This last weekend I had the pleasure of heading over to Rhode Island to be a part of the Mid-Atlantic North East Coffee Conference . Gwilym had spoken there last year, and he was so enthusiastic about it that I was pretty excited to be a part of it. I’m extremely glad he encouraged me to go! The event is one that people get a little possessive about – in a good way. This isn’t just the people who attend, but also evident in the companies who sponsor which is pretty interesting. The feel of the event is friendly, positive and open. Gerra, who organises it, understands that many baristas wanting to attend may not get a lot of support so tickets are priced accordingly. A ticket to the event is $100! This is, without doubt, the best value for money of any coffee event I’ve ever seen. This ticket gets you a mixture of practical classes and workshops, talks, tastings and panels. The event has capacity for 150 and you can see why it sells out so quickly. I was there mostly to give a keynote on the first night, but it was fun to be part of panel discussions that went on too. The internet makes it challenging to give talks because they’re often available online afterwards which means you have to start fresh each time. I was pretty happy with how this one turned out, and I hope to get to refine this one and present it again because I had some great feedback. I know a couple of people recorded it, and if you read this I’d be delighted if you didn’t post it! (It isn’t laziness – I just want to be able to do it again and better, something I rarely get the chance to do with my talks). You can check Sprudge for more information on the event. I’ve been travelling a lot lately, but I definitely could have hung around for longer on this one. Perhaps I might just have to go as a sponsor next year…

I hadn’t meant to write these little summaries of single ideas generated by complex coffee cultures. I don’t think they are a good habit, but I am going persist regardless… This is by no means the sum of my experiences, but it was one particular aspect that stood out in contrast to London: cafe design. It wasn’t that cafes in Seoul were spectacularly different to those in London – it was more the depth of detail that stood out. These were carefully considered and curated spaces. Even if some design had a clear path traced back to someone else’s cafe, it was interesting that it was clearly considered a vital part of creating a coffee shop. I can’t remember the last time I felt so touristy as I constantly photographed the little things that stood out. It felt like rich detail and design was important in a way I hadn’t encountered before. For great photos and write ups of cafes in Korea (and the rest of the world) then I’d strongly recommend checking out Aaron Frey’s site frshgrnd.com I’d love to see some feedback from consumers on this, on how important it is to them and how much it influences their decision to frequent one place over another… There are so many other things I should probably write about my brief glimpse into the explosive growth in coffee in Seoul, but I’d rather wait til I’ve had the chance to go back there again because it is fascinating and difficult to simplify.

I’ve been wanting to go to Australia for a long time, for coffee drinking purposes that is. In the UK there has been an undeniable and positive impact on our coffee scene from those travelling over. Inevitably I went into this with expectations – these we’re derived from talking to people who’ve visited, lived and worked there in the past and those who continue to do so. I honestly wasn’t there long enough to get any real insight – hence a short post on my experience there. I was pleasantly surprised. Not because every cup of coffee was somehow flawless (it wasn’t, because no country, city or even cafe in the world is capable of that yet). When people pick on the Australian coffee scene it all tends to boil down to one idea/word for me: satisfaction. The feeling of having achieved great coffee and not really being interested in improving or evolving it. (One could argue that Italy has long suffered a similar plight.) What pleased me, inspired me, on this trip was the number of people who were dissatisfied. Their frustration with everything from raw coffee, to roasting methods, to equipment, to service; this will drive things forward and potentially do so at quite a pace. This is awesome. While this dissatisfaction is necessarily hugely widespread, I have high expectations of seeing things being pushed forward by a small group of passionate people.

I might start posting these a little more regularly (let me know on twitter with a yay or nay) - I have various link repositories full of interesting stuff. Coffee Wars A piece on Alterra in Milwaukee – some great quotes and it’s always interesting to read about coffee companies and how they started and grew. If you were the next Steve Jobs I’d recommend reading this, not for the main point of the article, but for the impact that a small kindness can have on a customer and how they perceive you and the business you work in. The value of a small gesture like this might be nothing, or it might be a glowing mention on the Harvard Business Review blog… Common Cupping Mistakes – Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 Daniel Humphries is posting some good stuff on cupping over on his blog. Worth a read!

