I have always wondered what the transition is like to turn a hobby into a business. It has always sounded like a great time to me. In the first couple months of 2024 I decided it was now or never and went for it.
First I needed a roaster. Since I was starting on a serious budget and didn’t know how much business I could drum up right away, I decided to buy a trusty Fresh Roast SR800 with an extension tube capable of roasting a mammoth 8oz of green coffee at once! The reason for the little fluid bed roaster can be partly described in How I Became a Coffee Roaster, where I lay out how I got started roasting coffee and how I fell in love with Fresh Roasts simple but effective roasters. The fluid bed roasting process is hard to beat for simplicity and gives such a nice clean bright profile.
After buying a roaster and getting reacquainted with roasting on it, I started to buy some 5lb bags of green coffee from a coffee importer called Copan Trade. Then came the best part, developing coffee that I was happy with and building roast profiles to highlight each one of those coffees. There were a lot of days that I would roast for an hour or so and carefully document every roast on a notepad and then bag it up, label it, and wait very impatiently for at least 24hrs to do a first cupping and see what I had done wrong in the roast and what I could try to improve on. ( I’ll be honest, the coffee rarely made it the for a whole 24hrs before I had to try it at least once).
The next step and the part I was dreading the most was picking a name for our business and trying to figure out what we wanted our bags to look like. This is where Jenna came in. I knew that without her artistic talents and slightly off the wall brain, ( I mean that as a compliment) I was going to crash and burn on this front rather impressively. We started brain storming and trying our hand at learning some very basic graphic design skills. When I say we, I mean Jenna did the work and I offered suggestions. When I think back to some of the business names that we thought about using and some of the logos we mocked up it makes me shudder. I will take that information to the grave! After many fails and input from friends and family we settled on Good Life Coffee Roastery which is a play on the old Nebraska state slogan, Nebraska the Good Life. We both loved the name and decided to stake our brand on it.
Now I had coffee ready to sell, a business name, and after some work had stickers for the front of our bags. Next thing we needed was customers. That’s where family, friends and church came in. We started telling our friends we were open for business and they started ordering, maybe at first it was just to be nice and then kept ordering because they liked the coffee. At least that’s what I hoped! Soon we had several families on a 1 or 2 bag subscription every week and we would take it to church every Sunday. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but 4 or 5 bags a week kept me roasting for quite a few hours with my very little beast of a roaster.
Oh, and did I forget to mention that I was roasting at the dining room table pushed up against the wall under a window with a fan mounted in the window for ventilation? Great times. Within a month or two I realized that wasn’t a long term solution so I moved to the basement. Luckily our basement is quite bare and very unfinished so we have plenty of room. I built a long high table for roasting and packaging, and with some 10 inch ductwork and a duct fan managing to vent 80% of the smoke and the delicious smell of roasting coffee outside. That’s where I am roasting today, although we are building a coffee studio in the backyard that I can’t wait to move into.
After a few months of roasting on the little SR800 I realized that If I wanted to keep growing this business and be efficient with roasting, I needed to invest in a bigger roaster. I had my eye on what I wanted, an Artisan 3E from Coffee Crafters. The 3E was capable of handling 3lbs in 9 minutes, so it was a massive improvement. But with the increased roasting capacity came a new learning curve. With this roaster there were more ways to monitor heat and airflow and the actual bean temp inside the roasting chamber. I learned the importance in RoR (Rate of Rise) and the difference in roast times on the same bean and the impact it had on the final flavor profile. Safe to say, I was in my happy place and nerding out on coffee!
Now we are selling coffee at two different hardware stores, have a website, are building a stand alone coffee roastery, and are slowly growing month by month. We’re always updating something. It might be the stickers for the bags or a slightly different roast on a coffee. We have a lot of fun. I am excited to see where we will be in another year from now. I hope some of you find this interesting because its been fun summarizing the building of this business that I am so passionate about, to share with the world.