Thoughts

A life changing beverage.

[kaw-fee, kof-ee]

cof·fee

Thoughtsabout

the little brown bean

While my family is not from the Scandinavia region of Europe, which is where they drink the most coffee in the world because they have long nights and cold winters, we are still from coffee-loving Europe. This is a daily ritual. There’s breakfast, there’s lunch, there’s dinner, and then there’s ‘coffee time’. When Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian people give housewarming gifts or other big holiday gifts, coffee is often a staple. I have grown up with coffee and have adopted my family’s and my culture’s love for it. To me, coffee represents family and my heritage.

It’s A Family TraditionI love the taste of coffee. I love that there are countless varieties of flavors and ways to make it–there’s always adventure involved in tasting a new flavor. The fact that coffee beans come from natural plants guarantees that coffee made from different geographical regions will have different flavors. I also love the smell. I enjoy it so much that I’ve actually caught myself salivating in anticipation of coffee when I smell it, like other people might do when they are excited and can smell a great meal.

It tastes good

I know this might sound like an oxymoron, a relaxing caffeine-filled stimulant? For me, yes. I drink coffee like some people may drink wine. I love sitting down, grabbing a book, and brewing up a cup of coffee. To me coffee has always been more about relaxing than it has about waking up and getting more energy. I enjoy it slowly. Sometimes so slowly that I have to throw a cup back into the microwave because it get’s cold.

It’s relaxingDespite what people may think, coffee does not have detrimental health effects. Actually, there are research findings suggesting that it seems to protect against type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, liver cancer, and cardiovascular disease. This information is coming from Dr. Rob van Dam, from the Harvard Department of Nutrition. I don’t know about you, but I’m okay with trusting research that comes out of Harvard University.

It’s good for me (I think)

WHY I LOVE COFFEE 15

A bitter brew

A place that seats 25 will have to employ at least two people for every shift: someone to work the front and someone for the kitchen (assuming you find a guy who will both uncomplainingly wash dishes and reliably whip up pretty crepes; if you’ve found that guy, you’re already in better shape than most NYC restaurateurs.

You’re also, most likely, already in trouble with immigration services). Budgeting $15 for the payroll for every hour your charming cafe is open (let’s say 10 hours a day) relieves you of $4,500 a month. That gives you another $4,500 a month for rent and $6,300 to stock up on product. It also means that to come up with the total needed $18K of revenue per month, you will need to sell that product at an average of a 300 percent markup.

Pastries, for instance, are a monetary black hole unless you bake them yourself. We started out by engaging a pedigreed gentleman baker with Le Bernardin on his résumé.

I never realized how ubiquitous the dream of opening a small coffeehouse was until I fell under its spell myself. Friends’ eyes misted over when my wife and I would excitedly recite our concept (“Vienna roast from Vienna! It’s lighter and sweeter than bitter Italian espresso—no need to drown it in milk!”). It seemed that just about every boho-professional couple had indulged in this fantasy at some point or another.

The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one’s own boss—none of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper—all the way to Barbie tea sets—than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they’re going to lose a lot of it.

Life’s not always rainbows – find out about the nightmare of a failed coffee joint and how it haschanged his life

Coffee brings people together. I’ve met some of the closest people in my life through coffee, and I hang out with them by drinking coffee. Like the author of this coffee-themed Huffington Post article a few days ago, I love working and hanging out in cafés. I can’t stand the silence of my room (music helps in this case). I love the hustle and bustle of a café; the music, the conversations, the sounds of coffee being made. And the smells, oh the smells of coffee. I love having conversations with people from the community and getting a feel for any by visiting a popular local coffee shop when I first arrive.

It’s Communicative

A personal reccount of John Kimmel

01 A bitterbrewPg 04 –A man’s sad story of his coffee joint

02 BaristaThoughts

03 Why I love coffee

Pg 08 –Find out why Sera Ann loves to bea barista!

Pg 14–Do you love coffee too?

Good morning large americano! How are you small non-fat latte? Hey there medium drip, I saved the last muffin for you! Yes, some customers are really mean, some customers are really nice and other customers are these people, the regulars.

Regardless of whether these people are bubbly or downright depressing to interact with, they’re familiar and expressive of their appreciation in that they come in every day. It makes me feel sharp when I can just see your face and know that I’m supposed to make a small, iced americano with extra ice and a smidgen of room for soy. And the praise makes me feel even better.

The Regulars

The PerksWhen I’m working, I have an endless supply of coffee to get me through my day. That’s a perk. When I’m not working, I can go into work and get it for cheap. That’s a perk. But along with those perks, I also have the advantage of coffee knowledge. Unlike many other American coffee drinkers, baristas develop a taste for coffee that is rooted in pleasure rather than necessity. That, is definitely a perk.

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9In the same vein, I love love love it when custom-ers know and address me by my name (and some-times even my nickname). Many of our regulars know all of our names. It just makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

Name That Barista!

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Coffee was a different story—thanks to the trail blazed by Starbucks, the world of coffee retail is now a rogue’s playground of jaw-dropping markups. An espresso that required about 18 cents worth of beans (and we used very good beans) was sold for $2.50 with nary an eyebrow raised on either side of the counter. A dab of milk froth or a splash of hot water transformed the drink into a macchiato or an Americano, respectively, and raised the price to $3. The house brew too cold to be sold for $1 a cup was chilled further and reborn at $2.50 a cup as iced coffee, a drink whose appeal I do not even pretend to grasp. But how much of it could we sell?

