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Reflections
In Portland we have a magical wonderland called the "bargain basement" at Next Adventure. It is a whole treasure trove of used outdoor adventure goods. Your city has them too. Need new snowboard boots for the season? How about dropping $40 on a pair of last year's rentals? Did you blow out your MTB shoes? There's a pair of Five Ten Kestrel shoes (barely used) for $55. Need base layers for winter riding? Covered. Goggles? Yep. Mountaineering boots? Plenty.
Sometimes I forget we're in the coffee industry. In my mind we're in the bike industry. Odd admission. What I mean is this. When I started Loam Coffee I was mentally coming from the vantage point of a mountain biker, former mountain biking guide, and immersed in the mountain biking culture. As a result, I viewed ourselves from the very beginning like a bike or component company ... a RaceFace, Pivot, Maxxis, Shimano, etc.
This is who we are; friends, riders, family. Though many of us will never have the opportunity to ride together, we know that as we descend, every rider is with us, leaving their mark in the dirt behind us.
I like pedaling. I like climbing. I like long climbs. I even like long technical lung-busting climbs.
And then I moved to the Pacific Northwest. For years prior I was a XC singlespeed guy ... long rides through the desert, undulating terrain, and the only consistent verticality seemed to be when going up. In other words, climbing was simply part of it. That was it. End of story.
We spend the winter pining for long dry summer days where we can ride late into the evening and log endless hours on the trail. Sure, we may complain about blown out trails and thick dust, but we love basking in the sun. This is especially true for those of us here in the Pacific Northwest where at times the sun seems like it is merely stuff of legends or a mythical creature like bigfoot or loch ness monster because it is almost never seen. We even use hashtags like #sunsoutgunsout as we revel in the glow of that giant orb in the sky that our planet hurtles around.
The coffee scene has gone through a lot of twists, turns, and changes over the millennia. Particularly over the last 75 years have we seen successive "waves" of changes ... from large commercial brands like Folgers and Maxwell House (first wave) to Starbucks, Seattle's Best, and Peets (second wave) to now the explosion of third wave or specialty roasters with early pioneers in the mid to late 90s like Stumptown, Counter Culture, and Intelligentsia. So what is the third wave? According to Scott Rao the third wave "now typically refers to companies favoring lighter roasts and brewed-to-order coffee made by hipsters" (The Coffee Roaster's Companion, 11).
