Honestly, I got into coffee completely by accident.
It started as a college job, working nights at a coffee shop in Nashvilles to pay the bills while I studied Spanish and French. I wanted to be a translator or working in foreign ambassadorial service.
Then I took six months off to study in Spain thinking I’d come back fluent and ready to chase that embassy work I'd been planning for. Instead, I realized I was so far behind everyone else in that field. They’d grown up speaking multiple languages, and had connections I didn't have. It just wasn't going to work for me.
So I came back to Nashville, a little lost, but the coffee company I'd been working for hired me back right away. I figured I'd get my bearings, figure out what was next.
And then they sent me to this conference.
The moment everything changed
It was 2010. The Barista Guild of America had just started doing educational conferences and certifications, and this was one of the very first. My boss thought it would be good training. I went, took the classes, passed the exam, and became one of the first BGA-certified baristas in the country.
I’d also walked away with the light bulb moment that there was a whole community of people choosing to make coffee a career. Not as a side gig or a placeholder. It was the thing they were building their lives around.
Seeing that, being around people who cared that much about craft and quality, made me realize this could be a real business. One I actually wanted to own and run.
I'd always been interested in entrepreneurship. I did DECA competitions in high school, built business plans, went to state and nationals for marketing pitches. But coffee? That wasn't even on my radar until that moment.
On the drive home, my friend and I started talking about opening our own coffee shop.
Wait, coffee can taste like this?
Not long after that, I started working at a place called Dose Coffee in Nashville. They were using beans from PT's Coffee Roasters in Topeka, Kansas. It was really high-quality stuff, roasted completely differently than what I'd been making at my previous job.
One day I tried this Panamanian coffee. Might've been a Geisha, might've been an Ethiopian. Honestly, I don't remember the specifics. What I remember is how it tasted.
Fresh blueberries. Bright, fruity, almost startlingly so. Nothing like the dark, roasty coffee I'd been brewing for years.
That was the first time I understood what coffee could be. Not just a caffeine delivery system, but something with actual flavor. Something worth paying attention to.
I've been chasing that feeling ever since.
Jumping head first into roasting and coffee competitions
Around this time, my friend and I started a training and consultation company called Beve. We were hired by a shop called Crema to train all their baristas, and eventually we merged with them.
Crema wanted to start roasting their own coffee, and even though I'd never roasted before, I was obsessed with the idea. I wanted to understand coffee from the ground up, control the process, bring out the best in these incredible beans we were sourcing.
My first year roasting, we entered the US Roasters Competition. We placed second in the country with this coffee from El Salvador called Finca Suiza.
I’ve tried to find that coffee again for years since. It's my white whale.
It tasted like fresh strawberries and crème brûlée—creamy, custardy, sweet. I've never had anything quite like it since, and I've tasted a lot of coffee. But that Finca Suiza? Still haunts me.
The next year, I competed again. Placed second in Roasters, third in the US Brewers Cup with a Geisha from Colombia.
These competitions taught me how to taste, how to articulate what made a coffee special, how to bring out the best in a bean. But more than that, they connected me to the people actually growing this stuff.
And that's where the story really starts to matter for me.
Meeting Jorge
By this point, my partners and I had opened our first shop and roastery Steadfast Coffee (a barista-forward shop) moved on from that, and opened our next shop, Good Citizen, with another group. With this new shop I ran a wholesale roasting program and continued building relationships with farmers.
In 2019, I went to Costa Rica with our importer. He thought it would be good for me to meet some producers, build relationships, taste coffee at the source.
We met this guy named Bram DeHoog who worked for the importer. He had just received samples from a brand new farmer that morning. Bram put out a full table for me to taste, and the last two coffees were completely different from everything else.
They were from a farm called Roble Negro, owned by a man named Jorge Ureña.
Most Costa Rican coffees taste bright, acidic, like tropical fruit. These tasted like licorice and red wine—full-bodied, rich, deep. Bram was shocked I liked them so much. He'd thrown them on the table just to see what I thought, not expecting me to pick them.
We changed our whole schedule to visit Jorge's farm. And when we got there, I understood why the coffee tasted different.
Jorge had come from banking and sustainability work. But he'd taken land that had been in his family and started growing coffee, all using regenerative practices. Walking around his farm, I saw things I'd never seen on a coffee farm before: a giant plot of squash in the middle of the coffee trees. Cattle, pigs, goats, all living among the plants. Natural waterways he'd redirected to protect the reserves from any runoff.
