When I was ten years old, I designed a mansion. It was really more of a castle, but when I took drafting class in high school, I fleshed it out into my dream home — something akin to the mythical Wayne Manor.

I was born with an affliction: a poor kid with expensive taste. I remember, at around thirteen years old, going on a shopping trip to the mall with my mom to buy a pair of khaki pants. I found a pair that I loved, but they were way out of our price range. So we spent the rest of the day going from one department store to the next trying on less-expensive khakis that I’m sure were perfectly fine. But I’d already made up my mind. And apparently I was a brat.

After I started my first company out of college and transitioned from football to adventure sports, I decided I needed a four-wheel drive SUV. So I hightailed it to the Land Rover dealership to purchase the safari vehicle of my youthful dreams. During the two years I spent out west before returning to Tulsa to open DoubleShot, I basically lived out of that Discovery. I saw some amazing places and learned to live a simple life, but I still harbored the dream of being rich. And famous. My business plan boldly forecasted rapidly escalating sales, following a path I predicted in my early-20s: that I would be a millionaire by age 33.

From 2004-2007, I lived very primitively. And by the end of my thirty-third year of existence, despite expectations for my life’s fortune, I was destitute. I’d grown intimate with poverty, dodging debt collectors and the repo man. Still to this day, my fight-or-flight instinct kicks in whenever my phone rings. But I’ve subsisted by escaping into the wilderness or a good book, making things instead of buying them, self-reliant in all things, finding pleasure in simplicity and nuance.

I spent a couple of years peering into that other world. My girlfriend at the tail end of my 30s lived in a mansion, took airlines instead of long drives, and opted for luxury accommodations in her travels. She didn’t think twice about dining at expensive restaurants and could easily afford extravagances I’d only dreamed of. I’d learned it was difficult to be happy when you can’t pay the bills. But during that period of my life, I discovered that satisfaction comes from earning, and there’s more delight to be found in small luxuries than extravagant ones. 

I can spend hours in a creek bed picking up rocks. Sit in front of that wonderful Moran at Gilcrease staring off into a painted landscape that takes my imagination on a meandering journey to a place of freedom and serenity. I cherish a good book more than a night on the town. And an amazing cup of coffee … I wouldn’t trade it for the best wine in the world.

“Affordable luxuries,” we call those. Even the most expensive coffees we’ve ever sold don’t hold a candle to the price (per milliliter) of many folks’ everyday wine. We have an idea of what coffee should cost and it’s not the same as our idea of what things like wine should cost. Wine almost always comes in the same size bottle, so at least you can compare one to another. Coffee bags have gotten smaller, with most companies selling 12-ounce bags or the new trend of 10 ounces, usually for the price of our 16-ounce bag of coffee, if not more

Oftentimes when I drink wine, I think all winemakers must’ve gone to the same school. It’s like that in coffee too, but our school sucks. Roasters tend to be baristas who got promoted (like a bartender being promoted to vintner) or business owners who got the automated system (I don’t know if there are wine-making machines that you can dump grapes into and then let the computer do the rest). Roast profiles all copy each other, probably letting AI do the job, and produce a bunch of coffee that might taste good to some judge at a Coffee Quality Institute event but doesn’t taste good to me.

It’s a tough business, I’ve learned. Now, I’m not in it for riches. I gave up that dream a long time ago. I don’t want a boat or a membership at the country club. You don’t have to worry; I won’t show up at your cocktail party. (I wouldn’t even have anything to wear.) No, I do this for an entirely different reason. I do it because I actually love coffee and everything it stands for.

But let’s take a step back.

Coffee grounds are simply smashed-up coffee beans, which are the roasted seeds of coffee cherries. They grow on trees in the tropics, and the best ones are at high elevation on mountainsides in places like Boquete, Panama and Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia. It’s even grown inland from some of your favorite tourist destinations in Mexico and Costa Rica.

Until global warming creeps up into the Rockies, we’re probably going to have to continue buying coffee from the tropics. Except for Hawaii, the United States is not in the tropics. So, apart from over-hyped Kona blends, we aren’t able to grow our own coffee. I travel to places like Colombia, Nicaragua, and India in order to get to know the land and the people who are responsible for the broad range of coffees I roast. Like the people who grow the coffees, each one has unique characteristics, bringing the aromatics from these exotic origins to your morning cup.

You probably don’t pay any attention to the commodity markets. Or tax rates. When a vote comes around for a third-penny sales tax, you probably don’t even know or care what a third-penny is. So I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you don’t know what tariffs really are, and you might even think the US government is levying these taxes against other nations.

Maybe you like the idea of tariffs. Maybe you think we can bring manufacturing back to the US if we make imported goods really expensive. Everything you see at Walmart could be produced in our nation's factories, built by American hands. Perhaps you’d like to have a job on an assembly line. Probably pays pretty well, right? Maybe then we can isolate ourselves from the rest of the world and create a homogenous society like the pilgrims always dreamed of.

Tariffs are taxes charged to people in the United States who import goods from other countries. I pay tariffs when I import coffee from producing countries. I’m paying tariffs on The Coffee Purist book, which is being produced in China. When I buy coffee from other importers, they pay the tariffs. But guess what. That increases the cost per pound, so they charge me and I charge you. Trickle-down economics, Reagan might call it. We haven’t felt the full impact of tariffs yet because we’re all still selling through pre-tariff inventory, but little by little it’s creeping in and you’re going to take it on the jaw.

