EP 84: All About Coffee with Kirby Crenwelge | Part 1

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Before we start today's episode, I want to give you a heads up that this is a two parter. Tune in to part one today, then come back next week for part two. Enjoy. Welcome to the Think Happy Podcast. I am your host, Caitlin Quavis, and you know, this episode today is kind of a big deal for a couple of reasons. First of all, and most obviously, I am here with you on a video. Like a legit video, right? This is a big deal. So previously, the Think Happy podcast has only been available via audio. But now, as you can see here and I guess some of you might not be seeing, but if you're not seeing, you should go see while you're listening.

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But as you can see here, we're now doing a video component of the show, and I'm so gosh darn excited about it. So if everything goes according to plan, you could be seeing more of this. Yay. Get excited. The second reason today's episode is kind of a big deal is because I'm getting to sit down and talk with someone who you have actually heard me talk about before. So if you've listened to the show before, which I hope you have, you have heard an ad run for a company called Kirbeans Coffee. Okay, well, I am sitting down and talking with Kirby from Kirbeans Coffee, which is going to be so, so much fun, you guys. But before you meet Kirby, I have something really quick to tell you. It's also super exciting. And that is all about the newest addition to Think Happy's product suite, which is the Becoming Your Best You course. Okay, so you've probably heard me talk about the Becoming Your Best You group coaching program. If that has piqued your interest before, but maybe you didn't feel quite ready for it, or if group coaching just isn't your jam, doesn't sound like something you've been interested in.

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But if at the same time you've been curious or wanting to learn about some of the things that we cover inside the program, such as identifying time that you waste or don't use productively figuring out how to reallocate that wasted time so it serves you better. Learning how to better manage and prioritize your tasks. Figuring out how and when to start delegating. Learning how to build sustainable habits and routines that serve you well, then this course is literally calling your name. I hear it right now, like, off in the distance, I hear it calling your name. And if it sounds interesting to you, if there's even a small part of you that's like, okay, I kind of want to learn more about this, go on Instagram. Send me a DM that says by course, and I will get back with you. I will answer all of your questions. We can dive into the details. I'll give you a behind the scenes look at what it looks like, and I'll help you get all signed up. So, again, if that sounds interesting, just send me a DM that says by course, and we'll take it from there.

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Now, with that being said, the time has come for the real reason that you are here today, and that is to get to meet my friend Kirby. It is my pleasure to introduce you say that three times fast. To my friend Kirby. She grew up in college station, Texas, and went to Texas A&M University, whoop. I also went to Texas a and m. She got a degree in recreation, parks and tourism sciences. And these are her words, not mine. She's literally hilarious. If you've seen parks and rec, she literally went to school to become Leslie. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Yeah, leslie nope. I was like, is it nope, nope. But I have it written down. Nope. Anyway, after college, Kirby went into student ministry for five years, where she met her husband Luke, who was also on staff, not a student. She did want me to point that out. Very important to know. Yes. And she now works for a small city outside of Houston, and she and Luke own and operate Kirby's coffee, a coffee roasting business. And we get to talk about that today. Welcome to the show, Kirby. Well, thank you so much for having me.

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Oh, my gosh. I'm so relieved that I can stop talking to no one over here and officially look at you and talk to you. This whole video thing is new. You look very comfortable.

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Thanks. I don't have a lot of experience in front of the camera, but you know what? We're just going to go with it.

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We're going to go with it. I'm totally here for that. So let's start. I always feel like this is not really a fair question because it's, like, so open ended, but tell us a little about you, and tell us a little about Kirby's and just how it came to be.

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Okay. So I'm kirby and I have lived in this area for about five years now.

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Okay.

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And I met Luke the day that I moved to this area, actually. First day on the job, and then we've been married for two years this past week. Happy anniversary. Thank you so much.

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Thank you.

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I work here in the weathers. I work for a city north of houston, and I'm just one step closer, I feel like, to becoming Leslie. Nope. I love people. I love being outside. I love the summertime, and fajitas margaritas oh, heck. Have always been able to brighten any bad day or just make any good day even better.

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There you go.

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Yeah.

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There you go.

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If I could recommend one product, if you just want to go splurge on something. Yeah, a margarita machine.

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Margarita.

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Margarita machine. It was a wedding gift that we got, and it has been my favorite thing. Oh, absolutely?Use it too much, but no judgment. Too much margaritas.

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Probably not.

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No.

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Anyways

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Absolutely not.

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And then we started Kirbeans as a coffee roasting company, just as a hobby to do on the side. And that's still some days it's a hobby, some days it's a business, but it's still just something that we do on the side, and it was something that we started because Luke is very entrepreneurial. He always comes up with new ideas. Hey, let's try this. Hey, let's try this. And I was in a place of so coming out of student ministry. I went into teaching, and I taught 8th grade algebra for three months.

