From the left, Evan Sledge and TJ Ryan host a pop-up event.
What started out as a semester-long assignment for a TCU business course has blossomed into a successful North Texas coffee company. Whiskey Morning Coffee, based in Tolar, has gained a successful word-of-mouth following over the past five years because of its unique flavor profiles and smoking technique.
What sets this breakfast liquid apart from the rest, according to co-founder Evan Sledge, has to do with the process he and his two cohorts, Carson Becker and TJ Ryan, use to create their unique flavors.
It starts with aging a sundry of green coffee beans inside of a series of used bourbon barrels for several months. After the beans have been aged, they are then roasted, which burns off the alcohol but leaves a hint of the bourbon flavor behind. If this sounds like a process that took years to perfect, you’d be wrong.
“Surprisingly, our first batch actually turned out really good,” Sledge says. “This was a big part of how we got our confidence because we didn’t have anymore money to do a second batch.”
Sledge said that he and his partners initially raised $320 to get their idea started, with the added benefit of helping him make the grade in his business course. Sledge says this business idea came as a result of taking an entrepreneurship class at TCU’s Neeley School of Business, where Michael Sherrod, the William M. Dickey Entrepreneur in Residence, has teams of students devise, plan and launch a business by the end of each semester.
“I liked this class a lot,” he says. “There were no tests, no papers, we just had to come up with a business idea, some capital, and try not to get sued. It fit me perfectly.”
What Sledge regrets was not making a smaller test batch in case the coffee didn’t taste great. However, Sledge and his partners got lucky and sold every drop of their first batch at several TCU-sanctioned events — all with positive feedback.
The used bourbon barrels Sledge and his partners use are in essence his birthright since they come from his grandfather’s distillery, which sits on the Sledge family property at 8210 Paluxy Highway in Tolar. It’s on this same plot of land that Sledge says the coffee is made. And on any given week, this trio of friends crank out about 1,800 pounds of coffee, which includes all five of their core flavors, plus one special new flavor made every month. The flavor ideas come from the group as a whole, which include the jalapeno inspired TX TNT, the toasted pecan flavor of Fall Creek Thrasher, and the lemon and orange peel of Let’s Get Tropical.
“Our two most popular flavors are the Bourbon Barrel, and a coffee we call the ‘Texian’, which is my favorite,” Sledge says. “We throw it in a barbecue smoker and smoke those beans.” Sledge says the trio are still working on a bacon-flavored coffee that hits the right flavor notes.
Per the class that spawned it all, Sledge says Whiskey Morning Coffee is one of only a handful of businesses that actually continued post-graduation.
“A lot of the guys I was going to school with kept talking about finding real jobs after graduating, and I was like, ‘We have a good thing going. None of us are married or have kids, so why not just keep making coffee,’” he says.
This year, Sledge said that Whiskey Morning Coffee is primed to do $1 million in sales by December, so it seems his instincts were in the right place, especially because the business has grown on its initial $320 investment. But if you are looking to find a brick-in-mortar locale, you’ll have to drive to Tolar and stop by the Sledge Distillery to find the team in action. Even so, this business is primarily an online store. But that doesn’t mean this eager team of caffeinated business moguls don’t have plans of expanding further on down the line. In fact, Sledge says his team had been in talks with some of the big box stores but opted out when they found out how much they would have to compromise on flavor.
“One thing I want to get straight is, we’re not a bourbon company, we just offer a new way of supplying coffee flavors to coffee lovers,” he says. “We also take pride in how our product is made. We’re not in this to make a quick buck, rather a quality coffee made with all-natural flavors.”
