Today we’d like to introduce you to Tio Fallen. He share his story with us below:
Three Keys Coffee is a family-owned craft coffee roastery that offers a multi-sensory coffee experience through taste, sight, and sound. Founded by Tio and Kenzel Fallen, Three Keys Coffee explores the connection between art, music, and coffee through vibrant bag design, curated Spotify playlists to pair with each roast, and top-quality, award-winning coffee.
Three Keys takes its inspiration from Jazz, deriving its name from the valves of the trumpet—an instrument of simplicity that uses just three keys to produce notes across a creative and complex range of tonal outputs.
The trumpet is a personal connection to our origin story, with co-founder Tio Fallen having played the trumpet for over 15 years including for the renowned FAMU Marching 100. Coffee became a passion for both Tio and his wife/co-founder, Kenzel after traveling to coffee-producing regions and exploring the art of home-roasting. Tio has a professional background in mechanical engineering so he was intrigued by the science of roasting but also drawn to the art of creating coffee, reminiscent of the artistic freedom and creativity of creating music.
Today we have shipped our coffee to all 50 states and even internationally. We’ve won numerous awards and honors both for our branding and our coffee quality/taste. We’ve experienced fast growth in our two years of being operational.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Our biggest challenge has been in keeping pace with increasing demand in a thoughtful and methodical way. We make sure to employ really great people on our team, focusing on quality over quantity. Sometimes that has meant turning down opportunities if we felt like we would be biting off more than we could chew or overstretching our team. It also helps to make sure that we are growing in a way that we can be proud of and exploring opportunities that connect with our customer base. We are building out a new roastery space which will allow us to expand our operations more efficiently so we look forward to that being completed later in summer or early fall.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Three Keys Coffee was created to offer a multi-sensory and inclusive coffee experience through art and sound (jazz music specifically). Many people feel intimidated by some of the language and terms used in traditional specialty coffee spaces and so we wanted to offer an approachable experience that would resonate with a greater audience of people.
A lot of people we come in contact with think all coffees are basically the same. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. I like to draw a parallel between coffee and wines or beers. There are so many different flavors you can get from different coffee varietals and some types can even give you a similar taste and mouthfeel as tea. But beyond the type of coffee, there is also the way that it’s roasted. Similar to the art and skill of top chefs, not all roasters are created equal.
We roast on a hand-built cast-iron machine that was imported from one of the top manufacturers in the world, a Giesen roaster from the Netherlands. This machine brings out uniquely robust, smooth, and exceptional flavors in the coffee. Our Giesen also has proprietary technology that allows us to repeat a roast profile, essentially so we can replicate each roast and ensure we get consistently great flavors from every batch. Our founder, Tio, is our head roaster and comes from a mechanical engineering background so his experience with heat transfer and thermodynamics has been critical to perfecting the science and art of roasting to ensure we offer a supreme product.
Quality is definitely paramount to us and a big differentiator that sets Three Keys Coffee apart is that both of our founders are licensed Q-Arabica Graders. That title is similar in prestige to achieving the title of a wine sommelier but for coffee and there are only about 500 or so Q-Graders in the US. Four of our coffees have been rated 90pt+ by Coffee Review and one was a finalist in the Good Food Awards, a global competition. So not only do we offer a multi-sensory experience with our accompanying playlists, but you can be sure you are enjoying a superior taste experience as well because of our strong commitment to quality and excellence.
Pricing:
- Three Keys Coffee offers both whole bean and ground coffees through their website at www.threekeyscoffee.com. 12oz bags range from $16-20 and our coffee offerings rotate frequently so be sure to follow along on Instagram and Facebook @threekeyscoffee for product updates and promotions.
Contact Info:
- Email: info@threekeyscoffee.com
- Website: www.threekeyscoffee.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/threekeyscoffee/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/threekeyscoffee
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/threekeyscoffee
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY-DqR_byDc-Urdk4tG_-JA
- Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/4uv9aol0k06ekhxdsttooy4wn?si=79b30443b2744dd5
