Harris set her mind on figuring out how to shape that love into a livelihood. Makes sense, turning a childhood passion into a career dream, right? Sure, but consider that many teenagers love football, and they don’t spend their waking hours figuring out how to buy the Broncos. Harris was clearly harvested from a different crop. She enrolled in Colorado State University’s management program and spent much of her time working at local coffee shops, learning about the business side. After reading about home coffee roasting, she finally found what she was looking for. So at the tender age of 20, with two years still remaining at CSU, Harris emptied her bank account and bought an electric roaster on eBay for $6500. “I thought I would roast coffee in the window of my shop and that would differentiate me from Starbucks and everyone else,” reflects Harris. “I thought it would be super easy, put the coffee in and turn it on. But no. It took me a year to get it drinkable. I’m opening up all these credit cards now buying beans and it’s coming out bitter and I’m like, this is not so easy. You don’t just turn it on and let it do its thing.”
still in school full-time, I had picked up enough wholesale accounts that by the time I graduated school, it was more than a full-time business; it was me working my tail off. Just me.” The interview for this story took place, predictably, over a freshly brewed cup of one of Jackie’s favorites, Heaven’s Blend, which is essentially a mix of Brazilian beans, light roast and medium dark. To keep things organic and environmentally conscious, Harris provides her guest with pure liquid cane sugar and fettuccine noodles for stirring sticks. She, of course, drinks it black. “I love going to a coffee shop where you can just sit and play chess with the barista,” Harris says with her characteristic squinting smile, and enjoying every second of the discussion. “There are things about coffee that don’t translate to any other business. It just seems to make people happy. And it’s art. You go to a little coffee shop in Fort Collins, you’re going to get a hand made cup of coffee that each barista is going to make a little different.” Harris prides herself on making sustainably sourced, cooperatively grown, organic and
of an unjust situation represents a problem for her. Most of her beans, she says, come from small family farms, but, she confesses, “as much as I would love for all my coffee to be fair trade, it probably will never happen.” Harris still wanted to help the small, familyowned growers without supporting what she felt was a hypocritical situation. She joined a “coffee cult,” basically a club of coffee roasters to help her network. Through this group, she met a Columbian man who was searching for new roasters to buy his country’s products. Harris, along with a group of American roasters, headed down to South America for her first international business trip. Remember the risks of parenting? When a callow 21-year-old is building a business that depends strongly on imports from a country with a reputation for kidnappings and other serious crimes, those risks can be magnified, and learning happens fast. Like the time when Harris wondered aloud why she couldn’t roll the windows down in the van, despite the heat. “Everyone looks at me like I’m an idiot,” Harris says. “Jackie, you’re in a bulletproof car!”
“There are things about coffee that don’t translate to any other business. It just seems to make people happy.” In her senior year of college, while her friends were out drinking, she was roasting beans in her boyfriend’s garage trying to come up with the perfect coffee, or at least something halfway decent. “When it finally got drinkable, I had three different kinds and I was completely out of money and had all these credit cards, so I signed up for a local farmers market at the end of the season. I can’t believe anyone bought anything,” Harris says. Someone did, and she returned the following week boasting that it was the best she’d ever had. The woman also happened to own Café Ardour, a coffee shop in Old Town Fort Collins. “Her first order is for 65 pounds of coffee and I’m roasting three pounds every 22 minutes,” Harris says, still incredulous at the magnitude of the task. “How many hours am I going to have to be up to do this?!” Another fortuitous event spurred her further. While shopping at The Cupboard for a coffee brewer, a store manager recognized her from the farmers market and told her they had gotten requests for her coffee. He wanted to stock it on the shelf but she would need to find a way to package and seal it—fast. “From there,” Harris says, “it just completely exploded. My whole senior year of college, while 58 Mind+Body/Holiday 2014
environmentally conscious coffees. But at the mention of “fair trade,” a term that has gradually crept into the conscious shopper’s vernacular, she becomes noticeably uncomfortable. “When I first started 10 years ago, fair trade coffee was just starting to gain momentum and a lot of the shops were asking for it,” she says. “I started to research it and the more I looked into it ...” Harris’ enthusiasm trails off. We have hit a sore spot. To label coffee “fair trade” the coffee dealer has to be certified by a third-party agency. Harris says that an agreement is signed six months before the harvest is ready, and the farmer is guaranteed a price, generally a few cents more per pound than what the market bears at that time. The farmer is basically getting a loan in exchange for a contract to sell his coffee. “They have the right idea,” Harris says. “However, the price of coffee fluctuates wildly, and since it’s only harvested once a year, you can see where this is going.” If the price goes up during the harvest season, Harris says, the farmer who locked himself in is now unable to make considerably more money on the open market. “This wasn’t helping the little guys,” Harris laments. Like any responsible parent, she is looking out for all the children in the community, not just her own. And the idea
After the other roasters had flown home, leaving Harris as the lone foreigner, she found herself in the backseat of a Jeep with her hired translator, driver and security guard. “We drive way up into the mountains and visit with a bunch of different farmers, hear their stories, and then it’s a race to get back to the city before dark,” she says, her countenance turning serious. “I was like, can you please slow down? You’re making me really nervous. He says that we can’t slow down because we can’t be on these roads after dark. We really shouldn’t be on them at all. That was the only time I was scared.” Harris chats candidly with her guest in her modest warehouse suite, located in an industrial complex in north Fort Collins. Oddly, the smell of coffee doesn’t penetrate the senses until it’s freshly brewed in the roasting and grinding room. The floor is covered with hulking 100-pound sacks of coffee beans stacked on wooden pallets. Various coffee and espresso machines sit atop the counter running along the side of the room, expected accessories. The essence of Jackie’s Java, though, the very definition of this labor of love, hangs on the walls, with photos of Central and South American farmers posing in front of lush, verdant hills and vast swaths of fertile plantations. One image in particular, a blown-