Carry a little summer sun with you wherever you go.
Summer Sun Coffee is a Chattanooga coffee brand built on one big idea: seriously delicious coffee should feel like a pause. A deep breath. A reminder that right now is worth being present for.
How it started
In 2024, Laura and her husband took a trip to Hanalei Bay, Kauai. The kind of trip that gets under your skin — coffee and açaí shacks, unhurried mornings, and the particular quality of light that makes you feel like time has slowed down just for you.
On a whim, they grabbed a bag of beans off a shelf at a local grocery store. She didn't try them until she was back home in Chattanooga. They were unlike anything she'd had before.
She got a subscription so she'd always have them. And then she started trying to figure out how to hold onto everything else that trip had made her feel.
What she kept coming back to was a feeling — the wide-open freedom of a childhood summer. Riding bikes to the gas station for candy. Sprinklers in the backyard. The sun dropping low and knowing, without thinking about it, that tomorrow you'd begin again right where you left off.
She'd been an entrepreneur most of her career. So when a really hard job became too much to carry, she started opening a Google doc on the worst days and planning a fake coffee business just to decompress. When it came time to leave that job — abruptly, without a plan — the fake business was sitting right there waiting.
She decided to see what happened.
About the coffee
Laura grew up watching her dad drink coffee from morning until night — talking about proper bean storage, how roasts change over time, what he was tweaking to get a better cup. She didn't start drinking it herself until her first job, when she was mixing it with powdered Nesquick just to get through early mornings.
She's come a long way. Her drink of choice now is a cortado and a cold brew latte — and the beans on the Summer Sun cart are the same ones she found in that Kauai grocery store and couldn't stop thinking about. Roasted on the island and sourced seasonally from farms in Central and South America that put sustainability and innovative practices at the forefront. Seriously good, and the kind of thing worth sharing.
Hi, I'm Laura.
I started Summer Sun Coffee out of a desperation to create and share more peaceful pauses in this moving-at-light-speed world. My goal is simple: that everyone who crosses paths with Summer Sun carries a little of it with them — shares slow moments and great coffee with the people they love, and generally keeps it sunny.
I live in Chattanooga with my husband and our dog, Mocha. Mocha is a southern Cur — technically a hunting dog, practically terrible at it. She was surrendered to the shelter twice before we found her. When she arrived she was named Sunshine, because she has a gift for finding every single ray of sun in any room. We renamed her Mocha for our love of coffee — about ten years before Summer Sun Coffee was even a thought. Some things are just meant to find you.
Don't let the beauty of right now escape you for one more day.
Summer Sun Coffee exists to make the ordinary feel a little more alive. The cart at Studio Ours on a Friday afternoon. A cold brew waiting in your fridge. A coffee bar at your wedding that your guests won't stop talking about. Every cup is an invitation to slow down, be here, and carry a little sunshine with you wherever the day takes you.
Contact us
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