Gold Bar coffee roasters turn coffee into an art form

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, June 3, 2026

EVERETT — After spending just under 30 years in prison, Jeff “Pilot” Rousey found his calling in coffee.

Currently, Jeff Rousey runs Rousey Coffee Roasters with his wife, Jaymie Rousey. But his coffee journey kicked off when he incorporated his first company, Original Pilot House Coffees, in 2010 while incarcerated.

Why coffee? Jeff Rousey’s great-grandpa had left him $2,500, and he needed to decide what to use it for. He recalled reading the Wall Street Journal and deciding he wanted to buy the No. 1 traded commodity: oil.

“One of my friends said, ‘You don’t actually get the oil, Pilot. You get a piece of paper that says you own the oil,’” he recalled, standing at the wooden coffee bar of his Gold Bar Roastery. “I said, ‘Well, that’s not what I want.’”

So, he moved on to coffee.

“I started doing a whole bunch of research, and like Shawshank Redemption, I started writing letters to different farmers and to different roasters,” he said.

He was released in 2013 after serving a sentence connected to a fight over a drug debt that resulted in a man’s death in California.

Jeff Rousey went on to operate Original Pilot House Coffees in Monroe. After several years, he relinquished ownership of the business. Now, the coffee shop is known as Monroe Coffee Co.

“I walked away from coffee for two years, and that was really hard,” he said.

He met Jaymie while she was helping organize a 5K at Lake Tye for the Veterans of Foreign Wars Monroe Post 7511. She was the first female elected officer at Monroe VFW Post 7511.

“He came up with the idea for us to sell coffee to raise money to put the race on itself,” Jaymie Rousey said. “Then we kind of just became friends through the VFW for years.”

Eventually, Jeff Rousey found his way back to coffee, putting a roasting machine in Jaymie Rousey’s garage. In 2021, he began roasting as Rousey Coffee Roasters.

While coffee fans can spot the roastery’s black and white bags of beans on local grocery store shelves and on their website, rouseycoffeeroasters.com. You may already be drinking a cup of joe powered by them at your nearby coffee stand.

The couple roasts for around 30 companies, including wholesale out of state, including Alaska and Texas. Instead of just sending out bags of their standard coffee lines, the Rouseys help espresso stand owners and coffee shop crews create speciality roasts, so each place’s cup is unique.

It’s called profile building, Jeff Rousey said. The couple will take coffee beans and roast it six or seven different ways to achieve various flavors from each bean. With 11 different coffee origins in-house, you can “pretty much mix and match.”

“If you do it proper, you can get some rad flavors out of coffee,” he said.

It’s a family operation, with each of their four kids helping out in some way, Jaymie Rousey said.

“It’s just a bonding thing,” she said. “We blast music, they can dance around in here and just have fun.”

Jonathan Cowles remembers his first time visiting the Rouseys’ roaster, prior to their Gold Bar location, after his friend introduced them to his coffee in 2022.

“It’s pretty cool, very romantic. We went up early in the morning, it was all misty,” he recalled.

When they got to the roasting house past the train tracks, the air smelled of coffee. He’s been drinking their coffee ever since.

“He puts a lot of heart and soul into it,” Cowles said. “He definitely treats it like an art.”

Jenna Millikan: 425-339-3035; jenna.millikan@heraldnet.com; X: @JennaMillikan