About Riku Uski

Cups deep since I was six

I’m Riku Uski. I founded and ran Warrior Coffee for eight years, roasted our own specialty coffee from 2017, sat on the board of the Specialty Coffee Association in Finland, judged the Finnish barista championships and shipped butter coffee to close to 20 countries. Cups Deep is what I do with all of that now.

Still tasting. Still taking notes

In brief

First coffee: Age six, on the farms near Turku, Finland. Mostly milk
Founded: Warrior Coffee, run from 2014 to 2022
Roasted: Our own specialty coffee roastery, from 2017 to 2022
Created: Organic instant butter coffee, launched 2016, sold in close to 20 countries
Served: Board of SCA Finland. Technical judge at the Finnish Barista Championship
Sourced: Coffee, specialty tea and yerba mate. Origin trips to Indonesia and Colombia
Now: Building Cups Deep, with AI agents

Milk with coffee

I had my first coffee when I was six. We lived in southern Finland, near Turku, and my childhood friend and I spent our days on the farms around us: cows, pigs, fields of crops, and farmers kind enough to let two small kids ride in the tractor cab at harvest. For a six-year-old, that was the entire internet.

The best part was the coffee break. The men walked over to an old house by the fields, to a cosy little break room with a coffee pot that never seemed to be empty. We followed them in and sat down at the table as if we had harvested the whole field ourselves.

It wasn’t coffee with milk. It was milk with coffee, in that order and roughly that ratio, with sugar stirred in and a cookie dunked until it gave up. Nobody asked whether it was a good idea. It was the best ten minutes of the day, and in a way I have been chasing that coffee break ever since.

After that, like most adults on the planet, I just kept drinking it. Filter coffee, every day, for years, without giving it a single thought.

The espresso years

In my early twenties I lived in the Czech Republic. Around 2005 and 2006, espresso drinks there were still new enough to feel like an event, and I switched sides: from the filter pot to the portafilter, from a mug to a cup with a saucer. For the first time I noticed that coffee could taste of different things, and that someone behind the bar was making choices.

When I moved back to Finland in 2007, one of the first things I bought was a DeLonghi bean-to-cup machine. The filter coffee maker went quiet after that. For the next couple of years I made cappuccinos at home, bought whatever espresso beans I could find and considered myself a person who knew about coffee. I did not.

A thousand products and one rabbit hole

Then life took one of its turns. I was head of marketing and new business at a company that spun off a string of online stores, each in a different niche. One of them sold specialty coffee, tea and brewing equipment. That was around 2012, and that is when I actually met coffee.

We carried about a thousand products: beans from farms I had never heard of, grinders, kettles, drippers, scales and presses. I was mesmerised. The same plant, grown on a different hillside and processed a different way, could taste of blueberries, dark chocolate or black tea. I taught myself every manual brewing method we sold, and then how to pull a proper espresso, which turned out not to be the one I had been pulling at home.

Riku Uski pouring water from a copper gooseneck kettle into a pour-over brewer behind a coffee bar while two women watch from the counter, one of them gesturing. — Pour-over behind the bar, explained with more enthusiasm than anyone asked for

Curiosity did the rest. I started talking to companies about coffee, and about good coffee in particular. As a consultant earlier in my life I had spent years in offices, and I had seen what the coffee break does to a working day. Bad coffee makes it an average break at best. Great coffee, and a little care around it, turns ten minutes into the best part of the day. I knew that feeling. I had first had it at six, in a farm break room.

Warrior Coffee

After a lot of conversations, and a lot of me getting overexcited in meeting rooms, I founded Warrior Coffee in 2014. Our first big build was a full specialty coffee shop inside GE Healthcare’s offices in Finland: espresso machines, modern brewing equipment and coffee beans we chose one by one. I worked the floor behind that bar, and I kept building new things on the side.

Our customers were offices and workplaces, the places that drink coffee in industrial quantities and rarely give it any love. I ran sales from the first day, which meant I got to sit down with a lot of fantastic companies, many of them well known, and change how their people drank coffee. Most of them didn’t want a lecture. They wanted a better break, and we gave them one.

Riku Uski, raising a fist, and a colleague at a café counter next to a black and red Warrior Coffee sign that describes butter coffee made with coconut oil and ghee. — The bar, the sign and the butter coffee pitch: “Whatever is your battle, Warrior Coffee has your back”

Butter coffee in a packet

In 2015 I started working on butter coffee. You may know it as bulletproof coffee, the name the American biohacker Dave Asprey coined: coffee blended with butter and oil, drunk for a long, steady lift instead of a spike and a crash.

I wanted it without the blender and without the mess. So we put coconut oil, ghee (clarified butter) and high-quality coffee into a single-serve sachet. Tear it open, add hot water, stir. One packet in a jacket pocket and you had a creamy, energising, frankly rejuvenating coffee in an airport, an office or a ski hut.

Two hands holding up a red and black box of Warrior Coffee Organic Instant Butter Coffee, six 15 g sachets, with a Design from Finland badge in the corner. — Six sachets, add hot water. That was the whole pitch

Two boxes of Warrior Coffee instant butter coffee resting on a snow-covered tree stump in low winter sun. — Built to travel. Tested in a Finnish winter

A black enamel Warrior Coffee mug beside two boxes of organic instant butter coffee, the original in red and the vanilla in pale blue, on a wooden table. — Original and vanilla

We launched it in 2016. In the years that followed it sold in close to 20 countries, including Japan, Slovenia and the United States. It went to fairs, fight nights and gyms, and at least once, on a customer’s own initiative, to an airfield a very long way from Finland.

