It’s difficult to write a history of Sagebrush Coffee page, without talking about the owner Matt Kellso and the earliest stages of his love for coffee. When Matt was young, he used to steal coffee beans from the pantry and eat them like candy. That may have been the birthplace of Sagebrush Coffee. Or maybe it was when a few years later a small independent espresso bar opened up next to the baseball card store that he frequented. There were many days for Matt that included delivering papers in the morning, then riding to the espresso store for a latte and then next door to the baseball card shop to spend the remainder of his paper route money. That was definitely the start of something.

Several years went by. Matt went on to become an engineer that drank a lot of coffee. He was a daily regular at the local coffee shop, in fact, many days he would schedule midday meetings there instead of at the office. On vacations, Matt and his wife Jenna would talk about opening a coffee shop in whatever small town they would visit, but it never really went beyond that.

One fateful day on one of those vacations the true seeds for Sagebrush Coffee were planted. In 2009 in Portland Oregon, Matt tried his first cup of third wave fresh-roasted coffee. The complexity and depth of flavors turned a life long love of coffee into a personal passion. As soon as Matt got home, he made it his mission to recreate those flavors. He tried local Arizona based coffee roasters and they just didn’t compare. So he began roasting his own coffee in small batches on his kitchen stove, learning the art and science of roasting coffee through study and hands on experience (and an obsession that borders on problematic). As his experience and ability grew, Matt graduated to more advanced roasting styles (the whirly pop popcorn popper has long since retired). Around the end of 2011, Matt began seeking out ways to bring his coffee to the public. Thus, Sagebrush Coffee was born.  Rather than opening a shop, he aimed to put his fresh roasted coffee online and market it to anyone that is seeking a better cup of coffee. By the spring of 2017, Sagebrush was busy with a retail location in Chandler, Arizona along with even increasing popularity online.

Welcome to Sagebrush Coffee!

Sagebrush Coffee continually seeks the best coffee sources, producing each order in small roast-to-order batches, all the while providing exemplary customer service. As much as we love coffee, our passion now is bringing these amazing beans to our customers.

You are our bottom line, and we won’t be happy until you are drinking the perfect cup of coffee while reflecting on a pleasant purchasing experience.  

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was October of 2012 and I had my plan to start Sagebrush Coffee. I think I had a name and rough plan at that point, but it was one of 30 different business ideas I’d had just that year. That being said, the ‘almost execution’ of this business was just that; one of 30 potential businesses that was either going to become a thing or be added to the pile of ideas that never turned into anything.

With the idea on my mind, I took a guys' trip to the mountains of Colorado with two friends. I sat on the back porch of our Airbnb trying to decide if I really wanted to go after this venture. I mean, I already had a great job. I was very content with life. So why shift? Why do something else? There are 150 million coffee drinkers in the U.S., what do I have to offer them? The answer was, maybe, really good coffee. The coffee I was drinking on that back porch was pretty good. I had become the guy that brings the coffee amongst my friends. I was like so many home roasters that bought green coffee from Sweet Marias and thought I could add something to a very saturated market. I left that trip thinking, “I’m going to go after this and see what happens.” It is worth the risk, which admittedly was low at the time.

When I started Sagebrush, I didn’t have a mission statement, I didn’t have a thorough plan. I knew a few things, the first being that I loved coffee. The second being that I didn’t always like anyone else’s coffee anymore. And the third being that I was pretty good at online marketing. I figured I’d put those things together and see if I could create something out of them. I started down the path of building a coffee business with the idea that I wanted to source and sell the very best coffee I could find. This is interesting to reflect on because it shows evidence of our current mission statement in those early days.

Early Days

I’ll admit, I thought I was a coffee nerd when I first started Sagebrush. And, in many ways I was.  However, I knew that if I wanted to start a coffee business, I had to become a coffee expert so I read everything I could get my hands on. Surprisingly in 2012, there wasn’t a lot written about coffee. It was a different time in the coffee industry and although the drink had been around for hundreds of years, specialty coffee was a relatively new thing.

