Tim Coonan

Expertise: coffee roasting, coffee entrepreneurship, restaurant industry, café ownership

Coffee insight: Tim says if you’re going to invest in one piece of equipment for brewing at whole bean coffee home, spend your money on a top-notch grinder and a simple pour over brewer.

Coffee fun fact: According to Tim, we need to throw out our obsession with coffee roast dates: “Coffees evolve over time…It’s counterintuitive, but [freshly roasted] coffee is not good.”

Tim’s coffee journey began as a teen and spanned over two decades in restaurant kitchens, from Italy to the legendary Spiaggia in Chicago, Illinois. Though immersed in the culinary world, his passion for coffee never waned. In fact, he was an avid home roaster, graduating from stovetop experiments to a full-fledged garage operation.

For Tim and his wife, Patricia, who is also an incredibly accomplished leader in the restaurant industry, the love of coffee ran deep, But they saw it as more than a beverage—it was a social unifier. “We love coffee as a catalyst for what it can do for couples and communities,” Tim explains. “Coffee houses, cafés, historically, have been places where people gather together, and the conspire and create revolution and enjoy a really wonderful beverage and have conversation.” 

Fourteen years ago, when Tim and Patricia were starting to think about their own coffee business, there were very few cafés in Chicago that were as focused on customer-centered service as their restaurant counterparts. So they set out to change that. Big Shoulders Coffee was born—a hospitality-driven roasting company and café that prioritized their customers, their team, and their producers. The name, a nod to Carl Sandberg’s iconic “Chicago,” perfectly captured their vision for a Chicago institution.

Today, Tim is co-founder of Big Shoulders Coffee, an award-winning coffee roasting company with six cafés across Chicago, a booming online retail shop, and a thriving food service wholesale. Their long list of accolades includes being named Small Chain/Franchise Champion in the 2024 Golden Bean World Series and being named the #1 Independent Coffee Shop in the US by USA Today in 2023.

Tim emphasizes that their original mission—connecting people, nurturing relationships, and serving their community—has stayed at the heart of their coffee business, even as they grew from a small roasting operation and a single café to a leader in the coffee industry. 

Tim says he and Patricia wife have never lost sight of what brought them to coffee in the first place—a focus on bringing people together and caring for both customers and their team. “So really, to this day, coffee is second or third,” he says. “People are shocked to hear me say that. Coffee comes well after guests and employees. We are a people company.”

If you love coffee and want it to be available for the foreseeable future, Tim says, you have to respect the intense labor that goes into farming it. Coffee farming is hard work, and the financial instability of the global coffee market means that many young people in coffee-farming countries are leery of careers in coffee agriculture. In Tim’s words: “Coffee can be cheap, it can be fair in some cases, and it can be good—it can be delicious—but it’s not going to be all three, and certainly not at the same time. We need to find a way to reward farmers that are doing really hard work and pay a fair price for that.”

 “The best cup of coffee is the one that brings us together. I really believe that,” Tim shares. At Big Shoulders, that sense of community extends from the customer to the roasting and café team and the farmers who grow their beans.  For Tim, that means Big Shoulders’ coffees have to taste great—based on their customers’ tastes, not what the professionals deem to be good—but also push toward positive change in the supply chain. 

As just one example, the beans for his current favorite Big Shoulders roast—Manos de Mujer—come from a co-op in Tolima, Colombia, made up by a collective more than 100 women coffee producers. “We’ve really worked hard to figure out a way, with this coffee, to move the needle for women farmers,” Tim says. “So I think this is a group that has been given less opportunity at origin, and we’re trying to move the needle as far as that goes. But it’s a delicious coffee. … It’s a chuggable, delicious coffee.”

Big Shoulders Coffee website: https://www.bigshoulderscoffee.com/

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.