Our story
The Story of THRUM
Maybe it doesn’t need to be a whole thing.
Somewhere along the way, taking care of ourselves got complicated.
The good stuff started requiring a morning routine, a meditation practice, the right supplements, an hour we don’t have—or a ceremony on a Saturday afternoon.
I wanted something that could simply become part of a life.
A cup before work. At the kitchen table. In the garden. Between meetings. With someone you love. Something you can pay attention to when you want to—and just drink when you don’t.
Make a moment of it. Or just make cacao.
THRUM belongs inside the day you already have.
How I got here
Cacao had been following me around for years before THRUM existed.
I spent much of 2012–2019 traveling, and for years during that time I didn’t use caffeine or stimulants at all. I became interested in what different kinds of energy actually felt like in my body—not just whether something made me more awake.
Eventually cacao entered the picture.
I drank it in ceremonies. Found it in markets. Tasted it while traveling. Shared blocks of it with people all over the world.
Sometimes it held space for something profound.
Sometimes it was shared between friends.
Sometimes it was just a random morning in the middle of my week.
And that’s what stayed with me.
The more cacao became part of my life, the less interested I became in keeping it inside a special container.
I didn’t want to have to go somewhere special to access it.
I wanted the cup on Tuesday.
And frankly, I was tired of coffee being the default answer every time I wanted to meet a friend, sit down somewhere beautiful, get some work done, or just have a reason to linger for a while.
I wanted another kind of cup.
For years, I was inspired to open a café.
Not just somewhere to get coffee.
I imagined a place people actually wanted to stay.
Plants everywhere. Art and creativity. Beautiful things to look at. A room that somehow made it easier to drop into whatever was in front of you—a project, a conversation, a book, a few hours of work, or absolutely nothing but staring out the window.
Somewhere that welcomed those little pockets of attention we don’t always make enough room for.
I kept imagining it in different cities and different forms as I traveled.
Eventually I realized the thing I was most interested in wasn’t owning a café.
It was creating what could happen inside one.
The cup. The pause. The conversation. The creative spark. The shift into whatever came next.
That idea kept evolving.
And then John came over.
Then John came over.
John had spent more than twenty years building Chocolate Alchemy, following his curiosity about cacao all the way back to the bean.
One of the things that originally pulled him into chocolate was a chance encounter at a party where someone handed him a cup of drinking chocolate.
That curiosity became years of sourcing cacao, learning roast and process, adapting equipment, experimenting, and helping make bean-to-bar chocolate accessible to small makers.
Fast-forward more than twenty years.
John had just ordered a raw ceremonial cacao from Oaxaca, directly from the source.
He was at my house one afternoon. I’d just moved back to the area, and we’d spent part of the day planting a ridiculous amount of onions.
We were talking about all things chocolate when he told me about this new bean.
He thought there was something there.
So did I.
THRUM is what unfolded from there.
What happened next
We started with the bean.
Roasting and testing it with all variations to find the exact cup THRUM wanted to become.
And the pieces started connecting.
The years of traveling with cacao.
The café I’d imagined in a hundred different forms.
The desire for something other than coffee on the menu.
The belief that a meaningful moment doesn’t have to announce itself as one.
And a really remarkable cacao sitting right in front of us.
THRUM became a way to bring all of that together without asking people to rearrange their lives to make room for it.
Really good, whole-bean cacao—beautifully sourced, custom roasted for the cup, with as little standing between the bean and the person drinking it as possible.
I’ve spent years sharing cacao in all kinds of ways—a block, a drink, a ceremony, a moment.
Now my work is bringing that same range of possibility into ordinary life.
Making the cup delicious.
Making it easy.
Getting it into cafés and kitchens.
Creating enough around it that you can go deeper when you want to, without requiring anything from you when you don’t.
You can drink it before the board meeting or while answering emails. Make it while the kids eat breakfast. Bring it into a conversation with someone you love. Drink it while you’re making something, tending the garden, or doing absolutely nothing worth optimizing.
It doesn’t need your morning routine.
It doesn’t need two uninterrupted hours.
It doesn’t need you to call it a ritual.
Because a cup can hold a whole moment.
And sometimes it’s simply what you’re drinking on a Tuesday.
Make a moment of it. Or just make cacao.
That’s THRUM.
Choose your THRUM