Olympia Coffee Roasters Find Perfect Blend

The Olympia Coffee Roasters have found the perfect blend of pleasure and work. I discovered it one Friday night while I was downtown and this is my story.

While networking at Einmaleins one Friday night, chatting with Mathias, a young chap known as Panda, came into the store to invite us all to a party with free drinks and food at Olympia Coffee Roasters.  My reporter’s nosy nose started burning, so I had to go.

Strolling into Olympia Coffee Roasters I learned that Olympia Coffee Roasters serves 100% organic coffee bought directly from coffee farmers internationally and locally.

“They are innovative and their coffee is bar none the best among the west.”  Chad Akins said, a loyal customer. “It’s a total perk.”

Chad Akins follows their updates on the website where the owners share new developments fresh from the field.

Bryan Dibble, who is a co-partner of Kobos Coffee Company from Portland, Oregon, was one of the first coffee roasters in the northwest, even before Starbucks. Kobos has been around since 1973, take that overpriced coffee milking giant.

Charles Weber, who came all the way from Eugene, Oregon, is the web designer for the Northwest Roasters Group. A position he volunteered for at the first meeting.

Over a cold beer and coffee, he explained the whole coffee networking venue to me and said that the Northwest Roasters Group meet twice a year to size up their competitors and roast each other, ha, ha, no, no, just kidding, he really said they meet to bounce new ideas off each other and network.

“They are a very cohesive volunteer based community,” Weber added later.

 Of course, every North-Westerner is different, which is why I believe Pemco Insurance loves doing profiles on us. Weber too, has his own passions besides coffee roasting, which make him a great example of a modern northwest coffee guru. Weber has been diving in Kona, Maui, Hoodsport and up and down the West coast.

Besides diving in the Northwest waters, he is also a self-professed hardware geek, in the cool way though.  As a licensed contractor, he installs and builds coffee equipment.
In addition, Weber manages his own website, where he makes two-thirds of his sales from distributing whole sale coffee. The other third you were wondering about comes from selling coffee in the Market of Choice stores in Portland, Eugene and Ashland, Oregon.

For the first five or six years though, his business was a 100 percent online. His first customer said,

“I might as well light my money on fire,” because he was buying coffee from a website and didn’t trust online shopping. Of course after Weber delivered good customer service and a high quality product, the guy became a 10 year loyal customer.

Weber has sold coffee to some rather unique customers. He said that he has shipped his coffee to a privately contracted military vessel floating in the waters surrounding Japan and Guam.

“I’d ship them 40 pounds of coffee at a time and they’d always be in a different place,” Weber said.

As we ended our conversation, I gave him my business card. He smiled and suggested I change my title from Human Marketing Flotation Device to Business Buoyancy Control Device, a scuba joke. I told him I was a certified scuba diver as well and first dove in Tacoma, WA.

You never know who you might meet when you wander downtown Oly. But, way to go coffee roaster guys. Keep being green and innovative.

Olylites: when you are downtown, I strongly urge you to check out Olympia Coffee Co on the corner of 4th and Cherry St, simply put, because they are the best of the west and stop by Einmaleins to meet some neat people.