coffee is a family affair for the valley's oldest roasting company
BY Gwen Ashley Walters | PHOTOGRAPHY Ray J. Gadd
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abeling Kirk Peterson a “bean counter” turns out to be a double entendre. One half of K & K Mountain Roast coffee company (the other half is his wife, Kim), Peterson is also a private accountant. “If you’ve been around the community long enough, you have a pretty good idea that it can take more than one job to stay here,” he said, “unless you have a trust fund.” A self-proclaimed “ski bum,” Peterson fell in love with Sun Valley after living here a short time in the early 1970s, before college. He tried the “three-piece-suit gig” with a national accounting firm after college but “didn’t dig it.” As a Seattle native, he did love coffee, and when he and Kim and their three small children moved to the Wood River Valley in 1988, no one was roasting coffee commercially. At that point, Peterson’s only experience with the coffee business—other than accidentally stumbling into a roasting house in Italy where he fell in love with espresso—was a college project, which entailed developing a complete business plan from scratch. Hanging out in a coffee shop near the University of Washington—a favorite pastime—he tossed around ideas with a fellow student on what kind of business to develop for the project, and then it dawned on him: a coffee shop. Bonus? They could continue to “just hang out” at the shop to do the research.
Established in 1991, K & K is the oldest of six coffee roasting companies in the Valley. Hailey Coffee Company, Zaney's River Street Coffee House, Lizzy’s Fresh Coffee, Grace Organics and Maps are the other five commercial roasting companies. It was just Kirk and Kim manning the operation in the early years, but as their children got older, each one became involved in the business. It was, and still is, a family affair. Daughter Britt developed her own brand of coffee in 2009 called Grace Organics, with feminine packaging and focused on sourcing organic beans. At the time, Peterson said, there weren’t many female roasters. Around the same time, son Jens, who turns 28 at the end of December, was learning the roasting process before and after school. Five years ago, Jens became the primary roaster for K & K and Grace Organics, and recently developed his own coffee brand called Maps, introducing a new style of roasting to the family roster. “I’d wake up in the morning and help my dad for an hour before school,” Jens said. “After roasting for some time, it changed for me from ‘Oh, it’s just a job with the family to, Hey! This is cool and I’m interested in it.’ At some point I realized I’m in control of this process. I started paying attention to the fact that I could make tweaks and it changed the coffee,” he said.
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