Roastmaster's Blog

Friday the 13th

SEVEN

Psychic Coffee Phenomenon

Yesterday I walked across the room and around the corner and into an old dream. There, at the sofa, sat a Caucasian man and two Asian men, all wearing business suits. I don't know why. And not a word was exchanged between us. I'd only seen them once before, in my sleep. Insignificant details. But I dream a lot. And my dreams become reality.

I once was visiting my cousin, Greg, and we were both probably around 10 or 12 years old. I was always fooling around with cards, maybe because my parents weren't allowed to play cards growing up and so there were cards all over our house. And we were fascinated by card tricks and fancy shuffling techniques. But card tricks weren't my forte; that was my brother's thing. So I shuffled the deck with a simple riffle and bridge and told Greg I wanted to show him a trick. "Pick a card." "Look at it and memorize it and put it back in the deck, anywhere you want." He stuck it back in the middle. And I shuffled the deck some more. A lot more. An unreasonable amount. So much that Greg became bored and annoyed. I shuffled and shuffled, and then I spread the cards like a fan and pulled one card out of the middle, and showed him the card and said, "That's your card." He was shocked. How did you do that? Do it again. Tell me how you did that. But I wouldn't budge.

Because I knew the one thing about card tricks that no one ever thinks of.

Even if you don't know any tricks, you still have a one-in-52 chance of being right.

To say, "This doesn't always work" is an understatement.

But that's not the only card trick I did growing up. My friends and I were determined that we could learn to do things that other people couldn't. We spent parts of our lives trying to teach our brains extra sensory perception. Focus. Concentrate. I see the card you have in your hand. Was it the card I could see or was it the mind of the person holding the card? Could I see into the future and know the next roll of the dice? And where did we cross the line between being right by a 1-in-52 chance and being able to know the card without looking? Was it a child's exercise in futility? Or did I learn something you don't know?

The average person only uses 10% of his brain, we were told. And we wondered what the other 90% was capable of. Statistically... we didn't keep track. Our goal was to be right every single time. We didn't know what we were doing. We just figured if we did it enough, we'd get better at it. Like learning Spanish. When I was right, I'd focus on the same thing again. Or was it the lack of focus? Having an open mind? Or focusing on the mind of my confederate? Or were we just practicing statistics?

"I'm a good guesser. That's how I got through high school." It was a catty remark I used to explain my uncanny ability to guess right. This has been an ongoing theme in my life.

I have always dreamt a lot. When I was a child, and we had moved from my birthplace to a town in red dirt country, I remember having a dream that I was a superhero and I was fighting crime and criminals, and I vaguely remember glimpses of the dark hallway and my shadowy parents and then the next morning, waking up to find out I had been sleepwalking through this dream. And the sleepwalking plagued me, finding me wide-eyed and nightmarish, wakeful but asleep, flying through the colors between mesas and struggling to avoid the big fall, straining, flailing. And playing basketball in the hallway of a hotel during a school trip to Washington D.C., in front of a roaring crowd at Madison Square Garden, schooling Dr. J and throwing up that jump-shot to win the game, and then waking up to my schoolmates standing around my bed with the teacher over me, asking me if I knew my name and if I had been taking drugs. But I also had dreams about conversations, about people I didn't recognize, foreshadowing real events that seemed to take place later when I would remember someone I had known for a short time in that dream before I met them, and the words coming out of their mouth would already be in my brain, because I had already dreamt it, already experienced it in my sleep, and my responses were already written down for my recital. Brief glimpses. Many people. New friends from old dreams. And I was told that my grandmother used to dream about people before their ultimate demise. A forecast of death. A foreboding shadow. But maybe it's hereditary. Her grandparents were Native American. Do the Indians have special powers?

You laugh.

But my dreams come true.

Can I penetrate your mind? When I look into your eyes, what do you feel? I know what you feel. I feel it too.

I feel it while I'm roasting.

