I grew up in a small town on the coast of Maine, the kind where the hardware store still has a bell on the door and everyone has an opinion about what the harbor used to look like. We made things. We fixed things. If something broke, you didn't replace it — you sat with it on the porch until you figured out why.
I left for a while. Came back. The hardware store is still there. The bell still works. The harbor doesn't look the way it used to. Most things don't, actually.
Somewhere between the third "unprecedented" news cycle of the week and the fourth doomscroll of the morning, I started noticing how much energy I was spending being upset about things I could not personally fix. The country was getting louder. The conversation was getting dumber. Important people kept saying important things on the internet and nothing seemed to actually move.
Meanwhile I was drinking gas-station coffee out of a paper cup with a lid that didn't fit, and I thought: well, here's a thing I can fix.
End of Times Coffee started in a converted garage two miles inland from the harbor. One drum roaster, a stack of green beans from people I'd met and trusted, and a brewing setup my grandfather would have called "fussy." We roast in five-pound batches because that's what the machine holds and because anything bigger stops being attention and starts being manufacturing.
The name is a joke. Mostly. It's also true that the world feels strange right now in a way it didn't used to, and pretending otherwise seems worse than acknowledging it with a wink. Naming the thing is the first step. Then you make a cup of coffee about it.
The world has always been ending.
We just have better notifications now.
I am suspicious of brands that take themselves too seriously. I am also suspicious of brands that take nothing seriously, because that usually means they don't take you seriously. We try to do both. The label has a skeleton on it. The bean came from a farm we know the name of. Both of those things are true at the same time and that's basically the whole pitch.
Direct trade. Roasted by hand. Shipped within seventy-two hours of roasting, in bags that say what they are. No subscription you can't cancel. No autoplay video on the homepage. No fine print. If you don't love it, we'll make it right — not because of a policy, but because that's how my dad sold lobster traps for forty years and I haven't found a better model.
Order a bag. Make a cup. The headlines will still be there. At least now there's coffee.
Somewhere on the coast of Maine