to build out the store. I had to learn to do all that myself, and put in the time to actually produce. This is a working coffee company. I built The Rookery out of a 170-year old dairy barn on purpose because I want our home to represent who we are. And we are a company with a work ethic.

I know coffee from all these years of experience, dabbling in every aspect, obsessed with every detail. And I want you to know coffee too. Because then you’ll better appreciate what you see in a bag of coffee beans and what you taste in a cup. The more you know, the more meaningful it is when you choose your coffee and consume the brew. That’s one of the main reasons I’m publishing The Coffee Purist. Not only do I expect you to come away in disbelief that so many wild things have happened over the course of my coffee career, but I hope you’ll conclude with a greater understanding and appreciation for what happens before the coffee finds its way into the barista’s hopper. (If you haven’t purchased a book yet, what are you waiting for? Pre-order one now at purist.coffee.)

Even at DoubleShot, which coffee you choose can have an outsized impact on our supply chain. All of our coffees are good, but farms like La Minita and Rio Negro are big factory farms owned by a vertically integrated Japanese tea company. I love La Minita, but whether I buy one sack or five hundred sacks of their coffee, it doesn’t make any difference because they have enough customers to sell their entire crop at a high price. When you choose to purchase coffee from some of the small farms like Bambito (owned by Priscilla), Montelin (Juan Ramon’s farm), Volcancitos (Sergio), Maduro (Ariel and Cristina), and a host of other producers you know I have a personal relationship with, it makes a much bigger impact. These coffee farmers are oftentimes producing coffee specifically for us, to my specifications. They are hoping to sell as much coffee as possible to me, because their only other alternative might be to sell it into the commercial coffee market, where they’ll make half as much per pound. Buying from a stand-up guy like Juan Ramon helps support his family, allowing him to invest more in his farm and improve his coffees, and it allows him to spend more money in his local economy. When he’s forced to sell coffee to big exporters that sell to those companies you see on the grocery store shelf, he’s often earning less money than it cost to produce the coffee. When I make a deal with a farm owner, I’m giving them a way out of that stressful cycle. I pay far greater than the commodity price, far more than it costs them to produce the coffee. I know this all sounds far fetched, but you don’t have to believe me; I had coffee producers, Cristina Garces and Ariel Montoya on the AA Cafe podcast when they were in Tulsa, visiting from Colombia, and they talked about it. It’s a long episode, but well worth a listen (or two). Go do that now: aacafe.org

Listen, I’m a country boy at heart. I grew up in the middle of a massive cornfield that stretches from Nebraska to Ohio. More often than not, I listen to country music. So it’s in my nature to be on the farm, to feel the texture of the leaves of coffee trees between my fingers and touch the soil that nourishes their roots. I become friends with the people I do business with. It’s not fair trade or some other certification, and I don’t even think of it as direct trade. It’s me forming friendships with people and developing mutual respect and trust in one another, so that they produce excellent coffees and I do them justice by roasting them properly and talking about the people who work so hard to produce them. The hard work and diligence on the farm continues in this very building.

You might feel good about your awful coffee purchase because a portion of the proceeds goes toward some worthy cause. But how can you be sure? Who is ensuring that money is used wisely? I’m skeptical of companies who put their philanthropy out front as a reason you should purchase from them. It’s playing on your emotions instead of providing you a quality product. Buy from someone you trust, like me, and I can assure you that we take care to look around and support the things I think are important. Like the arts in Tulsa. The schools near the farms we buy from. We created a micro-finance project years ago that continues to grow today and support needy farmers in Nicaragua. We’ve helped orphanages and community projects in poor parts of Colombia. We gave money to build water lines to a rural school so the kids would have clean drinking water. I paid for coffee pickers when I heard of a farmer who was ill and at risk of losing his farm. And we’re currently working on a larger project to help fund water wells in Ethiopia. We don’t normally talk about all the things we do, and I can’t even remember it all. Because I feel that responsible giving is really important, but shouldn’t be the reason you buy my coffee. It should be an undercurrent of what you feel but don’t necessarily need to know about. Buy from people you trust.

You can buy a pound of coffee off the grocery store shelf or from one of the big companies online that spend millions on marketing, and you’re supporting an industry that disrespects farmers. They lie, they cheat, and they sell the worst version of coffee on the planet. Or you can buy coffee from me, and know that your dollars are actually helping people in the tropics who need it, and the coffee will be top-notch.

What difference does it make? For every pound of coffee you buy, you’re actually making a moral decision. It doesn’t have to be that. You can just buy coffee from DoubleShot because it tastes good. But you’ll still know that I do everything I can to do the right things. Because you know me. Do you know the person who owns Community Coffee or Folgers or Dutch Bros? You may not have known that your coffee buying decisions were either hurting or helping people, but now you do.

And now you get to make that choice for yourself.