2023: first year recap and reflections
Photo Credit: Robert A
Welp, it’s taken me (Mabel) until the last day of 2023 to write our very first post. I’ll make it a 2024 resolution to post more on this blog 😅
Looking back on 2023, this has been a HUGE year for us (Ming and me). This year marks the first full year that we’ve started Moonwake Coffee Roasters. It’s sometimes hard to perceive how far you’ve traveled, until you stop and take a look back.
late 2022 to January
By December 2022, we launched our coffee roasting in a more formal capacity. Prior to that, we had been roasting informally for friends, family, and our neighbors since 2020 (the pandemic brought out creative pursuits for many of us).
✌🏻out— In January, I officially quit my full-time program manager job at Meta to fully dive into building Moonwake Coffee Roasters full-time. My stints at the previous companies I worked at had always seemed like aimless wanderings, until then. For the first time, I finally felt like I was fully running towards something, instead of running away.
🛠️ if you build it, they will come (that’s the theory anyway)— We had already decided in December 2022 to build a cart so we could introduce and serve our coffees to people to experience, but we now had a deadline in February to hit. And so, we (by we, I mean 99.9999% Ming) got to work on the build. There were many considerations that factored into the final build - which we’ll plan to write another post for (in 2024 please, I only have one hour left of 2023 to finish this… ).
📈 Scale— we also started working with CoRo - an amazing co-roasting facility in Berkeley - to expand our roasting operations. We’re really lucky to have this type of facility available to us in the Bay Area, to support a variety of batch sizes (5kg to 35kg phew!)
February
Cart is finally finished— just in time for our first pop-up at the Studio Climbing Gym in downtown San Jose (shoutout to Pete and the team)! We were overwhelmed by the support and showing for our first pop-up - from friends, family, and new faces at the gym.
On bar: Alex Z., Sean
March
Massive thank you to my Meta Coffee Peeps friends Aiden and Michelle, and our friends Fan and Kevin for helping us!
First catering event for my old team at Meta— a new type of service model for us to get under our belt. Our neon sign was also a gift from my old team 🥹.
First Nova Series launch— this marked our first foray into sourcing and roasting coffees with higher complexity (and often consequently… higher prices). We began challenging ourselves to dig deeper into unpacking the nuances of vast flavor potentials in coffee. We also started to understand more how the innumerable interventions along each step of the production lifecycle can impact the final cup (i.e. from coffee cultivation, harvesting, processing, roasting, final quality control, etc.)
Second pop-up at Boutique Dandelion— we hosted our second pop-up at our local neighborhood boutique, meeting more members of our local community, and being able to serve our neighbors! This was also our brief introduction to the Bae Area Coffee Club community, with some folks from the club swinging by to give us a try.
April
Babies’ first time at SCA Expo ever— I imagine this is basically Disneyland for coffee nerds, professionals, enthusiasts… stepping into the Portland convention center as incredibly fresh coffee professionals, we felt imposter syndrome at level 1000. The highlight of our trip was meeting Roberto Rene Gonzalez and his son Emerson of Finca Liquidámbar, the producer of one of our Honduran coffees we launched earlier in the year. We left the Expo with an intensified excitement for the opportunities ahead of us. It would also be at Expo, that we’d begin to foster more relationships in the coffee industry and community (specifically, the Bae Area Coffee Club). More on this below.
With Roberto Rene Gonzalez and his son Emerson
May
Bae Area Coffee Club Discord Community— This was a pivotal moment for us, in joining this motley crew of extreme coffee enthusiasts in the Bay Area. We were introduced through our friends Harry and Robert, who we had met after getting delayed at the airport on the trip home from SCA Expo (and we also met through Brian who had visited us at our March pop-up). We had major imposter syndrome when we initially joined the club with our limited coffee knowledge, but they welcomed us into the fold. We’d quickly learn so much from this extremely knowledgable and passionate community, and build friendships through this shared passion. They’ve been huge supporters of our journey, some of our biggest advocates and collaborators.
June
Ming’s Q-Grader cohort at Boot Coffee
Ming gets Q-Arabica Grader certified— After weeks of extensive training (including a temporary household ban on overly spicy, smelly, or seasoned foods 🥲), Ming successfully obtained his Q-grader certification.
Upsides: new friendships and connections with other coffee enthusiasts and professionals, improved sensory perceptiveness, a systematic framework for evaluating coffees for green sourcing and roast profile development
Downsides: Slurping noises are now a regular soundtrack, there seems to be an unending pile of Barista Hustle cupping bowls to be hand-washed (they are a PITA to dry iykyk), and we have strong spoon shape preferences
Max Chillax— started a silly, but rooted in actual science, project to create a rapid chiller capable of chilling multiple drinks back-to-back. TL;DR, we used some graham condensers and pumped ice water through them to cool coffee. We’d eventually put googly eyes on it, and call him Max Chillax. Might do a blog post on that later, discussing principles of rapid chill extract (vs. say cold brew, or adding ice to your coffee)?
