You can now order Comeback Beverage Co. canned coffee sodas online at comebackbevco.com. That means you can enjoy the sweet taste of strawberry — and lime and lemon and thyme — coffee without leaving your house.
You can, of course, still stop by Comeback Coffee and get a can along with fresh coffee and house-made pastry.
“The plan has always been taking this product and breaking outside of Memphis city limits,” says Hayes McPherson, who, along with his wife Amy, owns Comeback Coffee. “They’re doing this with beer, where the name of ‘Memphis’ is being spread in the beverage industry. And we want to do that with coffee.”
The native Memphians opened their shop in March 2019. They wanted to get in “the movement of specialty coffee that was starting to exist here,” Hayes says.
They don’t brew coffee at their shop. “We’re a multi roaster,” Amy explains. “That means we bring in coffee from all over the world.”
Food & Wine magazine named them one of “The Best Coffee Shops in America” in 2019, about six months after they opened, Hayes says. Some of that is doubtless due to the coffee itself, but some credit must go to the coffee shop. They wanted to “create a unique space for people to come together,” Amy says, “make it comfortable.”
Coffee soda, which became a staple in the coffee industry four years ago, is a “cold coffee, oftentimes with some sort of flavoring, sometimes sweet, sometimes not,” Amy says. “Ours is sweet.”
After trying other brands of coffee soda, they thought, “I think we can make this and make it better.”
“We figured out a process where we could hold onto all the good parts of coffee,” Hayes said. “Cold brews a lot of times are bitter. The coffee tastes burned or old or kind of gross.”
Their coffee sodas have sweetness from the sugar and fruit juices along with a not-overpowering coffee taste. “You get those fun flavor combinations, but you still get the caffeine kick.”
Hayes, Amy, and Ethan McGaughy, who all work on the flavor combinations, launched their strawberry-lime flavored coffee soda at the first Grind City Coffee Xpo in 2019. People “dug it,” Hayes says.
They put it on tap when they opened the shop. “And sold 10 gallons of it that first day.”
The couple launched Comeback Beverage Co. last year and began selling small batches at the shop. They sold out all 100 cans in 30 minutes the first day, Hayes says.
Comeback Beverage Co. now sells only two mainstay canned coffee sodas: “Field Day,” the original strawberry-lime drink, and their No. 1 seller, the lemon and thyme “Southern Style.”
Memphis artist Macon Wilson designed the labels.
This past year, Hayes and Amy researched “how to create a system to make bigger batches and have full control over it instead of sending it out places to get it made or relying on other folks to do it,” he says.
Now it’s all done in house. “About six months ago I started a process of buying this equipment to do this in bulk.”
Comeback Beverage Co. is in “literally a garage” connected to their shop, Hayes says. They plan to physically build out the business, though, “and help build out this district, the Pinch, a district we’ve fallen in love with.”
The Comeback crew wants their coffee sodas to be “all over the country and all over the world,” Hayes says.
“This started out as a singular drink on a coffee menu over two-and-a-half years ago. We never anticipated it would be this well received,” Hayes says. “Well, our community has supported us in ways we are so thankful for and allowed us to jump into something like this and spread it out.”
And, he says, “If it wasn’t for the city of Memphis, we would not be able to do it.”
Comeback Coffee is at 358 North Main Street; (901) 860-4215.
