I was talking to a guy the other day who works at a boutique coffee shop here in Salt Lake. As a novice barista, I asked him about brew times and he walked me down a rabbit hole of sensory feedback. Each batch of beans is different, he said. Every morning and throughout their shift, he and his fellow barista’s pull shots and test for different tasting notes (coffee has more than wine) as well as visual and aromatic cues. They use feeling as they tamp the grounds with a goldilocks pressure that they’ve honed. They listen for a specific pitch that signals their wand is blasting tiny air bubbles of steam at an angle that denatures the proteins in the milk to create a velvety texture that is just so. Although according to this guy, milk detracts from the true experience of the beans.
The shop he works at is downtown so it's not uncommon that it’s filled with random passers by, tourists, people in town for conferences. And mostly, the harried patrons order their beverage, pay the exorbitant fee, and carry right on. Sure, the coffee will serve its role to caffeinate the drinker. But any coffee could do that. It made sense when he told me that it’s the return customer, the connoisseur, the true fan who gives his job meaning.
It’s not that we have to care about everything, that would be impossible. But the world we’re living in doesn’t appear to ask us to care about much at all. If you don’t care about coffee, what are the things that you do care about? How do you experience them? Is there a chance that a deeper investigation might allow you to experience these things more fully? What would happen if we let the things we care about in all the way?
