Call it what you will—betraying the ideals of the specialty coffee community, a lack of passion, just a general bad temper—but I'll be blatantly honest with you (as I've always been doing here, anyway).
I'm simply mesmerized by the way specialty coffee is entering new markets. And it's ironic, "mesmerizing."
I've seen it several times already.
People live in peace for centuries, pay their penny for a normal, absolutely-nothing-special-100% cup of coffee (or even tea, in some cases, by the way) – drink their coffees with their families before going to work, meet up with old friends for a drink espresso and chat about how everyone is doing, they use those old-fashioned coffee makers to make a romantic breakfast coffee for their loved ones…
In other words, people are busy doing much more important things, primarily socializing, rather than thinking about a cup of coffee.
Coffee is a small part of the whole picture, detail, not the centerIt's not the espresso that's the main hero. It's the people we meet while sipping it, or relaxing after a day's work, or having a moment of peace and time to think and be alone with their thoughts, or the magic of the moment when you walk into the bedroom with a breakfast tray on Sunday morning, and your wife/husband is waking up and looks up at you with those sleepy, grateful, surprised, loving eyes...
And then a bunch of know-it-alls come along and start terrorizing everyone about coffee. They say they've been doing it wrong all along, but now it's time to change, and the transition will be smooth and almost painless if everyone stops doing it the way they were doing it overnight and lets the coffee geeks teach them how to do it.
About something as comforting as your usual cup of coffee.
I mean, IT IS like that.
To put it more simply, I was like that a few years ago. I was trying to convince my local customers at a small Italian restaurant to drink El Salvador. Those poor customers were perfectly comfortable in every way with the Italian blend we had. And I was trying to offer them washed catuai that tasted of cherries, red apples, and brandy. The coffee itself was great, no questions asked. But all the other things—timing, focus, audience, my grasp of the whole picture—weren't.
Did I really try to do that? Hell yes, I did, and I felt I had the right to be doing it.
Was it a good idea? Not even for a moment.
Although, you know, it was actually good for me, in a way. I learned that I don't have the right to teach anyone until they ask me to. Politely suggesting something—that's as far as I can go.
I realized that the less experience you have, the more tempted you are to “teach everyone.”
Sometimes I start to think coffee geeks should be called "specialty coffee fanatics." Honestly. And I was the "geek" in that sense, so I know what I'm talking about. I mean, honestly, don't they remind you of those guys for whom it's not enough to believe in a certain "god" (coffee in this case)—they have to convince everyone else to believe in the same one?
I'm writing this to make some peace with myself from the past and to bring that problem of lack of focus (and respect) to light.
My point is… We probably don't need to push so hard for it. specialty coffee?
Maybe it will be easier for everyone if we see the specialty as an exception to the rules, not as a rule.
The rule is: people like coffee simple, accessible and easy that does not distract them from life, they like it pay an affordable amount of money and they don't like it waste a lot of time doing itAs you can see, the specialty doesn't fit here. Not at all.
If you're having trouble imagining what that might be like, think about a product you don't really care about. Something you buy, use, and don't think much about afterward. I mean, canned tuna, or ham, or cheese for sandwiches. Ready? That's how 991% of the world's population thinks about coffee.
It's not normal to feel uncomfortable with the fact that most people like dark-roasted robusta blends. They like them. And people love capsules. And robusta blends are accessible because they are. Not shocking, not challenging, just coffee that allows us to focus on other things, and it doesn't cost much. It costs almost nothing.
I'm talking about this because understanding what's happening is the necessary step that will get us out of where we're stuck and allow us to communicate better with consumers, rather than locking ourselves into a small community of "those in the know."
The specialty part is only a small part of coffee. It's a good place to be, it's a good home. We can be good hosts, we can open the door to the customer, we can show how great the interior is, what it can be like…
But whether he gets in or not is up to him, and there's no right or wrong with that. It's just coffee.