While the commodity market (a financial market that speculates in oil, minerals, agriculture products, etc.) plays a large role in the price of commercial coffee (think big brands like Folgers, Maxwell House, Starbucks, etc.), those traders only occasionally provide a base for differentials in higher-end specialty coffees like mine. I happen to be friends with most of the producers I buy from, so I pay them more-or-less what they ask, which is often double what the commercial market is paying. As the commodity market has risen over the past year, the high price of commercial coffee has driven up the costs of these big brands, and the rising tide lifts all the boats. Thank goodness alcohol consumption is on the decline. Perhaps we’ll collectively have the budget to spend more on coffee. (See graphic.)

But beware. Do your research and you’ll find that nearly every coffee roaster in the US claims to have relationships with the folks who produce their coffee. I’m not sure if everyone is simply using the same AI bot to write the “about us” section on their website, or if they lack the integrity to tell you the truth about their “ethical” sourcing. But very few have actually been to the places where their coffee is grown and even fewer know the people who grow it. If they did, they certainly wouldn’t hide behind names like “Southern Weather” or “Monarch.” Perhaps they would write the name of the producer on the bag. Or some other foreign word that causes you to try and pronounce it in your head over and over again, e.g. Lah Mee Nee Tuh, Bam Bee Toh, Moan Tay Leen, etc. (Those are farm names.)

With escalating prices, due to tariffs and commodity markets, a lot of “specialty coffee” roasters are choosing to buy lower-quality coffee in order to keep their prices in check. That’s an easy thing to do, particularly when you’re not friends with the producers. I could simply call one of the big importers and ask them to send me samples of a few big commercial lots, and even though the coffee wouldn’t taste as good, most consumers are price sensitive and care less about quality than value. If you look around at any coffee shop (mine included), you’ll see that most people are consuming coffee with milk and sugar and flavorings. (We only have chocolate — and even though most people prefer it, ours isn’t chocolate-flavored syrup; it’s actual chocolate). Milk and sugar and flavorings mask the taste of bad coffee. Bad coffee is the result of laziness, ignorance, or prioritizing money over quality. If our “specialty coffee” roasters continue to pay low prices and purchase low quality coffee for their production roasts, blending to hide the defects and the farmers, the small producers around the world who are trying to elevate their craft will have no incentive to continue striving for quality. And that will be a HUGE loss.

I do my best to honor the farms where the coffee comes from and the people who work hard to produce the coffees. I’ve tried like hell to develop relationships with people around the world who I trust to produce excellent coffee and who believe in the same ethics of quality, hard work, and integrity. I love the craft that coffee can be — using our hands to care for the coffee plants on the farm and to pick the coffee cherries off the trees when they are ripe. To feel the coffee on the drying bed or the fermentation tank to determine its readiness. Hand-sorting coffee beans for quality, removing those beans that might taint our delicious brew. Even loading the coffee into bags at the mill and carrying those bags on men’s shoulders to load into a truck or container. My hands turn knobs and push levers, pulling the trier to see how the coffee is progressing through the roast. I roast by hand and I use my fingers to comb the quakers out of the cooling bin as it spreads hot beans over a high-speed fan. I love a good hand-made pourover. It’s the way Juan Ramon makes me coffee when I’m at his farm (Montelin) in Mosonte, Nicaragua. That’s how I make my coffee every morning when I wake up, even using a hand grinder instead of electric. It’s the manual nature of it all that draws me to it. I’m blue collar through and through. But I have expensive taste.

When people tell me they don’t like coffee, I say I don’t either. Because I can guarantee that the same coffee they didn’t like, I also don’t like. I’m not sure where a good price point would be for that commodity coffee. I suspect most producers are breaking even around $2 per pound, so for sustainability’s sake, it must be higher than that. But with the commodity market fluctuating around $4, it’s pushed specialty coffee prices into new territory. Specialty coffee is not commercial coffee. We are not Starbucks or Folgers. So what is the right price for specialty coffee? Right now, I’m paying a huge range of prices for coffee. Frankly, the cost of living is different everywhere I go. That’s part of the reason Hawaiian coffees are so expensive and Vietnamese coffees are so cheap. Living in Panama is not the same as living in Nicaragua. Hell, I could live like a king in Bolivia. So each producer asks me for a different price. I want them all to be successful and continue improving their quality each year. So I pay it. Do I think specialty coffee prices are too high right now? No, I think we’re used to paying too little. We all need to get accustomed to the idea that inexpensive coffee is not good coffee.

We have no way of knowing what’s happening on the local level for coffee producers, but I can tell you that exporters and cooperatives have power over small producers. So even when you see the C-market soaring, that may not trickle down to the farm level. When you buy coffee, whether you like it or not, you’re making an impact by supporting either low quality or high quality, either commercial or specialty. When you support low quality, you’re feeding into a system that doesn’t care about people, only about money. If you care about people, I’d suggest you carefully consider your purchases. (If you’re reading this, ignorance is no longer an excuse.)

Coffee bean prices at DoubleShot are going up. I’m paying more money to producers than I ever have. And since I’m not rich and privy to loopholes in the tariff assessments, we’re going to have to continue paying extortive taxes to the federal government. But I don’t see these prices ever coming down. Even though it pains me to have to charge my customers so much more money for excellent coffee, I’m happy that the farmers are finally making the profit they deserve. Our coffee has gotten better over the years because of access to better beans, acquisition of better equipment, and more experience roasting different types of coffees from all over the world. I’ve just gotten better at it. Better equals more value, and more value costs more money.

It’s still an affordable luxury.