Discarding food as a self-canceling expense at best, the coffee needed to account for all of our profit. We needed to sell roughly $500 of it a day. This kind of money is only achievable through solid foot traffic, but, of course, our cafe was too cozy and charming to pop in for a cup to go. The average coffee-to-stay customer nursed his mocha (i.e., his $5 ticket) for upward of 30 minutes. Don’t get me started on people with laptops.

There was, of course, one way to make the cafe viable: It was written into the Golden Rule itself. My wife Lily and I could work there, full-time, save on the payroll, and gerrymander the rest of the budget to allow for lower sales.

The psychological gap between working in a cafe because it’s fun and romantic and doing the exact same thing because you have to is enormous. Within weeks, Lily and I—previously ensconced in an enviably stress-free marriage—were at each other’s throats. I hesitate to say which was worse: working the same shift or alternating. Each option presented its own small tortures. Two highly educated professionals with artistic aspirations have just put themselves—or, as we saw it, each other—on $8-per-hour jobs slinging coffee. After four more months, we grew suspicious of each other’s motives, obsessively kept track of each other’s contributions to the cause (“You worked three days last week!”), and generally waltzed on the edge of divorce. The marriage appears to have been saved by a well-timed bankruptcy.

A BITTER BREW 05

things I loveabout being a

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I vividly remember my first day on the coffeebar. It was hellish. I had been handed the responsibility of providing the public with their morning coffee without even knowing what hit me. I knew nothing about the espresso machine. I hadn’t learned how to steam milk properly. In my memory I see 15 or 20 empty cups lining the counter, waiting to be filled with lattes and mochas and cappuccinos.

At that point, I still hardly knew the difference. What I remember the best is burning my hand, being yelled at by a patron who was “appalled” that I didn’t know what breve means and swiftly being thrown off bar for a good month if not more.

While the job itself is difficult, it seems that Jolee’s list of grievances is focused primarily on customer interaction. That truly is the hardest part—it can be distressing, upsetting and devaluing to deal with mean people.

But there’s good news: For every busy-body jerk who neglects to say his pleases and thank yous, there’s a gentleman who seems to have been raised right. For every inconsiderate college girl who orders while she’s on the phone (apologizing not to you, but to whomever is on the line), there are handfuls of considerate young men and women who treat me like a human being and disprove the claim that our generation sucks.

My job as a barista turned me into a morning person. Before I became a barista, and in between jobs, six a.m. didn’t exist to me. But it really is the most beautiful part of the day. Waking up early is always a positive experience, especially when you have good coffee at hand.

Morning Glory

Nothing in the world smells better than coffee. Few things taste as good. What’s sexier than the perfect shot, in all of its caramel-colored greatness, it’s chocolate-hued mottling? It’s difficult, in any other instance, to get me as excited as I am when I steam the perfect pitcher of milk—smooth, fluffy, white and flawless like new-fallen snow. And when it mixes with that perfect shot, and I’m able toform the perfect rosetta… not many other things are as beautiful as this.

A Perfect Shot

Thirst for KnowledgeOnce you fall in love with coffee, and all the aspects of its preparation from bean to cup, there’s no turning back. Soon enough you’ll want to know everything, from where it’s sourced to how it’s roasted to how it tastes made in a french press versus pour over. You’ll spend all your time sniffing, sipping and slurping. I know that sounds like a weird (or even kind of gross) way to spend your time, but that’s how I spend mine and I’m happy as a clam.

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BARISTA THOUGHTS 09

Coffee NerdI’ve become a coffee nerd, and the place to find more coffee nerds to nerd out over coffee with is at the coffee shop—usually behind the counter. You work with a lot of amazing, interesting and passionate people when you work with coffee. I’ve met some of my closest and dearest forever friends at work. I don’t believe a whole lot of people can truly make that claim.

ExperimentalistSometimes, being a barista is like being a mad scientist. How can we make a latte taste like peanut brittle? Or a girl scout cookie? What does this roast taste like brewed three different ways? Why does an almond milk latte taste like wood and how can we get it to stop doing that? So the next time you order something off of the specials board at your coffee shop of choice, be aware of this process and try tasting it too.

It’s hard to master, fun to make, and well worth the ooohs and ahhhs. With my latteart mentor, making both art and latte at the same time feels the best.

Latte Art

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Any tip is a good tip. Baristas, like waitresses, aren’t the most well-paid people on the planet and depend a lot upon their tips to make ends meet. Becoming a barista requires the attainment of some extremely detailed and hard to master skills. Good tippers (meaning any tippers) make me love my job because it shows that they acknowledge and understand that the skills I used to make their drink weren’t honed in a day.

Tip Me Over

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If it weren’t for coffee,I’d have no

personality whatsoever.

David Letterman

indentifiable

Sources:

Elephant Journal 2010http://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/05/10-things-i-love-about-being-a-barista-ren-cousineau/

Slate Magazine http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bit-ter_brew.html

Serious Eats http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2011/08/opening-a-coffee-shop-advice-for-cafe-owners-tips-mistakes-to-avoid-small-business-owner.html

Illustrations: Gladys Seet

Credits