Davis high schooler sells hand-roasted coffee, honoring his father’s legacy
If you ever want to feel like an underachiever, talk to Harvey Uyeyama. At 16 years of age, this soon-to-be high school senior has been roasting coffee by hand for two years, selling the aptly named Harvey’s Coffee from his Davis home.
Uyeyama learned to roast coffee from his father, John, who once owned a coffee shop in Lafayette and continued roasting at home using the very machine his son believes his father used at the cafe.
“He had been roasting coffee pretty much my whole life. One night in June 2024 he asked if I wanted to roast coffee with him, and so I went out. It was probably 11 p.m. and I believe we roasted coffee until about 1 a.m.,” Uyeyama said.
The teen was born with an entrepreneurial spirit. From a childhood lemonade stand to math tutoring, he tried multiple things in order to generate cash. Finally, his father encouraged him to learn coffee roasting. He immediately began selling bags of the roasted beans, going door-to-door in his neighborhood.
“It probably took a hundred nos before my first yes. So I improved the script. I also realized you can’t have coffee in a black backpack. You look like you’re trying to rob them. So I start putting coffee in a wagon, and then I got labels so it was branded,” he said.
Uyeyama’s father died not long after, on his birthday. Devastated, he took a break from roasting, but not for long. For his father’s funeral service just a couple of weeks later, the church needed coffee. Uyeyama rose to the occasion.
“I’d never roasted coffee fully by myself before, and it was a learning curve. I can’t tell you how many batches I probably ruined that night. Everyone who drank the coffee at the funeral was like, ‘dude, this is really, really, good coffee. This is too good coffee for a funeral.’ And I was like, huh, maybe that’s a sign,” he said.
Uyeyama runs his business with his girlfriend, Abby Merchant, an 18-year-old student at UC San Diego. Although she’s studying biology, she turns out to be an adept marketer, and has redesigned Harvey’s Coffee’s logo, packaging and customer experience. Beyond the roasting, Uyeyama handles the technical side of the business, even creating an app to manage sales, including recurring subscription sales. Harvey’s Coffee is closing in on 100 monthly subscribers.
Each month, Uyeyama selects beans from a different region, a part of the business he enjoys greatly. He himself favors East African coffees, but he mixes things up to keep it fresh.
“I look at the acidity, I look at the body. I just usually base it off of if it’s something I would like to drink and the general consumer would like to drink. I read a lot of history about the coffee. I know generally what regions I like and don’t like. I just look at all the data on each single origin varietal until something kind of catches my eye,” he said.
The business is high-touch in the extreme. Each bag of coffee is roasted by hand to specification. Uyeyama even tailors each pound to individual customers’ tastes.
Uyeyama’s roaster was designed in the late 19th century and constructed in the early 1900s. It very much looks, and sounds, like a product of the Industrial Revolution.
The roaster has two chambers suspended above propane burners. Uyeyama lights the burners with a long match, then turns the roaster on. As the roasting chambers rotate, they chug like a vintage locomotive. Once up to temperature, Uyeyama pours in the beans, which make a rhythmic susurration as they tumble in the roaster.
Uyeyama is limited by the capacity of the roaster. He can roast four bags’ worth at a time, and can produce about 12 bags per hour. The first few minutes are the slowest, waiting for the beans to begin to roast. He taps at the knobs for the burners, dialing the heat up and down incrementally to roast at the right rate. Roast too fast, and you’ll get beans with underdeveloped centers; too slow, and the beans stall and become flat and lack flavor.
Once he hears cracking sounds, he begins taking their temperature with a laser thermometer and periodically pulling beans out to inspect them. Once they reach the right color with a dull sheen, he dumps the beans into a cooling bin on the roaster, where a fan drives heat off the beans.
He bags the beans, and hand-writes codes and customer names to indicate where each bag is headed. Local deliveries usually happen within 24 hours of roasting, but Uyeyama ships throughout the US.
“We have people who are in New Mexico, Iowa, New York, random places all over the country,” he said.
Uyeyama is set to graduate early, after one final semester. This will leave him nine months before going off to college, time he intends to use to scale the business to the point where he can be hands-off.
“We’re probably gonna have to get a warehouse, new equipment, a new grinder, new setup, but we are probably going with nothing that’s automatic. We want a roaster that’s manual, you need to have a human sitting in front of it. Each batch is custom, truly the coffee is like as customized and like fine-tuned as you can get,” he said.
