About coffee lawyer adam vanho

From a very young age, when my Dad would leave for work, I would drink his cold, dark, instant, black coffee after he left for work.  I am pretty sure I was the only first grader in the entire history of the Euclid City School District that was doing reading time with a caffeine buzz.

If coffee stunts your growth, I should have been 7'2.  

But it did not matter to me -- I liked my morning coffee.  As I grew older, I started to drink non-instant coffee, which was (comparatively) a Godsend.  At one point at The Euclid High School, I figured out how to sneak coffee out of the principal's office without him caring.

Then came college.  

Allegheny College had unlimited amounts of coffee available at all sorts of weird hours.  I also started experimenting with various types and styles of coffee.  We even had a then-newish coffee shop that was a cool place to hang out between classes, debate tournaments, and study for exams.

After Allegheny came law school at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University.  For those of you who don't know, law school is fueled by caffeine: pop, coffee, and whatever else can give an extra twenty minutes of energy. 

(It's also fueled by cheap beer, but that's a story for a future business.)

During law school, much to the contrary advise from my Grandfather, I developed an affection for criminal law.  It came about as a result of internships at the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office, Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, and the United States Attorney's Office in Cleveland.  I also worked on the third trial of Bay Village Doctor Sam Sheppard.

After law school, I went to work at the Montgomery County Prosecutor's Office, the Summit County Prosecutor's Office, and the Ohio Attorney General's Office.  

In that timeframe, I dealt with everything from juvenile speeding tickets and deadbeat parents to rapists and murderers on death row.   This was a caffeine-fueled time in my life, when pots of coffee became a daily necessity.

During my timeframe with the Ohio Attorney General's Office, I spend a lot of time on the road.  This meant going to small towns and the larger cities, sometimes at obnoxiously-early hours of the morning.  

I learned where to find the best coffee in a lot of small towns, as well as which courthouses had their own coffee shops.  While some of those coffee shops had some great drinks, I also drank a lot of coffee that bordered on used motor oil.

After years of public service, and after I got engaged, I decided to settle down -- or so I thought.  After several years with Burdon and Merlitti, I started my own law firm in downtown Akron with a former law school classmate that ended with an office fire on December 12, 2016.

I then opened a small law office, VanHo Law, in downtown Hudson.  I gradually moved back to downtown Akron, and have been working on cases from all around Ohio.

During my travels around the state, I have continued to explore various coffees and mixtures in small towns and big cities around Ohio.  

Just before the pandemic began, I had taken a class in Entrepreneurship Essentials from Harvard Business Online.  I wanted to try something outside of the practice of law, and while I knew how to do the 'mechanics' of starting a business, I wanted more insight on how to actually get a business off the ground.

During the pandemic, while courthouses were shut down, I spent a lot of time researching various ideas and concepts, but nothing seemed 'right.'  

Then I stumbled on an article about roasting coffee from home.  I thought it would be interesting to try -- not really as a business, but as a hobby.  

The first experiments went terrible.  We tried to do it on a frying pan, which caused the whole house to smell up.  Then we got a small, tabletop roaster, which did a good job, but there were still a lot of burned beans.

But after a while, I got the hang of things.  This ended up with us sending some beans to friends and family, who started sending back their insights and thoughts.  

Over and over, we kept hearing "you should sell this."

And that's what started the idea for what became Raging River Coffee Company .....

I decided to start HipsterCoffeeLawyer as a way of document this experience and journey, as well as to (hopefully) give some inspiration to others out there to explore their own passions.

So stay tuned ......

(ABOUT THE IMAGE: ME DISCUSSING CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM AT AKRON PECHAKUNCHA IN 2019)