It may just be human nature, but anything we do repetitively – no matter how simple – has the possibility of becoming quite technical and complicated, and it becomes important to step back, breathe, and reassess the situation. It was in this spirit, that our new coffee brewing method (debuting at our new space) was born.
Tomorrow will be the last day of a very important era at the shop… the era of Mariah working for me. While we enjoy the metaphor of a business running like a machine, this is at best an understatement and probably just a flat out lie. The reality is that businesses run because of the people who work at them.
Mariah has been at the shop for 5 years, which is almost its entire life. Through those years she has quietly and graciously taken whatever task I gave and done it as perfectly as possible. Wake up five mornings a week and pull shot after shot? Yes. Organize the backroom? Yes. Keep the shop clean? Yes. Most daunting of all, keep me organized and on track? Yes.
Many regulars have had a constant every morning, being able to wake up to a sassy joke and a delicious beverage. Judging by the gifts and cards, I know they realize this.
And this of course is the real meaning of a cup of coffee. Not the hints of lemon, or the perfect extraction, but the relationships we develop while sipping.
Mariah is moving on to other things, and of course we wish her luck (although she barely needs it) in all she accomplishes. Of course, a part of us wants one more morning, but what we really want is to say thank you for all the cups we’ve already had.
Thank you, Mariah.
An interesting conversation was happening on Twitter this afternoon involving pricing and creating an espresso café culture here in the Twin Cities that more closely resembled Italy. Due to the fact that I’m not very good at checking Twitter, my response is almost certainly beyond tardy, but also this is a topic that deserves much more than 140 characters.
On Monday, my wife and I took my nephew to Sweetland Orchard to do some apple picking. It couldn’t have been a more gorgeous fall day.
I was reading in the paper today about the ongoing saga with Surly Brewing and its “destination” brewery. Cities are falling over themselves to court the company, while Surly remains coy about its plans.
This is all well and good, I suppose, but one quote from the article struck me. The owner of Surly’s described the ventures as “something people are going to travel to… It’s not like it’s just a neighborhood tavern.” What is so disconcerting about this statement is the lack of interest in place, as if being part of a neighborhood somehow degrades a product. And seems to imply that location is just another asset to be assessed be the numbers people.
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Last week I was reading the Dining & Wine section of the New York Times. There was a wine article about Barbera wines written by Eric Asimov.
While I enjoyed the entire article, one phrase really stuck in my head. He described a wine as “an easy-to-swallow lesson in how wine could be both pleasurable and thought-provoking, while performing its basic function of making food taste better.” (italics mine).
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Every weekend at the shop we do something we call Brew Bar, in which we take one coffee and explore a slower brewing method. The results are a brew that is really quite awesome, and – even better – can easily be done at home.
Another year has come and gone, which means it’s once again time for a Rick Love art installation at the shop. While a lot of art is content to simply hang on the wall, Rick’s like to move in and live in the space. Perhaps some regulars remember his neon “Clean is Not Perfect” and video loops from years past.
All this got me thinking about the ways in which we both allow and deny people access to our space and lives.
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Today I started training for my latest employee to work the espresso bar, which is an awesome time to reflect on what I’ve learned about espresso and coffee thus far in my life.
There was a recent opinion piece in the Star Tribune about waste and resources that used my industry as an examples. While I respect the author’s point with regards to making recycling rules simpler and more streamlined in order to decrease the amount of waste we throw into our nation’s landfills, I think there was essential failure of imagination about the way in which we produce and consume things.
Andrew Kopplin creates some of the most brilliant coffees, tasty teas and delicious hot chocolate in the Midwest. His café, Kopplin\'s Coffee, has a comfortable and modern aesthetic make for a popular meeting spot in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul, attracting a micro-culture of friendly people from all over the Twin Cities.