Iconic Pro Walks Away from Snowboarding to Make Coffee | “I just really like coffee.”
If you’ve been snowboarding more than a few years than you remember Wille Yli-Luoma. Wille was a smooth operator with some of the best style in the game and crushed a bunch of great parts in Mack Dawg and Robot Food videos. Then he walked away and got into the oversaturated coffee market in Portland.
It sounds cliché but he made it happen and Heart Coffee Roasters has taken the scene by storm. And just like in snowboarding Wille has managed to put his own style into things and make it stand-out on a worldwide stage. Portland coffee insiders claim that the scene there is very tight-knit amongst baristas and roasters except everyone who works at Heart who have a “too cool” reputation. Judging by the quality of their coffee though maybe it’s working for them.
“Wille stopped measuring himself against coffeehouses down the street and compared his work to roasters across the world. “Eventually we figured out our own style. You get good at something and you want to do it your own way. Like with snowboarding, you see a trick and you’re like, ‘That’s cool, but I actually want to do it differently.’ You slowly start getting to the point where you learn enough about something that you’re no longer just following what people are doing. You’re doing it your own way. That happened to me like two or three years ago, when we started taking our own path.”
Click over to Transworld SNOWboarding for the full feature Crafted: Heart Coffee Roasters
Follow BOARD RAP on Insta for more updates.
