Interview with Jeff Taylor of Bird Rock Coffee Roasters
The following is from a transcript of a recording made during the Covoya Specialty Coffee and Roast Magazine party at the World of Coffee in San Diego in April 2026. Fortunately, everyone was having a great time at the party. Unfortunately, the party was so loud it overwhelmed our recording equipment. But we loved the content. Edits have been made for length and clarity.
Jeff Taylor of Bird Rock coffee sat down with Mark Inman and Todd Mackey and as we join the conversation, Jeff is answering the question of how he made the leap from award-winning photojournalist to coffee, first in Topeka, Kansas, and then 20 years later, doing it all over again in San Diego, California.
Jeff
I don't know how I made the leap, I'll be honest. I tell people all the time I tripped and fell into coffee. I was a photojournalist and I won some awards when I was living in Columbia, Missouri, out of college. Job offers came in and randomly I ended up in Lewiston, Idaho, took a job at the newspaper there. It was a good photo-oriented newspaper, and I ended up winning Regional Photographer of the Year, which included four states, in 1990.
Offers started coming in again and I'm from Kansas originally so I was very aware of a newspaper called the Topeka Capital Journal. Anybody that follows college basketball, you may have seen pictures in Sports Illustrated for the last 30 years from a man named Rich Clarkson. Rich Clarkson was the director of photography at the Topeka Capital Journal. He was known as a career maker, people went there and Rich made their careers. He would employ them, help teach them, critique them, and he was a hard ass to work for. But everybody loved him for it. Anyway, that was my connection with the Capital Journal.
Rich wasn't there anymore, but one of his protege's, Jeff Jacobson, was the new director of photography. He called me and said, hey, it's your time to come home. And I'm like, okay, I'm in, let's go. So I moved back thinking this is my big chance to go from Topeka to New York Times or a big magazine or whatever.
I got to Topeka and the newspaper wasn't what it once was but living in Lewiston in the late 80s–Starbucks had not gone public yet–but I had heard chatter around about these Starbucks. And there were also coffee carts on the street in the Northwest back in the late 80's. I don't know if you remember that. There were coffee carts everywhere and there was a coffee cart in Lewiston.
I took it for granted in Lewiston. I didn't think anything of it. I would stop for my coffee and go on to work. I moved to Topeka and went, how is it possible there's no coffee here? The only coffee was at gas stations or something like that. It confused me. Like, how can this be? And then I found a local coffee shop in Lawrence, Kansas. There was a place there. They didn't roast or anything. They just had a little coffee shop.
I found myself driving over there every weekend. I would drive 30 miles on the weekends in the morning just to get a cup of coffee. One day I thought, what am I doing? I figured a coffee shop can't be rocket science and I decided one day to open a coffee shop in Topeka. It'll be a nice hobby. I never intended to give up my career. It’s a side hustle. I had just moved to Topeka thinking I'm going to be the next superstar photojournalist.
So when I opened this little coffee shop and it started working, I had a roommate at the time who was managing three deli’s, three different stores all at once. I was like, dude, why don't you quit your job and come manage my coffee shop for me? I'll give you half of it. I'll be a half owner if you come to manage my coffee shop. He’s still my partner to this day and Fred is one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet.
Mark
How long from that moment until you left your primary career and became a coffee guy?
Jeff
I quit my job at the newspaper, I want to say it was, 98, 99. So, like six years later. On a side note, my boss at the time, when I went in to tell him I was quitting my job to go manage my coffee shop, he looked me in the eye and he said, You're giving up your career to go manage a coffee shop? And I was like, oh, when you put it that way… I thought about it for a second and said yeah, I guess I am. Then he told me “I just want you to know you're going to fail.” Dead serious. Those were his words. It didn't bother me because I was already committed, I was already in, man, I had bought a roaster.
To his credit, later he sent me a letter saying, Jeff, I just want you to know I'm really proud of you. I was 100% wrong. You're doing great work.
You know, it was interesting and fun years for us in Kansas. We didn't have mass distribution, we didn't have density of population, so it was challenging for us to make a living so we had to grow to where we had, at one point, five retail cafes. But not all of them were successful. We had two or three at any given time that would be successful.
We realized, being in Kansas, our path was probably more wholesale. So we had our retail cafes, but really just as a front to help us sell more wholesale.
Mark
You're doing wholesale at grocery or restaurant?
Jeff
Cafes. I was a purist, Mark. I was a complete purist and I didn't want to ever do grocery because that would be selling out. Eventually, I realized good coffee can be made for everyone but at first we just sold the specialty cafes. We didn't even really sell to restaurants. We just sold to specialty cafes around the country and that was it.
Mark
Your territory spread out far and wide from Kansas.
Jeff
Yeah it did. Eventually we were selling wholesale in 35 states. I think it was around 2007, 2008 we looked it up and we were in 35 states and things were going very well. And then the economy–remember the big bubble economy in 2008? Like many coffee companies, it didn't really affect our sales immediately. When the economy went down, we didn't notice it right away, but we did notice it over the next four or five years. I think it was also timing in the industry. More and more of our customers were starting to roast their own coffee. That was just the trend in the industry because the market crashed, people were looking for ways to save money.
