A wonderful group has formed in Athens called the Georgia Climate Change Coalition (GCCC.)  We have decided to participate in the event they are doing a great job of planning for September 24th.   We will not be planning a seperate event.   Please join us in joining in with the GCCC.   Read below for more details….

Georgia Climate Change Coalition

Through education, advocacy and action, the Georgia Climate Change Coalition aims to increase awareness about climate change and its projected impacts; work in  partnership with all Georgians and stakeholders to promote solutions and adaptations to the climate crisis; actively support local, state, national and international energy/climate change initiatives and legislation; serve as a clearing house for climate information.    

Georgia Climate Change Coalition Launches in Athens

September 24 march and rally will call for reduced carbon missions 

 Athens, GA — Responding to extreme weather events, a punishing drought and growing concern about the impacts of climate change, an eclectic mix of Athens residents will officially launch the Georgia Climate Change Coalition on September 24, 2011.

 The group, which consists of fly fishers, University of Georgia faculty and staffers, environmental activists and community members , is staging a march from the University of Georgia to Athens City Hall, where a rally will be held urging civic leaders to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

 The event will be affiliated with the worldwide “Moving Planet” rally planned for the same day by 350.Org. The non-profit group, founded by author-activist Bill McKibben, hosted the world’s most widespread day of political action on Oct. 24, 2009, bringing together 5,245 grass-roots actions in 181 countries around the world.

 Organizers hope the Moving Planet rally will eclipse the 2009 event, and the Georgia Climate Change Coalition is asking all residents of Athens and Georgia to join in this day of grass-roots action to raise awareness of man-made climate change, address climate change denial, and promote cutting carbon emissions to slow the rate of global warming.

 “Let us come together on this historic day to pool our common efforts,” Athens organizer Barbara Burnett said. “We need to conserve energy, reduce our burning of fossil fuels and begin conversions to alternative energy.”

The Georgia Climate Change Coalition will begin preparing for the Moving Planet rally later this month, asking residents to fill out pledge cards to reduce their own energy, gas and water consumption.

Then on Wednesday, September 14, at 7 p.m., the group will host an Athens screening of a rolling teleconference hosted by former Vice President Al Gore, highlighting extreme climate events – floods, fires, storms, heat waves and drought – in every time zone around the world (www.climaterealityproject.org).

The screening will be followed by a climate change symposium at UGA’s Ecology School auditorium on Friday, September 23, 5:00 - 8:30 p.m., discussing climate change impacts in the Southeast.

The following morning, Saturday, September 24, marchers are asked to gather at 11 a.m. on the greenway near Carlton St. and Agriculture Drive, UGA south campus, where University professor Chris Cuomo will kick off the event. The march will pass by the University’s coal fired steam plant enroute to Lumpkin Street, and from there to City Hall in downtown Athens. Speakers will inform civic leaders that they have community support for reducing carbon consumption and that all Georgians must respond to this appeal.

“Our fly fishers work hard on stream improvements and habitat conservation,” said Oconee River Chapter Trout Unlimited member Rich Rusk, whose group led the call last Spring for greater focus on climate change. “For us, trout are the canaries in the mining shaft. Fish dying in a recent North Georgia drought sends a message everywhere. We must all move with greater urgency on this massive threat not only to North American trout and salmon, but the entire planet!”.

Those wishing to participate can find parade route, pledge cards and information about the Sept. 14, 23 and 24 events at the Georgia Climate Change Coalition website, www.georgiaclimate.org.

About the Georgia Climate Change Coalition

Through education, advocacy and action, the Georgia Climate Change Coalition aims to increase awareness about climate change and its projected impacts; work in partnership with all Georgians and stakeholders to promote solutions and adaptations to the climate crisis; actively support local, state, national and international energy/climate change initiatives and legislation; serve as a clearing house for climate information.

The group is actively seeking coalition partners from across the state (see www.georgiaclimate.org).

“Once you’ve seen all the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”*

10 Notes on the Master Roaster, from small Hotel Room, Bogota, Colombia April 2011

I have just completed a series of two three-day 8 hour-long trainings on roasting to over forty different Colombians in the mountains of the Quindio Province.   Before heading back to America, I took up this room in the Hotel Americas to make myself familiar with silence again.

I have had regular excursions in spastic-honking-cabbies across the divide of Bogota to the cupping lab at Virmax, where I have been working though endless scores of samples and making notes with groups of cuppers.  I also made it to the Museo de Oro, where I found myself enraptured by the postures of gold encapsulated miniature Shamans sitting with their hands cradling their knees and this being called, much like the Buddhist Lotus, a basket position.  But outside of that, the majority of my time in Bogota has been spent in a room reviewing my thoughts at five years as on what it means to be a Master Roaster.

