The story of Classified Coffee started in 2016 when a co-worker of mine, introduced me to home roasted coffee. They told me all about where to get the beans and how they started with a skillet on a stove top. After trying a sample of his home roast, I was sold on freshly roasted beans. I had always liked coffee from even a young age, when I would sip my mom’s cold, cream & sugar laden, coffee because it was like a sweet treat. As I began traveling as an adult, I would always try the local shop/roaster. My co-worker’s home roast was up there with the best I could remember drinking.

Skip ahead 6+ months and I found myself at a new employer, where I started to talk coffee as an ice breaker to meet my new people around the office. We started a “coffee club” that through, conversation and laughter, created friendships and business relationships that helped us all. I decided this was the perfect group to start my own home roasting adventure. I started roasting for the group’s daily brew. Some were really bad but many were very good. As the popularity of my roasts intensified, I found myself roasting almost every night to keep up with how much we were drinking. Recognizing the swift increase in demand, we used our collective engineering skills to build a larger scale roaster. It was built from a clean 55-gallon oil drum, some perforated sheet metal, and salvaged parts from my propane grill. It wasn’t pretty or efficient but it did the job of making larger quantities of great coffee.

The final chapter that launched CC’s beginning was the 2020 pandemic that sent us all to work from home, bringing our coffee time we enjoyed together to a halt. My entrepreneurial spirit has always wanted to find something which created a positive impact on people’s lives. The heart of Classified Coffee is not to only provide a great cup to drink, but to create an inviting space around that cup to bring people together to experience the consumption of life. Classified Coffee provides the “coffee club” belonging, we all desire.