Riku Uski and two colleagues at a dark Warrior Coffee fair stand stacked with bags of beans and a blender, above the slogan “Once you go good, there’s no turning bad”. — Fair season. The slogan was not modest

Riku Uski in a Warrior Coffee T-shirt and a gold bow tie bumping fists with a man in a grey suit in front of a EuroFC MMA backdrop. — Ringside with EuroFC

Riku Uski in a Warrior Coffee T-shirt, fists up, posing with two men in TFW Helsinki T-shirts, one of them holding a bag of coffee. — With the TFW Helsinki gym crew

A soldier in camouflage and sunglasses holding a bag of Warrior Coffee beans and a second bag of coffee in front of a parked camouflage jet trainer on an airfield. — A customer sent us this one. He took “whatever is your battle” literally

Our own roastery

Buying great coffee is one thing. Roasting it yourself is how you find out how much you still don’t know. We built our own specialty coffee roastery in 2017 and roasted there until 2022. In 2018 and 2019 we upgraded it into a new space with two roasters, ready to scale.

Three Warrior Coffee founders sitting on jute coffee sacks in front of a drum roaster, with enamel mugs and boxes of instant butter coffee on the table in front of them; Riku Uski is in the middle. — At the roastery, on the sacks, where the meetings were

The work took me to origin, to farms and mills in Indonesia and Colombia, where you see what a cup costs before it is a cup: the picking, the sorting, the drying, the weeks of somebody’s work in every bag. After that you never pour coffee down the sink casually again.

Riku Uski in a Warrior Coffee T-shirt and round sunglasses sorting green coffee beans on a raised drying bed under a corrugated roof, next to a smiling coffee worker in a blue beanie. — At origin, picking through green coffee on the drying beds

We didn’t stop at coffee. We sourced specialty tea, and yerba mate, the original caffeinated drink of South America. Once you are deep enough into coffee, you realise you are really into caffeine, and caffeine grows on more than one plant.

A gloved hand holding a 250 g bag of Warrior Coffee Peru medium roast, organic and Fairtrade, against a snowy field and a spruce forest. — Peru, medium roast, minus a few degrees

A 250 g bag of Warrior Coffee Colombia Dark roasted beans beside a glass pour-over dripper and carafe on a wooden table, lit by a candle. — Colombia Dark and a dripper

A person in a fleece jacket holding a 1 kg bag of Warrior Coffee Colombia Dark roasted beans, organic and Fairtrade, against a white wall. — The office size

Kespro, the Finnish foodservice wholesaler, featured us as one of its Pientuottaja small producers, under the headline “Kahvin puolesta!”: for coffee. That sums up those eight years better than I can.

An open Finnish magazine showing Riku Uski sitting on a copper coffee roaster and swinging a jute sack overhead, under the headline “Kahvin puolesta!” and Kespro’s yellow Pientuottaja small-producer badge. — Kespro’s small-producer feature: “Kahvin puolesta!”, for coffee

Riku Uski pulling a face at the camera and holding a black Warrior Coffee enamel mug, in front of stacked jute sacks of organic green coffee from Papua New Guinea. — Green coffee in, opinions out

Inside the craft

Along the way I served on the board of the Specialty Coffee Association in Finland, the Finnish arm of the international association that exists to move coffee knowledge forward, country by country. For one year I was also a technical judge at the Finnish Barista Championship, watching the best baristas in the country work at a level of detail most coffee drinkers never get to see. It made me a better taster and a far more annoying café guest.

We ran Warrior Coffee from 2014 to 2022. Eight years, two roasters, a mountain of sachets, a great team and more coffee breaks than I can count.

The whole journey, from the first bar to the last sachet, is still up on Warrior Coffee’s archived Instagram. See it on Instagram: @warriorcoffeeco

The Warrior Coffee crew

Why caffeine, still

I never got bored of great coffee. I travel with my grinder. Wherever I live, I find the local specialty roaster, buy their beans and run experiments on myself before breakfast.

And people still ask me things. Friends, old customers, people who remember me as the coffee guy. How much caffeine is actually in this? Why does my afternoon cup wreck my sleep? Is butter coffee real or a cult? Should I quit, switch or just stop at two? I love these questions. Every one of them warms my heart, and they are the reason this site exists.

Caffeine is the one drug most of us take every single day, usually before we have said a word to anyone. It shapes how focused we are, how we feel, when we fall asleep and how we wake up. On a good day it is the switch that gets you into flow. On a bad day it is why you are awake at two in the morning reorganising your life. I wanted one place that tells you plainly what is going on, with numbers you can check.

So I built Cups Deep: an instrument that shows how much caffeine is still in you at bedtime, a method page with every equation and source behind it, and a drinks table where every number carries its source. More tools and more stories are on the way.

Built with agents, out loud

Cups Deep is also my other passion at work. These days I build products and brands with AI and agents, connecting the dots and connecting people, and this site is built that way, openly. Agents research, draft and write code. I decide what is true, what is good and what ships. There is no AI persona pretending to be the expert here. The coffee years are mine.

Coffee, or caffeine if you like, and building things. Those are my two passions, and this is the first project that is both.

Say hi

Thank you for being here. I hope you find something useful, or at least something that makes you look at your third cup a little differently. If you have a question about coffee, caffeine or building with agents, you are always welcome to get in touch. Let’s see where this journey takes us.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Riku