As you walk through Wilmore, you might hear a train passing by or see local college students playing frisbee on the green at Asbury. On Main Street, you might visit some small shops and restaurants, but nothing makes the town a tourist attraction. It almost seems as if Wilmore is not affected by the outside world. When you think of the small Kentucky town, coffee is not one of the things at the forefront of your mind. A new shop might be working to change that, though.
“I [am] really excited,” said junior Macey Fix when asked about her reaction to a new coffee shop opening in Wilmore. “There aren’t many places to go in Wilmore, so it definitely provides more options. Going to Asbury, you’re kind of trapped on campus. … To have something new in Wilmore is super nice.”
Drinklings Coffee, a coffee shop that recently opened in downtown Wilmore, is a small shop with a wide-reaching impact. The Drinklings website states that its coffee is “Coffee with a Mission,” meaning that part of all sales go directly to missions work and impoverished countries.
“We came up with [Coffee with a Mission] probably about six months or so after we started doing the coffee,” said one of the Drinklings owners, Randy Hardman. “I think one of the things that as we became more aware of coffee, and how it’s sourced, and the global economics that are behind it … the more we realize that coffee as an industry is one of the most impactful industries in the whole world.”
Drinklings carries out its mission in multiple forms. Hardman said that two ways in which they try to act on this goal is through ethically sourced coffee and giving back.
“We work directly with farmers, and we also work with women producers to keep women out of sex trafficking, human trafficking, things like that,” said Hardman. “Since we’ve started, we’ve given a couple thousand dollars away, either to missional organizations or to missional causes.”
The organizations to which Drinklings contributes use the money to provide supplies for communities in poverty-stricken areas. Some of the donations include mosquito nets, soccer balls and medicine. A portion of the money also goes to building schools in Sudan.
“Coffee with a Mission is about raising awareness, but it’s also about giving to those specific programs,” said Hardman.
Finding where, and how, to give back has been a learning process for Drinklings. Originally, the shop sent a percentage of proceeds from specific bags of coffee to certain organizations such as addiction relief centers. Over time, the shop decided to give a percentage of all quarterly sales to measurable causes.
“One of the things I think we realized through that was our giving isn’t measurable, and I think that’s really important,” said Hardman. “We can see and tell the stories about what this did in a quantifiable way.”
Hardman said that the process of turning the shop into what it is today was a process of culmination. Originally from Charlotte, North Carolina, he said that he came to Wilmore in 2009 to attend Asbury Theological Seminary.
“Wilmore is one of those places, I say, after you’ve been here for four years, if you don’t get out in that four-year mark, it’ll hold you in,” said Hardman.
He continued by saying that after finishing his education at the seminary, he opted to go to Asbury University for a master’s degree in social work. Around the same time he was starting at the university, Drinklings began to form.
“I just had this concept of printing on coffee mugs and doing things like that,” said Hardman. “We started doing coffee mugs and three months later that turned into roasting coffee on a little popcorn popper so we could put something in the coffee mugs. And then that just kind of grew into doing retail roasting for grocery stores and wholesale roasting for coffee shops. Then that grew into an online storefront. Then all of that kind of culmination turned into a storefront.”
Going forward, Hardman and his co-owner, Andrew Eberhart, want Drinklings to be more than “just a coffee shop.”
“Ultimately, what I think that both me and [Eberhart] really feel like the coffee shop can be a coffee shop, or it can be the front end to something a lot bigger,” said Hardman. “We don’t just want to run a coffee shop, we want to have good conversations, we want to do some change, advocacy, policy, research and education.”
Hardman said that he would love to work with the schools in the area in order to help educate people in the community. Ideas he has for the future include coffee trips to meet coffee farmers and educating people about the coffee roasting process. One idea Drinklings turned into reality is “Thinklings,” which is a series of lectures and talkbacks to cultivate conversation between the community and local leaders or representatives of relevant cultural issues.
“That’s what coffee shops used to be, and they’re not anymore; they’ve become mass commercialized,” said Hardman. “They’re no longer the place of mass cultural change, and we kind of want to step back into that.”
As you continue walking through Wilmore, it may seem like not much is happening in the small town. But Drinklings is working to make a lasting impact all across the globe through coffee.