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That was amazing to me.

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I threw in the towel. You're like, no, thank you. Which I will say there were 180, like, 13-14 year olds. And I was just like, I deal with you every single day. No, this is not for me. So I got out. But at that point, too, I had done ministry through COVID, had jumped straight into teaching, and Luke saw me, and he said, you're not okay. You need to take a break. And so I took about six months of just not doing anything. And I'm somebody that just throughout my life, I think that I have been given a spirit of joy.

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Right.

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And I just had never struggled with depression before, but that was something that it was just all of a sudden, like, I think I'm depressed, and I don't know what to do.

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Yeah.

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I couldn't find the energy to just do stuff, and Luke would come home and be like, what did you do today? And be like, I made the bed. And that's all I could say for myself. And it just was a really weird place. And so he knew Kirby's normally a go getter, like, what's going on? And so he started pitching more ideas. I think he knew that I needed something to be motivated for. And him pitching ideas. It was all stuff that he had a background in. And it was something that it was like, well, I didn't really want to jump into a business. If Luke has a background in this and I have no background because he's getting to jump, like, he's going to be the know it all and I want to learn something together. And so he pitched coffee roasting, and that was something. I was like, well, we don't know anything about that, but we love enjoying coffee together.

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Yeah.

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And so we started toying around with that idea, ended up buying a roaster, and a year later, here we are. We're now roasting coffee.

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Oh, my gosh. What I love about that story and also this is just like, the small business lover inside of me is I feel like so many people have dreams like that, but few people actually turn those dreams into a reality. So talk me through how it actually came to be when Luke I'm, like, pointing over here, because Luke's back here behind the cameras, how you and Luke landed on the coffee roasting. You're like, okay, yes, we get to learn this together. But now fast forward. Like, here it is actually a business, and you actually have a coffee roaster, and you just showed me how it works, and it's amazing. So walk me through that.

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Okay, so to start all this off, I do think that impostor syndrome is real. And even being in these shoes doing this, I still feel imposter syndrome. I still look around and say, oh, my goodness, my friends are doing this. My friends are doing this. I get this little jealous bug inside of me, but at the same time, I have to take a step back and say, no, you have a coffee roasting business. That's still something. You're still doing something, and it's still way to go. I still need to remind myself, like, no, you're still doing something.

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Yeah.

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That being said, I don't want to take all the credit. Luke is the one who made a lot of the business side of stuff happen. He already has a different business that he does with his brother, and so he knew a lot of the legwork behind that, right? A lot of that I can't totally answer, like, how we went from the idea to now it's its own. It's technically a DBA under an LLC if you want to get all business. And even I don't totally understand that. But he mentioned the coffee roasting. I love dad jokes, and so from there, and he's like, but we got to come up with a name. Like, what will we even call it? And this was all over text one day, and I said, Curbines, and it just came to me, and I was like, oh, it's a pun, like Kirby, but we're making beans. Kirbeans.

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I love it.

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Wait, that's actually great. And so from there, we already had an idea of what kind of roaster we wanted just based off of a local coffee shop. And it's not very big. It's kind of the size. And I showed you back there about think of a culligan water machine, like, where you put your five gallon jug on top. It takes up the space of about two of those, right? One is the roaster. One collects what's called the chaff. So it's like the skin of the beans, but other than that. It's not that big. It does take a plug, like what you would plug in for a washing machine or dryer one of the bigger 220 volts.

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You could have said anything, and I would have been like, yeah, no one fact checker.

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And so it came down to having an issue of where to actually plug in and get it going. We currently live in an apartment, and so it does have to be vented. Really, the only way that we could have made it work, which was not going to work, would have been unplugging our dryer, plugging it into the dryer port, and then also taking the vents that your dryer exhausts out of and hooking that up so that the chaff would go out that way in an apartment. I'm sure there's fire hazards there. I don't even know. And so we ended up just ordering the roaster. We already had that business, like I said, that Luke had with his brother, and so we were able to open a DBA underneath that, and so we were able to use the LLC money to buy the roaster initially.

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Okay. Got you.

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They sent it to us, and it lived in our garage for a year, ten months or something like that.

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Yes.

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And by luck, we ended up going to that coffee shop that we really liked, which is actually where we're recording, right?

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Yes.

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We came here yes. And said, hey, what happened to your.

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Roaster that you used to use for your coffee shop?

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And she had split ways with that business partner, and she said, but I still would love to have a local roaster. And we said, funny you should mention that. We actually have that exact same roaster. We have all the leg up to start this business, but we don't know what we're doing. And she said, well, you could set up here, and I'll teach you.

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Amazing.

