Drinks 2026 | Feature

A Shot of Local Flavor

We asked, they answered: “How do you take your coffee?”

Humans have invented a surprising number of ways to extract brown bean water from a coffee berry. To celebrate those innovations (imagine life without them!) and our local coffee lovers, we talked to four well-known locals to find out how they like their cups of joe and how they fell in love with it in the first place.

Abbi Whitaker
Whitaker, the extraordinary founder/owner of Reno public relations company The Abbi Agency, swirls around her home while setting up her favorite pour-over Stanley Cup coffee-brewing kit. She started drinking coffee in her senior year of college at the University of Nevada, Reno. Back then, she worked three jobs and took a full course load. Coffee was the cure.

These days, her favorite way to enjoy a cup of coffee is on camping trips while, she says, “sitting outside my van when the air is a little bit chilly, drinking from this old-school Stanley Cup pour-over. It’s not for the gentle hearted. A beautiful Nevada sunrise and a little bit of gratitude is the best way to start the day.”

Teysha Harbin
“I have a long relationship with coffee,” says Sparks-based fine-art painter Harbin. “I am a veteran. I started off drinking coffee at 17. I couldn’t really drink (alcohol), and I didn’t smoke, so I ended up drinking coffee a lot.”

Every morning, Harbin’s wife makes a perfect cup of coffee and pours it into a to-go thermos for her. Harbin still isn’t sure of the method because it doesn’t matter how the coffee was made; it matters who makes it.

“I think the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had in my life was in the [San Francisco] Bay at Jack London Square in Oakland,” she says. “There was this little coffee shop with this Ethiopian guy.”

Harbin loves Ethiopian coffee.

“It took him like 25 minutes to make this cup of coffee,” she says. “And then we sat there and tasted it and, oh my God, this was the best coffee I’ve ever had.”

Sometimes Harbin believes they may have been in a secret coffee nebula.

“Every time we go back there, I can’t find him!” she says. “We talk about that place all the time.”

Krysta Bea Jackson
This owner and candy confectioner of Sugar Love Candies in Reno doesn’t drink coffee all the time, but when she does, she makes a fancy brew of single-serve Chemex pour-over coffee and adds one of her sumptuous handmade marshmallows.

“I don’t drink a lot of dairy, especially not in coffee,” Jackson says. “But adding a marshmallow adds creaminess and sweetness to the coffee. I add one of my big marshmallows, and it melts slowly while I stir the marshmallow in with a spoon and sip slowly.”

She fondly remembers drinking her first espresso in France while studying abroad. She had been staying in the city of Pau overlooking the Pyrenees. It seemed the perfect time to try something new.

“I was trying to be cool!” she says. “It was so bitter, I was not prepared for it. Here I was drinking chai and other sweet drinks, so to get a plain espresso was quite a shock.”

Jim DeVolld
DeVolld is one of the founders of First Independent Bank, now Western Alliance Bank, in Reno and Sparks. It’s a $90 billion company with 4,000 employees, based in a South Reno building near Rancharrah that features Kentucky-style classical architecture.

“I can’t wait to get to work to make my little coffee drink,” he says.

He started out drinking sugary Dutch Bros. coffee but graduated to a Nespresso pod machine that sits on a granite counter in his corner office. He adds a little scoop of Caffe D’Vita Mocha Cappuccino mix — only 5 grams of sugar — for the perfect cup.

“If Costco ever discontinues it, I’ll be in trouble,” he says. “I don’t do bad coffee. I gotta have that good stuff.”