The Story Behind Caprock Reserve Coffee: How a Lubbock Beekeeper Found the Perfect Cup

Caprock Reserve Coffee

If you’ve been following Tumbleweed Bees for any length of time, you know we’re a small operation with a big love for honeybees. We run three bee yards right here in Lubbock County, and every jar of honey we sell comes from our own hives — nowhere else. That little detail matters, and it’s actually the reason we started down the road that led us to our newest product:  Caprock Reserve Coffee.

Grab a mug, settle in, and let me tell you how this whole thing came together.

Here’s something about running a honey business that took us a while to figure out. Because we only sell honey from our own bees, we only have so much to go around each year. Whatever our girls make during the season — that’s it. That’s the whole supply until the next harvest.

And when the honey sells out, the rest of the shop goes quiet.

We’ve got a whole collection of homestead goods we’re proud of — beeswax lip balm, wax food wraps, honey dippers, food spoons, a stirring spoon, even a spurtle, plus tote bags and more. But what we noticed over time is that folks weren’t coming to tumbleweedbees.com looking for lip balm. They were coming for the honey. Once the honey was in their cart, then they’d browse around and add a few other things. Without the honey on the virtual shelf, the rest of the store kind of went to sleep until the next harvest came in.

So, we started asking ourselves a question: what’s something we could offer year-round that genuinely fits who we are as a beekeeping company?

Many of our customers buy honey to sweeten their coffee.  Coffee felt like a natural fit for our customers, but the coffee market is crowded. I mean truly, wildly crowded. We’re a small family operation, and we knew that slapping our name on some beans wasn’t going to cut it. We needed a reason to exist in that space — something honest, something that connected back to who we really are.

That’s when the idea clicked:  What if we only sourced our coffee beans from farms that keep honeybees on the property?

Here’s something I learned while researching this. Coffee plants are actually self-pollinating — they can take care of fertilization on their own, which is why a lot of the bigger coffee operations don’t bother managing honeybees. They don’t technically need them. But the deeper I dug, the more I found that honeybees make a real difference on a coffee farm. Bee-pollinated coffee tends to produce more beans, the beans are more uniform in size and quality, and some folks even swear the taste improves. (I’ll be honest with you — I’m not sure the taste difference is something the average person can pick out in a cup, but the yield and quality research is solid.)

So that became our line in the sand. Every single bean in a bag of Caprock Reserve had to come from a farm where honeybees are actively being managed. No exceptions.

We partnered with a roaster right here in Lubbock and told them our rule. They work with around 50 different farms throughout Central and South America. Surely, we’d find plenty of honeybee-friendly ones in a pool that big, right?

Out of those 50 farms, only three met our criteria.

Three.

That was a gut-check moment. Was this actually going to work? Could we really supply coffee year-round from just three farms? We did the math, dug into the logistics, and the answer came back yes — we could make it work.

And then came the bonus we weren’t expecting. When we looked closer at those three farms, we discovered that all of them were Rainforest Alliance certified and organic. That wasn’t even on our list of requirements. It just turned out that farms thoughtful enough to manage honeybees on their property were, as a rule, the same farms doing things the right way in every other respect too. It was a nice little confirmation that we were barking up the right tree.

Here’s where our beans come from:

• Light and Medium Roast — Costa Rica

• Dark Roast — Guatemala

• Flavored coffees — Honduras

Speaking of flavored coffees — this part was genuinely fun. We tried like 30 different flavors trying to narrow down coffee product options. We probably could have offered all of them, but we wanted to be thoughtful about it.

Our rule for picking flavors was simple: it had to taste great with a spoonful of our honey stirred in. 

The five flavors that made the final cut:

• Caramel Pecan

• Cinnamon Hazelnut

• Bourbon Pecan

• French Vanilla

• Honey Almond

Pair any of those with a spoonful of Tumbleweed Bees Honey, and I’ll tell you what — you’re having a good morning.

Once the coffee was sorted, it was time to design a package that actually looked like something you’d be proud to have sitting on your counter.

I reached out to Thomas Kohler, a graphic designer and old friend I worked with about ten years ago at a previous company where he was the art director. Thomas specialized in product packaging design, so he was exactly the right person for the job. We spent about a month and a half tweaking and refining — going back and forth on every little detail — until we had something we were really proud of.

We had a choice between brown, white, or black bags. We went with black bags and a black label, and I have to say, the finished product looks sharp. It looks like a coffee you’d be happy to gift to someone.

Action Printing right here in Lubbock handled the label printing for us, and they took great care of the project. Supporting local when we can is something that matters to us, so being able to keep the design, the roasting, AND the printing all local in Lubbock felt right.

Now, the logistics. Here’s how ordering works:

• Lubbock locals — We’ll deliver it to you, same as we do with our honey. We may also have it in a few retail locations around town if those retailers are interested in carrying it.

• Everyone else — Your order will be drop-ship directly from our roaster to your door. Fresh roasted, quickly shipped.

Caprock Reserve coffee isn’t just a side product for us. It’s a way for us to stay connected with our customers year-round, even in the lean months between honey harvests. And more importantly, every bag is a small contribution to coffee farms that understand what we understand — that honeybees make everything better. The honey, the orchards, the gardens, and yes, even the coffee.

When you brew a cup of Caprock Reserve coffee, you’re drinking coffee from farms where honeybees are tended to and valued. Stir in a spoonful of Tumbleweed Bees honey from our bees here in Lubbock County, and you’ve got a cup of coffee with a story in every sip.

We’d love for you to try it. And if you enjoy it, we’d be grateful if you’d tell a friend about it. Small operations like ours grow by word of mouth, and every share, every review, every “hey, you should try this coffee” matters more than you know.

Thanks for being part of this with us. Here’s to good mornings, good coffee, and the bees that make it all possible.