The coffee beans, inside the drum, roasting. Hotter and hotter. Cracking. I feel their personalities and their emotions. They want to be roasted, but not too much. And I felt the rock was alive when I was a rock climber. I could feel that it wanted us on it. Or it didn't. I feel the objects you accuse of being inanimate and always fill my life with interesting chairs and sticks and skulls and saddles with stories and old paintings, everything old and interesting, because when they speak, I don't want to be bored. And as the coffee beans near their final moments in my roasting drum, I feel their anxiety and I connect with them through my hands in the cooling bin, caressing and helping them cool, because it's so hot, it's so hot. And I cried when I saw the 60 kilo hipster machine at the coolest coffee bar around, with its auto-loader and conveyers and I could feel the loneliness of the beans and I said what they told me: "This is where coffee comes to die." And everyone was having such a good time in that sanctuary, that mortuary, laughing and drinking PBR and name-dropping and one-upping each other through passive-aggressive backstabbing, oblivious to the pain and sadness which lived in that hall.

I touch your coffee. And it touches me.

Finding good coffees is always an ordeal. Getting samples from brokers or farmers and roasting them in my little 2-barrel Jabez Burns and tasting them and making notes, and then tasting them again and comparing them, trying to decide which is best or which is delicious or which is interesting. And then deciding how much to buy. And hoping it tastes good when it gets here- as good or as interesting as it did when I tasted it on the cupping table or in our sample trials. Is it luck? Just hitting the odds? Maybe I'm still a good guesser or my sixth sense is honed in...

We have some new coffees that have just arrived and more on the way.

A new Rwandan from a lady named Epiphanie Mukashyaka arrived yesterday, and I roasted it straight away. That's what I'm drinking now. It's good. Different than the last Rwanda we had. This one has spice and nut and it's a full, sweet cup. I think it's going to be a big hit. Also on yesterday's pallet we received a new crop Brazil from Fazenda Rodomunho. We had a dry-processed coffee from them previous to this, but the new coffee is a pulped natural, which means they ran the coffee through the pulper to take the cherry skins off and then they dried the coffee with the mucilage still attached. Compared to wet-processing, this tends to lend a bit more sweetness and slight fruit tones to the cup. The Brazil PN is nice - with traditional nuttiness, but added sweet molasses and a buttery finish.

More coffees on the way. I bought a washed Sidamo that I like. Complex, mild berry and citrus and chocolate. I also committed to buy two micro-lots from Costa Rica. One from Tarrazu, the same region as La Minita, from their regional mill called Dota in a town called Santa Maria, where I once rode my bike over the rolling mountains and sat in the park in front of the church, watching school kids mill around the square playing soccer and fraternizing. The other is a honey process coffee (which is another way of saying pulped natural) from the West Valley, of an old variety of Bourbon known as Villa Sarchi, which was grown and processed at the Genesis farm by Oscar and Olga Mendez. Pretty exciting stuff, and I'm roasting more samples today in search of more.

But all that is nothing. Just wait til I tell you about some other dreams of mine that have come true...

Patience and Persistence

Writing instead of pacing.

Pacing while thinking.

Thinking thinking, the neverending stream of thought: of wonder, of hope, of concern.

Like the Labyrinth of endless possibilities, my Minotaur mind rambles through scenario and logical conclusion and back again in every direction and every twist and turn. Looking through the concentric, jagged paths of a shattered windshield on a cold, rainy drive back to where I started. Round and round. Round, like Botero's Colombian family mistress. Like when there aren't the right words, and you talk a lot hoping to at least surround it. To lasso it.

I think because thought is mine, solely mine. I am the master of my thoughts; I think what I want to think and those thoughts become belief and reality. They become my essence. They transform me as heat transforms a coffee bean, as the aromatics from washed Ethiopian's lemon and jasmine and bergamot and darjeeling transform the air around me, as boots stomp through muddy roads high upon the mountains of rain-soaked and roya-infested Colombia. You can't hold me. I think what I want and who I am and what I do, and only I can decide what that is.

