Sitting in our weekly meeting. I’m up for a blog post but not overflowing with ideas. BZ asks, “So, what inspires you?” I reply, “Well, if you want to know what I find really inspiring I’ll tell you, but I’m not comfortable blogging about it.”
Coffee is going through a really fantastic, interesting time. We’re unwrapping a thing we thought so familiar and going, “Holy shit! This is so much more interesting, amazing and fabulous than we knew.” A cup of coffee became so ubiquitous that it simply lost its luster for most people. It’s a thing you drink in the morning. It has caffeine in it. It’s warm. You get used to the taste. It’s coffee. You know. So what?
And then some passionate people came along and begin to peer into the murk, looking for a certain something they thought just might really be there. Maybe those passionate people have always been out there. Certainly, they’ve been around a long time. What’s happening now, at long last, is that the passion is getting out, and regular old people get the pleasure of rediscovery. For me, it’s like seeing a movie and thinking, “Wow. I’ve never seen anything like that before.” If you’re lucky someone will create something and expose a perspective never seen before. It’s thrilling.
So, what is happening anyway? What’s happening is that RoastLog is in on it. What’s happening is that, just like all the roasters and cafes out there working so hard to learn how to let coffee reveal itself to people so they get to have that, “Wow!” moment when the old cup o joe turns out to be so much more and so much better, we are building the tools that help roasters expose those new dimensions and perspectives. In so doing, we’re exposing a new perspective ourselves, providing new and different insights into coffee roasting, facilitating discussion and information sharing, dreaming up new ways of collecting, analyzing and communicating information about roasting coffee. If we’re lucky, and we intend to be, RoastLog will be instrumental in this current renaissance. I can’t wait to see what we find out along the way.