The Insane Coffee Project

Where I live, the houses have tattoos!

Just kidding. These are paint jobs of course and they’re not that common. What you see most often is a family crest, claiming to trace the old lineage back to the 17^th or 16^th century. I guess it helps us schlubs feel a little better about ourselves, almost as if there were a bit of blue in our blood. Sometimes you see something like in the photograph above. A sketch, and in this case accompanied by a rhyming couplet, proclaiming the house owner’s profession. How secure must you feel in your job to paint it onto the outside of your house? And who practices the same profession throughout their life anymore? Nevermind that our current jobs don’t lend themselves to being memorialized in this manner. How would we portray Social Media Manager? 😍👍❤️?

The German couplet above translates roughly as “The mightiest ruler throughout the land, yet is fed through farmer’s hand.”

It seems obvious enough, right? But we’re so far removed from the production-side of the things that we consume, that it’s all-too-easy to overlook. We go about our lives as if food comes from the supermarket and electricity out of the wall sockets. The reality of it is naturally messier.

With coffee we can have a bit of a hand in its production, if we want to. There are many ways to grind your beans and to extract your delicious beverage from the resulting powder, and the details of how you chose to do so will affect its scent, taste and mouthfeel. Some prefer to buy their coffee pre-ground, but they’re still faced with – or enjoy – a range of choices in how to prepare their cuppa (Moka pot, French press, espresso or any of its various derivatives, traditional filter coffee, the more modern pour-overs, AeroPress, vaccuum pot…). Convenience might be your highest priority, in which case there are many fully-automated machines that only require you to press a button.

It’ll come as no surprise that I veered away from convenience and love the ritual of preparation, although it wasn’t always so. Growing up I drank instant with lots of milk and sugar. Then one day I was served a fantastic espresso and it sent me down a rabbit hole of specialty coffee. How I prepare my coffees has since become more varied, time-consuming and loving. Soon I started roasting my own beans, which added new dimensions and variables to play with and explore.

This difference, the extent to which you can become involved in its making, stands out if you compare coffee to some of our other beloved drinks. For example, you can only cool, open and drink a beer. Wine at least allows you to let it breathe for a bit, and if you have a fancy red, you can play a long game of chicken, letting it age to its optimal point and hopefully not beyond that, when it starts morphing into vinegar. You can mix spirits and shake cocktails until the cows come home, but you’re basically just mixing stuff that other people have made. With all of these drinks, the artisinal beauty of their production is out of our hands. What we do with them in our kitchens amounts to wrapping and putting a little ribbon on, and then unwrapping somebody else’s present.

Please note that I said “we can have a bit of a hand in its production” three paragraphs ago. Because obviously the most important part in all of this is still the coffee farmer. Coffee is a natural product, a plant. What we harvest is the seed of a tropical shrub. And the only reason why we have this little bit of leeway to play with our kitchens, a leeway that is, as we’ve seen, large compared to other drinks, is because coffee is a very short-lived pleasure. It needs to be freshly prepared. If its taste didn’t deteriorate so rapidly, you can bet your taste buds that most if not all of our coffee would have been prepared and bottled by big producers and in factories, as is the case for our other beverages.

One last thing I should point out: it’s OK if you lean towards convenience in how you prepare your coffee. I’m not here to demonize button pushers. It’s a matter of taste, after all. What you drink and how you prepare it should suit your lifestyle, personal tastes and expectations of the thing. If you are at all curious, by all means dive in, I’m sure you won’t regret it. But if not, that’s quite alright too.

The elephant in the room of the global coffee industry is rather the coffee farmers, and without putting too fine a point on it, the question whether theirs is a viable lifelong profession. If it ever was is debatable, but the challenges involved have not gotten fewer. Quite the contrary. But I’ll leave it at that for now. We can take a deeper dive into that in a future post.

My intention is never to demonize or make anybody feel bad. Reality, as I wrote in this post, is usually much messier than such an impulse can do justice to. So I hope you’ll join me on the journey, and that you’ll share and subscribe.

Wishing you genussvolle Tage (days filled with pleasure, with relish)!