July
Kevin and EJ (behind) toughing it through with us
First Farmers’ Market Showing!
The Cupertino Farmers’ Market. A funny full-circle moment, because I grew up in Cupertino. Out of pure chaos and masochism, we decided to try doing a pour-over only service. We were equipped with 5 Hario Switches, two janky knockoff Fellow electric kettles, a big-ass kettle of water (I mean this thing holds almost 2 gallons no joke), a wok burner (which we later found out was illegal).
We featured pour-overs of all of the coffees in our lineup - as a solo pour-over hot or chillaxed, or as a pour-over chillaxed to make a signature drink. Man it was rough to go through the rush, but we learned a LOT. And we are so incredibly grateful for everyone who came out the first day to support us, and suffer through the heat and the long wait times (the equivalent of a 90s sitcom airtime…. oof). Definitely took those learnings to improve future showings. Max Chillax turned out to perform admirably both in execution and presentation.
I cannot thank our friends Kevin and EJ enough for toughing out our first Farmers’ Market stint with us, with the chaos
Second Farmers’ Market Showing— Made some adjustments to our setup, after being told propane heat sources were illegal under the De Anza College solar panels (for reasons?). Made some adjustments to our menu due to the operational limitations of pour-over only.
HUGE improvement: we brought the GS3 on bar with us to introduce espresso. We still wanted our menu to highlight the variety of coffees in our lineup, so we chose to serve non-traditional signature drinks that paired with our cocoa-forward expression and citrus-forward expressions as single-origin espressos. Our Nova Series was the featured pour-over. Big improvement operationally, but the feedback from customers was a resounding: GIVE US MILKY ESPRESSO DRINKS. Alright alright, we heard them loud and clear. We would finally introduce traditional milk-based espresso drinks in August.
August to October
Farmers’ Market Steady State— this is probably when we really hit our stride with the Farmers’ Market. It took us a few weeks in August to flesh out the kinks. We transitioned our set-up to be fully battery-powered (less stinky, we can now be where the people are 🧜🏻♀️ - instead of banished to the end of the market allocated to gas generator booths), added the Sanremo YOU to the bar (thank you to our friend Brian Quan for letting us borrow the machine), and used Husky mobile workbenches for combined storage and work surface (GAME CHANGING - if you have a trailer that can transport it, that is…)
On bar: EJ, Harry, Daniel
New custom packaging— getting custom packaging was a huge marker for us to feel more like the “real deal”. I know that arguably it’s what’s inside that counts, but also having a great looking box and bag helps. Building a consistent brand / design language makes it feel more real that we’re in this for the long haul. I can’t begin to tell you how much Ming and I hemmed over the seemingly littlest/stupidest details… but at a certain point you just have to send it.
Expanding our coffee offerings— this seems like a natural progression, but there’s a big “chicken or the egg” problem. On one hand, we wanted to share more great coffees with people to get a refreshing experience — but we didn’t want to sit on too much inventory that would age quickly. We decided to work with producers and importers of very enjoyable coffees that offered smaller bag sizes (of green coffee).
Our first major wholesale deal— we signed our first real wholesale deal to supply the coffee for a local tech company’s coffee bar. This was a really invaluable learning experience. I can’t thank our neighbor Barb enough for giving us this opportunity. Ming got to roast on the Loring S35 for the first time - the most coffee he’s ever roasted at one time. This deal gave us insight into what types of wholesale partnerships we’d want to take on in the future. Kind of wild to have gone from 2kg batches to 35kg within a year. Please also notice Ming using a mechanic’s stethoscope to listen for first crack lol. It works great.
Good Food Award Judging— Ming also had the privilege to judge the second round of this year’s Good Food Award. Thank you to Michelle Fleming from Equator, who was in his Q-grader cohort, for inviting him onto the panel - to help determine the roaster deserving of this year’s title.
November to December
Honestly the last two months of the year all seemed like a blur—our weeks became a bit more routine with the weekly Farmers’ Market and fortnightly (because biweekly is a stupidly confusing word) roasting schedule.
Before we knew it, we were already in December?? And we marked our first official birthday (at least the founding of our LLC).
