Yes, that was really his name
Richard, technically. Nobody called him that — not his friends, not the guys he worked with, not even my mom. He was Dick, and he thought the jokes were funnier than you did. He had a whole routine ready for anybody who smirked at an introduction.
So when it came time to name this thing, there was never really a second option. He’d have been furious if I played it safe.
What he taught me
To make the part that doesn’t exist. He didn’t see “they don’t sell that” as the end of a conversation. He saw it as the start of a Saturday.
To do it myself. He had a deep, almost personal objection to paying somebody to do a job badly when he could do it himself better for free. That’s how I ended up roasting coffee.
To keep asking why. Not the polite kind of why. The kind where he’d stay on it until the other guy admitted he didn’t actually know how the thing worked, he’d just always done it that way. It made him a great person to have around a broken engine and a slightly exhausting person to have around a dinner table.
What he didn’t teach me
Coffee. Not one thing about it.
What he actually drank — percolated stuff, whatever was in the aluminum percolator since 0’dark-thirt. The man had strong opinions about nearly everything and zero opinions about roast profiles. He would cry if you washed his coffee cup.
So I had to figure this part out alone. Scorched batches, ruined pounds, a lot of “why does it taste like that” at eleven at night.
Which, the more I think about it, is exactly what he did teach me. He never handed anybody an answer. He handed you the tools, pointed at the problem, and let you burn a few before it clicked. This was before YouTube. Getting coffee wrong for a year to get it right is the most Dick thing I’ve ever done.
What that has to do with your bag
Every bag is roasted after you order it, in small batches, by me. I’ve owned a coffee shop, designed software for an electric coffee roaster company, and have been roasting beans since 2019. Nothing sits in a warehouse. Nothing gets a label that says “fresh” while quietly turning nine months old.
Not because it’s a clever business model. Because doing it the easy way and calling it good was the one thing he genuinely couldn’t stand.
So
He never got to try this coffee. He’d have said it was fine and gone back to his own cup.
Years of Dick
People ask what he was like. Here’s two seconds of him that explain it better than the eight hundred words above: