THE NEXT ADVENTURE: PART II

November 16, 2021

We knew so little, back in May of 2015, when we installed and fired up our first coffee roaster. We spent a day driving around the Carolinas looking for a $2 part to finish the install. We dropped our first 20 pound batch directly onto the floor. We had exactly 0 hours of roasting experience on the Summit Coffee staff. We knew so little, some 42 months ago.

But for every drop of knowledge we lacked, we had one thing on the other side of the scale: a sense of adventure. In fact, I wrote a journal that May entitled “The Next Adventure,” and my wife, Tyler, sketched our beautiful San Franciscan roaster onto some black-and-gold shirts that we also marked with that three-word credo.

The next adventure, as it turns out, was a 6-year story that comes to an end today, on November 16, 2021. This morning we fired up the machine before the sun rose one last time, and roasted more batches of coffee than on any day in our history. And tonight, Donovan will let that San Franciscan cool down, give it one last great cleaning, and unplug it from the wall for the final time.

The Next Adventure, in most ways, is akin to any great story. There’s a desire to start, and perhaps an objective, and some ideas of what may happen. Certainly there are characters and central figures, and even some conflict that may occur. But rarely, when a story begins, do we know when or how or why the story ends. And this is where this story ends.

Some of the characters from those early chapters are still with Summit — brother Tim and I, of course, but also Andrew and Dave. Other characters have come and gone — Evan, our first roaster, spent more time on the SF than anyone but Donovan. And the story ends with new characters — Donovan, and Woo, and Parker, and Olivia — ready for the sequel.

There are a remarkable number of constants in this 42-month story. One machine, one building. Our hallmark coffee blend, Basecamp, has remained our best seller every week since 2015. And our first relationship coffee, from Rutas del Inca in Peru, is about to land in our warehouse for the 7th year running.

There’s been conflict. A fire, in 2017, nearly burned the building down — when the smoke cleared finally after some 40 blinding minutes, about 90 bees evidently hiding somewhere in our warehouse had gone belly up around the production floor. There was a beetle infestation, too, that ruined some 3,000 pounds of coffee. And there was some weird shit in coffee — rocks, screws, popcorn kernels.

There have been so many wins — the Charleston Coffee Cup, the State Fair, the Cup Tasters championship in Nashville. There have been a lot of losses, too (I have a weird desire to land Summit on one of those Best coffee in the U.S. lists … no luck, yet!).

The darkest chapter of this story, like in so many others, was the spring of 2020. Turns out when businesses close during a pandemic, they don’t need to order coffee. Suddenly, we had a week when we roasted 21 batches of coffee — approximately 6 hours of work — and our own cafes and e-commerce subscribers were just about our only customers.

But when you sign up for adventure, you commit to something more than a smooth trajectory. We knew so little, in 2015, but we had a surplus of the one thing that matters the most. Adventure has ups and downs, highs and lows, successes and failures. Adventure takes working together — when random people have packaged coffee, or helped fulfill orders — and grinding it out alone, as Donovan has done three days in a row long after the sun sets.

The Next Adventure, Part II, starts this Thursday when our new Mill City 30kg machine lands in our warehouse and takes Summit to another level. But this journal isn’t about that — this is about the first story in this series.

To everyone who’s worked with us, to everyone who’s bought a bag of coffee, to everyone who’s read this journal, and to everyone who has either directly or indirectly fueled our adventure, thank you. This has been a team effort, a team success, a team adventure.

Onto the next one. But for now, pour one out for the OG.