I wrote recently about roasting coffee at home and listed some things I’ve learned about coffee over the years. I’ve continued to learn as I’ve roasted and drunk (that’s sounds weird but I assure you it’s grammatically correct), and I’m going to share them here.

Yeah, I’m doing listicles now. And listicles sounds like a portmanteau for testicles that pull to one side, so, you know, balls.

There’s a book that I highly recommend by Larry Olmsted called Real Food/Fake Food. In it, Olmsted discusses food fraud, with an emphasis on Italian food (which I love); the gist of it, if you’re not much for book-readin’, is that thanks to America’s misplaced values and general lack of respect and basic human decency, we consume enormous amounts of food that’s not what it claims to be, that could not legally be sold as such in other countries that care more about things like accurate labeling, health, farmers, etc.

There is a group of adages suggesting that to reach your goals, you must first behave as if you have already achieved them. “Fake it ‘til you make it.” “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson calls it “working the gimmick”; various cultists and self-help charlatans have sold their own versions of the idea for centuries, if not millennia. I don’t put much stock in aphorisms, and even less in mysticism, but because my goals for the rest of my life are essentially lifestyle goals, as opposed to targeted accomplishments, I’ve been trying to build the life I desire and incorporate what elements I can, a little at a time. I may not wake up on a big, beautiful farm in the tropics, but I do wake up on a small, kind of shitty farm in the Pacific Northwest, and that’s closer to my goals than, say, an office job and an apartment in the Midwest.

It may not seem like much, but one of my lifestyle goals is to have a superb cup of coffee every morning. Continue reading →