At 16, Harvey Uyeyama already has a business, a loyal customer base and a highly specialized craft that most adults never attempt to master. From his home in Davis, California, the soon-to-be high school senior hand-roasts coffee, customizes orders and runs a growing subscription service, all while preparing for college. But Harvey’s Coffee began with something much more personal, the time spent with his father. According to a report by The Sacramento Bee, Uyeyama learned to roast coffee from his father, John, who had previously owned a coffee shop in Lafayette and continued roasting at home. In June 2024, his father invited him to join him for a late-night roasting session. The two spent hours working together, beginning what would become the foundation of Harvey’s Coffee. Entrepreneurship was already familiar territory for Uyeyama. As a child, he tried everything from running a lemonade stand to tutoring math in an effort to make money. Coffee, however, was different. His father had given him a skill he could turn into something of his own. He began selling freshly roasted beans door-to-door around his neighborhood. The first customers did not come easily. After plenty of rejection, Uyeyama refined his sales pitch and presentation, eventually swapping a black backpack for a wagon and adding branded labels to make the business look more professional.
Finding purpose through grief
Not long after teaching his son the craft, John Uyeyama died on his son’s birthday. The loss brought roasting to a temporary halt. But just a few weeks later, coffee unexpectedly brought Harvey back to the craft. His father’s funeral service needed coffee, and Harvey took on the job despite having never completed an entire roasting process alone. The experience was difficult, involving plenty of mistakes and ruined batches. But the coffee was well received by mourners, giving Harvey a renewed sense that roasting could be more than a business. It could also be a way of carrying forward something his father had passed down to him.
Building a business with patience
Today, Uyeyama operates Harvey’s Coffee with his girlfriend, Abby Merchant, an 18-year-old student at UC San Diego. While Merchant is studying biology, she has taken on an important role in the company’s branding and marketing, redesigning its logo, packaging and overall customer experience. Uyeyama focuses on roasting and the technical side of the operation. He has even built an app to manage sales and recurring subscriptions. The company is approaching 100 monthly subscribers, with customers spread across the country. Each month, Uyeyama chooses beans from a different region, examining factors such as acidity, body, flavor and the history behind each coffee. Although he particularly enjoys East African coffees, he deliberately changes the selections to keep the subscription experience interesting.
An old-school approach to modern coffee
Harvey’s Coffee is anything but mass-produced. Uyeyama roasts every batch by hand on a machine believed to date back to the early 1900s. The antique-looking roaster uses rotating chambers positioned above propane burners. Uyeyama manually adjusts the heat throughout the process, watching temperatures, listening for the beans to crack and inspecting their color as they develop. The machine can handle about four bags at a time, allowing him to produce roughly 12 bags an hour. Each order is then packaged by hand, with codes and customer names identifying where the coffee is headed. Local customers can receive their coffee within 24 hours of roasting, while shipments travel to subscribers across the United States.
Looking ahead
Uyeyama plans to graduate early after one final semester, giving him roughly nine months to expand the company before heading to college. Scaling up could mean a warehouse, larger equipment, a new grinder and a more sophisticated setup. But one thing is unlikely to change: the human touch. For Uyeyama, the future of Harvey’s Coffee is not about automation. It is about keeping every batch deliberate, personal and handcrafted — much like the first batch he made alongside his father on a late night in June 2024.Images Courtesy: istock and The Sacramento Bee