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And so we honestly lucked into that. And there are plenty of YouTube videos like Luke always jokes about YouTube university. Oh, yeah, he has a degree from YouTube university. Because truly, honestly, if you have any questions of how to get started in something, go look up a YouTube video.

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Sure.

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And I think that a lot of times, it's just kind of that fear of, like, what do I do? And honestly just jump into it, I think, is what it came down to. And so we jumped into it. We set up our roaster. She showed us one time how to do it, and then from there, she said, okay, I need five pounds of coffee for tomorrow. And we were like, oh, okay, I.

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Guess we're doing it.

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That was back in November. But fast forward to where we are now, and we've been doing this for half a year, and it's something that I think that we just get feedback more and more. Last week, we had three different people reach out to us of this coffee is actually the best coffee. Like, we've compared it to the other Mexico beans, other Brazil beans, and so it's really encouraging. That feedback.

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That's amazing.

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Fine tune it.

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So how did you guys take a love, I would say, for coffee? And how did you just convert that into something that you wanted to make a business out of? Does that make sense?

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Yes, it does. Something that I think is really important to me is just people. I love people. Love talking to them, love meeting them, and we realized that throughout our relationship, we're very different people and have different interests, but coffee was something that always brought us together. We were always able to sit down and just enjoy a cup of coffee together. But as we started looking around, just local coffees that you could get that were within a week of the roast date, you can't really find that in our particular area.

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Okay.

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And we just really liked the fresh, roasted coffee. So I think from that, that then became the idea of, okay, I think we're going to take this hobby that we enjoy doing together, turn it into the business that we now have. And it was just kind of through that thread, and we toyed around with several different ideas of, like, okay, well, what if we did something? Now it's been two years that I can't even remember what the other ideas were, but this seemed the most tangible, and it wasn't that much to get it started. I think the roaster itself was about $5,000, but beyond that and buying the beans, it's not like we started a brand new store that we had to get an inventory for, and it was.

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Not, well, much overhead. I think that coffee in my life also, wine kind of, like, fall under this umbrella of two things that just naturally bring people together and create really good conversation. So some of my favorite times during just an average week are like Oakley and me sitting in our bedroom and these bucket chairs that we have at the foot of our bed that look out into these windows that look into our backyard and before the kids are awake and just, like, sitting there and drinking coffee and just, like, chatting before the day starts. Those are my favorite, just, like, simple moments of the week. And then also other moments that are coming to my mind is at my family's lake house, we have this big porch that looks out over the lake, and every morning that we're there, everyone ends up on the big sofas that are out there. And just everyone takes turns, like refreshing people's coffee. And it's just such good family time. And I think coffee and wine also are unique in that they bring people together like that. People don't just sit around and drink a cup of water like that.

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I mean, they could, but there's just something unique about it. I don't know.

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I'd like to add margaritas to the list.

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Margaritas?

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Yes.

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You are a margarita girl. I'm always down for a margarita. Absolutely. So this might not be fair, but what is your favorite so far since you've started roasting for about the past six ish months? What's your favorite part of your job at Kirbeans?

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Honestly, it's getting to talk to customers or just people that we meet. So being set up in a coffee shop, especially at the beginning, we were roasting while she was open, and so we were getting people walking back and just asking questions and getting to meet just random people, whether it's a 20 year old guy who's coming, he's like, oh, man, coffee. That sounds cool. Or a 70 year old lady who's like, oh, I've never seen this before. Just meeting people in all these different spans of life has been really interesting. I've also liked it's kind of pulled people out of the woodwork. I've had people from high school that I was at high school with on Facebook. I posted about it, and they bought coffee. And it's cool starting an exchange. It's just really cool how it in the actual act of drinking coffee. Like, that was kind of what started this, of, like, sit down and enjoy it with somebody you love. It's kind of been our motivation behind this, is creating time with somebody that you love. It has also opened these doors for people that were like, it still is bringing people together on the back end of it.

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Yeah, for sure.

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So it's been kind of cool seeing that.

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That's really awesome. As I'm sitting here, I'm drinking the most delicious cup of Kirby's coffee. Kirby's is a wife and husband duo who turned their passion for coffee into a business. They are so sweet, and it makes me so happy seeing their business thrive. Now, let me tell you why Kirbeans is thriving. To put it simply, it's because their coffee is amazing. Think happy has had the honor of getting to pick a think happy signature roast. These dark roasted Mexico beans smell like a good day waiting to happen. When brewed, they create the smoothest cup of coffee you have ever tasted, and it is even still good after being reheated. If you're like me and frequently get pulled away from your coffee, you know, that's important. And I have a special treat for you. Think happy listeners receive 15% off their order of Kirbeans. Head to Kirbeans Coffee. Kirby's is spelled kirbeans and use code thinkappy at. Checkout for your 15% discount. Again, that's Kirby's coffee code thinkhappy for 15% off. So, okay, you've probably been asked this question when people would walk back while you were roasting during business hours, but can you walk us through the whole process from bean until me drinking a cup of coffee one morning?

