The shortest distance between two people is a cup of coffee.

Love Story One: Pride & Pollination Before instagrammable latte art. Before Nespresso pods. Before minimalist hipster coffee shops and pretentious baristas. Before V60s and espresso machines. Before instant coffee, coffee canisters, and the great commodity plantations of Brazil and Sumatra. Before the Green Dragon Coffee House. Before the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Before the Renaissance. Before Turkish pots and the Ottoman Empire. Before the Sufi mystics.

I think probably most people have fond memories of this time of year from childhood. Even if you didn’t celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah or anything like that, there was still time off, still time spent with family, still this atmosphere, at least in the States where I grew up, of togetherness, reconnecting, rekindling, sharing with one another, eating, giving gifts, the movies, the food, the music, the decorations, the lights. That odd mix of neon holiday lights with earth to

Something has been stirring for some time now. A quiet return, or perhaps a continuation. After years of working to restore Yemen coffee to its rightful status, I’ve long had the itch, a whisper that’s slowly grown to a scream, that something deeper is pleading desperately to evolve. Something bigger than a single origin. And not outwardly toward scale or expansion, but inwardly, toward so much more.

A scene from Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring  (1949), where the calm precision of the tea ceremony mirrors the film’s quiet tension between...