Our first coffee tasting / meet the roaster event— With the help of our former Metamate Danielle, Daniel and I were able to host our first meet and greet. Daniel brought his coffee plant babies, and I brought…the roasted and brewed children 🫣? This was our first meet & greet / tasting event, and Daniel did a phenomenal job sharing coffee and sensory principles.
Daniel dropping knowledge bombs, Danielle facilitating, Daniel’s coffee plant babies
Our first collaboration with Celebration Coffee Co— our first catering event we co-hosted with our friends Steven and Angie of Celebration Coffee Company back at Meta campus (almost one year since we debuted our GS3 on campus while I still worked there). It’s been amazing to see how Celebration has grown in the past year too! We connected with them back in January also, and Ming helped them with the finishing touches of their cart build.
Celebration Coffee: Angie, Steven x Moonwake: me, Ming, Harry, Aiden, Daniel
Slay(er), kween, slay(er)—The day after Christmas, we made a wild 36 hour road trip to San Diego to pick up a Slayer Steam LP 2-group machine for a project we’re working on in 2024. I need to lift more, I could barely help lift this thing. I was pretty proud of myself for being able to 1RM bench 100lbs…but this humbled me greatly. We find Slayers so beautiful - and fitting for what we have in store for it.
Slow Bar Pilot, more to come in 2024. Master brewista Alex O. on bar
Slow Bar Pilot— As we wound down our last service of the year, we piloted our slow-bar and duo comparative tasting experience. A really interesting experience for us to develop and pursue further, we might be the only coffee stand (at least in the Bay Area?) that is doing something like this. We are probably a bit crazy to implement this at a Farmers’ Market, but we want to bring excellent coffee experiences to people the best we can, despite the constraints that we may have.
With the end of the year, there was so much to appreciate in the past year — from the people, experiences, lessons learned, and so much to look forward to in 2024.
by the numbers:
What’s a self performance review without some metrics?…
Pop-ups: 5
Catering events: 4
Farmers’ Markets: 21
Friends / volunteers on our Farmers’ Market Team: 12
Pounds of coffee roasted: a lot
Gallons of coffee consumed: too many (or not enough?…)
what I’m grateful for
Increasing coffee knowledge and enjoyment in the past year (key word on enjoyment — ultimately, to sustainably work in coffee, I have to keep enjoying the process).
Being part of and helping grow the community of coffee enjoyers and enthusiasts, regardless of whether they buy our coffee or not
All of the operational and efficiency improvements we’ve made to our operations - we get better each week at the Farmers’ Market!
Everyone who has been part of our journey in some way, whether buying our coffee, telling their friends about us, provided physical labor (and especially the people mentioned in the acknowledgements below) - every little step we take together gets us miles further than we could ever go alone.
key lessons learned
Marketing is freaking hard - when I was a consultant at Deloitte fresh out of college, we utilized the 4 (or 5) P’s of marketing framework - Product, Price, Promotion, Place, People - for our recommendations. Of course, pulling together a framework is really easy - take a quick peek around the company, expense your travel and meal expenses, pull together some bullshit slide deck with kicker boxes and infographics with your engagement team. But when your own company is on the line, and you are responsible for all the execution required to implement the framework, it’s a completely different story.
There’s a lot of feedback noise, tread carefully - you receive a lot of well-intentioned feedback, suggestions, and opinions from people around you. We had to strike a balance between what feedback was worth pursuing, and what were opinions. Ultimately, you still have to stick to your mission and principles, and make decisions that support them.
So friggin cliché, but building relationships is so important — every person you meet, is an invaluable part of your journey, even if you don’t see it immediately. We wouldn’t have achieved what we did in the past year without the tremendous support in so many different ways of our “village”. This includes our customers, old and new friends, family, and the coffee community (special shoutout to the Bae Area Coffee Club Community) that we’ve become a part of. It’s exhausting to put yourself out there (even as an extroverted introvert), but ultimately this business and, more so, MISSION is about serving and sharing experiences with other people. If it was about just making really good coffee for ourselves, then Ming and I could just do all of that at home.
You gotta be gritty —
I had worked 6 different corporate roles in 10 years before I decided to quit corporate for real (this is now aging me oops). I felt a little bit of shame every time I left a company—thinking that maybe if I was grittier, I would’ve stayed longer. I felt especially ashamed when I thought about my grandparents who operated their restaurant for over 30 or 40 years before retiring. They busted their butts in the hot kitchen, standing on their feet for hours and never taking days off unless for an exceptionally special event. The longest role I held was just under 3 years. The shortest role I had was just over a year. This boggled my parents’ minds, who had held the same roles from anywhere from 10 to 20 years. But what I’ve realized (or at least this is the thesis I’m force-fitting my career into lol), was that I hadn’t found the role that I was willing to be gritty enough for.
