The man they call Bald Guy steps to the machine he lovingly describes as “the Cadillac” and pours in a bag of Guatemalan coffee beans — all of them green as lima beans, precious as little pearls.
These beauties roll down the hopper into the belly of his coffee roaster, where they bounce around, gradually turning brown, filling the room with a rich, cozy aroma.
“This is where the magic happens,” Bald Guy says, priming his nostrils. He tugs a tiny handle on the side of the Cadillac, which is now approaching 400 degrees, and pulls out a sample of roasted beans. He’s looking for its “historical thumbprint of smell and flavor,” ascertained through the smoke, like a wine aficionado swirling a glass of pinot.

When Cox converted the old Hollar & Greene Produce Company into a cozy coffee shop and roastery, he used a pair of tractor trailer beds to create his own version of a welcoming front porch. photograph by David Uttley
And with this batch, he’s found it. Just like he does every morning at Bald Guy Brew. In a few minutes, the discerning coffee-drinkers of Boone will show up to buy his beans by the bag.
“Welcome to my coffee-verse,” he says, taking a sip as the twang of a John Lee Hooker blues song plays over the speakers in his roastery. “My chairs are old-school chairs. Two dollars apiece. Sit down and meet somebody. There’s actually an eclectic mix of feng shui. I don’t know how that happened.”
Bald Guy Brew in East Boone is the creation of Don Cox, the 60-year-old proprietor with a life story as nuanced and surprising as his mountain espresso. On the side of Old U.S. Highway 421, near a hill frequently visited by deer, he constructed a rustic roastery in what used to house the Hollar & Greene Produce Company. There’s a front patio built from the beds of two tractor trailers, sipping tables fashioned from whiskey barrels and natural-edge slab wood, and his “hillbilly chandelier” handmade from scrap metal.

At Bald Guy Brew, founder Don Cox roasts organic coffee beans from Guatemala and serves lattes made with local milk. photograph by David Uttley
His coffee beans arrive in 150-pound sacks straight from the hands that grew them: all green, all shade-grown, and all fair-trade, organic, or Rainforest Alliance-certified — an Earth-friendly jolt of caffeine down to the biodegradable cups.
It seems almost criminal to taint it with cream, as longtime customer Isaac Church can confirm.
“I love black coffee,” Church says, sipping one at his laptop. “It’s just unapologetically simple. It’s a way of savoring life.” Cox knows his customers’ preferences so well that he can steer them toward blends he knows they’ll like: “I’ll order one and Don will tell me, ‘No, you don’t want that one today. …’”

To understand Cox’s devotion to this craft, you have to follow his story back to Heidelberg, Germany, where life included his father, mother — “a no-nonsense woman” — and a schoolmaster grandfather. Among his early memories, the one that stands out is visiting his great-aunt in Yugoslavia. In a house with a dirt floor and a hole in the roof to let the smoke out, she sat over a fire, stirring coffee beans as they roasted in a copper pot. He still has the spoon she used.
Along the way to Bald Guy Brew, Cox studied at Appalachian State University just down the road. He also worked for a time as a chimney sweep, cleaning out the fireplace at the home of noted mountain storyteller Ray Hicks. He points this out as friends relax in his roastery, and the story somehow adds flavor to his already potent java.
Cox may blend with the locals, but his path to coffee wizardry winds around the globe — to Rwanda, Mexico, and back.

By advocating for farmers and educating customers, Cox hopes to “stand in the gap” between those who grow coffee and those who consume it. “What’s in your cup matters,” he says. photograph by David Uttley
By the early 1990s, he had migrated to Pittsburgh to study for the Anglican ministry, but he kept stumbling into a coffee-flavored world. He first encountered green coffee beans in Pittsburgh’s historic Strip District. Encouraged, he bought a bag and fired up his skillet.
“Smoked up the house,” he says, wincing at the memory. “No one tells you.”
In preparation to work with the ministry in Mexico, Cox studied Spanish at a language school near Mexico City. On his way to class each day, he stopped at a coffee shop, where he was introduced to Americano. On several occasions, he had the opportunity to go through coffee country, La Huasteca Veracruzana, while traveling up the mountain for his work in San Luis Potosí.
“La taza habla. The cup speaks. If the last sip impresses the person who’s drinking it, you’ll have a repeat customer.”
“They had a saying down there,” he recalls. “La taza habla. The cup speaks. If the last sip impresses the person who’s drinking it, you’ll have a repeat customer.”
A few years after that, Cox found himself in Rwanda with genocide survivors who worked in the coffee lands. But his calling as a bean roaster emerged a bit later, back with the ministry in Pittsburgh, where he modified his roasting technique by using a popcorn popper.
“Took to it kind of like a duck to water,” he brags.

