Coffee People ft. Jean Brillman, White Horse Coffee Roasters
Jean Brillman of White Horse Coffee Roasters in Jenkintown, PA was our first podcast guest at the Roastar booth during CoffeeFest NYC.
Full video posted below, or watch and/or listen to Coffee People on:
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EDITOR'S NOTE: COFFEEFEST NYC
We recently attended Coffeefest NYC as guests of our presenting sponsor, Roastar. They included a late-night-esque studio set for us to engage with visitors to their coffee packaging booth. Coffeefest NYC hasn't historically been a terribly productive event for the Coffee People podcast, but it gives us a reason to visit one of our favorite places in the world and see all our convention friends.*
This year was different. The podcast set, and the comfy chairs, in particular, drew in booth visitors nearly non-stop over three days. We exceeded our goal of 8-10 interviews by a mile, leaving us with way more content to share than anticipated. If we only released one episode per week, we'd be running Coffeefest NYC posts until well into the fall. Instead, we'll be dropping batches of them on our podcast channels each week. The guests will still get devoted pages here on the Coffee People website, and we'll send round-up e-mails featuring several guests. With today being the exception!
Guest: Jean Brillman
Role: Founder at White Horse Coffee Roasters (WHCR)
Where: Jenkintown, PA
Find online: @whitehorsecoffeeroasters • whitehorsecoffeeroasters.com
"You can't be stagnant. You always need to be learning, changing, growing, and that's what I love about it."
• Jean Brillmann on hospitality
Jean was our very first guest in New York, and her visit before the doors even opened portended our successful week. She was on hand early to give a talk on what coffee entrepreneurs might expect from their first year in operation.
WATCH THE FULL EPISODE
SPONSORED
Visit with the Roastar Team IRL Booth 2443 at the upcoming World of Coffee San Diego, April 10-12. Learn more about the upcoming event at: https://usa.worldofcoffee.org/world-of-coffee-san-diego-2026
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Smart people learn from their mistakes, but really smart people learn from other people's mistakes.
- Keep your Google business listings up-to-date. It is especially important to post accurate hours and stick to them to create trust between you and your customer.
- Try to reward the reliable staff members who show up. Consistency goes a long way in hospitality.
- I am somewhat afraid of horses. I had an early experience on a family trail ride with a pony named Sparky that has left me scarred well into adulthood. Sparky was named for his boisterous personality. I'd note, Sparky was quite pleasant and calm, and it was only the anticipation of antics due to his reputation that formed the 10-year-old version of me's feelings toward horses. As an adult, I have a healthy respect for their physical prowess and intellect. So much so that I'll walk, thank you very much.
- Anybody can open a business, but to keep it going and make it successful or even survive, you need to be able to grind it out.
- Coffee is, or at least can be, a crutch, and that's okay.
- Baltimore is haunted. More specifically, the Lord Baltimore hotel near Camden Yards baseball stadium. Happy Opening Day! Click through to read about elevators traveling to floors with no guests but sightings of a young girl wearing a long, cream dress and black shoes playing with her red bouncing ball, or guests being touched by "unseen hands."
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From the intro: A note on conventions
*Conventions are kind of like summer camp for adults. At the beginning of the week, during your first coffee convention, you don't really know anyone. You're nervous, and the chaos is coming as soon as the doors open or the gates drop.
You'll meet 100s, if not 1000s of convention-goers for brief moments, but the other vendors in the booths around yours will become friendly faces during the more frenetic moments, as event patrons grab swag, ask questions, try to take your water bottle, and so on.
Before the doors open, you and a fellow vendor might share a chat over a coffee (Thanks, Mill City Roasters, for all the coffee in NYC!), commiserating about hotels or talking about a great meal you had out in the city the night before. After the doors close, you'll share laughs—often just in relief that you survived—or even a drink out.
By event end, you've made a dozen new friends, and like those kids at summer camp posing in front of the station wagon, arms intertwined, you might snag a selfie and swap e-mail addresses.
Some of these new collaborators, you may not see again, but others will be there with a wry smile as you begin to set up at the next convention, in another airy hall, in another city. You'll smile back, and know that when the lines are long and the idea of lunch long forgotten, your camp—I mean convention, friend will be there at the end of the day.
A CLASSIC EPISODE
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