But thought is a fickle fellow, sometimes a rope around your ankle and sometimes around your neck, a tie tied too tightly. And sometimes it's a vast reflection into a river valley, coasting on the wind and on the back of a white horse, peering down to the winding ribbon of Cauca below and up the greenest grassy slope to the stand of trees hiding my dream of a house with no road, no trail, no way to reach it except on this horse. And my thought, my mind, my spirit becomes ensconced in love and fantasy, dreaming of waking up to these things I see, happy every day, in love, (in love) in love with the land and never taking for granted what surrounds me or who touches my left shirt pocket, calming the racing beast of a heart in my chest, never worrying so much that today becomes unimportant. Unimportant even though now I cannot see my love, the wrinkles in her grassy slope that smiles so earnestly and feels so soft against my thumb and my fingers, surrounding her and caressing her, but it's not just her features I love. It's her that I love. Her coffee trees that bear fruit through the joy of service, of labor, of helping and trusting and producing something you don't understand because someone asked you to.

It's the coffee I love. Coffee, the product of so many hands, on a tree, on the ground, on a ship, in a roaster, in your coffee brewer, in your cup and in your mouth, she feels so sweet and full and alive and we all feel grateful that today marks the most important day of this coffee's lifecycle, pleasing me in every way. Today.

But some desires are afar and outside, and yearning and longing sometimes can't change you, even though my mother always told me to be careful what I wished for because I might get it. That's what I want. To be careful. And to wish. And there are coffees out there, like that house on the hill in the stand of trees with the big shade tree just down the slope where I wanted to put a big leather chair so I could sit and read and watch my love smiling and bristling my fingernails against the inseam of her blue jeans, that I wish for and I just don't know. But I hope. And they tell me it's unavailable. You can't have it.

But I thought I could.

I thought the roaster that wanted it had decided he didn't want it any more and it was available again.

And I was given the tiniest bit, but the soul of it, the smallest 75 gram sample, and I roasted it so carefully and I was so gentle with it, so expressive with my experiences and deliberate in my affections for it, and I knew this coffee. I knew it from my youth. Not that I had known it before, but that I had dreamt of it, created it in my mind when I was but a boy and that creation created me. My deep desire and longing for this coffee created a man who could appreciate it, and the sample was but a whispering love song in my ear (had I no eyes, but ears, my ears would love that inward beauty, and invisible) and I knew instantly I wanted it and it wanted me, and we tasted one another on that cupping table (or were I deaf, thy outward parts would move each part in me that were but sensible), her body lay sweetly on my tongue (though neither eyes nor ears to hear nor see, yet would I be in love by touching thee), the perfume of her natural essence so destroyed my concern for her cost or with her previous engagement with the other roaster because her aromatics tore down the walls around my heart, and the little lookout I had left there in the tower of this fortress came to the king with the news that she had finally come and the king knew this was true before the words were even spoken (but what if the sense of feeling were bereft me and I could not see nor hear nor touch and nothing but the very smell were left me? Yet would my love for thee be still as much for from the still'tory of thy face excelling comes breath perfum'd that breedeth love by smelling).

And I thought she was mine. I thought her suitor had given her away, that he didn't want her any more, that he loved another coffee, and I let my heart be taken.

There are coffees that change my life. Some in small ways and some much bigger, teaching me how to drink and taste and smell and appreciate and to understand from where they come and how they came to be what they are, and all along the way wasn't it just preparation for the day when the one coffee came to me, so that I would recognize her and know how to care for her, how to roast her, how to cup her? And then I was told that the original purchaser decided to take the coffee after all. Maybe he just wanted it because he realized someone else wanted the coffee, and he felt the pangs of jealousy that motivate men to act. And my heart was pierced. And I say be careful what you wish for because you might NOT get it.

But this is a familiar scenario to me, my bleating heart lowing in the flat field of discouragement, looking up to that house on the hill, on the mountainside, toward the clouds where the vantagepoint is victory. But thought is mine. And my thought is the thought that creates me today, and I cannot be defeated.

