Sorbenots is Stone Bros. spelled backward. The way the Stones make coffee is the coffee business done backward. Both are deliberate.
Ask Jason Stone what kind of partner his brother has been for 31 years, and he will point you to the small hours. Phil is the one awake at 2 a.m., checking on coffee that was fine when he went to bed. He has a spreadsheet for every variable. “Phil spends a lot of time pushing numbers,” Jason says. It took a man who cannot leave a question alone, a family that kept answering and three decades of Baker City mornings to arrive at the smallest thing they have ever sold: a packet of coffee light enough to lose in a shirt pocket.
The Stones have been fueling those mornings since Nov. 1, 1995, when Phil and his wife, Andrea, opened an espresso trailer in the parking lot at Lube Depot on 10th Street, at a spot where a car wash now stands. The idea was theirs, and so was the money. Jason, then 19, soon signed on as the third partner. On March 20, 1996, the business moved into permanent walls at 1270 Campbell St., and the trailer, which had been called Cappuccino Cowboy, closed shortly after. When Phil and Andrea ran a trademark search, they learned somebody else already owned the business name. They needed one nobody else could claim, in the most literal sense.