The United States of Coffee
Brand Strategy · Identity · Editorial Content · UX · Podcast · Sound Design
The best coffee shops in America weren't findable.
Specialty coffee had a discovery problem. The country's most exceptional cafés weren't being surfaced by Yelp or Google Maps — they were known by word of mouth, passed between roasters and baristas and the people who'd put in the years. There was no authoritative guide. No one had built the resource that coffee professionals actually trusted.
We wanted to build that thing. And we wanted to build it by going straight to the source.
Start with expertise you don't have yet.
In 2017, my collaborator Aaron and I launched a podcast — not because we were coffee professionals, but because we weren't. We interviewed some of the country's best roasters and industry figures, and at the end of every episode we asked them the same question: where are your three favorite coffee shops in America?
Over time, those answers became something genuinely valuable: a curated list built not by algorithm or advertiser, but by the people who knew best. Not just any good coffee shop — the ones that the best professionals in the industry would go out of their way for.
From there I built a full brand around the concept. Naming, visual identity, voice, and an editorial content system designed to feel like a trusted travel guide for the specialty coffee world. I handled everything on the creative side: identity design, UX and web design, content strategy, photography, podcast branding, and sound design. Aaron brought taste, cultural instinct, and deep connections in fashion and consumer culture.
A curatorial guide, not a review platform.
The brand extended naturally into a podcast, a social presence, and a planned app — all built around the same organizing principle: curation over quantity, expertise over crowd-sourcing.
The Instagram feed was organized by state, practical enough that someone on a road trip could open it and immediately find vetted recommendations for wherever they were headed. Every post was earned — no paid placements, no sponsored content.
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Real community. Real credibility.
We attended two Specialty Coffee Association annual trade shows, networked with roasters and café operators, and built our Instagram following to over 1,000 genuinely earned followers — real engagement from within the specialty coffee community, at a time before buying followers was common practice.
By early 2020, we had full brand sponsorship lined up for a sold-out live event in Portland — an evening with James Hoffmann and other prominent coffee professionals, underwritten by roaster and food sponsors.
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April 2020.
The Portland event was scheduled for April 2020. It didn't happen. The pandemic made the live, travel-based community-building model that The United States of Coffee depended on impossible, and the project went dark. The brand assets and community infrastructure still exist. The model, as designed, doesn't have a clear path back.
The identity serves the system, not the other way around.
Building a brand is not the hard part. The hard part is building the mechanic that sustains it — the thing that keeps creating value when you're not in the room. The United States of Coffee had a beautiful brand and a smart curatorial model. What it didn't have was a distribution engine that could survive the loss of in-person community.
That's the lesson I carry into every brand project now. Strategy has to account for the moments you can't control.
