Back in 2008, Pierce and Michael LaMacchia, two brothers who grew up in Knoxville, were on a family road trip through California, Oregon and Washington, when they started visiting small drive-thru coffee huts all along the West Coast. “When we saw these small, efficient huts staffed by one or two baristas, we loved the concept, and dreamed of bringing it back to Knoxville,” Pierce said. “Maybe it was truly a great idea, or maybe it was all of the lattes we were drinking, but our whole family got very excited about it,” added Michael.

Like many dreams of opening a business, when the family returned home, the conversations didn’t materialize into plans, and life kept happening. In the years that followed, Pierce graduated college at the University of Tennessee, and continued his work in hospitality, which began at his first job at Tennessee Smokies Ballpark concessions at the age of 13, and continued through many restaurants, both local and corporate. Michael continued his education at the University of Tennessee and had several side hustles. However, the dream of opening a coffee hut was not destined to be forgotten.

In early 2013, nearly five years after the West Coast road trip, Pierce and Michael were both ready for a change, and revived the dream of opening their own coffee hut in Knoxville. “We rented a Uhaul truck and trailer, drove up to Kentucky and bought a small used building that was previously used to sell snow cones,” Pierce described the scene. “It took the whole town and a commercial tow truck to get the building on our trailer, but after strapping it down securely, we headed back to Knoxville, excited, nervous, and without any clue what we were doing.”

As they retrofitted the building to support preparing coffee, they also began pitching the idea to local businesses to place the coffee hut in their parking lot, with no success. “We had pitched about 7 businesses, and I think it was becoming clear that, to them, we were a couple of ‘young kids’ who wanted to serve scalding hot beverages on someone’s property – the liability was simply too high, and the concept was too foreign,” Michael explained.

On the way home from the 7th pitch, Pierce’s eye caught a small brick building on the corner of Glenwood and Broadway, in the heart of Knoxville’s Historic 4th and Gill neighborhood, with a For Rent sign in the cracked window. “From the moment I saw it, I felt an emotional draw, and I knew that if there was one building that would make me forego the original concept in favor of a traditional coffee shop, that building was it,” Pierce said. Within a week, a lease had been signed, the hut concept rejected, and the brothers now had a much bigger project on their plate – a real sitdown coffee shop. Looking back, it was that decision that truly set the K Brew movement in motion.

On October 19, 2013, a few months after signing the lease, Pierce and Michael opened the first K Brew, in the 450 square feet of 1328 North Broadway. With a tiny coffee bar and 10 seats (if you counted the two makeshift tables outside), K Brew was crowded and “too busy” from day one.