Trilogy Coffee: The DeLand Story That Began in a Laundry Room

Trilogy’s own account of its beginnings starts at home. Clay Cass, the company’s owner and head roaster, was roasting in the family laundry room with a box fan helping move the air. That is a wonderfully unpolished image. Before the finished bag and the carefully prepared cup came a person trying to learn a demanding craft in the space available.

There is affection in that detail, but also ambition. Home experiments ask something of everyone living around them. Equipment takes up room. Attention follows the next attempt. A promising interest starts becoming part of the household’s daily life before anybody knows what the public version will look like.

Trilogy moved into a small space at DaVinci Design Studio and found an early audience through the Artisan Alley Farmers Market. That progression gives its story a distinctly DeLand shape. A maker brought something into a place where neighbors were already willing to meet makers. The business grew through an exchange that was personal enough to carry questions, encouragement, and another cup.

The café opened in May 2015 at the small roasting location. By 2016, Trilogy had taken on a vacant storefront and attached garage on Georgia Avenue, only half a block from its old farmers market setting.

Half a block is a short walk and a substantial chapter. A larger space means committing to an idea in public. The early experiment becomes somewhere people expect to find you. The roaster still has to care about the next batch, while the café also becomes responsible for the ordinary hospitality of a room.

That is what I find compelling about Trilogy’s downtown presence. The company did not have to travel far to become something larger. Its growth became part of the same neighborhood that had helped introduce it. You can read the addresses as a small map of confidence gathering around a craft.

It also fits the character of downtown DeLand’s independent business community. A storefront is more interesting when you understand the particular ambition behind it. Trilogy’s happens to have arrived by way of a laundry room.

Trilogy describes three connected stories: the coffee, the company, and the community. The first begins before DeLand enters the picture. Growing and processing coffee involve people whose work is easy to overlook when the finished drink feels so familiar.

The company’s account of roasting emphasizes preserving the character of the coffee’s origin. Its manual Diedrich roaster makes that attention tangible. The machinery is part of the craft; so are the decisions of the person working with it.

I like this understanding of making something. Expertise can mean knowing how much of your own hand to show and how much to let the material speak. A roaster receives work already shaped by climate, land, and other people. The responsibility is to carry those qualities forward into something another person can enjoy.

That gives the café a wider geography than its address suggests. A conversation on Georgia Avenue can begin with something grown far away. The connection is modest enough to fit into a cup and substantial enough to reward a little curiosity.

Coffee is unusual in the way it can occupy both the serious and the everyday parts of a life. Someone may want to talk closely about origin and preparation. Someone else may simply want a good beginning to the morning. Both can find meaning in the same place.

Trilogy’s idea that the customer completes the story leaves room for that difference. The roaster cannot prescribe what a cup will accompany. It may travel into work, a conversation, a quiet kitchen, or a few unclaimed minutes between responsibilities.

That openness is part of the pleasure of a local café. The business brings its standards and its character; the people bring their lives. Over time, the room collects associations that no founder could have written into the original plan.

When I think about Trilogy, I come back to the distance between that first box fan and the many ordinary moments the coffee now enters. There is real accomplishment in making a craft good enough, and welcoming enough, to become part of somebody else’s day.

The Boston Coffeehouse story follows another independent contribution to DeLand’s café life. Together they show how much personality lives inside the small rituals collected in Volusia County Stories.