The Legend

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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, the road became legendary during the days of Prohibition, when moonshiners carried their whiskey through the darkness, always watching for the headlights of the revenuers 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.

That spirit resonates with us because we've seen 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. With their young daughter in their arms, 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 road was different. But the spirit was the same.

Then there was my road.

Before Thunder Road Coffee, in an earlier chapter, I was a pilot flying hurricane hunter aircraft into the eye of some of the world's most violent weather.  Definitely not an ordinary flying job, it demanded preparation, teamwork, precision, and a willingness to go where most people probably would not.

The plane was also not ordinary, the P-3 Orion, a formidable aircraft that protected us and safely brought us home from every mission.  But it had one problem:  its mil-spec coffee maker produced some of the worst coffee on earth...terrible, horrible coffee!

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

Surely 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 few miles 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 is different.

We're not running moonshine.

We roast really good 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 spirit we put into every batch of Thunder Road Coffee.

The road has changed, the spirit hasn't.

Thunder Road Coffee
Outrun the Ordinary!