“I do not love roasting coffee,” says David Meyers. “I don’t want to spend my life doing this. I only want to do it one or two days a week.”
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Meyers is the roaster, packer, marketer, and delivery guy behind tiny independent Resistance Coffee. “Pretty much everything I do comes out of anarchist activism,” he says. “Rather than being just an end in itself, [coffee] is a way to build community and further these social goals.”
Up till then Meyers, who likes the control home-roasting allows, had been buying green coffee beans online and roasting them for his personal use in a popcorn popper. But coincidentally, the day before Parlak’s arrest he’d taken ownership of the Bean Boss, purchased for just under $900 on eBay. As Harbor County mobilized in Parlak’s defense, Meyers realized he had an opportunity: “I could have good coffee, make a little money, raise funds for cool stuff I believed in, and not have to work for anybody else,” he says. He got busy and in a few weeks he’d raised $2,000 for Parlak’s legal defense by selling pound bags of beans at $20 a pop. Ever since then, he’s pieced together a living between farming and coffee roasting.
But while the demand seems to be out there, Meyers isn’t interested in expanding his operations—in fact, he says, “I spent years trying to put the brakes on this.” Instead, he and another roaster, Michael McSherry, created the Chicago Coffee Confederation. Meyers met McSherry, a musician and freelance painting contractor, at a rock show in March and shortly after taught him the ropes. McSherry built his own version of the Bean Boss, and after a few false starts (his third trial batch caught on fire) was soon selling his own beans under the name Grinderman Coffee. He sells to friends and small offices, and occasionally at clubs.