Todd
Simultaneously the culture within the industry pointed to cafes and said hey you're missing the best stuff. If you're not roasting something's wrong.
Jeff
There's a part of it, coffee tourism that was involved in that as well. I was always an early adopter on social media and I used to post all my travels on Instagram. I know another coffee buyer who told me point blank that's the reason he now works for an importer and travels to buy coffee is because he saw all my pictures on Instagram. It made him want to do it.
Mark
I also feel there was a time that we were coming up in coffee and traveling a lot and that we sold a bill of goods that this is how the industry operates. I think now it doesn't work that way. A lot of people thought I’m going to be a coffee buyer with a passport and a suitcase and going places but now I have a calculator and pencil and I'm doing math.
Jeff
Exactly right. I remember Dwayne at Stumptown telling the story of how he got in his station wagon and took his wife and kids on a drive through Mexico down to Guatemala and I'm, yeah, we don't really do that much anymore and that's not really the way it works
Mark
2008 happens, you start to see a dip eventually. You obviously muscled through with PT's, but what brought you to look out this way?
Jeff
Well, I was in a small market. Many roasters own cafes in major cities. I was not in a major city. It's a fairly small town, 100,000 people. You couldn't support more than four cafes, five cafes. We were selling wholesale, but we realized as some of our best accounts were starting to close down to roast their own coffee, we have a problem here if we lose some of our best accounts because they're roasting their own coffee. How are we gonna make our living in the future? We realized our best path was to get into a major market where we could open up retail cafes and control our own destiny.
It just so happened that Bird Rock worked out, but it was my goal all along. If it wasn't Bird Rock, it was going to be somewhere else. The goal was to immediately establish a roastery and open up three to five cafes wherever it was I went. It just so happened that Bird Rock in San Diego called me and I ended up here.
Mark
At the time was the strategy to grow in a major market under the PT’s brand?
Jeff
Yes, that was the original plan. I was looking for a market that wasn't completely developed. Obviously Seattle, Portland, Chicago, New York, LA…there were certain markets that were taken already. I'm looking at a map and thinking where can I move and start over effectively? I sold half of PT's and was able to acquire a certain amount of money that was going to allow me to somewhat start over. Creating another roastery would allow us to grow. So, originally, the city I marked on the map was Washington DC. I flew to DC and looked at 30 different locations and spent three or four days there. When I got home Chuck, who was the founder of Bird Rock, called me and said Jeff, my wife and I are done, we’re selling the business.
I said, What are you talking about? No, you're not, you're crazy. He said, yeah, we're done. I told him I’d love to talk to him if he was serious. He assured me he was dead serious.
Like I say, I just sold half of PT's so the timing literally just landed perfectly.
Mark
When was this?
Jeff
The summer of 2016 and by December we had worked out all the details and I moved here in February. The day I signed the paperwork I already had my car loaded and was driving to California. I said my goodbyes to my friends at Topeka and promised I'd come back someday.
As I've told Chuck and as I tell everybody, Chuck got all my money and I got all his problems…is what it boiled down to. We opened our second store after a year so I'd signed my lease on the next location pretty much in the first three months. The goal was kind of one or maybe two stores a year if we could finance, if we could make it work.
Despite what some people might want to believe–they think I came here with just loads of money and I can just do whatever I want–coffee doesn't work that way. People can think I'm rich all they want. This is nothing more than hard work and making a few good business decisions.
Mark
So Bird Rock now has how many locations?
Jeff
We're up to 11 now. My favorite thing is, we're up to 11 stores now and the original Bird Rock location only does 5 % less business than when I bought it. I can imagine a little bit of drop off because we opened more stores but it's only down 5% from where it was when I bought it and it's still one of my top 3 stores.
I don't look at anybody else in town as competition. So I don't worry about what the other companies are doing. I'm happy to help any of them that want to come knock on my door but I just focus on my business. I don't ever go shopping in the coffee shops to see what they're doing. You guys do you, I'm doing me. It's all good and I wish everybody well.
Todd
So what I'm taking from this then is you have11 locations as of this weekend. We're looking at, I would say, 14 to 15 by the time we're hanging again in 2028.
Jeff
Coming out of the pandemic slowed expansion dramatically. One, we kind of topped out on how much I could borrow. My equity's kind of capped for a year or two here until I can pay down some debt. And two, I don’t know if you've opened a retail store lately, but construction costs have more than doubled. I mean, it's insane. So to open a retail store, a good one, one that you believe is going to do well over a million years in sales, is very expensive. We're not as eager to jump into expansion anymore. We're kind of slowing down. We may be at 13 in a couple years. We'll see.
Mark
Well, Jeff, super grateful that you decided to split off the time with us and really grateful to be in your town. I mean, it's beautiful and it's like just the perfect 68 degrees.
Jeff
I don't go on vacation very often anymore. People in San Diego are very happy. You get off the airplane, you sense it right away, the Uber drivers are smiling. People love living here. It's hard to live here, let's be honest, it's expensive. But if you can figure out a way to make a living here, you're happy. I often thank Chuck for allowing me to come in and develop the business he started. I owe a lot of that to him. All I'm doing is helping grow it and trying to maintain and improve the quality as I can. Thanks guys
