Bohemian Roastery Serves Up Wood-Fired Coffee On The Road

Bohemian Roastery Serves Up Wood-Fired Coffee On The Road

We want to take an opportunity to highlight one of the Coffee Shop Startups customers. Bohemian Roastery has embarked on their own journey to starting the coffee business of their dreams.

Each story is personal, each journey is real, and we are happy to highlight the hard work and dedication of those who have chosen to follow their dreams. Congratulations to a fine coffee roaster!

Coffee Roaster Business Highlight:

Bohemian Roastery

Today, we’re highlighting Bohemian Roastery from Arizona. Since that time, I have contacted Jeff earlier this summer and thought they had a great coffee business to share with us.

Like other coffee entrepreneurs, they decided to take a chance and follow their dreams. As a mobile coffee roasting business, they have taken their concept to the next level. They have formed their own unique coffee brand based on their wood-fired coffee roasting.

I had a chance to hold a Q&A with Bohemian Roastery, owner Jeff Akers. 

What type of coffee business are you starting?

Bohemian Roastery is a mobile micro-roasting coffee shop, created and operated by Jeff, Shelley, Don, Jacob, and Dominic Akers.

What inspired you to start a coffee business?

This coffee business concept was born in the summer of 2016. We started engineering a simple wood-fired coffee roaster after reading an article about a Texas guy that had built one from scratch.

Once the curiosity set in, we started researching the method and began looking for an existing wood-fueled roaster to purchase. It was not an easy thing to find.

We located only three companies in the world that produced them.  One did not sell to the US, and a second was a Chinese-made industrial unit. It looked more like a big oil drum. The third one was very nice looking. It had all the electronic controls and computers standard on petroleum fired roasters used by most coffee producers.

They all have their place and make good coffee. But I wanted to test a theory: great coffee does not have to be complicated and can be made using a simple device. Well, it can.

Roasting Coffee Like the ‘Old Days'

As it turns out, people still wood roast coffee all over the world just like the “old days,” using as many different devices as you can imagine. 

Our first attempt was to combine all the YouTube videos we could watch and pictures from the turn of the century of hand crank roasters the pioneers used.

We put together pieces of a BBQ, wood stove, and a few car parts, a real coffee-fueled Frankenstein. It worked well enough to inspire us to continue developing the idea.

We built several versions after that before we got to the current, mobile, micro-batch unit, which resides on the trailer's back.

It produces 5-10 lb. batches. It supplies the beans for our mobile coffee shop. This trailer will give people the chance to see, hear, and smell the wonderful mixture of select hardwoods and coffee from around the world.

Then they will get to try coffee from the beans we just roasted; it is kind of like getting a cinnamon bun right from the oven, delicious!

Tell us a little bit about your roasting?

Roasting coffee with wood requires constant attention. The roast-master controls the airflow, temperature, and drum rotation manually throughout the 20-30 minutes it takes per batch.

Woodfire produces a gentle moist flame that puts less stress on the coffee bean. It also lets it develop at a slower pace. Times and temperatures of each roast vary slightly from batch to batch. They are affected by air temperature, moisture content of the air, and the wood.

That variance of environmental factors is really what keeps the roastmaster at attention and requires all of their senses to develop each batch to its proper depth.   

What’s the biggest challenge in starting your business?

The biggest challenge in starting Bohemian Roastery has been not having an exact model to emulate to save us from making mistakes.

Another challenge that all entrepreneurs face is prioritizing their time and attention from one project to another as they transition from a different industry.

The best way to stay focused is to share as much as you can with as many people as you can.

Family and friends are great motivators. They make ideas grow and change by offering different perspectives.

The other motivating factor is that when you start a business, your bank account always seems to be way below comfortable, so you have to keep pressing forward!

What keeps you focused on your launch?

We created this coffee company based on the Bohemian philosophy of bringing together like-minded people for the greater good. Shelley and I met in Seattle in 1992.

She was very involved with acting, movie-making, and all things Seattle, and I was running my own construction company. From the minute we met, there was a chemical reaction. 

Within a month, we were living and working on the Big Island of Hawaii. We were caretakers on a five-acre waterfront estate in Puako, which was eventually sold to Neil Young.

A Coffee Business Was Born

It was definitely trial by fire, newly married, working together in a secluded setting for two years.  But it taught us that we worked well as a team. Since those early days of our marriage, we have been striving to create a coffee business concept to build something together from the ground up.    

For the past fifteen years, we have been living and raising our two sons in Scottsdale, Arizona. 

Although we love the desert, we believe our coffee business concept belongs in the Northwest. 

What better way to kick off our relocation than at the NASA sponsored Solar Fest in Madras, Oregon. (Beginning August 17, 2017.)

There will be more than 100,000, bohemian, coffee-lovin’, nature-worshipping humans at the total eclipse of the sun!

What the future holds, nobody knows. In the next three years, our goal for Bohemian Roastery is to build a brick and mortar roasting facility with a tasting room.

This larger roaster will help grow our online presence and allow us to implement a wholesale program that will supply whole bean coffee to quality-conscious restaurants and coffee shops.

During this time, we will continue to operate our mobile unit as a way for us to test and receive feedback about our products from people that may not know about our brand.

This also will serve as advertisement and brand recognition, partly because of the outlined image of the original roaster we use as our logo.

Further Reading: How to Start a Mobile Coffee Business

For more information or to show your support, visit Bohemian Roastery here.

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