A Longing For Deeper Connections With Coffee

“The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world.” -Rick Ruben, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

A Deeper Connection

Ever since I started roasting this Kenyan, and in the middle of working with our Ethiopian coffee, I wanted to feel closer, as close as I could get, to the coffee. While taking countless measurements of various roasts and extractions, brewing hundreds of cups, A/Bing dozens of different roasts at a time, I didn’t realize what this fully meant. Feeling connected to the coffee, for me, translated into an understanding of variables and controlled experiments to better understand how these coffees brewed and roasted.

It wasn’t until I started learning more about all of the things that happen at origin, before the coffee even leaves the drying bed, is when this longing for a greater connection started to become clearer. I wanted to find connection with coffee by being focused more at the source, not trying to understand it based on how it brews or roasts. I needed to be able to think of coffee differently, to look past the ordinary and familiar of my day-to-day experiences with coffee and attempt to understand what had been previously invisible: The Source - What actually creates and defines the coffee I’ve been studying all this time.

I thought I could get there by tasting thousands of roasters and tens of thousands of coffees, but I couldn’t. There was always an itch to scratch. I don’t know if that will ever go away, but what I do know is, roasting your own coffee can develop an appreciation for coffee more than you ever knew you had, because it can create a deeper connection with source of the actual coffee you love so much. Learning about the many processing techniques of a washed processed coffee, how the weather effects the harvest and post harvest drying periods, how Ruiru is being grafted to SL28 cultivars in Kenya because their roots are longer, which means they are more efficient at absorbing nutrients in the soil, while the part above ground, the Ruiru 11, is more disease resistant. It’s truly fascinating how many variables play an impact on your coffee that only happen at origin. It’s like my mentor said, “you can’t polish a turd”. Learning about how to improve practices at origin, and pick green coffee with that kind of knowledge and experience simply means you’ll appreciate the craft, artistry, and science of an incredibly produced coffee!

The more I learn, the more i’m a sucker for a great washed processed coffee!

I believe everyone should dip their toes in the wonderful world of roasting coffee and experimenting with roasting it. Roasting coffee sparks this way of thinking about the source of green coffee (personally) that brewing just wont teach you. I’m going to start selling the green coffee we use here at PSCC so you can all experiment with roasting the same bean, if it’s of any interest to you. I also will be looking into extremely affordable roasters (like more controlled popcorn poppers - how I started) to start selling and offering roasting resources to kickstart roasting coffee as a wonderful hobby or future profession for people that may be interested!

Balancing Data + Artistry = A Deeper Connection

“It’s not unusual for science to catch up to art, eventually. Nor is it unusual for art to catch up to the spiritual” -Rick Ruben, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

As I think about this Kenyan and Ethiopian coffee I’m currently drinking, I often imagine how those exact plants are doing right now, at this moment. What the weather feels like, the cool breeze that sweeps over those hills. I think of who is caring for them, having the privilege to watch them grow season by season. I Imagine being able to hear the birds flying above this crop during harvest, what the temperature feels like as the sun sets, I think of the rain pouring water on this plant which helps it produce, I imagine the farmers watching the sun beam down on the raised beds. It’s funny, this imagination is inspired by a simple bean inside of a fruit. It’s importance is so minuscule compared to everyone and everything else around it. Yet, at the same time, it is of such great importance to everyone and everything around it.

I feel very connected to this product, but I have always been longing for more…no matter how close I try and get, to fully understand coffee, it always seems to enjoy surprises, giving me something new, unexpected, and previously unexplored. Its complexities are very much like listening to music. When you tune everything out and focus on the sounds with a decent set of headphones, you might just pick up on an astonishing amount of new sounds, textures, dimensions, and so on, in the music. To you, it may just be an audio recording, but to someone like me, it’s hundreds if not thousands of audio waves that were captured with a single microphone at a specific place and time. Those sound waves were intentionally designed to translate emotion from creator to the listener. From dozens of performers, producers, engineers, equipment paths translating this emotion through electricity and 1’s and 0’s, somehow we’re able to still feel that emotion that was captured from the source. To me, that’s music, that’s coffee, that’s art, that’s science, and when combined and translated well from one source to the next, it creates a connection to the original source across the entire supply chain. Let that sink in for a minute.

Finding This Deeper Connection In Innovative Ways

Recent innovations in brewing and roasting are being fueled by experiments and studies by people of all skill sets, ranging from research groups, to your casual home brewer, to scientists in other fields that relate their work into coffee. Access to more data from these findings have been creating a lot of curiosity in the industry. The industry is now discovering exactly which particles make coffee taste bitter, and how to reduce this particle in your end cup for an enhanced flavor clarity experience.  The Industry is understanding the effects of grinding coffee at subzero temperatures and how that equates to creating new particle distribution shifts of microscopic fines that were previously unexperienced from a finer grind. The industry is discovering new burr geometries and are comparing/contrasting them against others with particle analyzers and our own taste experiences. Some people are looking at coffee bean particle motion in a roaster using Positron Emission Particle Tracking to try and achieve the “most even” roast development across all of the beans…

I could go on and on about all of the incredible things people are doing in this industry right now because of our own personal desire to understand coffee better. I am now realizing our attempt to understand these technical aspects of coffee means we are inevitably curious on our journey of (possibly) unknowingly trying to become more connected to The Source of coffee.

I believe our industry is hungrier than ever to learn and improve, which means we have a strong desire, (daresay) more so than ever before, to become more connected. Though data can quickly lead us further from our desired direction at first and distract us, I think technical knowledge and approaches are crucial to enhance our connection with coffee. Being able to translate that connection to The Source well will absolutely help the future influence and acceptance of great quality coffee in the specialty commercial market.

Final Thoughts

In an industry that revolves around selling a product that is completely unfocused on the actual coffee (aka, the seasonal latte or flavored drink), I’m starting to see a shift in consumer preference and culture. There are an incredible amount of people who are new or fairly inexperienced to the world of specialty coffee that are now asking great questions, watching YouTubers like Lance Hendrick, and are experimenting with brewing coffee at home with a more information-driven approach than what the industry was used to just a half-decade ago.

I believe these people are starting to care more and become more curious about the actual coffee, where it came from, and the story behind it. I believe they are starting to question more coffee shops and roasters to see if their values align as these people learn more and improve. It has been easier to identify with these customers more so than ever, but harder to standout because (I strongly believe) everyone feels like they need to offer the same thing: dark roasts, blends, flavored lattes, price-matched menus, and more milk sold per ounce than actual coffee, in order to maintain a successful, stable, profit-driven operation.

We absolutely need to incentivize cafes and people with a voice in their coffee community to be more creative in how they curate a better, more coffee-driven experience for this evolving customer-base, and industry, to create an even deeper connection to what we’re all fascinated by - The Source of coffee.

There is more demand than ever before to feel connection through coffee, and there is absolutely, without a doubt, a massive amount of people all over the world (and around your small community) that especially want to be a part of it!

Rally your coffee community together to bring everyone closer to The Source. Everyone wants a connection like that, It just needs to be shared and experienced in more unique ways than we currently are seeing today.

Cheers to the future!

-Connor