For Kim and Donnie Richards, coffee is more than just a morning ritual. It’s more than a much-needed caffeine boost to jumpstart your day or a hot beverage to warm your insides.
For this couple, coffee is the beginning of what came to be an 18-year long love story.
The Richards’ love story began back in 2001, when the two college kids walked into a Starbucks store in West Palm Beach, Florida, for their first day on the job.
“I happened to interview at the same time my wife was there and we met in our training classes,” Donnie Richards said. “We worked together and my senior year of college is when we started dating and got engaged.”
Kim Richards grew up in Greeley and the couple moved back to the area shortly after they got married.
Kim Richards stayed on with the Starbucks, moving up in the company while Donnie Richards started his own business, Legacy Home Inspections.
“I started the home inspection company more just to see if I could start my own business, what would it take, what would it look like,” Donnie Richards explained. “It went really well. I owned it for about eight years and sold it because I didn’t have an emotional pull.”
Wanting to go back to his original love of coffee, Donnie Richards started exploring the world of home brewing and began roasting coffee for family and friends.
As he began to learn more about the brewing and roasting aspects of the business, the idea of starting his own coffee company began to look more and more like a real possibility.
“When we first started talking about it, we knew that we didn’t want to do a brick and mortar right away,” Kim Richards said. “We were brainstorming ways we could do that differently.”
Shortly after, Kim Richards left her 10-year career at Starbucks to join her husband in launching Storymaker Coffee Bar.
“My wife has always had a gift for hospitality; for creating environments where people can sit and linger,” Donnie Richards said. “This is a business where I get play around with innovation and bringing a different spin on things and she gets to use her gifts for hospitality and creating moments for people.”
Inspired by a coffee company out of Arizona that used a camper to create a mobile coffee company, the couple hunted down a vintage 1956 Aljo family camper in Parker and transformed it into a fully functional mobile coffee bar.
“I had been looking for a while and I found the camper on Craigslist,” Donnie Richards said. “The owner had gutted it completely in the process of renovating so a lot of the hard work was already done.”
“We affectionately call her Bertie,” Kim Richards added.
Together, the couple revamped the camper into what is now the mobile Storymaker Coffee Bar and hit the road for their very first event in December 2018.
The name “Storymaker Coffee Bar” comes from the joy the family gets from listening to people’s stories.
“We landed on Storymaker because with the camper, it definitely is a show piece and having it involved in weddings or parties is part of peoples’ story,” Kim Richards explained. “We wanted to be able to have the name that would be something that could tell a story for them later. It’s coffee that creates moments and connects people.”
Storymaker Coffee Bar is offers beverage services for a variety of events such as weddings, anniversary or birthday parties, happy hours, food truck events, farmers markets and more. The Richards will even work with clients to create a custom coffee menu for their event.
In addition to the camper, the company has a nitro bike that offers cold brew options.
The company gets its beans from a variety of locations including Honduras, Brazil, Kenya and Guatemala.
Unlike most coffee companies who use a drum that turns, moving the beans around, Storymaker Coffee uses an air roasting process to roast their beans.
Air roasting suspends beans in the roasting chamber on a bed of 680-degree hot air. This bed of hot air allows each individual bean to be roasted evenly.
The chaff, or dried skin on the beans, is then removed to help prevent any bitterness, smoky or sour notes in the coffee.
After the beans are roasted, they are removed and placed on a tray and rapidly cooled to preserve the batch’s flavor and aroma.
When the pandemic hit, the Richards, like many companies, had to pivot their operations into a different direction and begin distribution to residential and business customers. Black and Blues Music and Brews in Loveland is a client of the Richards and raves about the coffee.
“We love Storymaker, their cold brew is so smooth and we can’t make our signature Old Fashioned cocktail without it,” co-owner Angie Gonzales said.
Customers have the option of purchasing coffee in whole bean, drip, French press or espresso versions. The company also offers monthly coffee subscriptions.
For more information on Storymaker Coffee Bar, or to purchase coffee, go to www.storymakercoffeebar.com.
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Create your own story with Storymaker Coffee Bar - Greeley Tribune
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