Mistreated at Sacramento coffee job, ex-workers’ new venture Weird City is all about inclusion

After working for Identity Coffees for about three years, Jess Mill — who ran the roastery, created recipes and tended bar — was fired in February 2020 after asking for a raise. Then the pandemic hit, making it difficult to secure another job.

It wasn’t until Mill was gifted a $1,300 home coffee roaster in June 2020 by their husband, Andrew Roach, that the idea of Weird City was born in their 950-square-foot, two-bedroom midtown Sacramento apartment.

“After the pandemic started we kind of just took a break ... and then it just kept going so my partner bought me a coffee roaster for my birthday with the idea that we could either keep as a hobby and sell to our friends and family,” Mill said. “Or maybe we could turn it into an actual thing in the future, make some money and not have to go back to working for other people was kind of the idea.”

Last year, Identity Coffees — which recently changed its name to Pivot Coffee — was in hot water when former employees accused identity co-owner and prominent figure in Sacramento’s coffee scene, Lucky Rodrigues, of gender discrimination, anti-gay slurs and mistreatment of homeless residents.

The Sacramento Bee reported on the allegations in August 2020; Rodrigues declined to directly respond to the allegations at the time and attempts to reach him and Pivot Coffee last week were unsuccessful.

Mill’s business partner, Kit Bear, who served and roasted at Identity from June 2017 to December 2018, shared their experience at Identity in a Reddit post that fueled the roastery to delete its social media accounts rather than deal with the criticism.

“I definitely think it was a really toxic, toxic work environment,” Bear said in a previous Sacramento Bee interview regarding their experience at Identity. “It’s been the past year-and-a-half of having so many close friends and making friends who worked for Identity and watching them suffer.”

Not wanting to leave the coffee business, Bear and Mill worked through 2020 and this year to get their new venture, Weird City, off the ground.

“Cultivating community inside Sacramento was one of the most important things to me ... so I spent a lot of time when I was working at Identity building that community in Sacramento — so did Jess and I,” Bear said. “And that’s what made us really want to offer this product.”

The idea behind Weird City

Bear, who doubles as Weird City’s graphic designer, said the duo bonded over being neurodivergent after meeting at Identity. So when it was time to create a coffee business, Bear said it was important to the duo that Weird City was centered around self-acceptance and queer identity.

“We have this negative experience, we’re feeling very alienated ... so Weird City is just about radical self-acceptance in the community,” Bear said. “It’s a space where if you spent your whole life being labeled as weird or misunderstood, you can come and we’ll accept you as you are.”

And Bear communicates that within Weird City’s illustrations — whimsical, colorful and playful drawings — strategically created with organic shapes to keep the pictures as human-made as possible. Bear said to be working with Mill means always thinking critically about how to be more inclusive and promote individuality.

The original brand featured muted colors with a melancholy feel. But as the brand was developed and it became a space to escape from the world, Bear said brighter colors were included with alien-like figures to communicate otherness.

“I think for Jess and I, Weird City is an escape,” Bear said. “It’s a place to go in our mind and with our friends to just be cozy and drink coffee and read comic books.”

Since launching the business with Mill two summers ago, Bear — a full-time student at Sacramento State and part-time worker — decided to reevaluate their roles for the company and now they handle advanced design tasks.

“Since then it’s been a lot more Jess, and I’m so proud of (them),” Bear said. “It’s tough to figure out that give and take — this is a project I really love and care about and how much can I give to it without depleting myself.”

A closer look into the at-home operation

Weird City sources from green coffee importers from out-of state partners. The beans are sent to Mill who roasts and packages them for delivery and pickup with an upgraded roaster in the apartment. They makes about 10 12-ounce bags a day. Each batch roasted contains two 12-ounce bags of coffee beans, which takes about 10 minutes a batch.

“That’s as much as I can do in a reasonable time frame basically ... so I’m kind of limited by my time,” Mill said over the phone, laughing about having to spend over two hours to roast 10 pounds of coffee before the day was over.

For Mill, who’s been unemployed since leaving Identity, Weird City is their main source of income.

“We’re still in the growth phase so my take-home isn’t much at all but we are doing pretty well,” Mill said. “We’ve been growing pretty steadily, hoping that the holiday will pick up.”

Roach, whose been married to Mill for seven years and gifted the roaster that started Weird City, said while he thought that they’d be able to make a few bucks, he never imagined anything like this. Currently, he fulfills a couple of orders a week through pick-up and mostly shipped deliveries.

“We wanted to start something that Jess liked to do and it was something that we could make just a little side hustle, provide coffee to our friends and things like that,” Roach said. “But it’s really grown beyond anything we thought.”

“Weird City wouldn’t have existed without everything that went down at Identity,” he said.

Weird City is gearing up for its next pop-up event on Sunday, Oct. 31, at Creative Space in Sacramento where customers can buy a cup of hot coffee, as well as merchandise.

“I thought (Weird City) was going to be pretty small, I wasn’t sure how interested people would be especially with COVID. ... Since stuff had opened back up and we’ve been doing pop-ups, it really started to blow up,” Mill said. “It’s gone quite a bit further than I thought it would, and I’m hoping to take it even further now.”

If you go

Weird City Coffee pop-up

Time: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Date: Sunday, Oct. 31

Address: Creative Space, 1525 U St.

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This story was originally published October 18, 2021 at 5:00 AM.