Who’s Running This Thing

Before Pit Stop became what it is now, Connor had a chance to leave for Berlin and roast for a company he had admired for years.

For a while, that felt like the dream. The kind of opportunity you chase because it seems like proof that all the years of work meant something.

But when it came down to it, leaving did not feel like the right ending to the story.

Connor and Chloe had already started building something of their own. A coffee trailer. Long nights. Hard events. Coffees that made people stop mid-sip because they did not know coffee could taste that way.

So he stayed.

Not because the opportunity was small, but because this mattered more: bringing that same level of obsession home and building a place where more people could experience what coffee is capable of.

Everything here is built on that decision.

The Origin

To understand why he said no, you have to understand what he was already building.

It started with a subscription box from a coffee shop in LA and the unsettling realization that coffee could taste like something most people had never been given the chance to experience. Bright, complex, strange in the best way. Coffee that made you stop and pay attention.

Once you taste that, you can't untaste it. And once you believe people deserve access to it, you can't really stop trying to give it to them.

Connor spent years as a barista in an extremely high-volume café, learning how speed, consistency, equipment, and hospitality all collide in real time. When a roasting position opened at that same company he turned it down — knowing it would mean never launching the mobile operation he'd been building toward. He found a used teardrop trailer on Craigslist, fought through over a year of permitting battles, and pulled it into Nashville.

He started introducing people to coffees they'd never encountered. Roasters from around the world doing something genuinely different, brought to a city that had barely seen any of it yet. Running on belief, stubbornness, and a secondhand trailer.

It was exactly right.

The events were relentless. Hundreds of them. Often 20 to 30 hours of work just to serve at a 2 to 3 hour event, sometimes barely breaking even. But one event worked. One kept us afloat, kept us learning, kept us honest. We refined it into a single-barista mobile espresso setup that could move shockingly fast without giving up brewed-to-order service.

That trailer is still running. And when we open our doors in Cookeville, it's going inside — not as a relic, but as the thing that carried this whole idea from a Craigslist listing to something real.

What's With the 22?

When we started roasting we didn't do it casually.

We did it obsessively. Sometimes twenty-two different profiles of a single coffee before landing on the one that was actually right. Not approximately right. Right. The profile that made that specific bean do exactly what it was capable of — sweet, developed, dimensional, alive.

Most people stop long before 22. Most people find something good enough and move on. We couldn't do it. We still can't.

That number stuck with us because it represents something we believe about this craft — that the difference between good and extraordinary is usually just the willingness to keep going past the point where most people quit. It's not talent. It's not expensive equipment. It's the refusal to call it done until it actually is.

That obsession is also what eventually made Connor credible enough to get a call from Berlin.

You'll see 22 on our bags, our boxes, our cups. Now you know what it means.

It means we didn't stop.

Connor & Chloe

None of this happened alone.

Chloe has been there for all of it — the events that barely broke even, the permits, the long nights, the obsessive roast profiles. She's Connor's spouse and Pit Stop's co-founder in every real sense of that word. She brought design, photography, and a software engineer's instinct for solving problems that don't have obvious solutions. In 2023, she quit her job to do this full time — not because it was the safe move, but because she believed in what this could be as much as he did.

Everything you see here — the brand, the experience, the way it all fits together — has her fingerprints on it.

After years of mobile events the hours became unsustainable. Connor took a step back from the trailer and accepted a Nashville roasting position from the same company that once employed him as a Barista. In the same ultra high-volume environment, but behind the roaster instead of the bar. More machines. More variables. More obsessive attention to why every decision mattered. This time, on a vintage Probat UG22 machine.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it came the breakthrough nobody saw coming.

In order to serve more people without sacrificing quality — and without the budget to hire — Connor developed an espresso recipe that could turn what is usually a 35-second shot into something closer to 7 seconds, without making it taste rushed, thin, or compromised.

That's not a typo.

And the extraordinary part? Side by side with ultra-high extraction espresso it didn't just hold up. Over time, it got better. Years of failure, adjustment, and relentless refinement went into that system. It is the most tangible proof we have of everything we believe — that mastery of your equipment, taken far enough, produces things that shouldn't be possible.

But this was never just about coffee.

Connor and Chloe built Pit Stop with something bigger in mind. Baristas are among the most skilled, most underpaid people in this industry. They're burning out, moving on, and taking years of irreplaceable knowledge with them. We believe better systems can help cafés build smaller, stronger teams, pay skilled people better, reduce burnout, and keep great baristas in the industry longer.

That's the mission underneath the mission.

We're in Cookeville now. We bought a building. We're turning it into a roastery and a café. And we're building it for the person who wants to know what coffee is actually capable of. The person who senses there's more to it than what they've been given. The person curious enough to stop, sit down, and let someone who has spent years obsessing over this craft show them something they won't forget.

That's the stop. That's what we're here for.

Pit Stop Coffee Co. — Cookeville, Tennessee.