Jason, the CEO and co-founder of Venturi Bold Brew, will tell you that his brand predates him by about a decade. The real story starts with Brian Holland and the team at Phoenix Roasters - career pastors who built a wholesale roastery in Buford, Georgia, one cup and one bean at a time. Jason came in later to build a brand around what they'd created. The result is worth 30 minutes of your time.
From a Church to a Warehouse in Buford, Georgia
Around 2008, as the recession was hitting hard, Brian Holland started a church and needed a way to support his community without asking for donations. His solution: sell coffee. Over the years, cup by cup and bean by bean, he built what became Phoenix Roasters - a wholesale roastery operation out of Buford, Georgia with roughly 60 years of combined experience in beverage production among the team. They're not engineers or scientists, Jason says. They're fiddlers. And when the cold brew and nitro craze came along, they started tinkering with something bigger.
That tinkering led to a twice-patented nitrogen infusion technology that optimizes the tap experience - and eventually to Venturi Bold Brew. Jason joined as CEO and co-founder, bringing his background in brand building to what his partners had spent a decade perfecting.
Why "Venturi"
The name is a nod to Giovanni Venturi, the 17th-century Italian physicist who discovered that when air and water converge onto a narrowing pathway or obstacle, they naturally accelerate. Think of water approaching rapids, or the tornado symbol on their cans - that's the Venturi effect. Natural acceleration. It's also, not coincidentally, the exact physics principle behind their patented nitrogenation system. The brand name, the logo, the science, and the experience all converge into one intentional thing. Jason didn't come in knowing how to roast beans, but he knew how to build a brand that meant something beyond the can.
Cold Brew Fusions: A Category of Their Own
Venturi's six public flavors aren't just cold brew. They're what Jason calls cold brew fusions - combining premium coffee with tea, fruit, and botanicals in ways that create something genuinely new. Strawberry Hibiscus is 80% fresh tea and strawberry juice, 20% premium coffee. Maple Vanilla Chai is 80% house-made steeped chai, fresh vanilla, and maple syrup, blended with premium coffee. The result isn't a square peg in a round hole - it's a beverage that sits in its own category entirely.
The nitro cold brew market is growing at 30-35% year over year, but historically it's been pulling from existing coffee drinkers: black coffee with a dairy alternative and a frothy head. Venturi's fusions expand the tent. Non-coffee drinkers who taste Strawberry Hibiscus and ask "there's coffee in this?" are finding their entry point into the category - natural energy without the synthetic aftertaste, antioxidants from the fruit and botanicals, and the kind of clean lift that makes the can worth picking up.
A Flavor for Every Moment
Jason's daily driver is the Stout Truffle - 276 milligrams of caffeine from a premium Nicaraguan medium-roast with dark chocolate notes, the rough equivalent of three cups of coffee. Cold brew's concentrated nature means higher caffeine organically, and nitrogen doesn't go flat the way carbonation does, so he cracks a can in the morning and revisits it throughout the day without any drop in quality. When he's feeling like dessert without the commitment, he reaches for Maple Vanilla Chai - what he describes as "Santa Claus in a headlock," with the equivalent of two cups of coffee and a flavor that arrives like fall in a can. And when the evening calls for something lighter, Blueberry Basil steps in at around 36 milligrams of caffeine. It also, Jason notes with a grin, pairs well with a blanco tequila and a squeeze of lime.
Strawberry Hibiscus has developed its own following among athletes as a natural pre-workout - caffeinated, hydrating, and without the face-tingling that comes with synthetic energy products. The brand is only six months into its public launch and already watching the consumer data tell the story of where each flavor wants to live.
Direct Trade That Actually Means Something
Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world after oil - and one of the only significant ones not grown in the United States. Phoenix Roasters has spent nearly two decades building direct relationships with farmers in Latin America, bypassing co-ops and brokerages to pay farmers the full price directly. Where a co-op might get a farmer 11 cents a pound, Venturi's partners pay $3 a pound - because they cut out the middleman entirely. Beyond pricing, the Phoenix Community Foundation has used proceeds to build schools and churches on non-harvestable land in farming communities.
The next step is proprietary technology that puts farmers on the front lines - sending photos of plant health to roasters in real time, helping predict crop quality by geography, and giving farmers a genuine voice in the supply chain. The goal, as Jason puts it, is to create an ecosystem where everyone who touches the bean benefits at the same level. Everything from farm to finished good happens under their roof in Buford, Georgia - the only exception being the beans themselves, which don't grow in the US.
Coffee Is Community
At its core, Venturi believes coffee is community. It's the reason Jason's dad still meets friends at the diner three times a week. It's the reason the brand wants to go "a mile deep" in every market they enter - not just getting into a couple of retailers, but into hospitals, schools, and churches. The Cycle of Relief initiative, through the Phoenix Community Foundation, channels brand proceeds back into the farming communities and other vetted charities where the supply chain begins. The mission, as Jason says, isn't an obligatory statement on a can. Anyone who knows his background knows he's done this before.