This isn’t Whiskey Morning Coffee’s first rodeo — literally.
But five years of selling at the Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo is a long way from the TCU classroom where the small business was first sparked in 2018.
It began when one of the owners, Evan Sledge, was enrolled in a course at Texas Christian University that required students to pitch business ideas and work to get them off the ground.
He wondered how used whiskey barrels from his family’s business, Sledge Distillery, could be utilized to age other products. Then, he read an article about how coffee beans can take on the flavor of burlap sacks they’re stored in.
He pitched the business idea.
“I said, ‘I don’t know if it’ll work or not, but I know we got a little 5-gallon barrel; we can get beans for about $100 to put in it; and we can roast it as simply as in a cast-iron pan on our stove in the apartment to try it,’” he recalled.
The idea worked — and the beans sold, too. By the end of the class, Sledge and his groupmates had turned a profit.
Sledge was the only one from his group in class who wanted to go all in on trying to make the business work as a full-time gig, so he recruited high school friends from outside TCU to help.
That’s how TJ Ryan and Carson Becker became involved. They knew each other from Granbury High School and were all working seasonally as guides in Alaska or Montana.
They later brought in Becker’s brother Garrett to help as well.
One thing that sets Whiskey Morning Coffee apart from other companies is the strength of the flavors, Becker said.
“It says bourbon coffee and it tastes like bourbon coffee,” he said.
Other flavors they sell include smoked, spiced rum, pumpkin spice and even dill pickle.
The company mostly sells online, but also in-person at markets like the State Fair of Texas and stock shows, Ryan said.
He described stock shows as “a natural fit.”
“Outside of our business … we do a lot of hunting and fishing and like being outside and taking care of our animals and that sort of stuff. So we found the stock shows, we fit really well,” Ryan said.
Earlier on, they were excited to see an order a day come through online, Sledge said.
Currently, they are averaging about 450 orders per week.
Sledge credits events like the stock show, where Whiskey Morning Coffee can interact with thousands of potential customers every day for weeks in a row, for boosting a company that did not have a marketing budget.
“We didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what kick-started the business,” he said.
McKinnon Rice is the higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at mckinnon.rice@fortworthreport.org.
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Great Job McKinnon Rice & the Team @ Fort Worth Report for sharing this story.