What teaching would I leave behind here at the gates?  What note would I nail to the wooden fence post as I left in the evening behind a wall of crickets and a fading screen of darkening blue?  What pace would I set the drum machine on as I laid down my broken down card board box, flipped back my Vans cap and set upon my suicide break-dance?  

One:  Roasting is not an art, nor is it a science.  To call it either or both, is akin to calling the heroic symbols posted on the cave walls of the ancients paintings or formulas.  To be so naive.  Roasting, rather, is the flicker of the soul cast outward.  Roasting is love.  Without the passion, there is no craft, just production.  Mechanical sick production.

Two:  To be a master roaster you must constantly be a student of four things: green beans, yourself, brewing practices, and the great machine.   You must constantly kneel before these as Surfer goes to the shore at the end of the day and watches the sea.  Watching how things change and connecting the roast to these changes.  See the parts, but remember that the sum is greater then all the parts put together.

Three: Roasting is like playing a par-three hole of golf.   The first swing (or phase of development) is controlled but the strongest in force.  You may approach differently, but of the three this has the greatest vigor.  The second stroke(phase of development), if on-course, is more controlled with the interest of setting up the final shot.    The final shot is gentle and controlled, so to guide the concentration emptied into a single space.  A missed shot, requires a soft and gentle return to course.

Four:  The master roaster is never a stagnant state.  He is always in the process of becoming the master.  This process is through the ebb and flow of roasting and cupping.   Though repetition, we find expression.  Roasting is about DEVELOPMENT.  If you are not developing, you are baking or burning.   Develop the subtle changing miracle over small time.

Five:  The master roaster is a student of the senses.  In spare time, you must submit yourself to arts, love-affairs, violent street fights, butcher boards, running marathons, listening to philosophical debates, meditations, strict yogic postures, Gestalt councils….etc.

Six:  The Machine will never beat the master Roaster in a kung-fu challenge for best roast of a coffee.  The machine follows numbers, coffee is not a number.  The master roaster must understand the mechanical numbers, but be a student of the swift and slow winds that run between words, underneath bridges, across empty fields, and power and fear.

Seven:  Being great at Roasting coffee happens before roasting coffee, during roasting coffee, and after roasting coffee.  There is no beginning and no end.  One day you will be able to abandon your timer.

Eight:  The cleaner your roaster, the sharper your sword.

Nine: Start with fire. Learn everything their is to know about fire.  How it moves.  How it lives.  How it transfers.  How it relates.   How it dies.  The roaster is the alchemist, the fire is the medium.

Ten:  Burn this blog. Everything is false.  Listen to yourself as much as you do others.   Cultivate a trusting sense of knowing, without having being told.  Roasting is telling a story, but it also a way of being, a path that isn’t found by a guide or a leader.

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said.

“What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer those questions because we have read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures.   We can’t get outside the aura.  We’re part of the aura.  We’re here, we’re now.”*

*D. Delillo, White Noise 1984

(episode #1)

In a morning taxi ride from Kristiansand to the airport, I'm seated with a UN delegate working to protect biodiversity in the northern region of Norway around the city of Bergen.   It's early, and darkness is still holding its own over the shadows.  I'm tired and barely keeping my head up.  At a point in the conversation she asks me where I'm from, and as I move to answer I find a black hole in my awareness.  I can’t remember where I am from.

(episode #2)

The premier coffee destination in Norway is without a doubt the miniture coffee factory of one Mr. Tim Wendleboe.   On an overcast Saturday afternoon, I catch a taxi up to an ultra-hip neighborhood to visit this culinary destination hot on my mental radar.   Mr. Wendleboe was nowhere to be found upon arrival, though his name was everywhere around the shop--on the doors, on the bags, on the walls, on the book that he wrote himself. The coffee is excellent, and I snap photos of every angle of his operation--memories in case I forget.  I'm so excited it's spooky.

(Begin Blog)

Life often defaults into a loop. 

A pattern that repeats itself without awareness of the changes at the core.  Allowing for the micro to become the dominant characteristic of the macro.  The small changes become the big picture.  One face begins to equal many faces.  One story explains everything.  We get religion.  We get society.  We forget our names, we remember others', we snap photos on endless shutter patterns to tell even still others of the names, places, and people we can no longer recall.   

Maybe it's time to reconsider the person.   Slow this spin.

(Deconstructing Spin)

Sophisticated consumer behavioral studies are based around understanding people and predicting these loops.  It’s not a stretch to say that companies often act so as to continue to loop.  Reinforcing consumer behavior by providing it not only what it wants (market demand) but also the psychological atmosphere of reinforcing the loop.  "A coke and a smile" becomes the same repeated background noise.   

