Meet Joshua Crane | Owner/Operator/Head Roaster/Bicycle Coffee Courier

We had the good fortune of connecting with Joshua Crane and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Joshua, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
Hmmm. This is a difficult question since there were so many in order to tip the scale into the direction of starting The Coffee Ride. The back story began by having a background in science and I had found my passion for drinking coffee while studying for medical school entrance exams. I began playing around with roasting coffee and fell in love with the science behind it and the fact that you could create a hypothesis, test it, and taste the end result.

Fast forward a year or so and I started bringing coffee into work in the mornings and using my co-workers as a focus group and quickly saw the positive impact our little morning brew sessions were making. People began coming in early to see what coffee I had and the rest of the day we were literally “buzzing” around on a high from the morning coffee brewing gathering. I had seen the potential coffee had for community building and leaving a long lasting positive emotional impression and I was hooked. I saw the ability to help people get through tough times and the day to day grind with coffee, which was why I wanted to go into medicine in the first place… to help people.

I took making a great cup of coffee and it’s medicinal abilities to create positivity, coupled that together with my daily bicycle commute, and the ethos of my grandfather Jerry the 1950’s milkman consistently delivering the freshest/high quality products to his customers; and decided to make it all a business.

Our company motto is “making people happy by delivering fresh roasted coffee by bicycle”

    sted coffee by bicycle”

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?

I wish it was as easy as saying that we developed a new product that had never been seen before and then everyone went crazy.

For us, it’s all about doing a lot of little things better. We source some of the world’s best coffees, that give back to their communities, and make the world a better place for it. We have worked tirelessly over the years on our roasting practices, developing custom profiles for each or our coffees, so that each region and all of its people’s hard work gets represented in the best possible cup of coffee to our customers. We bicycle deliver all of our local coffee and have ridden as a business over 26k miles just on our Thursday local delivery routes. We take sustainability seriously at The Coffee Ride providing our customers with fully compostable packaging. We compost everything we can from the roasting process to the grounds from our cafe. We recycle all of the packaging our green coffee comes in. We work with local food banks and farms as well as a number of charitable organizations to raise money…. and the list goes on and on.

There’s a lot of really good coffee out there, but I would say most of our customers choose to purchase coffee from us because they trust what we are doing as a company. They know who they are buying from. They get coffee that tastes amazing and makes them feel good because it’s roasted by good people working hard to do good things for the world. Whatever their “coffee ride” looks like, when drinking a cup of our coffee our customers can escape to their ideal happy place, even if it’s just for a few minutes. Coffee is cool like that. You can take time back in your day and go do something for yourself. We get fun emails all the time from our customers telling us how they feel while drinking our coffee. Or showing us on social media all their coffee adventures skiing or out in the woods camping.

Over the years it’s been a grind, pun intended, for sure. We’ve built our business one bag at a time and one bag per customer. You do a good job, have a great product, have great people helping you and your customers will come back. Treat people the way that you’d like to be treated. That usually works. Just like in most businesses, times get tough and those times are usually the fork in the road. Either you stop and choose another pathway or you believe enough in what you’re doing that you put your head down and figure out a way to solve the problem. You always think that it’s going to get easier, but that has never been the case for us. We’ve just become really good at solving problems as they arise.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
First things first we’d visit The Coffee Ride. We’re lucky enough to have a willy wonka’s chocolate factory for coffee nerds, right at our fingertips. We’d play and experiment with some new and staple coffees we have at the roastery. Most likely I’d take them on a fun bike ride out to Babette’s (where we roast the coffee ;)) for coffee and pastries. Head back to Boulder and either go to Shamane’s bakery or over to the Skratch Labs Cafe for lunch. Either more exploration of the fun dirt back roads of Boulder or head over to Avery Brewery for some beers (we supply the coffee for a few of their specialty beers as well). Possibly go listen to some music that evening if the roots music project has something going on. Southern Sun is always a great stop as well. Lot’s of hikes, possibly some skiing up at brainard lake, possibly some fun dog park sessions. MORE COFFEE. Audrey Janes Pizza Garage for the win.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?

There have been so many people along the way that have gotten The Coffee Ride to the point that it’s at today. We couldn’t have done it without you.

I would have to say that one of the more significant moments was after watching Allen Lim, founder of Skratch Labs, give his TED talk. I was teetering on the edge of whether or not I wanted to dive in and make The Coffee Ride a legitimate business and put the idea out into the world. It was their company’s grass roots beginnings. Hustle mentality. Die hard attitudes to make a better product. Most of all, it was that he had said that their first year in business he had done everything that he had thought he was supposed to do in business. Hire accountants, lawyers, fly around being at different events. At the end of that first year, he says, they didn’t make any money. What it all came down to was the late nights in the garage of his condo packing up orders of their drink mix, and getting them out for delivery the next day.

I don’t know, it just made sense to me. I had grown up in a family where my father had started and owned a small business too. I learned about the commitment that it takes and the idea of bringing people together to accomplish a goal and the feeling you get when you look back and see all the hard work that y’all have done is just cool. What Allen said just resonated with me and somehow made it all seem obtainable.

The coolest part now is that we get to work with Skratch Labs on projects and we even serve our coffee in their Boulder cafe. So everything has kind of come full circle. It’s all pretty neat when you look back at it.

Website: thecoffeeride.com

Instagram: thecoffeeride

Linkedin: joshua crane

Facebook: the coffee ride