Brian Franklin

Expertise: roasting, café ownership, entrepreneurship, coffee agriculture

Coffee insight: Coffee beans aren’t beans at all; they’re the seeds of coffee cherries, which grow in mountainous and tropical regions.

Fun Fact: Brian was the subject of a documentary, The Perfect Cappuccino, which covered his successful legal battle with Starbucks over the name DoubleShot.

After getting interested in the art of brewing coffee, Brian was flipping through catalogs when he came across a home roaster. “And I thought, ‘Oh. It never occurred to me that all coffee was roasted by somebody,’” he recalls. Initially he thought roasting from home would be too messy and difficult for a beginner.

But the idea of roasting his own coffee stuck with him. He bought a fluid bed roaster and a copy of Ken David’s Home Coffee Roasting. He describes the first sip of his home-brewed coffee as an “epiphany”: “I’d never had coffee that wasn’t stale before that. So it was my first time having fresh coffee.” Six years later he opened DoubleShot with the goal of introducing other people to how amazing coffee could truly taste.

Click here to find DoubleShot Coffee Company’s Ambergris Espresso Blend in the U3 Coffee Exchange!

Brian has served as the founder, owner, and sole roaster at DoubleShot since 2004. Brian describes the original operation as “bare bones”: “We had an espresso machine, a coffee roaster, and a brewer.”

Today, DoubleShot’s home is a nineteenth-century barn, which Brian purchased in Berne, IN, and had dismantled and reconstructed near downtown Tulsa. Brian says his staff of 17 to 20 people serves hundreds of customers every day while also running a successful wholesale business and online sales platform.

In 2023, Brian purchased his own coffee farm based in Nicaragua, and he’s currently working on a book about his experiences in the coffee industry. He also launched Native Design, an online platform for brewing equipment and accessories, including the Launchpad pour-over brewing station—Brian’s own design.

Brian says his mission has been the same since he first dreamed of his own coffee business: to show people what a truly incredible cup of coffee tastes like. That started with educating his customers, many of whom came in looking for sweetened, creamy coffee drinks.

Brian wanted people to learn to appreciate the taste of the coffee he’d worked so hard to create, not water it down with other flavors. He admits that focus made him a bit “rigid” and earned him a reputation for being gruff, even refusing to serve customers who didn’t understand his vision.

Today he says he takes a more incremental approach to educating coffee drinkers. “People come in and try to order a mocha or something, and I try to get them to drink a latte,” he says. “And then I try to get them to drink an Americano, and I try to get them to not put milk in it. We’re trying to get them to taste what coffee actually is.”

Brian says if coffee drinkers feel like they need sweeteners or creamy additives to make their coffee taste good, he’s got one piece of advice: “They need to drink better coffee.”

Brian says his first visit to origin reshaped the way he understood coffee and his role in educating consumers. “Touching the coffee trees and the coffee cherries and smelling the coffee flowers and meeting the people who pick the coffee and the people who take care of the farm,” he says,  “changed my perception of coffee and the responsibility that I have as a roaster and a person who brews coffee, a barista, to take more care and to explain to the customers how much goes into coffee before we get it.”

Brian says it inspired his commitment to know the people he bought coffee from and understand the work of growing, harvesting, and processing coffee. That mission to connect the entire process from farm to consumer culminated in early 2023 when Brian got the opportunity to purchase his own coffee farm in Nicaragua. In 2023, they planted 5,800 coffee trees, and Brian hopes to have their first harvest in 2025. All of that gives him a sense of pride and gratitude for his loyal customer base and “…the things that we’ve been able to manage to pull off somehow from this little, tiny café in Tulsa.”

DoubleShot Coffee: doubleshotcoffee.com

Native Design: native.design

Brian’s book: purist.coffee