As I started to learn about coffee, I realized there was a hole in the education space, so I decided to start writing about my new knowledge to fill that hole. We started our education section of the website and that caused a lot of growth in the business. As time went on, my goals for the business evolved. I worked hard to find the best coffees I could. I spent hours in my garage learning to roast better and better as our equipment changed. I started to connect myself to the origins of coffee more. I started to understand that Sagebrush Coffee was a small cog in a giant wheel. Not just because there were millions of coffee shops and roasters all over the world, but also because coffee roasting is really the end of a very long supply chain.

The First Big Commitment

As we grew in our understanding of coffee, our educational content on coffee grew. As that happened, our customer base grew and so did the business. In early 2015, my wife, Jenna, and I knew we couldn’t do this by ourselves forever and we needed to move out of the garage and into a bigger space. I didn’t want to roast in the garage another summer. And so, the search began. I still had a day job at this point, which would go away five years later, so I wanted to lease some space close to the house. Jenna spent countless hours calling and searching for a space. It was hard to explain to people in 2014 that we wanted to lease a space to ship coffee. “No, we’re not a coffee shop, we’re an online roaster.” That statement was met with blank stares and not a lot of support.  Responses ranged from “we don’t want smoke in our space” to “that’s not a thing.” Finally, we found a space where the local manager was a home coffee roaster. He understood what we were doing and was excited to help us get started.  

I missed the window of avoiding another summer in the garage, but by November 2015 we were in our first new space at Chandler Heights. We would spend five years there and bring in some great employees. We went from having my mom and sister, Zoe, helping me sticker bags on Sunday nights, to Zoe coming on as a full-time employee and helping with every aspect of the business. We added more employees in other areas of the company, but in those early days, my focus remained on two things; finding the best coffees I could and writing about what I was learning in the coffee industry. I loved it.

Five Years of a Blur

Those five years at Chandler Heights have become a blur today. I was still working a 50-hour-a-week job for most of it as an IT Director and was trying to move the business forward in my little spare time. There were times during those years when I would think about trying to quit my day job, but it wasn’t time yet and my boss, Jenna’s father, was super gracious in helping me manage the two commitments. 

There are a few things that stand out during this time. First, this had really become a family business. My youngest two kids, Noah and Eden, were helping wherever they could and Saturdays had become a family day at the shop. We all had our roles and we would get those shipments out as quickly as we could. My oldest son, Jonathan, was helping a lot with our image and design and as he learned about design, the ‘face’ of Sagebrush became clearer. Another thing that stands out during this time is that my understanding of the coffee industry grew significantly. We used primarily one single source for importing coffee. I wasn’t yet ready to go directly to origin but was very involved in the direct trade supply chain. Early on, my original importer was great and I relied on him heavily. But as all businesses evolve, we were moving in different directions. I was starting to formulate our mission in my head, about putting on display the hard work of the producers in our coffee beans, but this importer wasn’t on the same page. His focus was elsewhere and so I knew it was time to go. I started building relationships with others in the coffee industry and found a niche of people and places where I could get great beans from. This was so important to what we are today, but as with many things, I didn’t realize it at the time.

In the middle of 2019, I knew my days of working two jobs were numbered. Jenna’s dad and I had adjusted my schedule as the IT Director to make more room for my growing coffee business but it wasn’t enough. I was at a point where I had to either shut down Sagebrush and call it a fun seven-year experience or go all in. So, I gave notice and started transitioning out of my other job. That transition took longer than we expected for reasons that deserve an entire seperate blog post, but the end of the story is that my last day at Spencer’s TV & Appliance was April 1, 2020. Something else happened around that time as well.

Moving to Full Time & The Year of COVID-19

In the last weeks of my job at Spencer’s TV & Appliance my replacement said, “I think this COVID-19 thing is going to be a big deal, are you sure you want to leave a secure company right now?” He was gracious enough to offer me my old job back as I was walking out the door, but I knew if I did there would always be a reason to look back. I had to go for it. Man, was that a decision made in ignorance! Ignorance of what COVID-19 would become and thankfully ignorance of what COVID-19 would do for Sagebrush.