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Like, what happens?

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For the matter?

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How do we get there?

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I think that I can. Yeah, we're going to try this. Okay, so oh, no.

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Are we good? Okay, we're good. We're flexible here at the Think Happy podcast. I love it. Yeah.

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I wish I was more flexible just physically in all of this. Whenever coffee is grown, people actually don't know this. It's actually like, a little fruit. It kind of looks like a berry, and it grows on trees. Luke is nodding.

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Coffee trees. Yes.

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And so what you're actually getting is the pit of this berry.

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Okay.

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And so I don't know if it's machines that's picking it if it's hand picking, but how much coffee we have. I can't imagine that it's only hand picking.

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Yeah.

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It's got machines, and so they get it. And so there's several different ways that they can use to get the fruit off of the berry.

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Okay.

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Some of the things that they will do is they'll put it through, like, a high power water system to just blast off the fruit, and then they'll lay it out in the sun to dry.

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Okay.

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And this is all done in whatever country the beans are from.

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Right.

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So that's one way. The other way is they'll take it, and they will just basically put all the fruit out and let the sun rot the fruit off of it.

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Got you.

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And so there's two different ways that they'll do it, and then they'll clean up the beans, which is the pit from the fruit. And so it's kind of misleading. It's a bean, but it's a pit.

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Yeah.

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And so then from there, there might be a step or two in between. I'm not totally sure. But then they end up in these burlap bags. Yeah.

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We fast forward, and they are huge, you guys. Literally. I just saw one that was 150 pounds. Yes.

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Like what? Yes. So when we started, we started out getting smaller quantities. They came in, quite honestly, what looked like trash bags. They are venting bags that allow gases out, but not in. But we have since moved up to the burlap bags just because we were going through so much, and it's more cost effective. But those burlap bags, luckily, is fairly close to us. It's about an hour, hour and a half drive. Otherwise, it would have gone on a 18 wheeler, driven to the coffee shop, and they would deliver it. We were able to go pick it up. We threw it in the back of my tahoe. Well, throwing makes it throw away, and I just supervised and took pictures. Luke and the working there, did I?

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Oh, yes.

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And then we bring it here to the coffee shop, where we are set up with our 220 volts plug. There you go. You've been out the back door, not out the dryer. And once we get the roaster up and warmed up, which that takes five to ten minutes ish, we then pour it into the roaster, and what we have is an electric roaster and so it lofts the beans into there. It kind of looks like a little waterfall of beans that stay in this cage. And depending on the roast, if we're doing light, medium, or dark, depends on how long it stays in there. Light is in there for the least amount of time. Dark is in there for the most amount of time, and we take it out based on the temperature of the beans, at about 400 degrees, you hear the beans pop kind of like a popcorn that you hear popcorn popping. You hear them just all kind of start popping like popcorn.

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Like yeah.

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And so after that happens, you that's a light roast. Once they all kind of start having it, that's about 400 degrees. And so as you move forward, you can see by the color, you can see by the temperature what they're coming off. At the dark roast, we're pulling it closer to 450. Medium roast is closer to 420.

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Okay.

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We pull it off, and then right next to our roaster is this. It's a circle with a little mesh.

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Wire underneath it, like a colander or like a strainer.

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It's kind of a flat strainer.

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Yeah.

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So we pour the beans on that, and then that is this empty box. You can see me. It's this circle pan that sits on a box, but the box is open, and so it sucks the air through the circle pan. That cools the beans down the box, and then it's getting sucked out. That's why we have the vent the.

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Venting where it takes it out, so.

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That cools the beans. And so that process of roasting takes about ten to 15 minutes. The cooling takes three minutes, and then we package it, and you get it.

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And when you get it, it has a really cute logo on it. Yes, a very cute logo.

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So depending on what you get, right now, our logo is it's supposed to be me and Luke sitting on a couch. It's so cute from behind, though, because we wanted other people to envision themselves doing that with somebody that they love, whether that's somebody, like a spouse or it's your best friend or your mom, something like that. We just wanted people to be able to envision themselves sharing a cup of coffee with somebody that they love. And so that's kind of how it ripped in. And we would love to continue our kind of Calvin and Hobbes style drawing into other blends as we develop.

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Yeah. It's so cute. Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Think Happy podcast. I would so appreciate it if you could leave a rating and review. And if you just can't get enough, find me on instagram at thinkappy co. That's C o and online@thinkcappyco.com. I'll be back in your ears next week with another episode of The Think Happy podcast.