I was having a look at the C-price for coffee today, and looking at the recent fluctuations. As I looked at different time spans the data seem decreasingly dramatic. (There’s probably a metaphor for life or something like that in here too.) I’ve included the graphs below so hopefully this makes sense: Intraday Trading today: Not particularly useful data. A little spike, but only of about 1 cent. Let’s look at movement across the last 3 months: This now looks like a dramatic recent spike of over 20 cents per pound. A big deal surely? Let’s have a look at this in the context of the last year: I’m not interpreting this data, just presenting it like this because I think it is interesting. Suddenly this spike doesn’t look so spikey. It seems like a brief blip in a trend downwards. In the context of 2 years it looks like this: I don’t know what this means but then I’m not sure anyone does. This particular jump is likely the result of non-coffee related factors like speculators and the recent announcement of Mr Bernanke at the Federal Reserve. I can only imagine how this looks to people who have more than 20 years of experience dealing with this market. Perhaps it has some meaning to them. If this is mildly interesting, and you want a place to keep up with the C then I like this website a lot.

I never really liked the term “Third Wave”, and I don’t really think I’m alone in that. I never liked it because it never really fit into how I see coffee, or my individual experience coming up in the industry. I get why people like it, why it is useful, but this isn’t really my point. In some ways “Third Wave” seemed like a pinnacle – to me it is about traceability (so making something increasingly traceable didn’t make it 4th wave), it is about the inherent qualities of a lot of coffee, it is about roasting and brewing coffee in a way that makes these qualities available to the consumer. The net result would be something worth more. I’m not sure that is a stated goal though – it was a description of a change in our culture, rather than an explicit manifesto of “how things should be”. As many of us have come around to focusing on the provenance of our coffee, and the quality of the cup it brews, we really ought to have some goals. Goals are good. They give you purpose. If you pick good ones it allows you to refine and improve what you do because you have something measurable against which you can chart successes and failures. I think many of us want to make coffee more valuable. How can we measure this? Is it the average spend on a cup? Is it the average price per pound of retail coffee? Is it the percentage of our customers who own grinders? Is it the number of people who ask for a coffee based on its flavour, or by the name of the farm that grew it rather than the country where it was grown? We’ve chosen to try to communicate the value of coffee through describing its taste. This is something that, as an industry, we do in a surprisingly homogenous way. We’re all pretty unified in how we describe coffee – be it in person, on a bag, on a menu or on a website. There is some comfort in this – if everyone is doing it, then it must be right… This leaves me with two questions: Is it working? I can’t answer this, because it really applies to how you measure your own goals. Maybe it really is working. Maybe you have more and more customers who see coffee as a valuable thing, and their number is growing at a healthy rate. Maybe your average spend tracks completely with the complexity and linguistic gymnastics of your label. (I sort of hope it does.) This leads me to my second question: If it isn’t working, can you let it go? This is a tough question. The way we talk about coffee feels so right to us. Maybe we just need a few more years, maybe we’re on the cusp of change, maybe…. This isn’t a big talking, throw down type of question. This is one I ask myself a lot. I don’t often like my own answer. To abandon what we do now seems so terrifying. Maybe it is working for other people really well. Maybe everyone else has customers that are buying coffee because it has a ripe apple acidity. Maybe I have customers who are buying a coffee because of how we described the acidity. Is that why I would pick a coffee? If I imagine myself walking into a nice coffee shop, and having a look at the menu – what is driving my decision. I won’t pick one mill in Kenya over another because one coffee has a raspberry note while the other has a rosehip one. Why would I pick one coffee over another? Importantly: does the answer to that question require me to have spent years working in coffee. This post isn’t about my answer to my own question. (Perhaps another time.) It isn’t about suggesting alternative ways to try to communicate the coffees we’re selling. It is more about the vague sense of unease that we’ve blinkered ourselves, presumed that this is really the only way to talk about coffee. Do we even have a measurable goal so that we can tell this approach is, or will be, successful?