I have danced with discouragement, living each day as if today were the day and finding denial after denial after denial all day long and hearing the word no so much that, even though it never ceased to surprise me, I became dulled by it as a sword striking stone. And each night it became dark outside and in, and I realized it was not the lack of hope that kills a man, but hope itself. Hope and disappointment, repeated, unexpected failure, over and over again, tearing at the heart of who I was, of what I thought I could accomplish, and each night I would pray to whatever god might be listening that I might wake up in the morning without hope and give up on my dreams. And the next morning I would wake up with renewed hope. Hope beyond hope. More hope than the day before, believing THIS would be the day and I would charge into battle to be destroyed and demoralized just as I was the day before and this cycle continued for months, every day. Every day. I was dying. And hungry. And one day I was dealt a blow bigger than any of the other days before it, one so big I didn't know if I could recover. But that weekend I competed in a 24-hour mountain bike race at Roman Nose State Park in Watonga Oklahoma, and I was a good mountain bike racer in those days. But half-way through the race, in the darkness and approaching storm and cactus and sleep-deprivation and accompanied misery, I quit. I DNF'd. I dropped out of the race. And when I drove home, I wondered what happened to me.

I never DNF.

I never quit.

And I thought of all the obstacles and the difficulties and the problems in my life and the fact that my friend Jason dropped out before me, and that just shows that it was a hard race. And I drove home and went to bed, troubled. But the next morning I arose and went behind the house to a 1/4 mile dirt singletrack and started running. And I ran around that track, thinking, around and around thinking, 60 times around that track I ran, and I wondered what happened the day before, what would happen to me while running around that 1/4 mile dirt track, and then the answer came to me.

I DNF'd because I decided to quit.

And I could keep running around that 1/4 mile dirt track as long as I wanted, until I decided to quit.

Because I learned a very important lesson that day. That I cannot be defeated. No matter what happens to me, what obstacles come my way or problems arise or no matter how I feel or who wants me to stop, I stop when I decide to stop. Quitting is ALWAYS my decision. And the rest of the world can kiss my ass. I cannot fail because I am always in control of the outcome, whether I keep trying or I decide to stop. All else is a matter of time and time is irrelevant to a patient man.

And so I kept going, and I didn't give up and eventually it worked out because I didn't give up.

No one can compete with my resilience and persistence. These are my decisions, and mine only.

And the coffee came back to me.

And fruits from my journeys into the hills and mountainsides. Our coffee has come, and I declare it ridiculous. Delicious. Coffee should not be this good. But I dreamt of it and I prepared for it and I recognized it and I grasped it by the very essence, our spirits at once recognizing one another and intertwining forever. Forever. She is mine. Forever.

But you can taste my coffee.

The coffees of the holiday season are the sickest selection we have ever had. There are three (3). Nekisse is back, and you know how I feel about that, her natural Sidamo berry flavored, juicy, fantastic. Kemgin, another Ninety Plus offering from Nekempte Ethiopia... this is THE coffee. I have written about her before. If you don't get this one, I think you are making a huge mistake. But who am I? I am in love with Kemgin. The third is another natural from Colombia. I found her on the cupping table last week in the mountains on a white horse by my house in the stand of trees overlooking my reading tree. This is one of the best naturals I've had, sweet and clean, also not to be missed. Be prepared. We'll be selling these coffees in metal quart cans. You won't find better coffees. But who am I? I am no one.

This holiday season I hope you get what you wish for and it turns out to be what you want.

Never, never, never, never give up.

War

Tulsa Run Troubles

Nekisse

You ever wish you were a composer? Able to put down your thoughts into sound and rhythm and vibration. Instead of words. Because sometimes my thoughts don't really have words. They're feelings. And mood. They're tribal. Instinctual. Primal reflections from the ambient, transcendent, flood of inputs and senses. They're soft, airy trumpet and deep, resonant bass and drumsticks tapping concrete and chirping, like electronic birds and something that sounds like my heart beating in my ears when I've gone too far.

