Coffee aficionado turns passion into business

What started as a hobby has blossomed into one of the Valley’s newest businesses.

Alex Coker began roasting coffee beans in a Whirley Pop hand-cranked popcorn maker bought from Amazon in 2017. A year later, he parlayed his passion for good coffee into a cottage business of selling his beans in Mason jars at vendor events. That led to his roasted beans being distributed to retail outlets in the Valley and Fairbanks under the name Cold Snap Coffee.

The next milestone for the company came on Aug. 9. With the grand opening of Coker’s own storefront, Cold Snap Coffee welcomed its first customers to its Palmer-Wasilla Highway location in the building formerly occupied by The Crumby Bakery. It’s the same site that housed North Star Bakery for a couple of decades.

The business offers its house-roasted beans in a drip version, in a variety of coffee drinks, and also unground, in 1-pound bags, for home consumption. There are also some seriously good bagels available, also made in house.

A self-described Army brat who moved around regularly while growing up, Coker met his wife, Kayla, a Wasilla resident, in 2010. The couple married shortly after that.

He continued in the Army reserve while cultivating a career in sleep medicine. That changed when his coffee hobby got serious.

“I didn’t like paying more for good coffee,” Coker said. “I thought it was crap that Alaskans have to pay so much for coffee.”

He said learning a consistent, viable roasting process was “trial by fire.” But he worked through it with wise feedback from Kayla.

“My wife was the first person to tell me it was good,” he said. “But I burned a lot of coffee to get to that. She was also the first to tell me it was bad.”

After perfecting his roasting process and expanding his market reach, Coker was offered an in-house gig when F.J. Kruger bought North Star Bakery and opened The Crumby Bakery there in early 2024. During his time as coffee meister for the Krugers, he helped out at the bakery by baking bread, something he had never done before. That led him to experimenting with bagels.

“It made me realize how much I enjoyed baking bread,” he said. “The only reason I attempted bagels is because I heard how hard it is to make a good one. So I thought, ‘challenge accepted.’”

Much of his journey to making the perfect bagel was through trial and error. He’d tweak the recipe as he went, using bakery customers and their feedback for his research and development. The final product is now part of the fare at Cold Snap, where they come in three varieties – plain, everything, and jalapeno-cheddar.

When the Krugers decided to shut the bakery, Coker’s decision to take it over did not come without some trepidation.

“Part of the fear is what drives you. You don’t usually have growth when you’re comfortable,” he said. “Small business ownership is 10 percent succeeding and 90 percent feeling like a failure.”

Coker said his time at the bakery, working with the Krugers, gave him the confidence to know he could run his own business.

“Everything is a lesson. I got to see what worked and what didn’t,” he said. “The Krugers did a lot right. But it takes a lot to run a bakery. That’s why I’m not doing it.”

Instead, Coker adopted a bare-bones approach. Serving his Brazilian-Colombian blend of house coffee and his home-made bagels is enough. At least for now.

“Simple and high quality is the focus,” he said. “I’m not here just to take people’s money.”

To that end, Coker doesn’t skimp on good ingredients, and he employs an authentic process for making his bagels. That includes boiling them in the traditional fashion.

“There’s no reason to complicate something that’s delicious in its simplicity. Boiling gives the bagel its shape,” he said. “By not boiling it, it loses what makes it a bagel. It’s like eating a hamburger bun with a hole in it.”

Early results are promising. His bagels can be found at Bushes Bunches farm stand near Palmer, and also at the Joe Bagel drive-up sandwich shop on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway, which used to use bagels from Costco.

Meanwhile, his roasted coffee beans are used for the house coffee at The Grape Tap and Locals restaurants. Black Birch Books, near Wasilla, is also a fan of Cold Snap Coffee products.

Cold Snap Coffee is open from 7:30 to 11 a.m., Monday through Friday, and 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays.

“My business strategy is to do a few things really well. I want people to come here because they know they will get something good.”