Writing about coffee

September 1st, 2009

If the experience of doing a bunch of video blogs has taught me anything it is that I much prefer writing about coffee.

I was thinking the other day that I really enjoy a lot of blogs that I read, but having read a bit about wine or food recently I felt that what I wanted to read were decent length, well thought out articles about coffee.  Any aspect of coffee really, just researched and interesting.

I still want to read articles like that, but I figure that if you want something you may as well start yourself.  I’ve had the jameshoffmann.co.uk domain kicking around for a while so I figured it was time to do something with it.

The first article is up now, and is about as short as they’ll be on there.  I won’t post stuff up there very often, and it is as much for me to indulge in the pleasure of writing as anything else.  I am not saying these will be perfectly researched, detailed, faultless things – you can doubtless pick a million holes in this first one and on – but that is what I am working towards (knowing I’ll never get there).

I deeply enjoy writing about coffee, and want to do it better so I feel it ought to have its own distinct channel.  I am not abandoning this site – it will merely have a stronger focus on blogging, and hopefully get updated a bit more often, and to keep the community and conversation that goes on here for which I am very grateful.

Anyways – here’s the link:  Journalism and Coffee

On a side note – there are two videos left and I hope to finish them soon, plus I will hopefully have an update to the Chemex technique video done some time in September.  Plus I need to wrap up the latte art competition and get a winner announced!  All this very soon.

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  • http://twitter.com/lawrencebrown Lawrence Brown

    I would find it quite interesting if you included a Tumblr or Posterous engine to your 'jameshoffmann' site, some designers, musicians and young business people doing this on the web have provided a great resource for accessing new music, interesting reading, movies, music, writing, magazines, you get the point…

    I am soon to launch one of these myself – more for my own documentation. Have you seen http://www.daytum.com/feltron (this is the profile of Nick Feltron who is an obsessive statistics collector) – perhaps Squaremile could start one of these based around coffee region, or something along those lines.

    Just some thoughts whizzing around between the ears.

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/jimseven James Hoffmann

    I think I want to keep the other site as stripped down as possible.

    However I have been thinking about something like that for this blog. This will likely remain the main focal point for me online, so it fits better here.

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  • http://onocoffee.com The Onocoffee

    James-
    I'm like you, I prefer to read interesting articles about coffee and our industry, but those are far and few between – if at all. Your comments remind me of CNN.com where they include lots of video coverage that I always skip in favor of the written word. Quite simply: the written word is faster and I almost never view online videos because of it.

    Can we really expect more from our community of Tweeting people? When thinking and thoughts have become truncated to quick sound bites intended more to provoke or show how big ones' balls are, rather than a true discussion of issues? I'm definitely in favor of reading thorough articles about our business but I don't think they're coming anytime soon.

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/jimseven James Hoffmann

      Well I think twitter has removed a lot of clutter from coffee blogs. Fewer people are updating with strung out posts that could be condensed down to short, concise ideas. This is a good thing – there is nothing worse than feeling you ought to write more (like padding out essays from school to reach your word limit) when you have nothing to say.

      I will try and post interesting things, the stuff on the other site will probably retain a stronger focus towards the industry rather than the consumer, who I'll keep writing for here. (Or trying to!)

  • http://cwoffee.com/ Mike Gomez

    With all the bad news going on around the world, I too find it pleasant to read and write things about coffee. It somehow soothes me just by thinking about it.