Where to start

Thank you for being my friend.

Thank you for coming into my life and making it better. Especially if you helped with my caffeine addiction.

It begins, as most great obsessions do, with whipped cream.

Sometime around 2006, I had my first sip of a Java Chip Frappuccino. Mostly whipped cream, barely any coffee, completely life-changing. I didn't know it then, but that one drink set something in motion that I'm still following today.

For a long time, Starbucks was the whole world of coffee for me. Peppermint mochas every Christmas. That specific mid-2000s atmosphere that felt warm and familiar and like somewhere worth being. I think a lot of people know exactly what I'm talking about.

Then came college.

My freshman year at Walla Walla University in Washington introduced me to something I hadn't experienced before: a coffee shop that felt like it actually belonged to the people inside it. The Olive was a coffee and pizza spot that stayed open late, poured good drip coffee, and had the kind of energy that made you want to stay for hours. I did homework there. I had conversations that mattered there. I met people, Chris, Aisling, Jared, Brooke, who made that season of life feel less like survival and more like something worth remembering. The Olive is gone now, but what it taught me about what a space can do for people has never left.

Sophomore year brought me back to Texas, closer to family and to two of my closest friends, Cindy and Amel. It also brought me to the person I'd eventually marry. Adam and I met moving into the dorms, he dropped something of mine within the first few seconds, and the rest is history. We bonded over coffee and tea, cheap espresso machines, and an embarrassing number of Starbucks mugs. If you knew me then, you knew I had a new one every week.

But the city right next door kept calling. Fort Worth, Texas. The 10th largest city in the country, and the place that would become home.

Fort Worth cracked coffee wide open for me. Shops like Avoca, Summer Moon, Crude Coffee, and Cherry became chapters in their own right. Summer Moon was where I started watching people and realizing that what I loved wasn't just the coffee. It was the faces lighting up mid-conversation. It was the sense that something was happening in the room. I bought wood-fire roasted beans and taught myself to make espresso at home, but I always came back for the people.

Crude Coffee introduced me to drinks I had never seen before, including what I can only describe as a TX Whiskey Coffee Latte that I still think about. That's also where I discovered pour overs and figured out my taste: fruity, tea-like, complex. Coffee as something worth paying attention to.

And then there's Cherry. Cherry is the kind of place that makes you understand immediately why some rooms just work. Beautiful atmosphere, thoughtful drinks, the feeling that you're exactly where you're supposed to be. I took my senior graduation photos there. Not because it was convenient, but because it felt right. Because it was the kind of space I want to build someday.

That's what all of this is really about. Every cup, every shop, every late night and slow morning has been pointing toward the same thing: a belief that spaces have the power to change how people feel, think, and connect. Fort Worth taught me that. The people I met along the way taught me that.

This is where the love for third spaces started. And this is where Emperia begins.