I know the pandemic was a difficult time for many. Businesses went under all over the place and I, as many of you did, lost loved ones to the virus. However, for Sagebrush it created a huge boom. Coffee shops, and many other businesses, all over the country shut down and people were sent home. This created time for people to research things they love and surf the internet. As many businesses were moving online, Sagebrush was already there. We grew at rates no business should grow. It was a blessing to be full-time in those moments.

This immediate growth was a place for opportunity. I was able to take another step towards building relationships with coffee origins when so many companies were losing them. We jumped on some amazing coffees and our Black Labels were born. Not only did this time give us an opportunity to grow the business in volume, but the important part was we finished developing our mission well. We moved to our current location on Warner Road and were ready to lean into what we felt we did well. That was when we hired Karla to help us write more blogs and the business grew, not just in sales, but in who we were as a company. Having a side business is great, but until you’re fully invested in the business it will always just be a side business. The year of COVID-19 was when I believe Sagebrush came into its own.

The Coffee Shop & Today

I remember sitting in our offices and brainstorming with Jonathan about where we wanted to go as a business. He told me we were putting the cart before the horse and asked what our mission was. I let my rebellion against corporate jargon rule me and said, “We don’t have a mission, I just want to get out of the way of the producers and showcase their amazing coffee.” So, he wrote on the whiteboard, “Mission: Put on display the hard work of the producers in our coffee” and then said, “great, we can do that in a coffee shop.” 

As my understanding of coffee grew, I knew that a coffee roaster spends about 15 minutes on a batch of coffee, whereas a producer spends an entire crop season on it. I wanted my roasting practices to not focus on what I can add to the coffee, but to focus on what we can showcase that is already there. That is honestly why most of our roasts seem so similar. We’ve found a series of roasting curves that can apply to many coffees. We then cup them, tweak them a little, and run with them.

When we opened the coffee shop, we wanted to focus on the same thing that made our online business what it is today. We’re committed to making some of the best-brewed coffee available to our customers, but we want to take that a step further and showcase the producers wherever we can. This year has exemplified that. Now that COVID-19 restrictions are down, we made two trips to origin and it was huge for my education of coffee. We’re now able to get better coffees with better connections to the origins. In fact, I sent an email to a producer this week telling him about how his coffees cupped against some incredible auction lots that we had. It was great to have that connection and he was excited to hear about how his hard work was showcasing itself in the U.S.

We aren’t exactly a family playing settlers while a little home roaster roasts beans on the stove anymore, but we’re still a family doing what we love and putting on display the hard work of the producers in our coffee. As much as this company has changed, I still just want to find great coffee and sell it to people that love it as much as I do.

My husband Matt had just finished telling me about his newest home-based business idea: Selling fresh-roasted coffee online. It was October of 2012, and this was not the first business proposal he had brought to me. None of the other ideas had panned out or even been seriously pursued. Matt, like most of us, tended to be a good starter but not a great finisher, and while I wouldn’t say I had grown weary of hearing about the latest scheme, I would say that I was slightly suspicious.

There was one big difference between his newest idea and the others: He had a product. Matt had been roasting coffee out of our home for about three years and had completely spoiled me for any other coffee. Anything besides my husband's home roast had become, to me, bitter, stale, flavorless, burnt, and simply not worth my time or money.  As friends and family members had begun sampling Matts's coffee he was hearing more of the same. Once you’ve heard “This is the best coffee I’ve ever had!” a few times, you start to wonder if there would be people willing to pay money for ‘the best coffee’, leading to our current conversation.

His argument was compelling. We could get a tax break on the materials, including his new ‘fancy’ (read: expensive) roaster. He had experience with building websites and drawing in customers. Registering a business with the state of AZ was relatively easy and inexpensive. My reservations were minor, but I made it clear that I didn’t want it to be another half-baked idea. I wanted him to try. I wanted him to succeed. I encouraged him and said, “If you’re going to do it, do it well.”

In less than a month, our paperwork was filed and on November 16th, 2012, Sagebrush Coffee, Inc was officially a registered business with the state of Arizona. By Christmas time, the website was up and running, and we had begun selling coffee to friends and family. We quickly bought a second roaster, bringing our output to a whopping two pounds an hour. On the day after Christmas, we sold our first bag of coffee to someone we did not personally know. While the business was far from lucrative, much less profitable, it was exciting to see rewards as a result of our labor. We weren’t getting there fast, but it felt like we were going places.
 
