Will Burrows, president of Huey’s Coffee, and his brother, Sam, started working in 2017 with Scott Glover, who is the founder of U.S. Roast, a specialty coffee roasting company headquartered in Mt. Pleasant, Texas, that sells coffee to coffee shops and cafes nationwide.
Glover is also the founder of Mid America Flight Museum, which Burrows said is a collection of operational warbirds, that has a restoration shop in Urbana — the connection between the two companies and states.
When the brothers first started with Glover, the museum used to host a glider pilot reunion each fall for a group that served together in World War II. A few years later, the focus changed to Vietnam veterans and the museum acquired a Bell UH-1 Huey helicopter that served 3,000 combat hours and was shot down three times. Burrows said this became the inspiration for their branding and Huey’s shops.
In 2021, they decided they wanted to start their own coffee shop, mostly to develop a consulting program so the coffee roasting company could offer a start-to-finish program for people that wanted to start their own coffee shops.
“After operating the first Huey’s Coffee for a few months, we decided it was so much fun and something we wanted to put some time and effort into and we decided to grow,” Burrow said.
The brand has four locations in Texas with two more under construction, Burrows said. Urbana is the first location outside of Texas.
“My thought process on this is if we can effectively manage and operate a coffee shop in Urbana, we can likely do so anywhere in the country,” Burrows said.
The shop displays a similar static model Huey as the museum’s Bell UH-1 Huey on a pole out front. Burrows said at one point it was a flying helicopter that was in service, but are waiting on the background information for it.
“(We’re) hoping for that to be right there in front of the coffee shop for a long time,” he said. “It’s a memorial is what it is. A nice memorial to the veterans from Champaign County who served in Vietnam there in Urbana.”
Soon, Burrows added there will be a few steel plates put on display underneath the Huey that tell a quick story of the Vietnam war and also lists all the names of the people from Champaign County that were killed in action during the Vietnam war.
The coffee shop, which will employ 25 to 30 people from the Urbana area, will be open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday.
For more information, visit Huey’s Coffee Urbana on Facebook or www.hueyscoffee.com.
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