Writing a book seemed like a Pheidippidean task. One beyond my endurance, beyond my attention span, maybe beyond my abilities. But as we hit the twenty-year mark of the DoubleShot, I started looking back over my career and thinking about all the crazy and remarkable things that have happened. I've grown and matured and found a deeper well of patience and a team that supports what I do. I've found a rhythm to life, and it has allowed me to stop and think for once, not about what I should be doing, but about what happened and how I got here.
And so I've written. I've written things that no one knows about. I've written things I'd forgotten about. I've never been a big talker (I talk big but I don't talk a lot), and I don't particularly enjoy telling people about things I've done. But it was time, and I dug deep. I went back to the beginning, even earlier, and I explained my thoughts, my experiences, my perspective. I'm fortunate that I started journaling in my early twenties and have filled nearly thirty diaries with a bazillion words describing everything from the mundane day to my wildest dreams.
But this is more than the story of my coffee career. This is a book that will tell you what coffee is, where it comes from, where it came from, how it gets from tropical farms to your coffee table. I've tried to lay out everything you need to know to really appreciate coffee. So that whether you're brewing bad grocery store coffee or sipping on some of the finest beans in the world, your coffee experiences will be better by being fully informed.
Fans of our shop have been looking at me for years wondering what the hell was going on inside my skull, and I could never explain it. But I'm going to explain it. I'm going to tell you how I learned to run and how that taught me to run a business. I'm going to explain what it was like living without utilities for three-and-a-half years. Why I slept in a plastic chair on the streets of Long Beach. How I barely kept from peeing my pants with a pistol pointed at my forehead in Guatemala. And I'll tell you what I learned from all those experiences, and more.
It's not just my story, though. My mission from the start was about serving great coffee to people who appreciated it. Without them, there is no DoubleShot. Without them I have no purpose. This book is an extension of the coffee, if you will. It's a rear-view explanation of all the events you may have been a part of, or wondered about, or heard rumors about, or didn't know about. Where there were gaps in the knowledge they have been filled.
One day, heading to lunch, I saw a clean-cut young guy walking toward me. Straight toward me, as in awkwardly bee-lining for me. When he got close, he told me I make the best coffee on the planet. He told me he was a huge fan, and had been coming in since we were in the old location. I'm probably better at reading negative reviews than I am at taking compliments, so I clumsily thanked him and said something like, "We try hard." But that guy is folk. He's why I wrote this book. Maybe you've been buying coffee from us online. Maybe you've never heard of DoubleShot Coffee Company. That's OK too, because no one ever heard of us until they did. And when you know, you know.
If coffee is a big part of your life (even more if DoubleShot is a big part of your life), this is a field guide for you. If you're even thinking of one day having a shop of your own, read here first. You might find it indispensable. If nothing else, I promise you'll enjoy it.
— Brian Franklin, Roastmaster, DoubleShot Coffee Company
Brian Franklin is the founder, owner, and roastmaster of DoubleShot Coffee Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Franklin opened the DoubleShot in 2004, after a five-year career as a personal trainer and a couple years grinding out the foundations and support needed to get his foot in the door of the specialty coffee industry. Living in a run-down apartment without utilities in the salad days, the roastmaster proved his pluck, and a faithful group of unconventional characters formed the core of a diverse customer group known as DoubleShot Folk. Coffee-centric, staunch, and single-minded, Franklin earned his purist reputation early on for his desire to serve coffee unmuddied by milk and sugar, and his unwillingness to compromise his standards in coffee or in life.
With a background in sport, Franklin grew into an ultra-endurance athlete, where hours spent on a trail run or in the saddle of a mountain bike forged in him the attributes of patience, toughness, and perseverance. But many of the finer details of business management came out of his countless crashes, failures, DNFs, injuries, and occasional victories over the course of a racing career that has spanned well over half a lifetime.
Intent on knowing the people who cultivate the products he serves, Franklin began traveling to coffee farms within a year of opening the doors of the DoubleShot. In his journeys around the globe, he acquired knowledge and know-how through experiences, some of which were harrowing, all of which combined to change his outlook on the world. From staring down the barrel of a gun on a volcán mountaintop to a practical immersion in fluid dynamics in his half-joking creation of the DoubleShot Space Program, Franklin has lived his life in an astute awareness, acquiring experiential wisdom far and wide.
Attracting attention for his earnestness as well as his foolhardy disregard for conventions or protocol, the DoubleShot, with Franklin at the helm, has been the subject of documentary, popular sitcom, and frequent bouts of controversy. Distractions notwithstanding, it's been a career obsessed with a simple mission: to serve excellent coffee to as many people as possible. As that number of people has grown exponentially, Franklin's understanding of the potentiality of excellent coffee has bloomed to a seemingly unattainable standard.
"Brian Franklin recaps his career as founder of the DoubleShot Coffee Company, a celebrated cafe and gourmet coffee-roasting operation in Tulsa. After much do-it-yourself experimentation roasting his own beans, the author realized that people might pay for coffee that tastes good without milk and sugar and embarked on a shoestring startup odyssey—scrounging for money, working endless hours, gaining skills and savvy, and almost going to war over soured business deals. The book also serves as a colorful, sometimes dramatic travelogue of Franklin's journeys in search of exotic beans from India to Guatemala, where he encountered coffee growers who had formed a death squad to kill bandits who were trying to extort them and was himself robbed at gunpoint. The work is also a testament to one man's uncompromising, almost religious commitment to fresh-roasted brew that transcends the desire for profit. The author's reminiscences expose the commercial niceties and corruptions of the coffee business—like payola scams in which coffee critics confer stellar reviews in exchange for lucrative 'sponsorships' by coffee companies—while diving deep into the art and science of creating great coffee in richly redolent prose. People in the trade as well as coffee afficionados of all stripes will savor the result.A tasty, stimulating look at the coffee business that pairs canny life lessons with caffeinated connoisseurship." — Kirkus Indie
