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It is definitely that time of the year where many of you travel greater distances and embark on epic adventures. As temps consistently warm up (speaking from the PNW point of view) and we shift into summer mode many of you with jobs that keep you close to home Monday through Friday try and eke out travels on weekends, explore greater distances on long weekends, and use hard earned vacation time to push the boundaries even farther.
Race season is now in full force ... Enduro World Series, DH World Cup, and then a host of local and regional enduro, DH, and cross country races. Whether you're a sponsored racer, privateer, or weekend shredder, many of you are now getting into race season mode as you dial in your routine. What to bring? How much? Sleeping arrangements. Food. Travel. Oh, and then there's your bike ... are you flying solo? Do you have a mechanic? Lots of questions as you tweak things from race to race and weekend to weekend.
How's your coffee game?
Last week I ran into one of our loyal customers. He periodically orders 1-2 bags at a time and has done so over the past year. In the course of our conversation he paused and said, "My favorite cup of Loam Coffee ever was the Boondocker I had last May." Last May? I thought. What was different about the Boondocker back then versus the Boondocker now? Everything.
Drinking coffee is odd at times. No, not the actual process of drinking coffee itself but the stigmas attached to it. On one end of the spectrum you have blue collar miners packing a thermos full of (probably bad grocery store) black coffee in their lunch pails for the day. Gritty, hard-working, tough as nails and their coffee smells (and tastes) as bad their clothes at the end of their shift (or worse). At the other end of the spectrum you have bearded skinny jeans-wearing city-dwelling hipsters who're faux-gritty also drinking black coffee. The difference though is not about who's drinking coffee but the actual quality of coffee itself.
I like pizza. I also like (and love) sushi, peanut butter, pears, asparagus, and breakfast burritos. That's the easy part. The difficult question to answer is why? Why do I love what I do? I'm afraid that would would take years on the couch of a psychologist to plumb the depths of that question. Or maybe it really isn't that complicated after all. Maybe the answer is simply, "I just do."
Roasting coffee is ultimately a creative and artisan endeavor. It is a skill and trade that predates the current trend of the explosion of micro-roasters. "Back in the day" many people simply roasted their own coffee at home. You can read accounts of fathers roasting their coffee early in the morning as the smells wafted through the narrow streets of the Italian villages they called home. The only thing that has changed is the technological advancements and sophistication of our machines and the better quality of coffee that is being grown in places from Colombia to Ethiopia to Vietnam (well, maybe a little more changes than that, but you get the point).
