Retiring Our “Damn Fine Coffee” Slogan

I have written a few times on our approach to coffee. We want to craft delicious coffee without pretension and I had an excellent story that explained the slogan and demonstrated exactly the experience we were seeking to create.

A while ago, I took my pop to one of the top roasters in the country. Now, for those of you who don’t know my dad, he is an old cow boy type. He’s not fancy and doesn’t have any particular desire to be fancy. Me, in the other hand, was really into fancy coffee. I was looking to experience the best so I justify being judgey. I took my dad to this roaster expecting to just blow his brain up with how much better, how fancy this cup of black coffee would be. I spent $5 per cup and read all the tasting notes and documented the brewing process expecting to return to my table aa the sommelier and educate everyone on the awesomeness of myself…uh…I mean, the coffee…the awesomeness of this coffee.

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I brought the coffee over and explained the flavor profile, at which my dad smiled and nodded. I looked up from sniffing the brew to find my dad chugging it. Not sure how he did it without burning a whole through him, but he did. His only description was that it was, “damn fine.” I laughed but it took me a while to really process it.

I love high quality stuff more than I like the pretension that is often surrounding it. At my heart, I am not a fancy person. I’m actually very grounded, but I just prefer to have one really excellent thing than 10 mediocre. I remembered how frustrated I was trying to get into craft coffee and how I wanted to remove that hurtle for people like my dad, people like me.

This story still encompasses our feelings towards our coffee offerings, but it just doesn’t fit our brand message. We were having a bit of an identity crisis. We had to look at who we really wanted to be as a company and start to cut things that don’t fit inside of that. Not because it is no longer us, but so we can communicate a consistent message. When you look at us, we don’t want you to be confused.

We really want the conversation to be the primary product and the beverage to be the conduit. We decided to lean into a slogan we have been using for the podcast and apply it to everything we do. From now on (or at least until we change it again, lol), we will be focusing on “meaningful conversations with delicious beverages.” This is really at the heart of who we are and what we want to achieve. We want to be a community hub. A place where everyone around us comes together. In order for that to happen, we need people to talk to us and to each other. This also ties our blog and podcast into the coffee roasting.

It is sad to see that slogan go, because we really liked it. Customers really liked it too. We always got a good chuckle from people when they read our ingredients on the coffee bag (“100% Damn Fine Coffee”). Our hope is that this new slogan will focus our efforts and we will be able to better serve the customers we are blessed with.