Spokane entrepreneur who boldly and bluntly created popular coffee brand focused on sustainability dies at 70

Spokane coffee roaster Deborah Di Bernardo dreamed of a sustainable industry supported by organic beans, living wages and practices that enhanced the natural world rather than profits built off plundering it.

“I may not change the world … but I can try!” Di Bernardo once wrote.

And try she did, one f-bomb at a time. Di Bernardo died Sunday. She was 70.

A third round of cancer finally ended the run of the founder of Roast House Coffee, 423 E. Cleveland Ave., and First Avenue Coffee, 1011 W. First Ave.

Di Bernardo built award-winning coffee blends using only organic, fair-trade coffee beans, grown under the shade of a natural canopy instead of clear-cut groves, sorted by hand to ensure quality.

She paid a premium for coffee grown by women and provided funding for World Coffee Research, an organization that seeks to preserve coffee for future generations.

Facing terminal cancer at the end of 2022, she told The Spokesman-Review that she feared not enough people would realize how commercial practices of the coffee industry were driving it toward an ecological collapse.

“I’m almost glad I won’t be around to know,” she said. “The history of mankind. … It’s not going to change.”

Di Bernardo kept a book on her desk titled, “Swearing is Good for You” by Emma Byrne. Her longtime colleague, 32-year-old Aaron Jordan, said she lived by that code.

And, f-bombs were part of nearly every conversation.

“She always did it in a weirdly loving way. It’s an aggressive word,” Jordan said. “I’ve only met one person in my life who could pull that off. Deb was unfiltered. Say what is on your mind. No beating around the bush to get the impact you are aiming for.”

Doyle Wheeler, who formerly did branding work for Di Bernardo before he and his wife, Carri, bought First Avenue Coffee from her, still serves Roast House’s F-Bomb cold brew at all hours.

Wheeler said the blend got its moniker as Di Bernardo was trying to find a name for the creation at a time when she couldn’t eat sugar.

“And, she was a chocolate lover. The blend smelled like brownies. Every time she smelled it, she’d say the word,” Wheeler said. “After a while, it was fun to instigate her.

“I’d walk up and ask, ‘What’s the F in F-Bomb?’ She’d say, ‘Fantastic, you (expletive).’ She was hilarious. She was always like that.”

Later, Di Bernardo formed the F-Bomb Coffee Club.

Jordan put it simply: “We lost a (expletive) legend.”

Road west

The daughter of a Sicilian immigrant, Di Bernardo lived in Queens, New York, where her family ran an Italian restaurant. The family left the Empire State, moving first to California, then to Bend, Oregon, when it was still a small lumber town, then to Alaska.

Di Bernardo’s last stop was the Lilac City, where she arrived in her early 20s, though her parents moved again to Southern California, which reminded her father of Sicily.

“I just didn’t want to go,” she said in 2022. “I like Spokane. I like the weather. I’m an unusual Italian, because they like warm weather, but I like cold weather.”

Not long after arriving in the Inland Northwest, she married her first husband, a young attorney.

With her business degree and his law degree, they started law offices across the state, pioneers of using word processors in the ’80s to expedite bankruptcy and divorce paperwork.

“We did more divorces every year then almost all the firms (in Washington) combined,” she said.

Di Bernardo was living large, she said, noting the expensive suits and long fingernails she wore, the nice house she lived in. But the work drained her, and she began to think that she was profiting off the suffering of others.

“I quit, because I found it too painful to work with these people at the worst point in their lives.”

So Di Bernardo opened a deli, though she lost it when she and her then-husband divorced.

Wanting to stay in the food industry, she went to work for a local coffee roaster, where she learned about the industry from bean to brew. She was horrified by what she found.

“The most cost-effective, profit-driven coffees are the ones grown in a clear-cut environment with lots of chemicals,” she said. “It’s one of the most toxic crops.”

Unable to persuade her employer to change their business practices, she set out to open her own roastery.

Going all-organic and fair trade was part of the original mission.

“Vanilla beans, coffee, chocolate: Our foods are really threatened,” she said. “So I’m not doing that because I am looking for a way to showcase my company.

“I’m doing this because – I’m gonna say one more time, I am terrified. And I won’t be around to see it happen.”

Mission begins

In 2010, Di Bernardo opened Roast House in a small warehouse space on Cleveland Avenue in north Spokane.

Two years later, a 19-year-old Jordan began pestering her about the coffee -roasting business.

Moving here from Chicago, Jordan’s wife, Allison, while working as barista was trained by Di Bernardo. Allison Jordan then made the introduction to Aaron.

“I asked Deb for a roasting job. She told me to (expletive) off,” Jordan said. “I just kept coming around.”

He explained that roasting was his passion and asked for an internship. “She said, ‘You can come on, but I can’t afford to pay you.’ ”

Eventually the head roaster took another job. “Deb goes, ‘You want the job?’ I mean, that’s literally why I’m here,” Jordan said.

She made a business card for Jordan, who was 19 at the time, with an email address for “Roasterboy.”

Earlier in life, Jordan had a counselor tell him to find 20 people who were tenured in his target field and get in their back pockets.

“Everyone told me to get lost except for Deb. She took a chance on a 19-year-old punk kid,” Jordan said. “Nobody does that.”

Eventually, Roast House won more than two dozen national awards.

“I grew an appreciation and respect for her. That was our whole relationship,” Jordan said. “She would say, ‘I don’t know about that idea, but I trust you.’ Sometimes they would work and sometimes they would fail. We would just rebound together.”

Legacy

Di Bernardo leaves her husband of 25 years, James Haynes, and their beloved golden doodle, Lucy.

Jordan said Di Bernardo survived breast cancer and bone cancer, but then the disease resurfaced in her abdomen.

She spoke of her impending doom just like she did everything: blunt and to the point.

As she battled cancer in 2023, she sold the First Avenue location to Doyle and Carri Wheeler.

“It was not easy for her. It was her baby,” said Wheeler, 48. “She trusted us with her baby while she was alive.”

In 2020, Di Bernardo made Aaron and Allison Jordan managing partners of Roast House after she received a bleak diagnosis. They became owners as of Sunday.

Di Bernardo left explicit instructions not to have a memorial in her honor, Jordan said.

“She said, ‘Don’t give me some poor sad-sack memorial. Throw an Irish coffee party,’ ” he said. “So, that’s what we are going to do.”

Irish coffee party details, other than the inclusion of plentiful f-bombs, remain pending.