And then we nearly let Sagebrush Coffee die out altogether.
 
It is easy to forget how all-consuming the moving process is until you find yourself, once again, in the thick of it. From January to May of 2013 we sold our house on Sagebrush Court, and moved twice, finally landing in our dream home. Among many other things, our new home had space and resources to enable us to actually grow the business. Unfortunately, by the time the dust settled, the website was out of date and orders had dried up. However, Matt and I were in agreement. We wanted to give Sagebrush Coffee a fair chance.  Instead of a well-earned period of rest, Matt buckled down to many late nights, re-vamping the entire website, and again launched Sagebrush Coffee to the public in July 2013.
 
The orders began trickling in. In November of that year, we had sold enough coffee to order our first "big" Sonofresco roaster and had it installed in the garage. The decision to get a second large roaster that spring was an easy one, with a one-pound roaster to follow by fall of 2014. All packaging moved from the kitchen out to the garage, eventually outgrowing even the garage and moving into the spare bedroom. We moved quickly from “Babe, do you mind running these three packages to the Post Office today?” to setting out multiple bins of packages for USPS to pick up every day. Matt roasted most nights and every morning, and I would bag and package the coffee and tea orders daily. 
 
It became clear by 2015 that we could no longer house Sagebrush Coffee in our home. Matt desperately wanted to avoid roasting through another Arizona summer, where 100-degree mornings were normal, brutal, and led to terribly inconsistent roasting conditions. We received a crash course in commercial real estate as we began an earnest search for a storefront near our home with air conditioning, a natural gas line, and a low price point. We eventually found a great location, and owners that ‘got’ what we were doing and were willing to help us get started. Unfortunately, every step took time, and Matt was stuck roasting in the garage through another summer. We eagerly waited for flooring, cabinets, and a massive exhaust hood to be installed. We designed and organized the space, and painted the entire 1500 Square foot space ourselves the week after Thanksgiving. In the first week of December 2015, without missing one day of roasting (Christmas is a busy time at Sagebrush!) we began roasting and running production out of our new business home.
 
These last two years have been thrilling. We’ve hired Zoe and Elisa, and Matt's mom Dara comes in every week to help make bags. We are so thankful for them and thankful that we are in a place to hire help! Our kids help at the shop nearly every weekend. Our family calls the shop our ‘Clubhouse’ and we’ve spent lots of family time here, as well as hosted many ministry opportunities with our church in the Sagebrush Shop. In August of this year, we’ve opened our doors to the public, allowing people to buy beans and roasting equipment directly from us, as well as sample our delicious coffee. We have also launched our 3rd business, Sagebrush Unroasted, hoping people will fall in love with fresh roasted coffee and the home roasting hobby that got us started.
 
It is humbling, and very hard to believe, when we evaluate how far we have come as a business in the last 5 years. It has been a lot of hard work. But we know we haven’t done it alone. When I think back on all the friends and family members who have supported us along the way it nearly brings me to tears.  From plugging our product online, to packaging coffee, teaching us about photography, helping move loads upon loads of materials from our home into the new shop or just stamping bags when we were in over our heads. Many have helped without thought of reimbursement, we have been beyond blessed.  Trust me, you do not soon forget the kindness of friends.
 
Yet, for all the amazing help we’ve received there is one person who is the backbone of Sagebrush Coffee. This business wouldn’t be what it is, it wouldn’t even BE, without my husband Matt. I have heard people say, often when they hear what we’ve been doing with Sagebrush, that they’ve always wanted to start their own business. And I don’t blame them!  It is exciting! It’s very rewarding. But the things many of us don’t want to do, such as stay up late nearly every night, manufacture product in both scorching and freezing weather, give up personal time and vacation time and sleep, those are the things most people can’t see. Those are the less exciting and less rewarding parts of owning a business. Those are the things we have to do, to watch the things we want to do unfold and be successful.
 
We started this business on a bit of a whim. In our wildest dreams, we never could have imagined ourselves where we are today. Yet, here we are, 5 years later, still plugging along. It is God's kindness to us. It is love and help from friends and family. It was lots of late nights and hard work. Most people don’t understand or believe what they can’t see. I have seen it all. It does not go unnoticed.

