The not-so-mobile bicycle cart Chris O’Brien started out with remains the cornerstone of his brick-and-mortar coffee shop, Coffee Cycle, which just marked its fifth anniversary in Pacific Beach.

It’s been a road less-well-traveled for the small-business entrepreneur. O’Brien spent seven years learning the barista craft at Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, before striking out on his own.

“Once at the end of a shift, I invited a couple of my co-workers over to my house where I had 10 bikes in my living room,” recalled O’Brien of Coffee Cycle’s origin. “It was a joke that I ought to put a cafe on the back of one of those bikes. I woke up the next morning and began sketching it.”
The coffee connoisseur took three years to perfect a functioning, mobile coffee cart. Afterward, for nine months, O’Brien drove his homemade mobile coffee cart to Pacific Highway south of Fiesta Island close to Old Town. There, he worked a stretch of self-described “nowhere road,” catering primarily to cyclists.
“It’s like a beached whale,” said O’Brien of his old coffee cart, which he still serves from daily and vows never to take out on the road again. “It doesn’t roll well — but it rolls. It moves with the speed of a guy with a cane.”

Eventually, O’Brien found just the right permanent stop along the way at 1632 Grand Ave. And pairing bikes and beans has turned out to be a winning combo for the New Jersey native who came to San Diego via Cleveland, where he went to college and got his first taste of coffee brewing.

Coffee Cycle is aptly named, as O’Brien has never driven a car once his entire life – and has never had a driver’s license.

Every day is a klatch, a social gathering for conversation while drinking coffee, at Coffee Cycle. And you’ll find O’Brien in his customary spot: standing behind the counter next to his cart serving up his favorite brew while mingling with customers, local and not, who constantly cycle through his small-but-intimate shop.

These days, O’Brien is becoming more heavily involved with direct-trade coffee, a term for coffee roasters who buy straight from their growers, thus cutting out both the traditional middleman buyers and sellers, as well as the organizations that control certifications.

“That way we know they (growers) get 100% of the money and have these nice transparent supply chains,” said O’Brien, “It’s just a really nice, unique way to build that relationship and do international trade.”

O’Brien pointing out that, while the price of coffee beans has risen, “Shockingly, coffee is somehow inflation-proof,” he said, adding the highest price coffee has ever traded at was in 1979. Coffee is now being traded on the commodity market at around $2.40 per pound. “That’s not much higher than it was 10 years ago,” O’Brien said adding, “Yet, everything else is pretty significantly higher than it was 10 years ago – milk, eggs, wheat, oil.”

Seems like you’ve built a unique niche here. True?

“Fortunately for me, I’m not the first person with this idea,” responded O’Brien. “There is already a lot of crossover between cycling and coffee.”

Why is that? “It’s the social aspect,” answered O’Brien. “People like going to a coffee shop to interact with each other. Connection with other people is really where the crossover happens.”

O’Brien admitted there’s a lot more involved in operating a coffee shop than he expected.

“It’s a lot more challenging – and stressful than a lot of people envision it to be,” he said. “I thought when I opened, that all I would need to know would be coffee. And I thought I also needed to know some stuff about bikes. I didn’t think I’d also need to be a plumber, an electrician, a woodworker, and a commercial lease negotiator. Having all that on your shoulders all the time is a lot for almost anybody.”

What advice would O’Brien give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

“In running a business you trust systems, rather than trusting people,” he concluded. “If you build a system around what a person can do for you, or what you can do for your business, then you’re always able to be flexible and adapt.”

COFFEE CYCLE

Where: 1632 Grand Ave.

Contact: coffeecycleroasting.com, @coffeecycleroasting, 951-363-3066, general coffee questions:

[email protected]; events, collaborations, or wholesale requests: [email protected].