The Analytics of Gettin' Fresh

Gettin' fresh ain't easy.  

It takes more than a dozen roses at your lover's doorstep.  It takes more than a new pair of pink Puma's at the local YMCA Tuesday night pick-up game.   You've got to have a depth understanding of what it means to get fresh.  You've gotta have a Gilbrianian conception of "let there be space in our togetherness."   You've got to have the empty gym time that created the emergent quality of Tim Hardaway's cross-over.

Gettin' fresh takes...understanding, time, and most importantly patience.

Over the past couple of months we've been talking to a lot of different coffee people around the world about how to get fresh.  We have coffee harvest calendars pinned to our three by three cubicle walls.  We have stamped arrival dates on our jute sacks. We have priced out freezers for green bean storage.  We have stacks and stacks of papers piled up in our in-box.  But most importantly we have rounded up a room full of coffee ubergeek's who occasional spit out the profane:  (read with a whine) "IT tastes a little baggy."  "I'm getting a little cardboard in IT." and occasionally sing out the sacred: (read with a holler) "IT tastes a little green still."  "I'm getting a lot of fresh fruit in IT."    

BUT COFFEE IS MORE THAN A 'IT'!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Coffee is people, place, and persona.   Product or IT is just one of four quadrants involved in a integral understanding coffee.   We need to consider the relationship of buying an expected amount each year from a farmer you have made a agreement with, we need to consider the realities of an ecosystem's production output v. input measurements, we need understand how American redirectionality towards boutique will effect a communities collective identity or how that collective identity can interface will multi-dimensionality or how to translate freshness to Spanish.  You dig?  There is more, these are just tiny sign-posts in the thought arena around this.

So when it comes to getting fresh.  There needs to be a holistic understanding of what it means to embrace a seasonal approach to coffee.    That is the sea we are swimming in....backstroke, freestyle, and breast-stroke.

Our menu will be contracting over the coming months.  Slowly you will see coffee's disappearing from the list of offerings on our website.   Things are gonna be getting simple, but we want you to know that the complexity is there behind it. We might be lighting just one candle, but the placement of that candle has all the meaning. Instead of ten coffee's we might just be offering two or three at a time.   Our Espresso blends are gonna be a revolving doors two month expressions of our art.  The components might drift down to one or two origins for a given window.  This is something we have carefully considered over time and will continue to work it.    

We are not in the business of jumping on fast moving trains.  1000 Faces is moving towards promoting freshness because it the way of the expressive messenger.   Buy offering coffee's that are only within a window of time out from the day the cherry was pulled off the tree, we are empowering ourselves to show that coffee is alive.    It lives!!!!

Still, all the talk/action of seasonality in coffee is, for not, if the consumer doesn't become reborn as a co-producer.   We need you to take an active part in understanding your coffee, moving from the passive to the active.   The same way you tend to the local farmers market, the same way you think critically about where your news is coming from, the same way you arc your wrist on a jump-shot, or tell your children about sharing....for seasonality to become a true reality in the coffee world there needs to be a agreement from beginning to end that this is what we are going to do.  

The truth is: you can't have it your way.  This manipulative marking schema is the furthest thing from the truth we have ever heard.  Moreover, the consumer is not always right, but the co-producer is because they are workin' it, hustlin', and finding room for rest/patience. 

We will taste the coffee!!!!

This is all in the journey of decommification.   This is the journey of re-establishing humanity.  This is the journey of the hero with 1000 faces.

Get fresh.   

Comments

[Oliver]

Bravo and good luck