I’m a little conflicted when it comes to the idea of tradition. I firmly believe that an understanding of the past, especially its mistakes, is crucial to understanding the present and composing a reasonable guess at the future. A lot of coffee’s past is covered with the blanket of tradition, but I think we often neglect to look underneath to try and understand why and where they’ve come from.

I don’t really want to write this as a response to the articles Giorgio Milos has been writing, though they’ve probably helped crystalize some thoughts. We, as an industry, are continually struggling to deal with the impact and importance of Italian espresso traditions. (more…)

I am sure many people have seen this but in case I thought I’d repost it. Outstanding work!

More info here.

This post is a result of the rather excellent post on Chemically Imbalanced. I’m grateful to Ben at CI for consistently writing such good stuff, even if it takes three goes to understand every sentence.

His latest post is great.

It raises, to me, a few rather uncomfortable thoughts and ideas so I thought I’d share them in order to make them less terrifying.
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