This year proved to be a test of my grit — there is a LOT of operational work and strategic thinking that goes on in the background to even get to the coffee roasting and drink-making itself. I was responsible for calling my own shots, and getting the work done. If I didn’t do it, then nobody else would. Even the most mundane decisions need a resolution and execution, and we weren’t quite at a scale or profitability to bring on full-time team members yet (but that is the goal in 2024!). Most significantly, setting up each week at the Farmers’ Market is incredibly exhausting physically and mentally. Ming and I spend Friday and Saturdays preparing for the Sunday market (we also have to roast every 2 weeks on the weekends). On top of that, the physical and emotional energy it takes to do a Farmers’ Market Service is not insignificant (yikes, I hate when people use double negatives lol). But at the end of the Sunday, when Ming and I debrief on the couch barely able to keep our eyes open, I can always point to a highlight that gets me even more motivated for the path ahead of us, for how we’ll grow as a roastery and as a café.
Why quit a stable and well-paying job to enter a business that relies on enormous scale to earn a reasonably sustainable living? You do it because you have to love the process and the people that make the process happen.
I would also be lying if I didn’t mention how critical it is that Ming and I are gritting through this together. It is incredibly difficult to do this by yourself — I greatly admire the roasters that we’ve met that hustle all this on their own (Jenny/Cosmic Dust, Bill/Hydrangea Roasters - also shoutout to you for sharing your knowledge and insights with us!). Ming and I needed each other to help balance our strengths and weaknesses and to help each other grit through when we felt discouraged.
looking forward to 2024
Trying and sharing more new coffees — both for/in our lineup and also outside of our lineup, to explore more of what coffee can taste like (even if it means tasting some really weird, possibly not very delicious coffees)
Encountering more new faces along our journey - new friends, customers, producers, industry professionals, etc. Starting a business, especially in coffee, is so dependent on community and the network you build.
Working on some fun new projects for an even more enhanced farmers market and pop-up services (I won’t say too much now, but I can tell you it’s physically large). We’ve got a collaboration with xBloom planned launched (by the time I publish this blog)
Building out our café roastery - we’re signing our lease very soon!! Bracing ourselves for 💸💸💸👋🏻…
Continuing to develop and improve SOPs to make running our business more consistent, sustainable for ourselves and our team, and at the caliber of quality we want it to be
Building out an awesome team to help achieve our company mission. Emphasis on team — not a family. Teams are anchored towards achieving and winning a goal together, with each teammate playing and contributing a crucial role based on their strengths. Families can be amazing and supportive teams (I am grateful for our families for their support), but I know they can also be chaotic and dysfunctional.
Being more strategic about the initiatives we undertake— last year, we felt the need to try different initiatives (like wholesale deals, pop-up events, etc.) to spread the word as best as we could. But as we have grown, our bandwidth is becoming more constrained. We’ll have to be selective about what initiatives fit our mission, and what is sustainable for our personal lives outside of our business. Ming and I are committed to our business, but we are also committed to each other, and our amazing dog, Dashi — who we love dearly and want to cherish the time that we get to have her in our lives.
special acknowledgments
We want to give an incredible thank you to my family for their unwavering support—watching Dashi for us, hopping on bar, fetching rescue gallons of milk at a minute’s notice, telling their friends about us, believing in our ability to make this passion a reality.
Our friends at Meta Coffee Peeps that helped me start my journey when I began my departure at Meta back in December 2022: Danielle, Daniel, Alex Z., Michelle, Aiden, Weilon.
Our friends on the “Moonwake Coffee Crew” that have hopped on bar with us for volunteer labor in exchange for mostly sandwiches and free coffee. We wouldn’t be able to serve coffee without the donation of your time and energy to our cause. You’ve also been our collaborators and thought partners, suggesting great ideas for how to improve our operations and coffee experiences. Kevin, Fan, Ivana, Bill, EJ, Sean, Chuong, Jordan, Alex, Daniel, Harry, Alex O., Andrew.
A special shoutout to Harry, our “sometimes” coffee innovation director, for being one of our most invested thought partners in our journey and challenging us to put forth the best product — and Daniel, who challenges us to give people the best experience possible.
The Bae Area Coffee Community for welcoming us into the community and being an incredibly knowledgable, supportive, fun, and hilarious group of passionates that we can feel comfortable nerding out, collaborating, and enjoying delicious coffees with. We hope we can continue giving back to this awesome community as we continue our journey ahead.
Thank you for reading, if you’ve made it to the bottom of this stream of consciousness.
Thankful for a wild first year, our freshman year as a coffee roastery — looking forward to what 2024 brings!
