Since October 2009, owner Rob Webb and his longtime friend, roastmaster Jason Smith have been pumping out bags and bags of originally blended, hand-roasted coffee from the back of their shop in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Murfreesboro Pulse: How did you start all of this?
Rob Webb: I own Webb’s Refreshments (a Murfreesboro-based company that distributes coffee, stocks vending machines, sells filtered water systems, etc.). I grew up in the coffee business. A couple years ago I had the idea to marry specialty coffee with helping people in need.
I pitched the idea to my dad of roasting our own coffee five or six years ago and I could never get the numbers to work.
My wife and I were going through our adoption process and had this idea. I wanted to get the quality to surpass what was going on in Nashville, but put it right here…
MP: Where there is no coffee…
RW: Where there is no coffee, and try to get people who have an interest in coffee and think they understand it through national brands to kind of open their eyes to how coffee is supposed to be consumed.
Just Love Coffee Roasters ships all over the country, selling to family-run storefronts Webb cultivates from his website.
Explains Webb: “If you were gonna open up a storefront through us, you would go online, fill out an application and tell us why it is you need to sell the coffee. Then you create your own URL.”
Basically, families raising money for their adoptions, businesses looking to supplement their revenue and schools seeking an original fundraiser are mailed a commission check every month, a cut from the total coffee sales.
Just Love Coffee is not a small-time operation, however, nor do their 23 blends have a small-time flavor.
“We’re roasting dark profiles, and all our blends are proprietary. They’re not other people’s recipes,” says Smith, who manually roasts bags of coffee every day.
In fact, when you order a cup at Just Love Coffee Roasters (tucked behind Reeves-Sain drug store on Memorial Boulevard), they brew it the second you order, and they charge you a fair price for some of the most legit coffee Murfreesboro has to offer.
MP: Because in Murfreesboro we only have the many thousands of Starbucks. And once upon a time there was Espresso Joe’s where the kids hung out about five or six years ago. But that place no longer exists. Nor does the Red Rose.
RW: I didn’t want to buy from another roaster. I wanted my own product. I wanted to be in complete control of roasting. And since we do roast, we’ve got like 22, 23 coffees now that we offer.
Plus, we brew by the cup so customers can come in and instead of getting two or three choices of coffee you get 20 or so drinks to choose from. They come in from all over the world.
MP: Not to mention the wall of arcade games.
RW: Yeah, I ended up with all of those in time. Two months later we were drawing up plans for this place. Arcade games, the music. Plus, we’re supporting adoptions.
Just Love also boasts live music several nights a month, and more importantly, a wealth of Golden Age quarter-a-play arcade games. Titles include “Q-Bert,” “Ms. Pac-Man,” “Galaga,” “Robotron,” “Donkey Kong,” “Burger Time” and many more.
The allure of the store is simple: “Hand-roasted coffee. We’re not ordering it from another roaster out of the city; not even from Nashville. It’s roasted right here. You can see the stacks of burlap (bagged) coffee back there, and we educate people on the difference. You just can’t order coffee from a shop and have it be the same as getting it straight from the roaster.”
Webb, an accomplished organist, MTSU alum and former hip hop DJ, has defied all odds to keep his business afloat. Despite the inconvenient location, Just Love Coffee Roasters offers a service that no other place in Murfreesboro can provide. It simultaneously houses businessmen and college kids, time-wasters and empire-builders, conservative Sunday scholars and misanthropic wastoids without compromising its pristine image within each crowd.
The only thing missing is some additional warm bodies, like yours, maybe.
For more information, visit justlovecoffee.com.
