Black Rifle Coffee Company is marking Memorial Day with a project that’s a lot heavier than your average holiday promo. The veteran-founded coffee brand, launched in 2014, has grown into a nationally recognized company built around serving great coffee and supporting veterans, active-duty service members, first responders, and their families. This year, co-founder and former Army Ranger Mat Best released “Folded Flag,” an original song and music video that pays tribute to fallen service members and the Gold Star families who live with that loss every day. Backed by a $150,000 commitment to the Major Brent Taylor Foundation, Best explained the mission of the video and how he hopes it will help pull Memorial Day’s focus away from sales and back to remembrance.
What made you want to do something like this?
I’ve done a series called “I Choose Life” throughout my career on the internet, and it’s always meant a lot to me because people go through struggles—men in general, veterans in particular—and a lot of that stuff is what the standard male doesn’t want to talk about. Around Memorial Day especially, I think it’s become so commercialized: people think, “I get an extra day off, I’m gonna barbecue and drink beer,” which is great because it’s a celebration of our freedoms—but the generational sacrifice it took to give us that should be front and center at the same time. I wrote “Folded Flag” about my friend Luke, who passed away in 2008, as a way to tell a story of remembrance around him and hopefully inspire people going into the weekend to really understand the severity of sacrifice—not just in the GWOT [Global War on Terror] era, but all the way back to places like Omaha Beach in World War II.
For people who don’t know, tell us a little about Black Rifle Coffee Company and what inspired you to create it.
The origin story of Black Rifle is kind of fun because we never set out to be a big CPG company selling coffee at scale. I was already on the internet and had a lifestyle apparel company when I met my business partner and now CEO, Evan Hafer, who was this small‑time roaster in his basement working on a one‑pound roaster. He’d been in the GWOT as a Special Forces soldier and used to retrofit Humvees to roast coffee during the invasion of Iraq, so it was this perfect coalescing of my love for brand-building and his love for coffee. We looked around and saw no one in our community doing what we wanted to do, so we said, “Why don’t we sell coffee that tastes freaking awesome and support the things we love—our community?” That idea caught fire and has taken off over the last roughly 11 years, and we’re incredibly thankful for the support we still have today.
Where did the name Black Rifle Coffee Company come from?
I’ve got to give credit to Evan. He was running a high‑level training course for a three‑letter agency, roasting coffee in the back of a truck, and he had his black rifle—our service rifle, the life‑saving tool we take everywhere to protect our friends and ourselves—right there next to this delicious coffee. Coffee is usually the first thing all of us do in the morning before we get into the team room or our jobs, and those two things pair perfectly, especially at the range: we’re gonna go do all this crazy training, but first, coffee. Out of that moment, Black Rifle Coffee was born.
How long did you serve, and did you know you were going to become an entrepreneur when you got out?
I did four years and five deployments with the 2nd Ranger Battalion, then got out and worked another five and a half years for another organization, doing multiple combat deployments, so I’m just shy of 10 years of carrying a gun professionally. When I separated from the military, I did not have a plan—I always joke that I was just a stupid Ranger who got out thinking, “Whatever, I’ll figure it out,” and a year later I was like, “Oh God, what am I doing?” I tried college, but the campus culture didn’t fit; about a year and a half later, I got a job with a three‑letter agency, put myself through college, and slowly navigated civilian life to figure out what I wanted to do. I’m very thankful that my day‑to‑day still lives in the veteran and military community—doing work I love and, yes, still getting to play with lasers, guns, and jump out of planes once in a while.
How did your military experience shape the way you run the business?
Coming out of a prestigious unit like the 75th Ranger Regiment, the biggest thing you carry with you is accountability. In that unit, every day is an interview for your job—it’s not like you get your tan beret and coast. You’re tested constantly, expected to be a high achiever, and your teammates expect a certain level of performance. That translates almost perfectly into entrepreneurship because no one tells you when to wake up, what to do, or how hard to work; it’s all on you. Sometimes you have to get up at 3:00 in the morning and go to bed at 1:00, and it’s brutal, but the accountability to show up, do the work, and be a high‑functioning leader is directly rooted in my time in the 2nd Ranger Battalion.
No one’s shooting at you as an entrepreneur, but sometimes it feels like it. How do you manage the stress when things aren’t going how you hoped?