The soil was so lush you could scoop it up in your hand and it would just fall apart. It was full of life.
That's when it clicked for me. This wasn't just about finding good coffee. It was about the people growing it, the risks they were taking, the care they were putting into the land. Jorge was trying something new, something that went against conventional farming wisdom, and the result was coffee unlike anything else in Costa Rica.
I bought from him every single year after that. And I paid him 5% on top of what the green coffee cost, so he could reinvest in his land. Eventually, he bought a 200-year-old cypress tree to use for shade, and he dedicated it to me. Put a plaque in the ground that says "Good Citizen Coffee."
I didn't know he was going to do that. When they FaceTimed me to show me, I'll be honest—it hit me pretty hard.
Building something bigger
My relationship with Jorge shaped everything about how I built Good Citizen.
My goal from day one had been to create a business people could actually have coffee careers in. Not just jobs, but real growth and opportunity. I wanted to build something substantial, something fast enough that my team could grow with it.
But after visiting Jorge's farm, the mission became about more than just building a good company. It became about supporting the people who make this whole thing possible.
We called the company Good Citizen because we committed to paying 5% extra on every green coffee purchase to invest in regenerative farming. Not as charity, but as partnership. Because farmers like Jorge are the ones taking the real risks—planting new varieties, trying new processes, caring for entire communities of harvesters and pickers, stewarding the land for the next generation.
The weight of that responsibility is enormous. And the stories behind each coffee, the real relationships, the friendships, the dedication, those are the most beautiful stories to tell.
We sold Good Citizen in 2025, but that philosophy is still what drives me.
Connecting farmers to roasters
Mostly recently, I've been working with Bridging Tables as an importer. Our goal is to connect roasters directly with farmers and finance those relationships closer to the source. We pay earlier in the export process than traditional importers, and we don't act as a barrier between roasters and producers. It's built on transparency and relationship building, putting the right people together and making it happen.
I also got Q-Grader certification through Bridging Tables. A Q-Grader is basically a certified "sommelier of coffee," someone trained to objectively taste and score coffee quality. There are only about 500 of us in the U.S.
I'd always known I could get this certification, but I didn't feel the business need until I was on the import side. Because when you're qualifying coffee and telling a roaster "yes, this is as good as they say it is," there's a lot of money on the line. You need that verified authority behind your opinion.
Since getting certified, I've tasted around 750 unique coffees in just under a year. And every single one teaches me something.
And that's what I'm bringing to Folk.
Why I’m building Folk
Here's what I've learned after 20 years in coffee: we make it way more complicated and exclusionary than it needs to be.
Coffee isn't hard to brew well at home. You don't need to be a massive coffee nerd to truly enjoy really good coffee. You just need good water, a decent grinder, boiling water, a brewing method, and the right ratio. That's it. It's not mystical or complex.
It’s really more about taking the time to actually enjoy it.
My perfect morning with coffee? It's not rushing. It's not needing it the moment I wake up. It's getting the kids to school and sitting outside with my wife, taking time to actually savor it. Slowing down. Making it our moment.
That's what I want Folk to be. Not just good coffee, but a reason to pause. It’s about the shared experience of discovering it together. Because here's the thing, unmemorable cups lead to unmemorable days. And life's too short to miss what makes it meaningful.
Folk is my way of sharing the coffees I'm genuinely excited about. The ones I'm tasting through Bridging Tables, the ones with real stories behind them, the ones from farmers like Jorge who are taking risks and trying new things.
Each month, we send two coffees that score 86 points or higher—that's the threshold where the care and hard work from the producer really shows up in the cup. They're rare, often small-batch. By the time I buy one I love, there's usually only enough to share with a few thousand people.
And I think that makes sharing them even more meaningful.
Every coffee comes with approachable tasting guides that help you notice what's already in your cup. Not pretentious coffee-snob language, just plain talk about what to look for and why it matters. Because you already know how to taste. You just need someone to help you put words to it.
Success for me is nailing a full year of coffees. Where we get to tell each farmer's story deeply and meaningfully. Where thousands of people get to taste these rare coffees and understand the hard work behind them: the risks the producer took, the care they put into the land, the reason this particular coffee tastes the way it does.
I want to give producers a great outlet to sell exceptional coffee, and I want to give you a joyful experience drinking it.
At the end of the day, coffee is special. But it's never more special than people: the farmers, the roasters, the baristas, the folks drinking it at home and texting me about how wild that Kenyan coffee tasted.
That's what Folk is really about. Not just rare coffee, but the shared experience of discovering it together.
