The Coffee Ride Shop Visit: Do Good (With Coffee) – Hailey Moore

The Coffee Ride has ridden over 30,000 miles delivering coffee by bike. Since founding the business in 2014, owner Josh Crane has continued to push the envelope for using the business as a tool do to good, coffee is just the vehicle. Read on for Hailey Moore‘s shop visit to The Coffee Ride and an in-depth look at a small business that’s never content to coast.

“Coffee’s not really my passion,” said Josh Crane on a recent breezy spring morning, the sky turbid with a thin cloud layer, Boulder’s distinctive Flatirons in view. This was surprising to hear given that we were drinking cortados at a picnic table outside of the coffee roasting headquarters and café space for the company that Crane founded and operates.

“I love coffee,” Crane continued. “But I’m passionate about bikes and all these other things. [Coffee] is just the vehicle, right? So that’s why I feel like I’ve never burnt out on it.”

In talking with Crane, it sounded like he’d had plenty of opportunities to burn out on coffee since he started The Coffee Ride, his coffee roasting company, in 2014. But after more than a decade-long trajectory, punctuated by the extreme ups and downs familiar to any small-business owner, TCR seems to have found its sweet spot, and Crane—who practically vibrates with the energy of someone who drinks a lot of coffee—seems to have more ambition now than ever for what the business can be.

Crane was born and raised in Milwaukee but said he had always felt the pull of the mountains (“ I don’t know how I grew up in Wisconsin.”). After getting his business degree, Crane finally made the move out to Colorado in the mid 2000s, cobbling together side gigs in Breckenridge so that he could spend his free time snowboarding and mountain biking. He later made the move down to Boulder to work in a hospital’s lab and take a crack at getting into med school.

Crane describes his motivation to study medicine as trying to find a career that epitomized the balance of doing something “smart and good.” But, while working at the lab and taking a few prerequisite courses, Crane said that one of the doctors on staff talked him out of pursuing the grueling path.

(Single) Origins

A lifelong cyclist, while regrouping following his abandoned med school plans, Crane landed a job at The Pro’s Closet, heading the photography department, in the company’s early days. On paper, working in cycling for a cyclist should be a dream job, but Crane recalls that, at some point, the corporate nature of the work clouded his rose-tinted lenses—his bike commute to and from the office, versus his time spent on the clock, was always the best part of his day. In an attempt to enliven the corporate vibes, Crane took up the mantle of being the company’s unofficial self-described “positivity personnel.” He helped initiate weekly staff group rides and, along with another employee, Jacob, who had a family connection at Spy House Coffee in Minneapolis, started an informal morning coffee meet-up in the company’s break room.

By this time in the early 2010s, coffee was well into its third-wave era; glass beakers and pour-over cones that looked like matériel filched from the chemistry lab became de rigueur café equipment, and bags of whole roasted beans advertised their contents as tasting like everything—toasted almonds, jasmine tea, dark chocolate, burnt toast, green apple, bourbon—but coffee. Crane had started developing his own single-origin tastes during his long days of studying for the MCATs and credits the soft white-noise thrum of a coffee shop as being one of the few settings in which he could harness his distractible focus. By the time he was working at The Pro’s Closet, he had taken up home roasting as a hobby, ordering small batches of green coffee and using a stove-top popcorn popper to experiment with different roast profiles.

Every morning at The Pro’s Closet, Crane and Jacob would brew up a Chemex or two of Spyhouse beans or Crane’s own test roasts and ner…