Where should my focus be?

So, where is your focus? I think we may have gotten lost along the way.
Back in Michigan, when I worked at Kozy Koffee, I was struck with an idea. Where should my focus be? The coffee? The industry? The method? The job? Well, I concluded that since I was fortunate enough to work in the industry as a barista that I should redefine my title. I, in fact, do not and did not want to be a barista, I wanted to be a scientist and a researcher. So, I looked and found that there was many views and styles of producing the consumable coffee.

At the time I had been pretty lost and apathetic towards my job and my life. I really had not any reason at that point to be investing any time into coffee beyond the fact that I was paying bills and that sure felt good. I still to this day do not feel any connection to the rock-star barista lifestyle. It is not my goal to become famous and I pretty much despise idol worship. I have other ideas and plans, and as far as the industry is concerned, well as you could tell by my last blog post, I really am not happy with the current industry and its focus on certifications and processes. Although, I am happy with a few dudes doing some great things for the coffee itself.

The coffee, well, I love the coffee. I think it is beautiful and fantastic and it touches so many people around the world. This is indeed where a lot of my focus has been lately, but I sincerely find that beyond that, I have become very upset with what is done to the coffee by both uneducated persons and persons ignorant to the proper and professional ways of making coffee.

Which leads me to what I was thinking about back in Michigan. I was working with one other person (Courtney) who actually cared about the coffee as much as me. And well, I took it in my own hands to better my knowledge and do the right thing with the coffee. I personally bought a Chemex and designed my very own pour over/ drip station. I really wanted to find the right way of making coffee that would compliment the specific coffee brewed. I was very sick of airpot coffees that would sit for hours at a time. Coffees that would be dosed incorrectly, coffees that would not be ground to the correct setting, and mostly over extracted coffee. I was sick of coffees that were tainted with flavors added to them. To this day, I get angry thinking about how there are forces out there in the world that define coffee as just an economic commodity that needs sugar, milk, syrups and sauces.

I can understand working a job to make money to pay the bills, but lack of care and ignorance leads to bad quality, there is no doubt about it. I honestly refuse to go into most coffee shops because I know I can not get a good cup of coffee. I never, and I mean never, order a cup of coffee from a restaurant because there is no focus on the coffee, it is a restaurant. I also never get gas station coffee, I will leave that right there.

So the focus, where should the focus be in my rant? The focus is on the quality. The focus is on the coffee bean. The focus is on the method. Every coffee blog and site you go to will have fifty million different ways of telling you how to prepare the coffee, and how to properly do everything coffee related. The truth is, everyone is really just learning. Although the story of coffee is as old as humanity, maybe even older, we are just now in the past 100 years roasting the beans to a standard level, and only for the past ten to fifteen years been roasting the coffee to get real flavors, and I am not talking about dark roasted anything.

I feel like we are on the cusp right now of righting wrongs that have been wrong for so long. All the misconceptions are in the process of being de-misconceived, (if that is even a word.) The point is this, the more we learn about coffee the more we need to hold the standard higher. An analogy is in order : Yes, you can paint at home, but most likely, you will never be a Monet or a Da Vinci. Its the same with coffee, you can most likely make a good cup of coffee at home, but if you get it professionally made, it can be life changing.

I really hope that this does not come off as overly pretentious. It is just that when consumers go into coffee shops with uneducated baristas, it really projects onto the consumer. The consumer then becomes also mis-educated and passes the ignorance along. The current coffee markets have been in many ways very progressive by allowing the importation of some of the best coffee to ever have been tasted, and in so many cases this great coffee's potential is ruined by this ignorance. I am reminded of those medicine commercials you see on the television for all the new drugs being marketed, “Please consult a professional before use!” We have the ability to make great coffee, just a lack of knowledge currently that is stopping most.


Common problems that are constantly being corrected:
1.Do not freeze your coffee
2.Do not keep it in the fridge
3.You have thirty days limit after the roast day to use your coffee before spoilage occurs
4.Only grind your coffee right before you are about to use it
5.Dark roasted equates to “burned all the flavor away”
6.Dark roasted coffee also does not have more caffeine than light roasted coffee