Why We Roast Our Own Coffee

The sentence in the dark

It was about two weeks into a coffee fast, in January of 2026, and I was up in the middle of the night rocking our youngest, Naomi, back to sleep. In the quiet I heard it, clear as day: Start the coffee roasting business now.

I'd heard the pull toward this for years. And every time, I'd answered the same way. So I answered it again, half-praying, half-arguing: Lord, provide the money. It's so much.

To understand why a sentence in the dark could undo fifteen years of hesitation, I have to take you back to where it started.

A popcorn popper and a bag of green beans

In 2011, I graduated college and moved home to live with my parents and work for a landscaping company. I honestly don't remember exactly how the idea took hold, but somewhere in there my parents and I decided we wanted to roast our own coffee. We started with a stainless steel Whirley Pop — the kind you'd use for popcorn — and small batches of green beans from Sweet Maria's.

It didn't take long. The first time we tasted coffee that fresh, it was better than anything we'd ever had. We were hooked.

In the spring of 2012 I met Shenley. We fell in love fast, were engaged by September, and married in July of 2013. I moved into her home in Millcreek, where there was a detached garage. We were both working in sales at a local furniture store then, but I had this dream of a coffee roasting business of my own. I kept sharing coffee with coworkers and people from church, and a few of them started roasting their own, too.

The dream I shelved

I used to stand in that Millcreek garage and picture a corner of it turned into a little roastery. Then I actually priced it out — the machine, the packaging, everything it would take to do it right — and I got overwhelmed and let it go.

Over the next few years it slid to the back burner. Promotions came. Children came. Our daughter Hazel Grace was born in September of 2014. In June of 2016 we moved to the home we're in now, and not long after, we were expecting our second, Eden Rhae, who arrived in May of 2017.

The land had other plans

I'd always wanted a milk cow. I talked Shenley into letting me build a fence and bring home one heifer — which is a story for another post — except that one heifer quickly became a cow with a calf and a bull, and by the end of 2018 we had fifteen head of cattle. The dream of a beef farm I hadn't even been chasing was suddenly real.

It grew fast. By 2020 we were over seventy head, with a small herd of pigs and some chickens. Around the same time we started Shenley's interior design business, Shenley Schenk Interior Design, and by 2021 it had grown enough that I was able to leave working for other people and come alongside her — while still trying to grow the farm.

The coffee dream was still there. It just never got a turn.

Busy, and missing peace

By October of 2023 I couldn't reconcile two things anymore: how busy our life was, and how little peace I had — when peace is exactly what God promises. The deeper problem was that I didn't believe I could actually hear God. Every decision about our businesses, our land, our kids felt rushed and unplanned, like we were taking a stab at whatever was in front of us instead of being led.

That month I asked my brother to pray one specific thing for me — that I could just hear God's voice. Scripture had been telling me how the whole time: in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight (Proverbs 3:6). I just hadn't been acknowledging Him in much of anything.

That same afternoon I was sitting in a tree stand, and I had an encounter where, for the first time in my life, I knew He was speaking to me. Faith comes by hearing, Paul wrote, and hearing by the word of God — the rhema, the word spoken right now, in the moment. That was the word I'd been missing.

Letting go — even of coffee

A lot changed quickly after that. In December of 2023, I felt God asking me to let go of drinking coffee. I didn't know if it was permanent or just for a season.

There's a small detail that matters here. Back in 2021 my old Whirley Pop had finally broken, and the new models didn't stir the beans properly — so I'd lost my tried-and-true way to roast. From 2021 on, I was buying coffee instead, and I never once found a source as good as what I'd roasted myself.

So when I started that first fast and the craving to roast came back, it came back strong — and I sensed it wasn't supposed to be just for me. I felt I was meant to start a roasting business. And I ignored it, because starting one is expensive and the upfront cost is real.

December of 2024, the same thing happened. Another fast, so I wouldn't be owned by a substance — and the desire returned, stronger. When I started drinking coffee again that February, every single time I brewed a cup, the same thought arrived with it: you're supposed to start a coffee roasting business. Around then I finally said it plainly: Lord, if you want me to do this, you have to provide the roaster. You have to provide thirty thousand dollars.

The yes

Which brings me back to that night with Naomi, and the sentence in the dark.

After I heard it — start now — and answered the way I always did, I laid back down, picked up my phone, and started looking at roasters. And I came across a way to roast coffee I'd never once considered, at a fraction of what I'd always assumed it would cost. (How we actually built it is its own story, for another day.) The thirty thousand dollars I'd put in front of God as the impossible condition turned out not to be the number at all. He provided — just not in the shape I'd demanded.

I waited a few days and brought it to Shenley. She'd watched us start enough ventures to be cautious about another, but she said okay — as long as we could make it happen.

By the middle of March, it had happened. We were roasting and selling our own coffee from a licensed roastery on our farm, and a dream that started in 2011 with a popcorn popper finally came to pass. I sought the Kingdom first — even handed back the one cup I loved — and the thing I'd shelved for over a decade was added back, in His timing, not mine.

Why we roast

Our great desire is simple: that the coffee we roast would bless people with every sip. That as they drink coffee we roast from certified-organic, high-grown specialty beans, they'd find a little peace and a little health — that their minds would be put at ease, and that, somewhere in it, they'd come to know God as their Father.

That's why we roast.