For locals like Steve Hageman (right), a paleontologist and professor at App State, visits to Bald Guy Brew for a cup of coffee and a chat with Cox are an essential part of life in Boone. photograph by David Uttley
While Cox was living in one of Pittsburgh’s rougher neighborhoods, his neighbor, the principal at a local junior high school, asked if he would roast coffee for the PTA to sell as a fundraiser: Bikes for Beans. Proceeds from the sale went toward buying bicycles for students as an incentive to keep a B-average throughout the school year. The neighborhood kids gave him the nickname Bald Guy, which stuck as firmly as his new hobby.
An ordained Anglican minister, Cox would likely still be working in the church, but he slipped one day in 2004 and hit his head on a concrete floor, suffering a traumatic brain injury. Lengthy periods of reading and study were no longer possible, and it turned out that the 10 to 18 minutes it takes to roast coffee was about as long as he could concentrate at the time.
“Whatever my hand falls to, I do to the glory of God,” he says. “But I don’t run Christianity up the flagpole to sell coffee, because specialty coffee, properly roasted, sells itself. La taza habla.”

The mountains ultimately called Cox back roughly 18 years ago, this time with a wife and two sons. At his wife’s suggestion, he launched his new life as an Appalachian coffee virtuoso from the back of a souped-up Mercedes van, showing up at whatever farmers markets and old-time music festivals he could find. At one such event, Cox reunited with a client from his chimney sweep days, Ray Hicks, who regularly spun his yarns on festival stages.
“It’s hard to roast coffee in a van when it’s raining,” Cox says. He winces again, recalling how the vehicle filled with smoke and made it hard to breathe.
His fans, however, remember those early days with fondness and rattle them off inside his roastery while sipping a cup. Like the time Cox was invited to a meeting of zoologists and paleontologists at Appalachian State. He arrived with “Lucille,” his smaller roaster, in tow and poured his concoction for a roomful of academics from around the world, somehow pairing black coffee with pulled pork and a string band.
“Every customer of Bald Guy Brew becomes one of Don’s friends. You can’t separate the two.”
“The Italians were impressed with Don’s espresso,” says Steve Hageman, App State paleontologist and a Bald Guy regular. “Every customer of Bald Guy Brew becomes one of Don’s friends. You can’t separate the two.”
After nearly two decades, Cox is a near-constant presence around Boone, found not only in the roastery but in a second location in Blowing Rock.
Fans buy his bags of organic espresso, Guatemalan, Costa Rican, or Swiss Water decaf online and pick them up at the roastery, or they sit and enjoy a cappuccino while a Charley Pride song plays over the speakers.
Bald Guy coffee even turns up when you’re not looking for it — on the menu at Blowing Rock’s Bistro Roca, on the cocktail list at Storie Street Grille, and in the beer at several local breweries.
When Hurricane Helene struck in late September, Cox stayed busy roasting coffee for relief stations around Watauga County. Even with his parking lot mostly washed away, he kept brewing, worried about neighbors in isolated hollers, nervous about the coming snow, hopeful that attention will not fade from his beloved mountains.

Cox sources beans direct from growers and processes them into Bald Guy Brew’s signature roasts. photograph by David Uttley
He jokes that if specialty coffee doesn’t pan out, he can always go fishing. “The beauty of longevity,” he says, “is you don’t get spooked.”
But he needn’t worry anyway. People crowd in for coffee roasted and brewed by an old hand they know personally, somebody who walks on the same Boone dirt they do, and who considers every cup a sort of manifesto.
“So many people have ideas for what they want to do, but they don’t know how to dress it up and put shoes on it,” Cox says. “I want you to have an exciting interaction with a cup of coffee. How cool is that? I’m helping people do good.”
Bald Guy Brew
714 Old U.S. 421 South
Boone, NC 28607
1116 Main Street, Unit 2
Blowing Rock, NC 28607
(828) 414-1961
baldguybrew.com