Every road has a story. some become legends.

Long before Thunder Road Coffee, there was another Thunder Road.  Winding through the mountains from Harlan, Kentucky, through Cumberland Gap and Maynardville, and toward Knoxville, this road became legendary during Prohibition, when moonshiners carried their whiskey through the darkness, always watching for the headlights of the tax revenue agents behind them.

The stories grew larger than the road itself.  They made movies and wrote songs about it.

Fast cars.  Mountain back roads.  Close calls.   

Men who knew every curve and hollow and were willing to take a dangerous road rather than an ordinary one.

Over time, fact and folklore merged, but the spirit of the legend remained unmistakable:

Independence. Grit. Courage. And the determination to make your own way.

This spirit resonates with us because we’ve witnessed it in our own family.

Decades ago, my wife's parents escaped to America from a communist country with only a few dollars in their pockets. They left behind everything they knew, took a tremendous risk, and started over in a country where they believed they could build something of their own. They did exactly that. Through hard work and perseverance, they built a small business and a life that represented the American dream they had risked everything to pursue.

Their journey was unique, but the spirit was the same.

Then there was my road.

Before Thunder Road Coffee, in an earlier chapter, I was a hurricane hunter pilot, a job which required flying into the world's worst weather.  Definitely not a typical flying job, it demanded preparation, skill, teamwork and a willingness to go where most people probably would not.

The plane was anything but ordinary - the P-3 Orion, 

a formidable aircraft that protected us and safely brought us home from every mission, but with one problem, its military grade coffee maker produced some of the worst coffee imaginable...terrible, horrible coffee.

Somewhere amidst the turbulence, the long missions, and far too many cups of bad coffee, a thought took hold:

Coffee doesn't have to be this way.

That thought became an idea. The idea led to a small roaster, which eventually led to bigger roasters, and that idea became Thunder Road Coffee.

Our Eye of the Storm blend is a nod to those days, a little piece of that road carried forward into every cup.

Today, we are craft roasters here in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee,  just a stone's throw from the same East Tennessee landscape that gave the original Thunder Road its character.  We aren't trying to recreate the past. 

We're carrying the spirit of this region forward.

Because the original Thunder Road wasn't really about moonshine.

It was about people who weren't afraid to take the road less traveled.

Our road may look different.

We’re not running moonshine, we specialize in roasting exceptional craft coffee.

But we still believe in doing things our own way. In taking a little risk. In building something worth building. And in refusing to settle for ordinary when something better is possible.

That's what Outrun the Ordinary means to us.

It's the spirit of the road.

It's the spirit of our family.

It's the spirit that brought us here.

And it’s the passion we roast into every batch of Thunder Road Coffee.

The road has changed, the spirit hasn't.

Thunder Road Coffee:  Outrun the Ordinary!