I’m not a coffee snob but-

Maybe I am.

Photo taken by Summer Hughes

A few months ago, I was at an event to give a talk. A non-coffee event. That’s important.

Prior to the talk, I was mingling with some of the organizers. With it being morning, there was a provided spread of local pastries and fruit. While I’ve never been able to master the art of maintaining conversation while spearing melon balls on a paper plate, I do enjoy a good breakfast spread and the beverage station that often accompanies it.

There’s always some unlabeled carafe full of ripping hot black coffee and a scattered assortment of natural and artificial sugars. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, there are small, shelf-stable packets of cream (what a horrifyingly delightful creation: shelf-stable cream). Doctoring up a cup of pale, sugary-sweet office coffee taps into the part of me that used to make ‘potions’ out of shampoo and nail polish when I was younger.

“Feel free to help yourself before we get started. There’s coffee but I’m afraid it won’t be up to your standards.” The organizer I’m chatting with laughs nervously, “I’m sorry, I’m a coffee snob too and it’s pretty dreadful.”

My first instinct—and the one I act on—is to immediately assure her it’s quite alright, sharing in a conspiratorial laugh and wink that says don’t worry, I won’t judge you by the coffee you had no control over.

As she departs, suitably relieved that I’ve been warned away from the coffee, I’m left in a state of unintended and hyperbolic distress.

Good grief, I wonder, do I really come across like a coffee snob? That’s not at all how I am! Little does she know how I excited I am for my quarterly fix of shelf-stable cream!

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I get it though. I have a resume that says that I care a lot about coffee. I’ve spent my fair share of time belaboring the benefits of extract-chilling espresso and drinking out of cups specifically shaped to funnel a coffee’s aromatics directly into my sinus cavity.

The perception of pretension has gone hand-in-hand with the modern specialty coffee movement. There are plenty of jokes that suggest if you say “third wave” in the mirror three times, you’ll conjure a mustachioed barista with the signature cross-back leather apron and an eyebrow ready to raise if you order anything larger than a cortado. The internet is rife with videos parodying the craft barista caricature. And, credit where credit is due, some of them are pretty funny.

But back to the topic at hand.

I don’t think it’s very common for someone’s first touchpoint with coffee to be specialty. Specialty coffee is, by definition, a niche and exemplary segment of the world’s coffee production. More often, we discover coffee through our family—buckets of spray-dried instant, bubbling moka pots, mugs of diner drip, and coffeemakers with a hot plate. Then, somewhere along the way, we stumble across a cup that tastes like fruit juice and down the specialty coffee rabbit hole we tumble.

As we continue to open doors, new worlds filled with brewers, varieties, processing, gadgets, and gizmos become ours to explore. The elusive perfect cup becomes a frantic chase as we leave behind the coffee of our past.

We become snobs.

Right?

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Let’s zoom out again.

When I began writing this newsletter, I had every intention of making it a simple piece about my unabashed love for the occasional ‘bad’ coffee. Due to a heavy month of travel, my writing schedule was pushed around and the first half of this essay sat in my drafts, untouched, for several weeks.

Then on January 27th, Trump threatened 25% tariffs on Colombia.

Colombia produces nearly 10% of the world’s coffee—the third highest amount after Brazil and Vietnam—and almost 30% of the USA’s coffee is imported from Colombia.

In the following hours of that Sunday evening, shock rippled through the coffee industry. Frantic posts ran rampant about whether the proposed tariffs would affect coffee, how it would affect it, and how it would affect the entire world’s coffee production.

The following morning, it was announced that the threatened tariffs were called off for the time being. Shakily, I went into work, pretending that it was a normal Monday morning and I hadn’t spent the entire night doomscrolling hypothetical scenarios of what would happen if the tariffs had gone into effect.

Here’s something else to chew on: the price that green coffee is traded at has skyrocketed.

If you Google “coffee c-market price change” you’ll find numerous articles spanning the last year, all reporting that coffee has continued to hit new highs. In less than a year, the price per pound of green coffee has nearly doubled. Where will the market go from here? What does this mean for producers? For roasters? For consumers? We wait and see. People much smarter than I have written about this, including the New York Times, Christopher Feran, and Zac Cadwalder for Sprudge.

Untangle the increasingly visible environmental effects of climate change from the current economic situation and the future of coffee begins to feel bleak.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. There is brilliant research and development being done on new coffee varieties and species. We understand regenerative agriculture and biodiversity better. Coffee processing has never been more advanced and continues to evolve every day.

It’s a mixed bag. Always has been and, I imagine, always will be.

Still, I find myself continually coming back to that interaction I had at the non-coffee talk. The one where I felt my skin crawl when faced with the phrase coffee snob.

In some ways, I admit that I am one in the way she probably meant. I have developed preferences to what I enjoy, I am particular about how I brew, and I own enough coffee-related gadgets to fill a museum.

However, in another way, I have found myself releasing much of those previously-established preferences in favor for simply enjoying the coffee I have in front of me. Whatever that may be.

I was present for James Hoffmann’s recent talk at the Madrid CoffeeFest where he asked if it is the end of the golden age of coffee. The answer (spoiler alert, I’m sorry) was yes but that what we can do—right here, right now—is continue to enjoy the coffee we have.

The message may feel bittersweet at first but I’ve found that it has provided me with a foundation of hope as the coffee industry continues to persevere and adapt through ecological and economic hurdles.

To this day, most coffee cherries need to be hand picked. On average, to result in one pound of roasted coffee, nearly 5x that weight in cherries needs to be picked. That doesn’t change whether the coffee will ends on the World Barista stage or in the unlabeled carafe alongside a breakfast spread.

So damnit, I will continue to enjoy my coffee. If I truly believe that the greatest tool that we, as individuals, have is our ability to care then my care for coffee cannot be limited to the highest scoring, rarest cups.

“Please don’t apologize for the coffee,” I wish I had responded to that event organizer months ago, “I can’t wait to enjoy it.”