Let's invite people to participate with our campaign idea of Anywhere Great Coffee is Needed. And let’s start with the places it’s needed most, because one of those crummy truths isthat the places doing the most good always seem to be doing it on the worst coffee. We wanted to correct that injustice.

The answer is inventing a newkind of charitable philosophy called: Brew-Lanthropy—turning brewing coffeeinto a philanthropic deed. It’s the act of giving people doing good deeds somegreat coffee to do it on. This idea is the basis for The Brew-LanthropyProject. This program inspires the nation to nominate deserving originations towin free coffee for a year and a substantial financial contribution to theirmission. Then invite the nation to vote for who the next Brew-Lanthropy Grantrecipient should be. It’s a simple way to make their day better, and by helping them on their mission, make the world a better place

Continuing the mission of bringing great coffee anywhere, welooked at how people get coffee at home. We found coffee came in basically two options.The first is functional, inglorious, crappy, every day coffee. The other is thesuper precious, café-style, premium, snobby coffee. The first is bad, but easyto understand. The later is good but complicated.

Instead, the level system is based on a relative scale ofnumbers—like one would find on a “spice” scale for restaurants menus. We canguess intuitively how intense of a coffee flavor we would like, and startthere, and as importantly, we know right away what all the other coffee levelsare probably like after we try just one of them. Now people don’t have to learn regions and roasts, and this creates a middle ground: high quality but accessible.

Of course that all sounds logical, and is, but also we wanted the system to bring a touch of fun, exploration and style to a category that is steeped in tradition where everyone plays by the rules or even breaks those rules in the same way. It’s not for traditional coffee lovers, for hard-core purists or for the exclusive micro café lovers.
It’s for the rest of the planet, the ones whostill like coffee, and just needed someone to help them find one that they love.

It’s one thing to say you are about great coffee anywhere,it’s another to go out and prove it. And to kick off this brand in Canada, and highlight our new store locations, that’s what we had to do. We hit the road with an epic trip that covered the continent handing out 1000 cups of fresh coffee in the most unlikely places we could find. The online event garnered a nice following as the story grew people met us in the new locations and in each city the cups went faster and faster.

The whole project yielded an image bank for use in artwork and communications, and of course help kick start the lore of the brand. The stories of the people we met—bush pilots, chain saw carvers, rodeo clowns, street artists and others—merged with ours to redefine coffeeculture.