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Foreword

With these past couple of months coming down towards myself a lot harder than I’ve had the misfortune of experiencing within recent memory, I have found myself consistently wrung dry of energy and motivation to expand upon many of my ever-evolving endeavors. Unfortunately, this perfectly tracks with my own personality and the way that I have been choosing to take my adult life, so the current task is to figure out a way to cope with being myself in a sustainable fashion.

So joining in that effort is a kickstart of another shard for me to contain every single one of my hot takes,, advices, tips, observations, etc. I’ve been able to accumulate and teach myself throughout the years being a player within the specialty coffee scene. This would help me cultivate a space where bursts, or sprints if you’re a software developer, would be more welcomed, instead of shards requiring me to have a huge break of a unique idea that is significant enough to be curated into an entire shard. This will hopefully result in a curation of a much lower-effort read on your end as well, for those of you who would just visit Fracture Laboratories in search of quick advice and smaller tidbits to help you continue your own journey.

Hot Takes

• Coffee + Milk is not the ultimate/only combo.

  • Admittedly playing devil’s advocate, milk in its various common forms within the Western side of the world, does do a fantastic job mitigating the bitter notes of the coffee, and amplifying the sweeter notes of the coffee. Another side effect is that it dilutes the concentration of coffee within the drink, which gives the coffee a wider and smoother hit on the palate. So I guess there is merit to the Western tried-and-true, and there is an entirely valid reason as to why this combo is 95% of the coffee shops out there’s starting point when building out a fixed or seasonal coffee menu/program.
  • When you stop limiting yourself to the tried-and-true as the only way to create coffee-based drinks, you’ll start to realize that there is an entirely broad world of tried-and-true combinations through which cultures and regions have been enjoying coffee ever since the dawn of time. Some quick examples off the top of my head (quick-firing with their main ingredients and ignoring the multitude of tertiary ingredients and countless variations of the same category):
    • Just coffee + sugar can create an Italian espresso shakerato, or a café cubano.
    • Coffee + condensed milk can make a Vietnamese cà phê sữa đá, or a Spanish café bombón.
    • Coffee + different blends of spices can make a South Asian masala coffee, or a Central/South American café de olla.
    • Coffee + egg makes a cà phê trứng (Vietnamese egg coffee).
    • Coffee + cheese makes a Swedish kaffeost, or a Finnish juustoleipä (Scandinavian coffee cheese, which has been experiencing a recent resurgence in popularity within the past 2-3 years).
    • along with a myriad other regional examples…
  • In my opinion, if we were going to embrace the characteristics of third-wave coffee and lean into the approach of focusing on the distinct characteristics of each coffee, it would do coffee a massive service to bring in other culinary pieces to the table that would complement, contrast, amplify, and mitigate ALL of the various notes that the coffee presents. By becoming too comfortable with the traditional base of coffee + milk, due to the effects it has as I’ve discussed at the top of the section, we’re in a way reinforcing the stereotypical notion of coffee simply possessing two characteristics in this order, which are bitter and sweet. This goes against the core philosophy that specialty third-wave coffee tries its best to embrace, which is that coffee can be SO MUCH more than just bitter, sweet, and caffeine. The coffee bean itself has an amazing array of flavor compounds, and depending on your brewing methods and techniques, you’ll be able to present varying concentrations of certain flavor compounds within your resulting cup of coffee.
  • The points I make here will conveniently lead to my next hot take, so keep reading along.

• Creamer ain’t all that bad.

  • It is also to be said that I personally am not a fan of creamer in my own coffee. I know that that might be a bit confusing, but hear me out. As I discussed previously in the hot take above, there is a lot of interplay between the myriad of flavor compounds present in the coffee bean and the things you add to your coffee. Certain flavors complement one another, some others entirely mute each other out, etc. That being said, similar to different types of milks, the world of creamers does present that extra layer of flavor that reveals its own set of flavor interplay, and thus different manufacturers can take their own shot at taking their own approaches to creamers that people add in coffee. For instance, one creamer can aim to be a jack-of-all-trades (or an omni-creamer if you will, as a humorous parallel to a roaster’s omni-roast) that can be added to the widest range of coffees and will work well with any of them. And another creamer might shoot to be a creamer best used for chocolatey South American medium roasts that might emphasize the lackluster layer of floral depth to that type of coffee. So on and so forth. And thus typing this out, I realized that this hot take carries with it the near-impossible assumption that the specialty coffee world will adopt creamers into its repertoire.
  • Another point to make is that creamers, as an over-generalized category, make coffee easier for people to get into. And thus, it presents another entryway for people to be introduced to coffee, and potentially be brought on board with the journey later on.

