Welcome to Tetherball
A small sunlit coffee shop in Mandarin, a neighborhood of Jacksonville FL USA. We do killer coffee to give people energy! We have fun because we care! We want to uplift people to tackle anything & everything! Use local produce, contribute to the neighborhood, authentic Florida sunshine!
Way back in 2016, Tetherball’s owner Elias started focusing full time on coffee! Like, drop out of college and spend all your money on travel to visit other coffee shops and little local competitions full time.
He worked in a few small cafes, worked in the kitchens of breweries chocolate shops and nice restaurants. Picking up kitchen and people skills.
Eventually it'd been five years of making around minimum wage at multiple jobs, and at the time there weren’t a whole lot of better ways to make a career in coffee! At least not in Northeast FL. Besides opening something yourself. So what would that look like?
Traveling had made a couple things clear, there weren’t shops making a huge community impact near home, and they weren’t representative of the local, sunny colorful beach culture Elias had grown up with. Plus most of the coffee sucked.
So we wrote a menu that would combine really solid cut and dry specialty coffee, with native produce and more advanced kitchen skills. Something comforting and interesting, that felt right for our culture and what we could do with the space.
Cafe’s have the potential to help people get out there and reach their goals, tying together communities in a super fun, meaningful way! Especially if they feel like a place that belongs to the neighborhood. It felt like we had something important to contribute to specialty. Some bright, colorful, Florida-core coffee!
In 2022 after a couple more years of working in and around the industry, Elias began work on a shop that could do just that! He chose a spot right in the heart of Mandarin, his families favorite neighborhood in Jax FL, and got to work!
Now we’re bringing our vision everyday, coupled with high caliber coffee. Come visit!
PS. As I read over this in 2026, we’ve already made a decent impact in the culture. The coffee no longer mostly sucks, there’s more color in the nearby shops, and the people are happy to call us friends. They’ll even dry pineapple juice or coconut cream in their coffee : )
