Bean Dreams

In 2005, Pete Leonard led a missions trip to Brazil with men from his church. While there, they visited a coffee plantation where they saw and tasted coffee being roasted over an open fire. The coffee was the best Pete had ever had. When he got back home, Pete designed and built a grill-based coffee roasting machine and taught himself to roast. Pete thought he was roasting for his own enjoyment but Providence had bigger plans.  Much bigger! After learning to roast, Pete and Dave Scovotto "just happened" to get to know each other through Dave's volunteer work at a national post-prison re-entry program.  

In the spring of 2007 Pete and Dave combined Pete’s love for coffee and Dave's commitment to help post-prison men and women by founding a for-profit business with a compelling social mission built right in. I Have a Bean is a micro-roasting coffee company that employs former prisoners with the idea that they can gain work experience and solid references to help them on their journey back into the working world. Sounds great right? Well, it also works great! 

 The company is designed to do two things:

1. Roast and sell truly exceptional coffee

2. Help transform the lives of previously incarcerated men and women

Necessity is the mother of invention

To enable the mission of the business, and to ensure consistent roasting, we invented and built our own commercial-scale coffee roasting machine, the "BeanMaster 5000". This one-of-a-kind roaster has been turning out batch after batch of artisan quality coffee for more than 18 months. The great news is that I Have a Bean is roasting coffee like crazy, driving a growth rate of more than 10% per month! But we have a “high-class headache”: Our ability to roast coffee is being hampered by the back-yard bean cooling system designed for use with the much smaller, grill-based roaster which pre-dates the company’s founding.

Cool Beans?

A little known fact about coffee beans is that when they come out of the roaster at 430+ degrees, they need to be cooled off immediately. For the last 18 months we've been using Pete's old makeshift bean cooler from his grill roasting days. If we weren't growing, we wouldn't have a problem. This is where the high-class headache comes in. We're roasting so many batches of coffee that we need to triple the capacity of the "BeanMaster 5000" roaster. That project is already underway, but the “Little Bean Cooler that Could” can no longer keep up.  

What do we need?

The project for which we need funding is the design and fabrication of a brand new bean cooling system that will cool 20 pounds of roasted beans at a time, from 430+ degrees to room temperature in 90 seconds! We are talking about a completely unique undertaking. There is no after-market coffee bean cooling system that will do what we need.

Why do we need a larger bean cooler?

Because of our growth and our mission! If we can roast, cool and sell more beans we can hire more post-prison men and women! 

Helping us roast more coffee means you're helping us transform the lives of post-prison men and women, their families and the communities in which we all live.

So please support our mission and get some cool rewards in the process! Additionally, we'd love your help spreading the word about this project via the easy social media sharing buttons above - THANK YOU for your support!