It’s safe to say that BRCC’s brews are as popular on bass
boats as they are in suburban kitchens, an observation that
Hafer welcomes with enthusiasm.
“Fishing is one of my sub-cultures,” Hafer jokes.
“Fishermen? That’s my community. I understand that group.
I built my first fly rod when I was 12 years old, back before it
was cool to be building fly rods. I’m pretty good at making
coffee, but I was a kid who loved fishing a long time before I
started serving my country or roasting coffee.”
IT STARTED IN THE HILLS OF IDAHO
History buffs will identify the hamlet of Weippe, Idaho,
(population 441) as the prairie in the Nez Perce-Clearwater
National Forests where Meriwether Lewis, William Clark
and the members of the Corps of Discovery Expedition met
the Nez Perce.
It’s big timber, hunting and fishing country, laced in all
four directions with trout streams and steelhead rivers, and
within an hour’s drive of Dworshak Reservoir, a smallmouth
haven that is fed by the North Fork Clearwater River.
It’s a place where you expect to find loggers and outdoorsmen,
which is exactly what Whitey Vanderpool was.
Hafer’s grandfather, Vanderpool was the second of three
generations of loggers in the family tree – a lifetime resident
of western Idaho who was handy with a fly rod, and
generous of his time with his fishing-crazy grandson.
“My granddad was such a prominent figure in my life,
and the summers I spent with him are what connected me
the deepest to fishing and the outdoors,” Hafer admits.
“We’d spend the summer catching beautiful rainbows and
cutthroat, watching moose and bear, and just having an
incredible adventure between a grandson and a grandfather.
He was retired, so we could go out for a couple of weeks on
end. It was campfires every night, driving four-wheelers up
to these amazing mountain lakes around the North Fork of
the Clearwater. It was a magical place to me. I still fish up
there every year.”
CATCHING WHAT YOU’RE CASTING FOR
After poring through several sessions on YouTube, Hafer
walked out of the tackle shop in San Antonio with a collection
of plastic worms and creature baits, mice, frogs, and assorted
hardware to throw at the fish in that small Texas creek.
“I’ve been really surprised about the complexity of bass
fishing,” Hafer admits. “When I went into Bass Pro three to
five years ago, I was going to buy camo, binoculars and
scopes, or maybe some fly gear. Now, I’m going in as a bass
fisherman, and I’m blown away by all the different baits.
There’s so much room for creativity in figuring out what’s
going to make a fish bite. I’m into it. I can go right down that
rabbit hole.”
His strategy for connecting with the tight-lipped fish in
that Texas stream was simple and logical: “I have to throw
enough diversity at them – things that are distinctly different
– to see what they might hit. Is it the brown mouse? The
gray mouse? Is it a different color of worm? Is it action? No
action? What do they want?”
And as has been the case almost routinely with BRCC –
from those first bags of Freedom Roast to the tons of beans
shipped out of the company’s roasters in Utah and Tennessee
– Hafer found the right combination. After a morning of fighting
lures out of trees and slogging through muddy, chestdeep
water, he slung a low cast under some overhanging
branches, into the back of an eddy, and hopped his mouse
across the foamy sludge in the middle of the swirl of current.
“BOOSH! That big boy came out to eat my mouse right in
that sludgy water underneath that tree, and I swear to God, I
couldn’t have been happier,” Hafer says. “It was just perfect.
But even in that instant, my mind is screaming to me, When
do I set the hook? Do I set it hard? Do I set it light? That’s a
whole other learning point, and so interesting to me. But
when that thing hits and you get it in, you’re instantly teleported
back to a fish you caught when you were 6 years old.”
COMPLEXITY, CREATIVITY IN FISHING
[AND MARKETING]
As he comes to the end of the story about his Texas bass,
Hafer is reminded of the cornerstones he’s touched on
repeatedly throughout the 45-minute conversation: strategy,
hard work, coffee, marketing and fishing.
“There’s such a strong correlation between fishing and
marketing, it’s crazy,” Hafer says. “When you’re building out
your marketing plan for the year, you’re creating strategy. I
have a military background. I’m experienced leading men in
really complex environments that demand you to assess and
adjust to conditions. You have to figure it out. It’s the same
with fishing: I love to try to figure out what they’re eating,
what the currents are like. I’ll never forget when I figured
out a hopper dropper. It blew my mind.
“As we start to unravel what we’re doing [at BRCC], people
who know me say, ‘Oh, Evan is just basically fishing.’ I’m
roasting badass coffee, organizing strategy, figuring out
what people will be interested in. When we’re figuring out
content, I don’t want to build boring marketing content. I
don’t want to fish the same stream that everybody else has
fished 1,000 times, man. I want to go somewhere nobody
else has fished and catch fish in the most pristine areas.
BRCC is mission, management, logistics. I get to feed my
imagination, and then watch it play out every day.”
SAVE 20% — Use code “MLF20” at checkout to save
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JUNE-JULY 2020 | MAJORLEAGUEFISHING.COM | FLWFISHING.COM 21