We are a Coffee People
We are a nation of coffee people. We are a nation of people who love our coffee for a number of intertwined reasons. We love the way it tastes. And even if the coffee is bad, if it is the only coffee we have, we can still love it. We love how it brings us together. It is a thing that brings us together with people and groups of people we love. It introduces us to strangers, and we commune around it with our closest friends. Coffee is our ally. It is a taste, a warmth, it is a mug, it is a smell, it is shop, a communal vessel at the places we work. It is a break from what we want to be distracted from. And it gives us a spark. It is charged. We don’t deny our love of all the things it does for us. We love its aesthetic, and we love its content. We love coffee.
And right now, in America and around the globe, we have some of the best coffee ever grown on the planet, being grown, exported, imported and thoughtfully prepared, around the world, by people who are dedicating their life’s time exclusively to the purpose of making coffee, the often overlooked hot cup. And it is the best coffee in history. Growers are growing better, for themselves, and for their ecosystems. Importers are becoming more conscious in their endeavors to provide fair pricing to farmers. Roasters are paying more attention, experimenting, and highlighting the unique characteristics of individual crops, down to the lot size, much akin to the boutique wine market that has become accustomed to such rigorous and differentiated endeavors in terms of small, specific lot care. Perhaps we soon will see reports and reviews of specific coffee rows.
It is easy to get caught up on the nuance of coffee, but just as easily to get lost in something as simple as your everyday morning cup. These are the cups I live for. The cup that I am holding, perhaps even not paying much attention to it at first until I realize suddenly that the cup I am drinking is making my life better… because coffee does this. Often. Daily. That is the magic of coffee. These are cups I take pictures of. In my mind. We are a nation of coffee lovers, and most often we don’t think about it. It is part of the infrastructure of life. It is one of the first things you first notice when it is suddenly absent. It is one of the first things we look forward to, often throughout the day. We are a coffee people, connected to coffee by magic, which, as my eight year old suggests, might be made of magic fairy dust?
Hydrate to live, drink coffee for life.
