Death Wish Coffee: Small Upstate New York Brewer With Wickedly Strong Blend Hits Big Time With Super Bowl Commercial


Death Wish Coffee has already been building a very dedicated fan base with its unique roast, called the strongest in the world, and after Sunday the Upstate New York company could have a few hundred million more followers.

The Round Lake brewing company won a contest sponsored by tax company Intuit to win a 30-second Super Bowl ad, which this year cost the whopping sum of $5 million. Death Wish Coffee beat out two others in a public vote to win the coveted commercial spot and delivered with an ad featuring a group of weary Vikings who turned out to be riding a wave of the abnormally strong brew.

For the company, it was likely the biggest moment they could have ever asked for, but brought on a number of other worries. Company officials told the New York Times that they were worried about keeping up with the influx of orders likely to be generated from the Super Bowl ad.

“It’s almost like fans are more excited than we are,” said Kane Grogan, the company’s customer service manager. “We’re in the middle of it, so we’re more worried than anything.”

Michael Brown, founder of Death Wish Coffee, said he came up with the idea after customers requested something stronger than what his coffee shop had to offer.

“Customers would come in asking for the strongest cup of coffee,” he said. “And I wanted to mess with them a little bit.”

Part of the company’s appeal is in its tongue-in-cheek nature, including a “warning” printed on the bag.

“This is not your regular morning coffee. This is not your store bought coffee. You will not find this coffee at your local diner or at your sissy Starbucks,” says the disclaimer. “Death Wish Coffee is the most highly caffeinated premium dark roast organic coffee in the world. This is Extreme Coffee, not for the weak. Consider yourself warned.”

Death Wish Coffee has been popular for some time now (it caught the Inquisitr’s attention back in 2013), and amassed a big following online. The company is approaching 200,000 followers on Facebook, and was a hit on Twitter after the Super Bowl commercial aired in the third quarter.

The ad was also a gigantic hit with potential customers, with the website for Death Wish Coffee inundated with traffic in the hours after the Super Bowl commercial aired.

The Super Bowl was estimated to bring in about 115 million viewers, but the ad itself has an audience that could be much larger. In the age of digital media, companies are trying to stretch their $5 million commercial price tag by splashing their Super Bowl ads across as many areas as possible. So this year both YouTube and CBS were featuring a collection of ads, giving Death Wish Coffee even more eyeballs.

The company could have a big task ahead of it. The Intuit competition was for any business with fewer than 50 employees, but Death Wish Coffee is actually much smaller than that. At the time the Super Bowl commercial aired, it had just six employees including one solitary person filling all the bags with coffee beans. As Brown implied, keeping up with the demand generated after Sunday will be a challenge.

Those interested in buying Death Wish Coffee can check out the company’s website and order their coffee online — if they can keep up supply up to meet all the recent demand.

[Image via YouTube]

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