Cold Brewed: Jett Cropper and the Chicory Dose

"You get where you wonder how life got so whipless. Been there before, didn't want to go back.

"Did anyway.

"It happens. You end up staring at your boots asking how they got so wet. How the water on them got so hard. Guess these days, there ain't enough grinders like me left on the streets. Everything's darker than it used to be - more burnt, less clean.

"Some new Master Roaster comes into town and tampers with the trade and everything ends up in the knock box and the water gets hard again and runs the drains over.

"And when there ain't enough grinders like me who're willing to crawl down in there, down into the sewers to filter it all back out, then all that hard water creeps up higher and higher till it spoils us all..."

Jett Cropper's best friend dies from a bad coffee roast that had been laced with chicory. To find the new burnt Master Roaster behind this mess, Jett dives into the city's underworld to bring back justice no matter the cost...

Told through both words and pictures, Cold Brewed takes place in a classic prohibition-era world where coffee is currency. The story uses silent film and film noir techniques, but favors classy black and white photographs over pencil sketches--a grittier grandson of the narrative form developed in Selznick's books "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" and "Wonderstruck."

Shot and produced in and around Joplin, Missouri, Cold Brewed testifies to the art revival happening in our formerly tornado-devastated town.