This is worse than white noise.   This is the time to throw down your pack and fix eyes to sky. Check the coordinates.   Check the compestela.

The day-to-day input/output ritual becomes so hard-wired into our operating system it becomes difficult to determine what is an important decision.   We call the same friends, watch the same shows, drive the same roads, and replenish goods we have come to trust.  Thinking becomes a violent act. 

And still, these patterns are having their true and good validation.  We place ourselves on repeat in order to provide mental harbors, something familiar enough to shade the unknown with the knowable, the understandable. However, no matter how hard we try, these harbors we come to trust appear one day as abandoned and dead ship wrecks. The rotting wooden planks and the looting of hooligans becomes apparent as our barren feet swell, and the now incomprehensible and utterly painful record keeps skipping.  Coke becomes fattening, syrupy, sugar filled muck that rots our teeth and makes us feel uncomfortably warm in the face and rancid in the gut.  No more coke.   No more smile.  Yet the pervasive marketing tries to shift as though some wicked, malicious, sick programmer in the sky was altering the matrix yet beholden evermore to that which sets the original alterations in place.   A matrix working for a matrix.

(Enter Change)

It is called change. No matter what marketing firm you have hired, you cannot prevent it from coming. The folks we work with in Norway call it a revolution.   If there was ever a more apt definition of revolution, I think this is it......The slow beating the fast.   The clocks falling off the wheels and shifting in direction.   Fast becoming so, so, so, so, passe'.

Recently I have seen a trend of the large scale industrialized producers purchasing small and local entities, like Ben and Jerry’s.  They are chasing the trend of consumers shifting their trust to the small-scale producers.  This is the one of the oldest tricks in the book, the wolf appearing at your door dressed in the cloak of the sheep.

One of the major goals talked about in the Slow Coffee meetings this week in Norway was how to enable the small scale artisan producers to grow in a manner that can preserve their identity.   How can Slow Coffee become an entity that helps the companies we have grown to love remain lovable while still enriching and growing their brand/identity/employee payroll/offerings/etc?  How can we change the game?  

It has been said if there is one thing you can count on in life, it is change.  At every change vector there are two roads of choice. Hesse described this phenomenon as a long horseshoe-shaped corridor that is a mirror on one side and a great many doors on the other.  

STAY WITH ME HERE.

I think that in order to reach these change goals we need to first and foremost reconsider the consumer as the person.  Not on the basis of statistical input/output behavioral traits, but on the unique, unpredictable, and dare I say, beautiful human traits.   We need to celebrate these through the art of true story telling and making the time to rejoice and celebrate these stories.

What does it mean to reconsider the consumer as a person? How do companies take on important human domains like empathy and care at a very close level without being totally and utterly destroyed?  These are real and serious questions for which I don't have the final answer, but am willing and wanting to consider....re-consider.

In spending this week in Norway, I have been enabled to examine a whole different mental map of society.   Any new and different city has the opportunity to dissolve you. This is why we travel, or at least why I travel.  The experience of going into the disambiguation phase of identity and routine is for me as pure and refreshing as any drink or elixir to be found on the market.   If there is one hope I take home from this experience it is that I return to America with a new form of bright eyes, ready to act.

I go into every coffee bar.  On the road I become a pioneer junkie of coffee.   Sometimes I am in a spot where the barista doesn't know where the coffee was grown or roasted and I find myself in right there...right in that Parisian post-modern Brooklyn of the lonely.  

Can a coffee bar heal loneliness and transform it into solitude?  Is there a chance for something more if a true story can be told? Can a coffee roaster change the direction of how we consider the source?  Can small business be the radical change agents in our consumptive field?

In a speech last week in Norway, a local psychologist pontificated that the coffee bar has always been something both profoundly social and profoundly anti-social.  Can the coffee exchange provide a real and important form of sharing something without unnecessary speech?   In the ever expanding identity search in coffee via Fair and Direct trade, we have come to see an expansive watering down of the story.  So much so, that the loop has begun to fade into the background and to silently do its work even here in this ever growing sector of the economy.   Did you think that we were immune?

(Sweep the leg)

You can think of this sampling as a story you are telling yourself—one made of the world as you hear it, and the theater of sounds that you invoke with those fragments is all one story made of many.  Though it isn’t through fragments that a story is made personable, it is through decision of the story teller to lose themselves in the mystery that is the tangible and human aspect that makes something rich, special, and unmistakably something that you want to be a part of...

I can remember where I am from.  The hole in my darkness is swallowed with content.   The light moves up over Kristiansand and I am at the airport in Oslo, with something to think about.

