“Owning a business is not for faint of heart,” co-owner of Rock Falls Coffee and Tea Amanda Doyle said.
She is not wrong.
According to data by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, around 20 to 25% of small businesses worldwide were at risk of failure following the financial onslaught of the COVID-19 lockdowns, though exact numbers are unknown on how many did fail.
Even without the pandemic, around 20% of businesses fail during their first year of operation, and nearly half capitulate within five years, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Among the ashes of fallen businesses emerged space for more to occupy, such as Rock Falls Coffee and Tea.
A love for coffee is one reason Amanda and her husband, Tyler, stated why they chose to try the venture. But their decision was also influenced by two vastly different factors: their daughter and stimulus packages in the form of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security and the American Rescue Plan act.
Following an increasing trend of new businesses, 2021 saw a total of 5.4 million businesses founded, a 1.1-million-unit rise compared to 2020 according to the Commerce Institute. This rise is vastly attributed to emerging e-commerce, stimulus and general economic bounce back after lockdowns.
“There was a lot of financial aid given to people during [the pandemic],” Amanda said. “We wanted to be good stewards of it, we wanted to find a way to invest it so that we would get a return on our investment instead of just spending it.”
But besides the stimulus, Amanda and Tyler Doyle founded inspiration for the roasting company in 2022 from a project their daughter worked on for homeschooling.
“I was looking for a comprehensive school project that we could just work on and knock out as many subjects as we could in one go,” Amanda said.
The project focused on running a tea business, focusing on how to plan and execute ideas using STEM, economics and basic decision making.
Stemming from the experiment spawned interest in expanding to coffee. One half-pound roaster later, Amanda became infatuated with coffee.
Previously, Amanda and Tyler never geeked out about coffee, having been exposed to only store-bought commodity grade coffee.
After trying freshly roasted coffee for the first time, Amanda said she visited almost every local coffee destination after her new discovery, which fueled the couple to open their new business.
“It’s really a great way to supply ourselves with coffee,” she joked, emphasizing her love of fresh, carefully sourced coffee.
Adapting to the new age of commerce, and keen on getting a return on their investment, Amanda said they carefully planned for the shift to online markets following the pandemic.
When forming a business plan, she focused on what was common practice after the pandemic: focusing on SEO, social media and overall digital visibility.
“With every business decision, you have to evaluate your environment,” she said, noting the influence of the lockdowns on their business decisions.
Amanda evidently took her own advice. Rather than forming a capital-intensive brick and mortar operation, Rock Falls is working out of their garage.
The family receives beans in bulk, roasts, packages, and delivers or ships their beans in the area. They focus on online and local exposure, managing to put more resources into the quality of their product.
Although Amanda said they mostly focus on serving the Slippery Rock area and surrounding communities, they also ship to customers across the nation.
With their sourcing and products being the thesis of their entire operation, naturally, the two took their time in determining where they could best source their beans, and later, their tea.
Sourcing the product
Amanda explained how there are several grades of coffee, noting that the most common, commodity grade, is what most consumers receive when they purchase name brands such as Folgers.
Additionally, freshness plays a major factor in determining the quality of coffee. Currently, the FDA has no regulation on expiration dates of coffee. The FDA also allows up to 6% of the weight of ground coffee to be moldy or insect-laden.
“A lot of people, their only exposure to coffee is bad coffee,” Amanda said, explaining how coffee oils can begin to go rancid after as little as fifteen minutes of exposure to oxygen after grinding.
For example, Tyler never particularly enjoyed coffee before trying freshly-roasted coffee, untainted by months of sitting on a shelf already ground and, thanks to loose FDA regulation, 6% mold or bug.
Much like wine, coffee differentiates based on geographic factors, according to Amanda.
“When you have a really great crop when it comes in and it’s fantastic, you treasure it because you know its not coming back necessarily,” she said.
Amanda emphasized the importance of the unique factor of each individual batch of coffee crop.
“It’s not like a digital product with a repeated shelf life,” she said.
In a world of digital uniformity, the appeal of “craft” or unique products that vary from corporate blandness is evidence of the explosion of craft breweries and craft coffee like Rock Falls.
Amanda’s earlier claims about coffee diversity shrinking are true, where she prized the rare batches of one-off bean batches likely never appearing again.
According to reporting from the New York Times and Vox, it appears a reliance on large commercial crops within the two geneses, Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora, is not a good idea, leaving room for disease to wipe out entire crops due to a reliance on genetic similarity.
“The genetic diversity found in arabica and robusta represents only around 1 percent of the total genetic diversity of wild varieties found just in Ethiopia,” according to Vox.
The catastrophic crop failures are devastating to small co-ops and family farms in places like Colombia.
“Coffee is hard to harvest and hard to produce well, and there is only one harvest a year, so if your coffee crop does not come in, you’ve got very big problems including feeding your family,” she said.
In Colombia, coca plants, used to make cocaine, grow several times a year and are much more risk-averse and profitable than coffee, an ethical consideration Amanda said Rock Falls weighs when purchasing coffee beans.
Tasting coffee
“I am very particular to Ethiopia,” Amanda said, adding it is the believed origin of the coffee bean itself. “The terroir in that area is so unique, it has a blueberry-pomegranate note to it.”
Terroir is what Amanda explained as the environmental factors considered during sourcing, defined by Merriam-Webster as “the combination of factors including soil, climate, and sunlight that gives wine grapes their distinctive character,” though it can be applied to other food products as well.
Tyler is fond of Indonesian coffees which, according to Amanda, tend to be described as earthy, dirty and cedar-like.
Like wine sommeliers, the barista equivalent performs the same rituals of smelling, wafting and using different areas of the mouth to account for all flavors of a coffee bean. This is essentially how the notes of coffee are defined, as explained by Amanda.
Taste-testing coffee is referred to as “cupping.” Cupping is specified by a roughly one to seventeen ratio of coffee grounds to water. After water is heated to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, a pour is conducted and the coffee is left untouched for four minutes in a special cupping vessel before being sampled.
Roasting process
After beans are sourced, the next important process is roasting.
Roasting coffee beans is what gives coffee its brown coloration. Originally, coffee beans, like many plants, are green due to chlorophyll until exposed to the rounds of heating.
The roasting process is a careful combustion, essentially skinning the beans of their papery outside made of cellulose. Asserting their attention to detail, Rock Falls measures their roasts via data fed to a data control program on a nearby laptop.
The beans are tumbled around the carefully regulated flame, dancing until they pass through the “first crack” known for light roasts or the “second crack” associated with dark roasts. The reason for the naming of the stages is associated with the audible crack if you listen close enough during the roasting process.
Rock Falls’ roasting machine can handle up to five and a half pound of unroasted beans per batch, five pounds up from their original endeavor.
New grounds
Two years into their coffee and tea venture, Rock Falls has succeeded considering business trends. They are a part of a new generation of businesses born from the pandemic in a new, fully digital age.
“You have to have the mentality that this is an investment that will be returned later,” Amanda said, noting the demanding labor you do not necessarily get paid for in the beginning.
Amanda is hopeful since the successful launch of the business, especially with the increased demand for quality products. She also noted the northward suburban sprawl of Pittsburgh causing areas like Cranberry to almost double its population since the 90’s. She hopes the continued sprawl up Interstate 79 will combine with the growing business destination of Slippery Rock.
According to the same US Bureau of Labor Statistics referred to earlier, they have graduated into a shrinking class of surviving businesses. The new milestone for Rock Falls will be the category of businesses of three years, falling to a 61% survival rate.
“You want someone along for the wild ride,” Amanda said. “Because it is a wild ride.”
