Why Loxley?
Hello, you lovely people. My name is James McAdams, this is my blog. Strap in it’s going to get bumpy (grammatically mostly.) If you don’t already know I am the head roaster and one of the founders of Loxley Coffee. We currently are in the process of getting our new/old building in Fairmont, MN renovated so we can start a legitimate coffee roasting EMPIRE! In all seriousness though we hope to be open this summer and can’t wait to serve our local community and beyond.
I want everyone to be aware this is my first ever blog. don’t worry though it will be great. I plan to use this purely as a forum for spreading information and not plugging products or anything like that. If you ever have any coffee related questions please feel free to ask me. For my “first crack” (that’s an awful pun for coffee roasters) at this blog thing, I will do my best to keep it fairly short and as concise as I’m capable of. I’ll do this while answering a couple questions that friends, family, and others interested in our coffee have been repeatedly asking us as of late. Here we go!
We’ve been asked a lot lately why we chose the name Loxley Coffee. I wish there was some incredible story. Something like I traveled to Loxley, South Yorkshire in England and was overtaken by its rustic charm, the friendliness of the locals, and fell in love with coffee or maybe my fiance over a steaming cup on a rainy morning, the smell of ozone permeating the air. I didn’t and I’ve never been to Loxley. Really it just boils done to names. We had a name, it got trademarked by someone else and taken. We sorted through a zillion more names the majority of which were all taken until we got to a very short list. One name on it Loxley Coffee stuck out to me especially.
We always had the idea that we wanted to provide delicious coffee for less to make it easily available for everyone. We wanted to be largely community focused. Finally, we wanted a large focus on green initiatives to keep a relatively small carbon footprint. This got the ol’ wheels turning in my head and made me think of Robinhood. A famous fictional rogue known by many for taking from the rich and giving to the poor. His birthplace being none other than… Loxley. The name is short, simple, and within it holds our core values. We’ve decided our logo should pay homage to our original logo for Five Lakes Roasting Company. A bit of a tip of the hat to our lovely hometown and base of operations in Fairmont, MN.
People ask why a passion for coffee? For me personally, for almost as long as I can remember there’s been a special place in my heart for coffee. When I was five years old, I remember sneaking sips out of my mom's mug when she wasn’t paying attention just to get a sip of that delicious bitter mud. As a teenager I remember bored nights spent with friends sitting at diners just to drink copious amounts of bottomless coffee. A while back I decided to nurture this passion a bit and I wanted good coffee! I thought enough is enough and that there had to be something more to coffee flavorwise than just burnt bitter flavors. I began investing in high-end coffee equipment and better beans. Guess what, I was absolutely right! I never thought you could taste citrus-like acidity, berries, chocolate, or caramel in coffee without adding some sort of artificial flavoring, but sure enough, you can. All that flavor was hiding in plain sight within a little green bean all along.
After this revelation, I was really thinking I should start a business selling other people high-quality equipment to show them how amazing coffee could really taste. I pitched it to my brother Joe in a text that was something like “Yo Broseph, let’s sell coffee pots.” Joe, being a bit more business savvy than I said paraphrasing of course, “you’re dumb James, the money is in roasting.” I thought to myself why not roast coffee? That sounds like fun. I think maybe a day or two later we both pitched in to purchase a little 1 pound capacity electric roaster. It was basically a rotisserie oven with a rotating drum inside you fill with green coffee. After we decided roasting was pretty cool we talked to our brother Will. He decided he wanted in to help get the word out and lend a hand with some more of the business stuff. Just within a few months we had a business co-owned by three brothers. Will joining us freed me up to have even more spare time to roast and learn. Now a year and some change later we have a friend of ours named Craig working on our marketing, I’ve roasted hundreds of pounds on multiple roasters, Will and I have attended commercial roasting courses, all the while training my senses of smell and taste. It so far has been an amazing experience and this is just the beginning!
The next step is to be able to share what we are roasting with you. By the summer of 2019 we hope to be operational. We plan to be a fully functional small batch coffee roaster. Loxley will be selling roasted coffee beans through multiple channels be it online, wholesale, in our storefront, or at a local farmers market. We want good coffee easily available for you! We will also recommend and hopefully sell coffee equipment such as brewers, grinders, and scales. There’s a few more things we’d like to do as well but we’ll keep those a secret for now!
I said this blog would be as concise as possible. I don’t know if I achieved that, probably not. There are three things I hope to have achieved within these poorly punctuated lines. I hope you learned a bit about Loxley Coffee’s journey thus far and a glimpse into our future. I hope that if you don’t already drink delicious specialty coffee I may have piqued your interest, even if just slightly. Finally, this is pretty important… I hope I didn’t bore you to death.