Sometimes they have textures. I wish I could express myself in bristly branches of pine needles and the broad, gloss green, veiny leaf of a giant Poplar tree.

I wish I could turn conversation into the quickening pace of ceremonial drumming at I'n Lon Schka, the face paint of shirtless, beefy Osage warriors rhythmically, almost trance-inducingly, dancing, their jingling bells and sweat and concentration guiding a conversation without words.

I wish I could tell you how I feel by letting you follow the curvature of seven hand-carved, square, wooden slats stylishly supporting the back of a rounded, antique armchair, and by studying the heiroglyphs of worm-script etched under the bark of a lodgepole pine bough arcing over my mantle.

I wish I could describe my thoughts by taking you into the cold wind and rain freezing on my thighs as I climb Sugarloaf pass near the Continental Divide, freezing my ears, nose running, feet numb, not a ray of sun to be felt. Or the shock of accidentally touching a live 220v bare wire sticking out of the wall, acid taste in my mouth like putting my tongue on 9v battery terminals.

Stepping on glass with your bare feet. Not broken glass, but perfectly smooth, perfectly clean glass, slightly cold and featureless. And then it breaks. And it cuts you. And it hurts.

The crack of a big tree falling in an ice storm.

The pink and bluish hues of the sky as muddy clouds reflect the sunsetting behind trees, behind cornfields, behind the old, red barns that used to house hay bails and scraggly old country cats.

But really, the only way I have to tell you how I feel is to let you taste my coffee. And sometimes the only way I have to tell you how the coffee tastes is to tell you how I feel. Can I beg your pardon and describe the coffee with feelings instead of descriptors?

Because somebody got shot. In the head. And I don't like it.

It's a different world on the inside. And we're not there.

She was here. With her friend and mine. She was beautiful. Always smiling. She looked like an angel. She looked so innocent. I have her picture on my phone. I think a lot of people do. And then she did whatever she does and now she's dead, murdered. I hate that.

But listen, she's like candy. She was beautiful and sweet, and let's leave her that way.

And talk about coffee.

About Nekisse.

There's a girl who takes my breath away. When I see her I autonomically stand up, increase my heart rate for better blood flow and to put some color in my face, race some blood down to the legs in case I need to dash after her. Think think. Think of something to say. Brain needs blood. Lots of stuff needs blood. Faster. Blood pressure. Good. And she touches my arm. The right one. Up high, by my shoulder. Her hand is spiritual, my skin her church. That's it. That's the feeling. The bristling pin pricks that race through my body. On my neck and down my back. Even my legs must get the goose bumps. That's Nekisse. She's the angelic chanting voice behind haunting orchestration in Pan's Labyrinth, the woman singing Ave Maria at my friend Fred's Catholic funeral, the sound of Emily Swanson's voice answering the phone when I rotary dialed her house in junior high school.

Nekisse is cold Aloe cream on a sunburnt back.

It's finally getting past Denver.

It's laughing til your abs hurt.

Nekisse is a rope swing. The rope swing my ex-girlfriend wanted - the one with the wood seat I stencilled with that Banksy silhouette of a girl letting go of a balloon shaped like a heart, and then climbed up in her tree while she was at work to tie the heavy ropes that supported that board-swing seat, and the way her happiness at the discovery of her new rope swing filled my heart with joy. (Before she let go of my balloon-shaped heart and someone stole the Banksy-inspired board.)

Nekisse is chocolate-covered strawberries.

Nay, blackberries. The blackberries I spied on the dirt singletrack trails of Turkey Mountain as I ran. The blackberries I went back in search of and spent hours wading through stabbing weeds and bushes picking, so my mom could make the sweetest, most delicious blackberry cobbler.

And I'll be roasting the very limited Nekisse on Monday night. Get it while you can.

She's like Nekisse. And we're very sorry for our friend that she's gone.

(Come in and sign up for a pound $31 or half pound $16 of Nekisse, or send me an email to get on the list.)

I am

Mismeasurements

My Kingdom