Hot Tips

• Like any other field, hobby, or profession, a gross oversimplification for the sake of continuity is that it is much more simple than you’d think. Don’t obsess over too fine of details, learn to detect and understand patterns.

  • While my entire life motto sincerely goes against every single thing this hot take preaches, I do believe wholeheartedly in this when it applies to the general specialty coffee participant/member in any stage. With the nature of specialty coffee needing more visibility, continuity, and vertical progress in order to sustain as viable endeavors (in both the business sense and the resource, time, and energy sense), the decline of some not-so-sustainable horizontal branches of the field might potentially result in the loss of efficiency and resources that could have been utilized for upward progress.
  • Don’t get too caught up in the smaller minute details (like obsessing over brewing with accuracies of 0.1 g, weighing out your milk before steaming, etc., tiny differences in the minerals in your brewing water, worrying about the tiny area that you might have missed in your RDT, worrying about how many sprays of water you did onto your beans before grinding, etc.). As you’re progressing through your journey in coffee, whether as a barista, home brewer, roaster, shop owner, etc., to a certain extent the finer (pun intended) details of your processes do set you apart and define that journey as unique within a myriad of other similar journeys and progressions. But if you’re starting to find yourself over-stressing about pulling 0.2g of extra weight in your resulting shot and obsessing over if that extra 0.2g might have turned your shot from potentially perfect to utterly bland, it might be a sign to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of things.
  • Like any other field, hobby, or profession, pattern recognition is entirely crucial, and on this point I will always preach with my full chest. My niche approach within this field is the constant over-obsession, over-repetition, and over-analyses of the finer minute details that will result in more and more patterns popping up from data and experience that I can add to my arsenal. But that is not to say that most of you will, or should, need to follow that philosophy. It is an excruciatingly slow process that, if you’re only trying to get to set destinations most efficiently, this fine-detail approach is probably not for you. Instead, focus on learning patterns that people have already been floating around the community, like getting an intuitive understanding of how much air to inject into what type of milk, what coffees to use as an espresso base for which types of milk, how much/little you should extract when it comes to certain roasts and certain beans, how to solve the issue of your shot channeling by watching the behavior of the extracted shot and tasting it. Again, train your pattern recognition. Use your intuitions when you think you have a potential solution to something, and trust in it to implement it into improving the next time around. Most times your intuition doesn’t lie, but do try and verify that intuition over time to build up stronger pattern intuitions over time.

• Consistency is key!!!

  • Within any subsect of the field, whether it be professionally or as a hobby, do strive to be as consistent with your routines and your techniques as you possibly can. With consistency, you would be able to keep track of variables that changed that led to a better or worse brew, and thus would give you a great (in my opinion potentially the only) way to learn about characteristics of your brews and beans, as well as ways to improve your techniques.

• Don’t yuck someone else’s yum.

  • This incredibly important tip was passed onto me from the now moved important players of the Austin coffee scene - the lovely couple Madison Stubbs and Brady O’Brien. We were having a lovely conversation about the nature and the debate behind co-ferments, in the middle of the company they work for, the important Medici Roasting of Austin, were starting to carry wider and wider selections of co-ferments. And for those of you who have been following Fracture Laboratories for a while, you might be able to recall that I had a very well-read opinion piece on co-ferments, drawing parallels between the art of co-ferments and the practice of film photography, and how the practice and the enjoying of co-fermented coffee will always have a welcomed place in specialty coffee if specialty coffee chooses to practice what it preaches. The original idea that has been the cornerstone of my specialty coffee journey, perfectly aligning with the way I live my life and love those around me, was admittedly set in stone during that conversation with the O’Briens. To tie it back to my bigger point, if specialty coffee were to practice what it preaches about coffee and coffee people being so much more than people would imagine, it should set out to embrace, or at least not knock, differences between approaches, executions, and enjoyments.
  • At the end of the day, it’s just a hobby. Granted, it’s a hobby that some people are fortunate enough to call a job or a passion (such as myself). People like what they like, and at the end of the day they are trying to bring what you like to you, in the fastest, most efficient, and most affordable way possible. As a relatively small and still budding field, we have to consider and reserve space for people to enter and coexist within the playground that we all love so dearly, because what they bring to the table, whether you see it or not, will directly or indirectly have an impact on what you yourself bring to the table.
  • That brings me to an additional point. Regarding business competitors who are feeling not quite appreciative of your fellow peers within the same small or big playing field for one reason or another, I’ll leave this with you. Your peers will either bring healthy competition or healthy companionship, and the exchange of information, ideas, knowledge, sentiments, customers, etc. almost always promotes a much healthier and much more sustainable consumer market for you and/or your team.