I wrote some time ago about an experience I had early in my coffee journey—an experience that almost caused me to abandon my pursuit in the industry before I truly began.
In my early 20s, after being introduced to specialty coffee by some friends and mentors, I decided one fateful day to walk into a coffee shop in the Mission district of San Francisco. Native San Franciscans like myself will attest to the fact that the Mission is almost like ground zero for gentrification in the city by the bay. People like me, or rather the type of person I appeared to be at the time, aren’t often made to feel welcome there, which is difficult considering we're actually from there. Meanwhile, those with suspicious glances and nervous hand movements are, more often than not, transplants.
So, here I am—a young, brown, highly motivated coffee lover—eager to learn more and start getting my feet wet. I walk into this cafe and immediately notice the discomfort my presence causes. But I’m used to that; it’s not a big deal. I notice a small flyer near the cash register for 'coffee cupping' classes, which piques my interest. As I approach the counter, I place my order with a barista who doesn’t so much as look up to greet me, let alone make me feel welcome. After ordering, I inquire about the class. "What class?" the barista asks rudely. I point to the flyer, and he manages to grumble some response that I can no longer recall. I was so turned off by this, I didn’t even drink the coffee I ordered. The class, as it turned out, was a cupping class being done at Willem Boot's; Boot Coffee Campus. Which would later become the place I trained in all things coffee with Willem himself, who became my mentor.
My experience at this cafe in the mission was terrible, and I’m honestly not sure what to attribute it to. Is there pretension in our industry? Absolutely, yes. It’s widespread and often pervasive, from cupping rooms to customer service, and even—though I hate to say it—among our consumers. And I’m not entirely sure where it comes from.
I think that when specialty coffee began, it was ridiculed. It’s still ridiculed to a degree. And that hurts. When you really love something and people laugh at you, it's heartbreaking. I think many people in specialty coffee early on experienced that. They became obsessed with varietals, processing, and origins. They spent countless hours experimenting and dialing in roast profiles to perfectly capture the essence of every coffee. They pored over dozens of samples, slurping and spitting and writing notes. They traveled to coffee farms and developed deep, profound relationships with people across cultures and borders. And the result of all that was this cup. And when they took a sip of that the following morning after a long, arduous day, it felt like the cosmos had just exploded across their taste buds. Their next thought? Naturally, "I need to share this." And that’s where the story takes a turn. They served that cup to someone they cared about, eagerly anticipating them to react with shock and amazement… and some of them did, but many more did not. In short, I think there’s a type of defense mechanism that coffee people put up that can be perceived as pretension and maybe it is, but it's understandable.
Coffee nerd friends, let me tell you as someone who loves you, as someone who is one of you: not everyone is going to get it, and you have to be okay with that. You’re allowed to love what you love without anyone else's approval.
So, that’s the forgivable type of pretension we find in our industry. But there’s another type that I think is much more insidious. We’ve all been around a cupping table with that guy—and I say "guy" very much on purpose because 99 times out of 100 it is a male who is like this. He makes very little eye contact, looks at the cups on the table as if they just cut him off on the highway, and zips past the other cuppers with a clipboard under his arm, making sure he sips the coffee as loudly and aggressively as humanly possible. He feels the need to correct every minor breach of cupping etiquette he witnesses, and when it’s time to discuss the coffee, prepare yourself. Here come about a dozen flavor descriptors, half of which you've never heard of: “I taste elderflower, pule, fermented duck fat, hibiscus salt, buckthorn, ceviche, and gillyweed… 85.25.” He might even challenge one of your flavor descriptors: “Blueberries? Where do you get that?” I swear, I was at a cupping table once, and someone said a particular coffee was too “passive-aggressive” for them. This type of pretension I truly wish I understood. I wish I could trace it to some pathology that would give it some context I could relate to. But, I just don’t. Anyone who cares to comment and help out here would be more than welcome. I want to have some empathy for these types of people, but I just can’t find it.
This kind of pretension is ridiculous, even silly to a degree, but it also has real-world implications. Whether it’s wholesale rejecting entire categories of coffees because they’re processed a certain way, causing serious harm to farmers—or just the unfriendly barista making a person of color feel unwelcome, as was the case when I stepped into that coffee shop in the Mission all those years ago. This kind of pretension should really be weeded out of our industry, through training, to the best of our ability. It serves no one and hurts everyone.
I have another story about walking into a coffee shop. This one was in a different neighborhood in San Francisco, a small stall at the time. This was some time after my Mission experience, and I had decided to give specialty coffee another chance. I walked up, ordered an Ethiopia Yirgacheffe, and the barista made me a pour-over, handed it to me with a smile, and simply said, “I love this one, let me know what you think.” I sat down, drank the coffee (at the time, my first-ever sip of specialty coffee), and immediately had an explosion of blueberry flavor across my taste buds. It was incredible, delicious, transformative—I can’t even begin to describe it. I returned to the counter and asked the barista, “What do you guys put in this?” He smiled and responded that it was just coffee. Then he explained to me where it comes from, that their roastery has a direct relationship with the farm and farmers where the coffee grows, and that it’s picked, processed, and roasted in a particular way to ensure that the flavor of the coffee fruit (coffee is a fruit? I didn’t know that at the time) is preserved and showcased. It was unbelievable. The most powerful moment was when he began to explain that they had a “direct relationship” with this coffee cooperative in Yirgacheffe and because of that, they could pay them much higher prices for better quality beans. That type of real, material, social impact that actually changes people's lives spoke to me. From that moment on, I was completely obsessed with specialty coffee.
My career in coffee, in a way, began that very day. And it was all due to a barista who loved coffee in the way you’re supposed to love it—not with pretension or covetousness, but with care, passion, and a deep desire to share it with the world.
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