Mission Statement

Can destruction be a form of creation? I decided to start writing this blog after having turned over the Coffee Club I started and ran for two years to new leaders, packing my apartment full of coffee-making equipment into indefinite storage, and preparing to move to start a new job, where my relationship with coffee will most likely be reduced to grabbing a morning espresso on the way to work. It is here, among boxes of old equipment, sitting in front of my computer as I sip on coffee poured from my “travel” chemex, that I decided to write about coffee. Therefore, the primary objective of this blog is to help me maintain an intellectual and quotidian engagement with coffee as I venture into the uncharted wilderness outside my recently imploded ‘coffee universe’ (or perhaps the swirling, caffeinated energy of my coffee-verse just fizzled out in a big chill). Rather than chronicling the ongoing struggle with my espresso machine’s erratic grouphead (maybe it just needed moar tubes) or my attempts to craft matching roast and extraction profiles for my favorite coffees, the focus of this blog – as I see it at this point – will waver between the technical, the cultural, the academic, and whatever else seems of interest to me at the moment, as I use my ongoing experience of coffee to think about what is of interest in the world of coffee, and how approaching it a certain way can be of value to people who enjoy it.

The “extraction” referred to by the name of the blog is thus twofold: as we think about the literal extraction of chemicals from ground beans that turns water into to coffee, we will also hopefully be able to extract meaningful (or at the very least interesting) ideas about coffee and the role it plays in our everyday lives. Ambitious? Pretentious? Uninspired? I make no apologies. One of the most overlooked facts about coffee, especially by self-proclaimed “coffee geeks” such as myself, is that despite all the time we spend studying coffee chemistry, refining our roasts and extractions, and pushing towards the infinitely regressive “perfect cup,” people’s experience of coffee is largely shaped by the way it is presented to them and the way they approach it. In other words, the science of the perfect cup loses most, if not all of its meaning without a serious consideration of how people’s appreciation of that cup is shaped by the way they experience it. I could ramble incessantly about the “aesthetics of coffee enjoyment” (thus I abate my fear of the blank page) and I think it’s a serious issue that validates the purpose of this blog. As my hands-on engagement with coffee takes an increasing back seat to a more observational role, using my previous experience with coffee to think about ways of considering and reconsidering the ways we experience it in our everyday lives will cultivate an enriched appreciation of coffee that is both democratic and accessible. That, anyway is my goal.

Someone once warned: “don’t you know caffeine can cause serious delirium?” Perhaps that’s true, and perhaps this blog can also be seen as a lingering effect of the serious delirium associated with high caffeine exposure. In either case, I hope you will join me on my journey through the world of coffee and I hope you find it worthwhile. For those not up to the caffeinated task, gargling a mixture of fifty percent hydrogen peroxide and fifty percent water has also been known to help.