The newest addition to the desert’s coffee scene is hoping to make an impact with fresh roasting techniques … and music!
Desert Kid Coffee, on San Pablo Avenue in Palm Desert, celebrated its soft opening on April 9. Thanks to packed lines during festival weekends, social-media posts recommending the spot and word-of-mouth chatter, Desert Kid has already started building a solid reputation.
Desert Kid Coffee’s grand opening is set for sometime in May. For more information, stay tuned to www.instagram.com/desertkidcoffee.
Shortly before the soft opening, I stopped by Desert Kid Coffee to chat with founders Katie Reed and Joseph Eccles.
“Coffee has always been a big part of my life,” Reed said. “I was totally that kid in high school who would go pick up a coffee before going to school, and then when I moved out to New York City, (a café) was the place I would go to if I didn’t want to be alone, but wanted to be out and about and feel connected to the community. It’s where first dates would happen, or one-on-ones with my manager—or if people came to visit me, there’s always so much pride in showing them your local coffee spot. That’s when I really fell in love with café culture.”
Reed worked in tech for about a decade.
“With the changing landscape—like so much with AI, so much about over-optimization and everything in this world—I just want to get back to in-person community building, especially after the pandemic,” Reed said. “I just thought about building a ‘third space’ here in the Coachella Valley to be able to bring people together over coffee. … We have such a rich hospitality industry out here, so if Stumptown Coffee is to Portland, then there is definitely an opportunity for someone to be the blank to Palm Springs or the Coachella Valley, and we hope Desert Kid is.”
For Eccles, coffee has been part of his daily routine since he was a child.
“I remember when my dad would take me to middle school, and he was one of those guys who goes to Starbucks every day. … He would stop and hang out with his friends outside for usually 15 minutes before he took me to school,” Eccles said. “The rule was that I could get a coffee as long as it was not a sugar coffee or not something that was expensive … so I learned to drink coffee at a young age, and really started to love it then, and I just have those memories attached to it.”
That coffee love grew into a full-blown obsession.
“I got into specialty coffee culture early on, so when I would travel … I just felt like you saw culture thrive in spaces like coffee roasteries and shops,” Eccles said.
Obsession is not an understatement: Eccles left a decade-long teaching job at Shadow Hills High School to dive into the science of roasting the perfect cup.
“We have such a rich hospitality industry out here, so if Stumptown Coffee is to Portland, then there is definitely an opportunity for someone to be the blank to Palm Springs or the Coachella Valley, and we hope Desert Kid is.”
Katie Reed
“I turned my office … into my roasting room,” he said. “I had my roaster in there … and I would open my computer and just nerd it out. I nerded out on how I can craft the best specialty coffee, because at that time, there was really no specialty coffee in the desert. I think Everbloom had just started. I just wanted a new hobby, and it just grew and grew and grew. … I dreamed up the idea of what a roastery would look like with specialty coffee in the desert, having visited some really special ones around the world—but I didn’t ever anticipate actually taking action on it until Katie was like, ‘I have this idea.’”
Eccles and Reed said they’re adamant about collaborating with other local coffee shops.
“We’re friends with a lot of the different owners in the valley, and we’ve had outreach and are looking for ways to collaborate over time,” Eccles said. “I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity out here. … You go to Riverside; you go to Redlands; you go to L.A. or San Diego, and there are coffee shops literally next to each other, across the block from each other, across the entire city. It’s really neat when you see the outreach take place and when people come together, because there is such a cool coffee culture.”
Eccles explained Desert Kid Coffee’s unique roasting process.
“Our roaster is an air roaster … and there’s nobody locally roasting on an air roaster,” he said. “It gives you a lot of control over the process.”
Eccles and Reed are working to create direct relationships with coffee-growers.
“We got to do an origin trip a couple of months ago and go to Guatemala, to meet producers and shake hands and eat dinner with them and get toured around,” Eccles said. “… I think that’s a really unique thing, because the supply chain in coffee passes through so many different people’s hands. Oftentimes, the people who are left behind are the producers themselves—the growers, the farmers. The goal is, by cutting out more of that middle-man mentality, then you can pay fairer wages to the farmers and to the producers.”
Desert Kid is in the space previously occupied by Musicians Outlet, which was a beloved local music retail store—and Reed and Eccles say they’re committed to keeping the music going.
“This is where I learned to play guitar; this is where I took my first guitar lesson,” Eccles said. “Growing up here, going to Palm Desert High School, being a part of this space, there was always something really special about San Pablo and about this building. This was actually the first building that we came to, and we just kept going back to it. We went and saw a few other places, but we were like, ‘Something good needs to happen to this building.’”
Desert Kid has already launched a new concert series at the shop called Desert Sounds, inspired by series like NPR’s Tiny Desk. Artists will perform stripped-down performances inside the coffee shop, and the live sets will be professionally recorded and released online. You can check out the first episode with Palm Shadow, on Desert Kid’s YouTube channel.
“We’re obsessed with music,” Reed said. “We all grew up in the light of the festivals out here, in addition to all of us taking our first music lessons in this building. … We have so many talented friends out here who are musicians, and Joseph used to be in a band. So many people are talented from here, and we have so much pride for all our friends who are talented in the Coachella Valley.
Stay tuned to Desert Kid’s socials for information about the next concert, because they won’t necessarily occur on a consistent basis.
“We’re not billing ourselves as, like, a music venue, per se,” Eccles said. “It’s going to be much more like an intimate setting, and then we’ll go on some sort of rotation once we are up and running. It won’t be like we’re putting on weekly shows, but we’re really excited to bring to the community a little bit of a different angle from some of the other venues that are popping up.”
Reed and Eccles invited any local businesses who may want to collaborate to reach out.
“Anyone starting a coffee program—we want to be their hyper local go-to option,” Reed said. “You can see Desert Kid Coffee on the menu; we can help train their staff, help them understand what equipment to get and help guide them through that process, and then roast them coffee. We already have one customer, which is Brandini Toffee, and we help them spin up their retail outlet out in Palm Springs. Now we’re about to launch our wholesale site so that we can get more people to order from us.”
Desert Kid Coffee is located at 44850 San Pablo Ave., in Palm Desert. Learn more at instagram.com/desertkidcoffee and desertkid.coffee.
