We recently connected with Michael Gonzalez and have shared our conversation below.

Michael, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard

One thing that we do differently than most coffee brands or any coffee shop is we use rainwater to brew the coffee. Did you know that coffee is 98% water? That means the water that you use to brew your coffee has a huge impact on how your coffee will taste. Now don’t get us wrong the coffee itself is a majorly important factor. That is why we only serve freshly roasted, sustainably sourced coffee! But let’s get back to the water. Most coffee shops filter and distill the water they use, and that is fantastic, but by the time it has been through that process, it has already been treated with several chemicals. In our opinion, rainwater is some of the best-tasting, most satisfying, life-giving water you can ever drink. We decided to pair excellent water with excellent coffee beans to give you the most excellent cup of coffee.

Michael, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hi, we are Michael and Mayra Gonzalez, a husband and wife team who love coffee, community, and uplifting others. Our ultimate goal with this company is to create a place for people to come and enjoy craft coffee, create community, and feel uplifted. If you haven’t noticed, we like our rainwater. What’s not to like? It tastes amazing, is life-giving, it is water in its purest form…. Not to mention it makes our coffee taste amazing. That is why all of our coffee is brewed with rainwater, allowing you to experience coffee in one of its purest forms. Another thing that we do is use local raw honey to make our syrupms whenever we get the chance. After experimenting with different syrup recipes we found that using raw honey simply tasted better than using traditional sugars. Honey is nature’s natural sweetener and we decided to take full advantage of that. But we did not want to just use any honey. We are all about keeping things local and supporting the local community and business so we source our honey from Keepers Harvest, a local Austin based company that provides us with true local raw honey. At our core though our main mission is to love and serve others. We are a faith based company and our goal is for people to experince the love of Jesus not through our words but through our actions and service, we hope that people leave us with a fantastic cup of coffee and their day just a little bit better.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Yes, our side hustle turned into a full-time business. We started down this coffee journey as just simply trying to make the best coffee that we could for ourselves at home. This evolved into making specialty coffee for our friends and family, which soon turned into trying to get into our local farmer’s markets to sell our coffee. We were able to get into the Bee Cave Farmers Market and sell coffee. Our goal was to simply help people experience coffee for what it could be. Have them take a step away from the chain coffee spots like Starbucks and try something new. By selecting light-roasted coffees and brewing our coffee using rainwater we were able to deliver a superior product.
When we started serving coffee at the farmers market, we had two tables and a tent and only served cold brew and drip coffee. Fast forward to today we now have a mobile espresso cart, a commercial espresso machine, several flavors, milk options, and the list goes on. We are essentially a coffee shop on wheels now! The biggest lesson we learned was to simply show up. Nothing will be perfect their is always ways to improve, but just show up, do your best, be kind, and things will grow and fall into place.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I think one of the things that has helped us build a reputation in our market is being kind to people. When we ask them how their day is going, we genuinely want to know how it is. We care about each customer and our goal is to serve them and make sure that the 5 minutes we get to spend with them is the best 5 minutes of their day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://milkandhoneycoffee.co
• Instagram: milkandhoney_coffee