My name is Eric Gordon and I own Carabiner Coffee. It's the coffee shop that
I run out of my van around the country.
Carabiner Coffee started because I was a climbing instructor doing that for about
five years and it kind of got to the point where I was done doing that but I
still love the climbing community obviously and started to get into coffee
a little bit more and realized that coffee could take me anywhere in the
world and I could meet anybody that I ever wanted to really so I figured
if I could be the coffee guy for the climbing community I would love to do
that. I was looking to downsize life and really simplify things and start to
travel more and climb. I bought the van off Craigslist after working in a coffee
shop for about eight months, learned everything I could. That was my first
coffee shop I ever worked in. It was feeling solid so I quit that shop and I
started my own coffee business. Breckenridge actually kicked me out for
selling coffee on the side of the road. The Forest Service found me and they're
like, "Dude." First the the town wouldn't give me a business license because they
didn't allow anymore mobile vendors so I went outside of town to the outskirts to
the scenic lookouts and started selling coffee there. The Forest Service found me
and were like, "Sorry dude, dunzo", so then I moved to Seattle and started doing the
whole official food truck deal.
Welcome to Old Blue. This is the van that I live in and I tour the country with and sell coffee.
This is obviously the living room and the coffee making area.
This whole rig is solar-powered so I've got like a panel up top. Goal Zero makes
all this happen so all the coffee making stuff, the sound system, got like a little
home theater system kind of tucked away in here so that makes it really nice to
listen to music. I usually have just a water jug in here, under there. I have
coffee grinder, an electric kettle, then I make pour overs and Aeropress with.
When I'm just chilling this is the setup in here. I usually have a cooler that I'm
like sitting right here on and serving coffee on a table but when I'm not it's
kind of folded out like this. Few pillows. I always make sure I have The Uke
because you're gonna be on the road you got to sing about it for sure. When I'm
sleeping I actually developed this where the back of of this pops out lays right
here so this entire area becomes a bed.
Currently this is where all the
clothes are stored in here, whenever I'm on tour. Cooking to be honest I actually
I do have like a jet boil and a double burner Coleman but most of the time I
will just pull up to a grocery store get some groceries and eat right in the
joint, in the parking lot of the grocery store. I'm usually either
traveling or like about to go camping for a week I'm just like, " Agh, it'd be nice to
just like eat in the van", so sometimes I do that. Other times I actually there's a
little table as you'll see in the back of the van there that I like to set up the
whole kitchen situation, but in the winters you're definitely just in here
you know, sipping coffee and eating soup and stuff.
For sure.
One day I was selling coffee and this guy he hands me this little tag
and it says, "The universe has a message for you. I love you." Yeah this is the
coffee mug that my dad hitchhiked with for an entire decade back in the 70s.
Yeah it has tons of stories attributed to that and it's kind of cool to have
that with to you know just have kind of a little legacy between me my dad of
traveling and living on the road. He's definitely all about, he's psyched
that I chose to live in a van and sell coffee, which is sweet. We're all gonna
die one day and it might be tomorrow it might be when you're 105, but I would
say if you're not living the life right now that you are psyched to wake up and
live, change it as soon as possible. Just, you know, if that means quitting your job
or if it means tweaking some things getting rid of some negativity in your
life just go for it and it might be hard at first, but in the end, do you want
to live the best story that you've thought you ever could or do you want to
you know wake up when you're 90 and say like, "Shit. I really should have done some
different things." Just, you know, put it all out there.
Live the dream. That's what I would say to do.
There's a lot of things wrong with the van as there are with these old, these
old vans. I have let's see like the other day I was going down a mountain
pass and my brakes started to smoke really hard so like you got to pull over
and I literally was dumping Nalgenes on the two front brakes and then
I just you know took a nap on the side of the road so that's kind of the
average story of how I travel. My flashers don't work so and it's like a
pole switch so I'm literally when I'm going up a mountain pass I'm in like
second gear maybe going like 20 miles an hour and I'm manually flashing my
flashers. Also the blinkers don't work or like they don't blink by themselves so I
have to like flip the switch to blink either way. Yeah I mean the engine has
blown up once, for sure. Yeah like the huge like the alternator
pulley literally cracked in half and just was whipping around in the
engine compartment once. I had to like run a red light and go park somewhere
otherwise the van was going to start on fire so um.