From Russia with Love

Texas Coffee Traders

Words by Jessi Devenyns  Photos by Eric Morales

For 26 years, Rc and Beth Beall have been serving up coffee to passersby on the corner of East 4th and Navasota, pioneering the concept of fresh roasted beans and steaming cups of sustainable coffee. However, Rc remembers a time when caffeine addicted patrons were harder to come by, as he takes us back to the place where his coffee adventures began: on the corner of Moscow’s Red Square.

One year prior to the Texas Coffee Traders’ existence, Rc Beall opened a coffee roaster called Montana Coffee Traders Vostok – meaning East – on the edge of Moscow’s Red Square. On the other side of the square, he opened his office so that he had access to a telephone from which to conduct business, both on the official state-sanctioned market and the black one.

Russia, after the fall of communism, was a blank slate for businesses of all stripes to make their mark. “We’re talking 1930s gangsters almost. We’re talking real interesting…” Rc recalls. In a meandering stream of memories, he recounts searching for light bulbs to light the entry into the roastery, turning a profit even as the ruble plummeted in value, and bribing his way into hotels with pounds of coffee. 

Although his offices had white-washed walls and were cleaned until they gleamed, Rc remembers how starkly this background contrasted with the rest of the Taganski Market purveyors. In the surrounding area, shoes were sold in mis-matched pairs, and burned out light bulbs were hawked by merchants. One product that was not sold, however, was quality coffee.

“[The coffee] was just horrendous. Since the early 1900s, [Russia] had become a tea drinking culture, not coffee,” he recalls. Nevertheless, he laughs explaining that Russians undeniably had a nose for quality coffee. Armed with his mantra that “there is always room for quality,” and the help of an acquaintance named Sasha Malchic, Rc set out to revive the Russian coffee industry. In the process, he became the first roaster in Moscow in generations. Despite the novelty of this title, Coffee Traders Vostok did not immediately generate business. In fact, it took two months before Rc sold his first pound of coffee to an English-language newspaper called The Moscow Times.

With a single sale in his bank account, Rc quickly discovered that business in Russia was conducted according to a different set of expectations than in the United States. Rc regularly visited embassies and hotels to make sales calls where he was often greeted by a mafia member looming by the entrance. To make it passed the guard, he admits resorting to bribery. Money never exchanged hands though. Instead, it only took a whiff of fresh roasted beans to transform a dubious reception into a warm welcome. “And then his eyes got big. And we’d give him a half a pound of coffee, and into the place we’d go,” chuckles Rc. “The smell of coffee opened more doors than anything you can imagine.”

After discovering that coffee had a knack for opening doors, Montana Coffee Traders Vostok quickly found a place in dozens of hotel coffee urns and breakroom percolators around Moscow. In the process, Rc and his employees also found their way into peoples’ confidences. “Everybody was friendly. Everybody had a tragic story. Everybody had worked for the KGB,” he shares. Despite the struggles of the previous decades, Muscovites were entrepreneurial by nature. That mindset of hard work and creativity permeated the business, and, in short order, Montana Coffee Traders Vostok evolved into a sustainable business that has now weathered almost three decades and reintroduced quality roasted coffee to Russia. 

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