I’d like to write these posts quite often – especially with comments disabled. A chance to highlight interesting responses or just interesting coffee writing on the web. Direct Trade Sucks Steve Leighton of HasBean writes a frank, honest and important post about his experiences with trying to change his sourcing model to be more direct. I hope this one generates a lot of discussion, because up until now our industry has broadcast one message that “Direct Trade” is the only acceptable method of sourcing. Nothing is ever as simple as that…. Read this post! Re-envisioning the Retail Experience Colin Harmon responds to my SCAA talk . It is a great read, once again a great piece of honest writing about being in business. Water and Taste I can’t really claim that Colin Harmon (again! this man is on fire!) is responding to my water post – I think he was thinking independently on the same subject. Whether you saw his great WBC performance in 2010 or not – this is another great post about one of the main ingredients we serve but pay little attention to… Broken Windows Theory & Coffee Responding to a twitter discussion after the water post , Drew Moody wrote a great piece on what we should be worrying about, whether we should beat dead horses and how broken windows theory applies to what we do every day. Hopefully I catch most things on coffee, and related discussions but feel free to harass me on twitter if I missed something.

I meant to write this review a while ago – and Liz Clayton’s excellent review finally spurred me into action. In early June I was in Boston, and had a little spare time. I made my way to Dwelltime in Cambridge, and while waiting to order I saw this book for sale. I grabbed a copy, and started reading as I drank my coffee. A little backwards and forwards on twitter with Merry White (better known as Corky) and suddenly I’m no longer having coffee alone, but am enjoying being sat talking with her face to face – she is local, being a Professor at Boston University. She very kindly took time out of her day, and took me around some local cafes and introduced me to people and it was a lot of fun. I’m very grateful, and wish to be transparent, and I think (or at least I hope!) that day doesn’t really influence my review. Most of the books on coffee I’ve read recently have bee devoted to getting us to brew better coffee, or understand the product itself better. (This is no bad thing!) It felt so invigorating to read about how coffee can become entwined within society, to look at how cafes fit within a different culture and the roles they can fulfil. Japan’s wider culture can easily become an obsession, because so much of it feels so alien. Seeing how something as familiar as coffee shops became interwoven into that society was oddly inspiring to me – a renewed feeling that we could do interesting and novel things in our own cultures, certainly beyond the narrow coffee culture we currently have now. I had no idea of the breadth of coffee influence of Japan – it made me interested in going further into aspects of the history of coffee in Japan. On the brewing/barista side of things, the term kodawari was appealing and compelling. I will avoid trying to explain as Corky does a much better job than I! Perhaps this isn’t really a review, more a recommendation – all I can really say is that I enjoyed it, and if you want to read something well researched and well written then you’ll probably enjoy this too. Check below for some links to purchase (none are affiliate links). Links: University of California Press Amazon Amazon UK @merrycorkywhite

