As I sat with my cup this morning I thought about why it's such an obsession for me. Really, though, I think it's more of a fascination. Few people take the time to truly comprehend what a complex effort it takes to get them their coffee--at home, from the C-Store, from any specialty retailer or fast food place...style, price, quantity and quality don't matter.
Let's work backwards, starting with "the last ten feet" of coffee's trip. Of course it's you, the customer, the paying consumer, paying an average of $2-$3 for 10-20 ounces of any combination of brewed coffee, syrup, espresso, and milk. But looking behind the "bar" you can see so many others working with it, taking so much care, measuring and brewing, steeping and plunging, tapping and grinding...labor-intensive work with little margin for error, ending in spectacular results that you the consumer have come to regard as a requisite coffee experience these days.
A true-blooded Barista can tell you how much coffee to water is a good ratio, how long to steep a press, why you shouldn't freeze your coffee or keep it in the fridge, what goes well with chocolate and what goes well with cherries and why, and rattle off ten or so brewing methods and what coffee pairs well with each of them--and why. They know coffee is boiling hot (190-200 is requisite) and have learned to repress that flinch we all experience when spilling hot liquid ourselves, because they know it will only make a bigger mess. They're honestly not trying to display their superior knowledge when they ask you what type of coffee filter you use at home (and when you don't know), they're just trying to get you the best coffee they can. And they'll thank you for that quarter in the tip jar--and really mean it.
Those Baristi are the trusted front-linesmen charged with delivering the final product, so carefully crafted by the roasters, to the public. Largely unseen by consumers, the roasters take the bean from green to brown, taking painstaking measures to balance fire with time, temperature with moisture, and have learned to listen to the beans as they travel the roast spectrum. They know what temperatures are best for what origins, how to grade bean sizes by eye, and tell you how long a batch has been roasting with their nose. Once second, one degree, one bean too dark or too light can spoil an entire batch, an entire year of hard labor for the most under-appreciated player in the coffee game.
The farmers and pickers, growers, agronomists, co-op heads, sorters, processors, baggers, porters. Think of them the next time you proclaim your reliance on "coffee" to "live". For them the two are inseparable. They are the beginning of it all, the most important part, and yet the least familiar to us all. True, this is applicable to most agricultural products, but the amount of effort and energy it takes for even one pound of beans to make it to the last ten feet of its journey are astronomical. The average coffee tree takes six years to mature into a flowering plant, and only then can it produce beans. Pickers work by hand to identify only the ripest cherries on the tree leaving the younger ones for a later harvest. The steep mountainsides will be braved by the workers up to four times a year to bring in as many crops as possible.
Each region processes differently, but it is always a labor of love, of treating the bean the way it wants. The world expects an Ethiopia to taste a certain way, and that tradition is passed along through the ages, the nuances of milling and washing, drying and raking, turning, sorting, aging. Fending off rot and mold, pests, storm, and theft. And sadly those that work so hard rarely enjoy their own hard work's results, as each high-quality bean must be sold for profit, leaving none for those who labor so hard to produce them.
So this is why I get a little upset when people are too lazy to time their shots. Or when they say "we just do half batches and keep it for an hour." It's not something I can effectively communicate in a split-second of coaching, or with a point to a line in a resource manual. Sometimes I want to fly off the handle, into an passionate diatribe about their utter ignorance on why we do what we do and why they should care, and at the very least, why I do care.
Maybe I should.
