Bitter Press

Essays: Trust me, I’m a coffee worker

With the thousands of separate variables that dictate whether or not a cup of coffee is good or not, it seems funny to focus on trust as one of them. However, water formulations, presence of fines, technique — none of them mean a whole lot if the consumer doesn’t put trust in the cup.

It’s easy to hear a lot of folks who work in coffee wish that customers had more trust in the coffee that they’re preparing. If there was more trust, then there wouldn’t be such a rush to the condiment counter for sugar or cream. But that’s only part of the equation. There needs to be the same level of trust between coffee workers across the world. Trust in the fact that no matter where you go, wherever you are, you’re going to be delivered the best service utilizing best knowledge and available technology that this place has.

I’m extremely lucky and grateful to work for Intelligentsia, but we’ve grown a bit as a company, and most coffee shops don’t have access to the resources that we do. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a certain quality available there.



Regional shops and small counters have their own specialties, and the coffee workers there are bound to have an opinion of their own product. Asking for a recommendation is easy; trusting that they’ll steer you right is the hard part.

There’s nothing worse than the person who knows exactly what they want, and instead of trying to find an equivalent on a menu, they try to describe it to the coffee worker and create their own beverage. That person is probably not going to be satisfied with the end result, and they should know it.

Put trust into the fact that that shop has a set number of drinks that they can prepare to 100% quality. Everything else is sort of winging it, and if the coffee workers don’t know exactly what this person wants, then it’ll be hard to have an equivalent for the coffee worker to go off of.

This concept also desperately needs to spread to brew methods. There’s a certain fella who lives in Chicago and was considering a brew competition throw down. I said “Great, I’ll bring my Hario V60!”

“Oh you can’t win with a V60,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t extract enough.”

Then this fella rattled off some scientific data on extraction levels, etc. Now I’m fairly new to the whole in depth specialty coffee world. Up until last August, I’d never tasted coffee from a Chemex before. What I do know, however, is that I make approximately 50-100 cups on a V60 five days a week, and that I couldn’t in good conscience keep that up if I didn’t believe that you could get a tasty cup off that sucker.

Maybe there is hard, empirical data that says the V60 is flawed with it’s extraction rate, but what does that matter to me? So I adjust my grind and dose and water temp and behold! Delicious coffee! All that’s missing is the trust that I’ll be able to make a tasty cup off that thing.

There’s also an instinctive territorial stance about brew techniques that I think impedes progress. I recently watched a video of a Chemex pour that had an absolute backwards theory about pouring style. I’ve always been under the thought-sphere that concentrating the pour in the center of the Chemex would help keep it from side-channelling. In the video, the man poured along the sides until a dry island of coffee grounds was floating in the middle, which he waited until the end to sink. Initially, I thought “This is wrong.”

But I was wrong. This is a technique that’s produced a tasty cup. Otherwise he wouldn’t be filming it. Given a dose and a brew volume, as well as a grind size, and I’d try this technique myself. Placing trust in the resulting cup bridges the gap between the different coffee worlds and stokes the every burning flame of collaboration and innovation.

Okay, that last bit was cheesey sounding, but I do honestly believe that the more we all work together and put trust into each other, the quicker we’ll move forward as an industry as a whole.

And apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks along these lines. While I’ve been stewing over this blog post for a while, the well traveled Scottie Callaghan pre-empted me with this one on Monday.