A while ago Gwilym sent me over a link to this video. It had been sitting, unwatched, in my links repository for a while – despite the fact that I’d watched and enjoyed the previous film from the film maker. Give it a watch now – it is a worthwhile ten minutes – and best watched before reading this. Made by Hand / No 2 The Knife Maker from Made by Hand on Vimeo . I really liked a lot of what he had to say – he was engaging and clearly passionate. I liked hearing about spending a lot of time practicing and being ok with not being very good. I enjoyed hearing about developing technique to the point where you feel comfortable to start making art. I agree completely about mistakes being really, really great ways to learn if you are open to that. The thing that he said that I had a negative, visceral response to was, to quote him, This tag “handmade” on its very, sort of, basic face value means quality. If it is made by hand it’s made with great quality. If you think of a handmade suit, you think of something that’s, like, perfect. That’s why you pay more for it. Or a handmade car. To me that’s the sort of the value of handmade. If we’re honest, the speciality end of the coffee industry has traded and marketed hard on this idea – all the while knowing that it simply isn’t true. Something is not imbued with a greater level of quality simply because it is made by hand. One could argue that it attains some form of value, some cultural capital. I could understand if people believed that because it was handmade it was worth more, but it isn’t of higher quality. His knives are worth more because they are a combination of skills, vision, materials and art. In his eyes would he believe the knife would be better, more functional or long lasting, because he didn’t use any of his machines, and did everything by hand? Is he compromising his quality in return for commercial gain every time he switches on a lathe? I don’t think so – and I would be surprised if he thought so too. This inevitably leads us to thinking about divorcing the ideas of value and quality – something we’ve tried very hard not to do in coffee. It makes us think about things like tradition in a different. A particular process may have some worth because it is traditional, because it is a cultural artifact that is worth preserving. In food, and in coffee, there are many processes that are retained because of their cultural value – because we see them as having worth. It easily brings us to an awkward word and idea that, so far I’m glad to say, coffee hasn’t had to contend with: Authenticity. (An entirely different post could ask, and stumble around the answer to the question, “Is authenticity even possible in coffee, with so many opportunities for input along the way?”) This intersection of quality and cultural value popped up again in the interview in two parts of the NYT wine critic Eric Asimov. (Part 1 , Part 2 ) When asked why he is against blind tasting he says: I think it’s infantilizing. It gives consumers the illusion of a level playing ground. I think we’re all very open to the idea that because we’re Americans and we’re democrats with a small d, aristocracy is a fiction and if everybody is given the same opportunity, then everybody can shine equally. I think there’s a lot more to it than that. I think that’s a dumbed down way of looking at wine. I think for evaluating wine, there’s a great deal to be learned by knowing what you’re dealing with, the history, past performance, past experiences. It seems silly to me that only wine critics are asked to shut their eyes to that. (Emphasis added) You could argue that in the past 10 years speciality coffee has done a better job selling the story of the coffees we drink than it has done selling geuinely excellent cups of said coffee. You could argue that the great success of Kona or JBM is the ability to sell the story to the extent that it becomes and brand and an idea where the price becomes totally divorced from the actual value. Going back to Asimov’s point – would a tasting have greater impact if you ran it blind, or if you talked through the coffees – their provenance, their meaning – as you tasted them? (This is an open, rather than rhetorical, question.) More than this – as specialty coffee gets to a point where we have to look at sustainable pricing – is focusing on increasing the cultural capital of a cup of great coffee a route with greater returns than just focusing on everything in the cup? The challenge of increasing the cultural value of coffee (because right now it carries very, very little cultural value) takes us to a similar place to wine – a world tripped up by pretension and snobbery, and where people seek to manipulate the value of things through exploiting what we have decided is valuable about it. ((I already feel entirely out of my depth on this subject so I should stop here.)) I hadn’t planned to bring this post to a rousing finale, more to think out loud. It seemed worth commenting on the way we can misuse words that could be really useful to us when used properly. It also seemed worth noting that lots of people and industries have the same issues, challenges and current solutions we do – and I’d be fascinated to know how they think coffee is doing compared to them.

The break, for those not exposed to the coffee industry’s tasting rituals, is a part of the tasting process when cupping. After letting the ground coffee and water steep for a set time we bring our noses down to the floating layer of grounds we call the crust. We stir a prescribed number of times and we inhale the aromatic release through our noses. We pause, we think, we assess. It is a part of the process treated with much seriousness when training or explaining the process. It is one ritualistic moment of interaction in the otherwise pretty boring brewing process before we start tasting. Over the last couple of years I’ve become less and less interested in this part of the process. It isn’t just because I’m tall and the table often feels a long way down for a lazy man. It just felt like an awkward process from which I gain no real insight into the coffee I am assessing. Or perhaps better – I get no information of value from it that isn’t available via tasting. In the past I had various theories about why I thought the break may be a valuable tasting tool, but I suspect they were so wrong that I am not even going to confess what they were. When I started cupping getting the chance to break felt like a privilege, but now it feels more like a chore. I am reassured to find that I am not alone in this. When cupping with colleagues and peers it is getting to the point where we need to draw straws to see who, reluctantly, has to do it. I think there is some value in assessing the smell of the dry grounds, but if I am honest I love the idea of arriving at a cupping table with the bowls already stirred and cleaned, cool enough to be ready to start tasting. There is pleasure in ritual. Perhaps the frequency of the process has fatigued me, and I don’t feel like I can give it the time to be patient, slow and methodical. There really isn’t a bigger point to this. I am not saying that we should never smell the break ever again. I’m not trying to play the “challenge everything we take for granted” card either. One of the reasons I continue to write this is because it is a journal of sorts for where I am, what I am thinking, and a way to share that with a large, global audience who may react to it in a way that inspires me.