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Reflections
At Loam Coffee, we’ve always supported trail building in small ways behind the scenes. Most of the time, that involved sending coffee to work parties for trail builders to enjoy. Other times we’d send bags of coffee to be raffled off for fundraisers for trail projects. We also support a small non-profit trail building organization monthly. But now that Loam Coffee and Trail Builder Magazine are figuratively under the same roof, we’re leaning into this more.
It’s been a week since I announced that I’m now at the helm of Loam Coffee. It’s been a touch over two weeks since that change took place. In the midst of it all, we had already planned a family trip to Santa Barbara, California. The timing actually couldn’t have been any better.
It was almost three years ago when I sold Loam Coffee. I started Loam in 2015 and ran it for five years. Feeling burned out and needing a change of pace, I broke the company into two pieces and sold each part. With great relief, I moved on and threw myself into other endeavors and startups. But I couldn’t shake Loam Coffee.
Interestingly, the older I get, the more I opt for convenience. Guilty as charged. Back in the day, if I had to relocate, whether, across the country or town, I’d recruit an army of friends, and we’d pack a U-Haul truck and do it ourselves? Now? I wouldn’t move without hiring a moving company. I used to love camping … you know, leaky air mattresses, the hard cold ground, and all the work of setting up camp and then breaking it down. I’ve become weak. Soft.
Access to trails is not evenly distributed from community to community. In some places, your town is your trailhead. All you need to do is simply hop on your bike at home and pedal over to one of a myriad of trails nearby. One typically has to drive 45-60 minutes to get to a trail system in places like Portland. While that’s slowly changing with a few new little trail systems within the metro area, we’re definitely not a place where our city is the trailhead.
For the first several years of Loam Coffee’s existence, we never had a van or anything like that. Whenever we did events, we’d move stuff around in my SUV, set up tents, etc. But that all changed once Nacho the MTB Van came into my life … What that also means is every time I head out of town on a road trip with Nacho, I grab a couple of different coffee brew method devices to test out. I have a cabinet full of various brew methods at home. Recently, I made such a trip and brought along with me the Cuppamoka by Wacaco.