It took me a long time to get into the right mental space for that. In entrepreneurship, you rarely celebrate wins; every problem in the organization funnels up to you, so you’re problem‑solving 24/7 and feel like you’re drowning, and even when you land something like getting into a massive retailer, the reaction is more, “Thank God it’s not a problem” than a celebration. My advice is that you’ve got to be tough and gritty and stop fixating on small, extraneous things you can’t control; sometimes you have to just accept a loss, let it go, and not invest your emotion into it because that only hurts your path forward. I recently went through a divorce that reminded me of business in that way—there were things that weren’t fair, but focusing on them wouldn’t help, so I stayed focused on the future, found the successes, and refused to let the losses hold me back.
What about the charitable side of what you do? How does that fit into the company?
Part of our core mission is summed up as “great coffee, great mission,” and that mission has two buckets: the cultural side with our content and the philanthropic side of the business. When we went public, we formalized that mission aspect by becoming a public benefit corporation, which means we actually have a fiduciary responsibility to participate in the community and support charities—and that’s something Evan and I really wanted, so that mission lives in the company’s DNA even beyond us. We’ve got a great director of philanthropy, Dean, who does incredible work for the community, and any time we do a project we try to align it with that mission. For this Memorial Day piece, I asked him to find a grassroots, family‑oriented organization that really understands Memorial Day; that led us to Jennie Taylor and the Major Brent Taylor Foundation, which brings Gold Star families together for community and resources. With “Folded Flag,” we pledged 150,000 dollars to the Foundation, which will help fund events like a gathering at Fort Benning where 50 to 60 Gold Star families will connect, network, and access support programs—just one example of the kind of impact we’re trying to make.
For the coffee drinkers out there, what do you recommend to really light up in the morning?
I live or die by Silencer Smooth—that’s my favorite. It’s a light roast, and people assume dark roast has more caffeine, but that’s a fallacy; the lighter roast can actually give you more of that kick. I do a double shot on an espresso machine and drink Americanos, just black coffee. If I’m not drinking that, I’m reaching for our energy drink, which is also sourced from coffee and is absolutely delicious.
Black Rifle Coffee Company is marking Memorial Day with a project that’s a lot heavier than your average holiday promo. The veteran-founded coffee brand, launched in 2014, has grown into a nationally recognized company built around serving great coffee and supporting veterans, active-duty service members, first responders, and their families. This year, co-founder and former Army Ranger Mat Best released “Folded Flag,” an original song and music video that pays tribute to fallen service members and the Gold Star families who live with that loss every day. Backed by a $150,000 commitment to the Major Brent Taylor Foundation, Best explained the mission of the video and how he hopes it will help pull Memorial Day’s focus away from sales and back to remembrance.
What made you want to do something like this?
I’ve done a series called “I Choose Life” throughout my career on the internet, and it’s always meant a lot to me because people go through struggles—men in general, veterans in particular—and a lot of that stuff is what the standard male doesn’t want to talk about. Around Memorial Day especially, I think it’s become so commercialized: people think, “I get an extra day off, I’m gonna barbecue and drink beer,” which is great because it’s a celebration of our freedoms—but the generational sacrifice it took to give us that should be front and center at the same time. I wrote “Folded Flag” about my friend Luke, who passed away in 2008, as a way to tell a story of remembrance around him and hopefully inspire people going into the weekend to really understand the severity of sacrifice—not just in the GWOT [Global War on Terror] era, but all the way back to places like Omaha Beach in World War II.
For people who don’t know, tell us a little about Black Rifle Coffee Company and what inspired you to create it.
The origin story of Black Rifle is kind of fun because we never set out to be a big CPG company selling coffee at scale. I was already on the internet and had a lifestyle apparel company when I met my business partner and now CEO, Evan Hafer, who was this small‑time roaster in his basement working on a one‑pound roaster. He’d been in the GWOT as a Special Forces soldier and used to retrofit Humvees to roast coffee during the invasion of Iraq, so it was this perfect coalescing of my love for brand-building and his love for coffee. We looked around and saw no one in our community doing what we wanted to do, so we said, “Why don’t we sell coffee that tastes freaking awesome and support the things we love—our community?” That idea caught fire and has taken off over the last roughly 11 years, and we’re incredibly thankful for the support we still have today.