Brian Franklin

Brian Franklin is the founder, owner, and roastmaster of DoubleShot Coffee Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Franklin opened the DoubleShot in 2004, after a five-year career as a personal trainer and a couple years grinding out the foundations and suppot needed to get his foot in the door of the specialty coffee industry. Living in a run-down apartment without utilities in the salad days, the roastmaster proved his pluck, and a faithful group of unconventional characters formed the core of a diverse customer group known as DoubleShot Folk. Coffee-centric, staunch, and single-minded, Franklin earned his purist reputation early on for his desire to serve coffee unmuddied by milk and sugar, and his unwillingness to compromise his standards in coffee or in life.

With a background in sport, Franklin grew into an ultra-endurance athlete, where hours spent on a trail run or in the saddle of a mountain bike forged in him the attributes of patience, toughness, and perseverance. But many of the finer details of business management came out of his countless crashes, failures, DNFs, injuries, and occasional victories over the course of a racing career that has spanned well over half a lifetime.

Intent on knowing the people who cultivate the products he serves, Franklin began traveling to coffee farms within a year of opening the doors of the DoubleShot. In his journeys around the globe, he acquired knowledge and know-how through experiences, some of which were harrowing, all of which combined to change his outlook on the world. From staring down the barrel of a gun on a volcán mountaintop to a practical immersion in fluid dynamics in his half-joking creation of the DoubleShot Space Program, Franklin has lived his life in an astute awareness, acquiring experiential wisdom far and wide.

Attracting attention for his earnestness as well as his foolhardy disregard for conventions or protocol, the DoubleShot, with Franklin at the helm, has been the subject of documentary, popular sitcom, and frequent bouts of controversy. Distractions notwithstanding, it's been a career obsessed with a simple mission: to serve excellent coffee to as many people as possible. As that number of people has grown exponentially, Franklin's understanding of the potentiality of excellent coffee has bloomed to a seemingly unattainable standard.