Matt, you have done what was needed, more than was required, and you have done it well. Congratulations, babe.

I’m Jonathan and I currently work at Sagebrush under the title of “doer of whatever needs to be done today”. I’ve been officially working for my dad since 2016, but my first contribution to the company was well before then.

I very specifically remember when I 'worked' for Sagebrush for the first time. We were in Oregon as a family, staying in a cabin near Mount Hood. It was a brisk time of year, as we were on the tail end of the summer season, and we were about to take a white water rafting tour. My dad was about two years into Sagebrush at this time and was on the lookout to possibly refine the current logo he had.

We had just gotten done spending the first half of the week in Portland, so all of us were equipped with lots of coffee, fresh art supplies, and plenty of motivation. I remember a specific book I got, The Hand Lettering Ledger, which opened my eyes to the art of typography. In the heat of inspiration, I began sketching some typography of my own, and what better text to mess around with than “Sagebrush Coffee?”

This is when and where the first iteration of the current Sagebrush logo was born. In the opening pages of a blank sketchbook, with a brand new marker and only a slight idea of what I was doing, the classic orange-on-grey stacked logo came to be. I don’t remember exactly what my dad said when I showed him the marker sketch, but I remember him sort of being like “oh wow that’s actually pretty good”. Keep in mind, I was only 13. With that, he opened his laptop and gave me a blank Adobe Illustrator file to see how it’d look transferred into a usable vector format. The file I put together that morning became the logo we would use for the next four years of the business. 

This interaction turned an interest in graphic design into a passion that would continue to be fostered by Sagebrush throughout my years of high school. As I began taking payroll from the company, the responsibility of all things visual media was quickly moved into my realm of tasks. Photography, graphic design, and packaging design all became areas where I was the lead. As someone who’s very artistically minded, this was a perfect job. Granted, I was 16, and the first couple of years showed that. I had a lot of room for improvement, and frankly still didn’t know what I was doing. But, through multiple graphic design and photography classes in high school, I was able to refine my ability in the Adobe Suite and up my efficiency significantly. I still have a ton of room to grow, but I’m confident with the level I’m at now, and only have Sagebrush to thank for pushing that along. 

Fast forward to today. I’m writing this in late October of 2022, as we’re rounding the corner into our busiest season. Right now I’m involved in all things visual, marketing strategy, coffee house upkeep, barista work, on-bar process development, menu development, and an endless list of projects revolving around refining the business. It’s easy to get caught up in the heat of all the busyness, but being able to take a step back every time we do a cupping and just rave about the way a bean was processed, or the extremely dynamic flavor profile of a coffee from a new farm we’re working with, makes all the difference. I love specialty coffee; I love the industry, I love the craft, and I love the creativity. Having taken my first of hopefully many coffee origin trips this March, I got an insight into how widespread this industry is. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of families who depend on coffee to sustain their life. Whether it’s a single mother picking during harvest season in rural Guatemala, a family dynasty of the world’s finest coffees in Panama, an entire village coming together to process beans in Ethiopia, your local barista manager here in the states, the head of an importation company showcasing coffees in Colombia, or a graphic designer working for his dad in online coffee marketing, you would be surprised to see the ripple effect a single plant can have on the world.

In 2012, my dad had a blank sketchbook of a business, with only a slight idea of what he was doing. It’s incredible thinking it’s already been 10 years. His hard work is unmatched and the sheer number of hours poured into this company by my dad is unparalleled. We don’t know how far into this sketchbook we are, but what we do know is we’ve loved every single page along the way, and are excited for these nearby pages to come. 

As a regular customer, I’m sure it’d be easy to equate your benefit with Sagebrush since you receive yummy coffee from us every week or so. But know that you’re not the only one benefitting here. Not only does your contribution back benefit us, but it benefits a long supply chain of family upon family upon family upon family dedicated to their own unique subset craft within the coffee industry. There’s truly something special about coffee, and the opportunity to see a tiny sliver of a glimpse into the industry this past decade has been beyond incredible.