Yellowstone’s Rip Wheeler has branded human flesh with a cattle iron, thrown a rattlesnake into a man’s face, and beat the daylights out of a gang of bikers, to name just a few of his escapades. Inspiring a fine bunch of North Texans to line up outside a Walmart before 6 a.m. on a Tuesday is far from the most brutal thing he’s ever done, but it’s pretty rough.
It’s okay, though, because there’s coffee! So much coffee. Cole Hauser, the actor who brings Rip to vivid life, is here in Fort Worth to promote his new coffee brand. With three partners from Midland, he bought San Angelo’s Long*Horn Coffee Company, a small local roaster, in 2022. They renamed it Free Rein Coffee Company last year and are now scaling it up—way up, launching it in 1,700 Walmart stores as of this week. The national rollout started at this store off the Airport Freeway, near downtown, at dawn this past Tuesday, with the promise of a celebratory sunrise coffee toast from Hauser and a meet and greet for the first fifty fans in line.
They started lining up at around 3 a.m., though the store didn’t open till 6. At 6, Walmart associates let them inside, where the herd had been instructed to go to the coffee aisle, choose its Free Rein products, go through self-checkout, then dutifully follow the trail to line up again outside and wait for their brief moment with Hauser. Free Rein staff are serving up coffee and merch from an enormous RV with an enormous image of Wheeler’s cowboy-hatted head on the side. A covered wagon drawn by two rare American cream draft horses pulls up and parks itself in the middle of the main traffic lane running along the store’s facade, an incongruous sight under the big lighted Walmart sign.
Free Rein leans hard into universal cowboy tropes, despite its famous founder’s Californian cowboy history—Hauser is the great-grandson of one of the founders of Warner Bros. and spent his early childhood on a Santa Barbara ranch. The brand imagery shows Hauser in Rip mode, sporting a dark wide-brim and a work shirt, in a close crop that accentuates his fearsome bulk. The company’s slogan, a Hauser idea, is “Get up and get after it,” as cowboys and ranchers do. The “FR” logo looks like a cattle brand, somewhat like that of Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan’s Bosque Ranch coffee, which factored into a lawsuit Sheridan filed last year that was quickly dropped. Maybe I’m high on the event’s cowboy vibes, but Free Rein’s packaging design even reminds me of upside-down Marlboro packs. Yet we are a long way from cowboy life here, on the Airport Freeway in a city of almost one million people. (I’m wondering: Does “free rein” even register as a horsey term anymore? More than one newspaper has repeatedly misspelled the brand’s name as “Free Reign.”)
Hauser arrives at 6:30 and goes inside for a long session of photos and chats with Walmart employees. I perch by a tower of canned pumpkin to watch. Then he heads outside for more of the same with the Yellowstone fans. He autographs coffee bags and cheerfully poses for selfies, cracking jokes and offering fist bumps to small children. He’s wearing a black shirt, as he so often does on the show, but his look is greatly softened when he’s out of character—in his Free Rein trucker hat, he looks like a taller version of most of the guys in line.
Later on, we talk about the coffee. He says he and his wife are coffee nuts, and the chance to buy this company was a dream come true. He’s drinking a tall cup of Free Rein’s American Dirt roast, which he helped create. He praises the San Angelo roasters as some of the best in the business, saying, “I told them I wanted as dark a roast as it could be, and they basically lit it on fire.” The name was his idea. “I love the thickness and the dirt of it, so that’s where it came from.” He adds, laughing, “It tastes like American dirt. If you’ve ever been knocked down in the dirt and got a little bit in your mouth, it tastes like that.”
I can’t recall having tasted dirt. I’m reflecting on how different my life experiences are from those of a guy who’s spent years playing the badass heavy in a graphically violent western saga—a fantasy combination of fixer and expert cowboy and loyal lover/protector of a strong woman. And American Dirt tastes good, all joking aside—like a French roast.
Unlike his most famous character, Hauser is laid-back, with a genial and amused air. I register the twinkly blue eyes and the apparently dyed hair—his natural coloring is not much like Rip’s, as you may recall from his turn as one of the bullies in Dazed and Confused. He and his partners—Paul Anderson, Aron Marquez, and Karl Pfluger, all Midland entrepreneurs with energy-industry ties—talk a lot about the ethos of their company. Anderson points out that coffee is something that can unite people, whatever their backgrounds. “We live in such a divided time, and the hope is this brings people together. . . . We can disagree and still be friends.” Some proceeds go to charities such as the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, and the “Buy a Bag, Serve a Cup” initiative provides coffee to first responders, nurses, and more. Tireless veterans’ advocate Mark Wahlberg has signed on as a brand ambassador. But all four partners take pains to emphasize inclusivity.
“My grandfather was in Iwo Jima, and he was kind of the man who raised me,” Hauser says. “Before he passed away, he said, ‘If you don’t serve, serve in a different way,’ so this is my way of serving and helping them. What we’ve gone on to do with Free Rein is also start serving some of the people in our communities, whether it’s teachers or firefighters, not only veterans and military, and we’re really proud of that.”
The dozens of fans who showed up before dawn weren’t talking much about any of that—or the coffee. “I won’t turn down coffee,” one offers when I ask a group of them about it. They just love Rip. Monica Lopez, from Decatur, about forty miles northwest of here, is with her daughter, Juliana, who’s wearing a T-shirt depicting Beth Dutton, Rip’s wife on the show. Rip is “the manly man, in a world where there’s not any more manly men,” Monica says. “My favorite moment is when he tells Beth, ‘Beth, please put the crazy away,’ ” says Juliana. Another woman in line also mentions what she calls “the whole Rip-and-Beth thing.” Melissa Lopez (no relation), of Fort Worth, says she likes Rip’s looks. Then she allows that “his acting is great. I just love the rescuing of the damsel in distress. And that bad boy thing.”
Yellowstone trades in powerful messages about manhood and character. The first two people in line were men. July Barron, of Arlington, was here at about 2:20 but stayed in his car, hanging back until other people started showing up. “He’s just so cool,” he says of Rip. The second fan to arrive, and the first to line up, was Brian Zeppernick, of nearby Saginaw, who showed up at 3 a.m. “My girlfriend got me into Yellowstone last year. I’m not really a western guy, but I just fell in love with it, and [Rip]’s my favorite character on the show. He’s a badass. He reminds me of my dad, who passed away. He’s just a real tough guy. He is my dad, basically. He protects his family at all costs.” He starts to tear up, then takes a step or two back from me, dabbing at his eyes. He apologizes, and a couple of us tell him there’s no need. No need at all.
