Where are you going and where have you been? We drank a lot of old weird coffee during the band touring years. We were doing a lot of driving around, waking up in new cities, and pretty much living out of the van. We’d hit up truck stops and gas stations where the coffee would range from tasteless brown water to rough brown sludge.
But every now and again we’d get a local tip on the best coffee in a given town, and sometimes the band would be rewarded with a decent cup! This was the pathway to good coffee. Also, we had some awesome LITTLE AMPS, which were very easy to carry.
We got into GREAT coffee a few years later, living in Oakland and watching the small roasteries out there open up and start serving coffee like we’d not had before: intense, flavorful, fresh and with no sign of the roasty burned taste sold at the big coffee stores. The (then) micro roasters like Ritual and Blue Bottle were able to get better beans and make them sing! We found that we didn’t need milk or sugar; the coffee was naturally totally sweet.
Soon we were home roasting and started getting fanatic about learning what it takes to get that kind of taste in the cup: cultivation, elevation, harvest, processing, shipping, storage, roasting, and preparation. When every step is in harmony with the others and perfectly executed, you get the aWEsoME fresh coffee.
We got crash courses from formidable roasteries. In 2009, we moved back to Harrisburg, PA and bought a little commercial roaster and several hundred pounds of the best beans we could source. After lots and lots of time doing business stuff and coffee stuff, we were ready to go. The rest is/will be history! Also, we do still have some of those little amps, and we just acquired a rock basement if you want to, you know, Rock Out.