I found this in Norway:  http://www.belowtheclouds.com/2008/01/11/kaffebilen-i-oslo/

Then I read this in the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/dining/25coffee.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Coffee&st=cse

Then all of sudden the words of EF Shoemaker were running through my head like a little Japanese car on an empty highway. I am apt to make the case that SLOW and SMALL are of the same family tree.   

The future of real coffee “leaders” in this country might well emerge as some strange herd of anti-rebels, oglers by birth-right, or people who dare somehow to back away from ironic passivity and act brave enough to endorse and instantiate a single-entendre principle. These leaders will treat the plain old, untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. consumption life with reverence and conviction.  For they have come to know these peacock feathers only too well.

They might be called the willing, accomplishing great feats of being inclined towards a parting of self-consciousness and hip fatigue.  These new icons might be seen as outdated, of course and rightly so, before they even start. They will be seen as dead on the plate, dead in the cup, dead upon arrival. Too sincere.

Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real thing.  For as far as I can see, the risk of disapproval in today’s society is of greater net value than the current currency of approval.

Today’s risks aren’t so clear. The new coffee rebels might have to become artists willing to risk the rejection, the rolled eyes, the cool smile of teenage malaise, the broken ribs, the parody of the current avante garde of the establishment, the “Oh! How they are fools.”

I am calling for you to go out to sea, at the risk of unbearable accusations of sentimentality, being a drama queen.  Of overcredulity. Of suicidal life-styles of the unknown and unwanted. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of gawkers and celebrity profiles, who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Why? 

Because coffee is an issue this country cannot afford to ignore anymore.   But what is the "issue" of coffee exactly? What is in contention? What is the polemic? There are the complexities regarding our relationship to coffee that the country has not really worked through. 

There are distinct disparities that exist between a farmer and a consumer.  There are concentrated pockets of coffee poverty, a direct product of the self-righteous understanding of our personal cup. There is the obvious degradation of our environment from the interdisciplinary taxation of conventional agriculture. There is the sickness of subsidies and the addiction it reaps. 

The successful development of a coffee revolution here in my home town of Athens is not disconnected from movements exploding in similar American towns across our countryside. It is dependent on honesty. I have been thinking in depth over the past six months about the definition of honesty, and I have a new deity in my theoretical kingdom. Her name is sincerity, the New Sincerity. Honesty is our perspective on our own personal simple truths, but we are beholden to understand a reality far greater than that. The New Sincerity asks for collaborative efforts. She demands games of trust where we fall on each others' hands, risking the slip through arms in a dusty crash. The New Sincerity acknowledges context, and community. The courage to resist the lure of the status quo of self-reflexive honesty takes sincerity.  We cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together.  And to solve them together we must regain acute awareness of not only our own needs and desires, but those of the greater system at work.

My belief in this new god comes from my unyielding faith in the collective power of the people of all backgrounds.

In these times - times of nutritional, agricultural, cultural, and environmental decline - we need a redefined army. We need farmers who are heroes, roasters who are samurais, importers who are wandering monks, producers who are sturdy, and the whole lot of them willing to sail into murky shark-winnowed waters of mediocre coffee production with all eyes bent on the gale in the mast rather than the unknown below. We need the new agriculturalists who reject the known safety of the 4H and Farm Bureau and stand under the twinkly lights of the future with neon postcards of the Downtown Farmers Market and coffee tattoos as their new scythes and trowels. We need educators that can move with delicacy through the sticky inter-tangling of the nation's first generation of direct trade heads, bringing progressive vigor to the coffee classroom and the rural backwater coffee houses. We need garden parties and church sermons and potlucks to color their choruses with a new credo of co-production rather than co-consumption. We need brazen, sincere warriors who give the consumer no choice but to follow their lead. The New Sincerity is hope - an oath taken under the cloud of gunfire and insurmountable odds between the men and women that are inspired to push a sense of humanity back into our kitchens.  The battle is fought with weapons of the cuppings, the chemex, the espresso machine, and the revival of coffee slowness in the American dawn.  In that bunker the soldiers tie a hand written note to their arrows and fire backwards in time while telling their children tales of the triumphs of such new-fangled arcane tools.... and the notes, of course, are compostable.  

It has been said that the greatest selling album of all time is the blank CD.  Numbers over Thriller, numbers over Rolling Stones, numbers over Purple Rain.    What, if anything, can a food and culture learn from this?  What is our metaphorical blank CD?   What is the emergent quality that we have overlooked?

My submission: Sincerity.   It is an unwritten hope.   A blank CD awaiting a perfect play-list by imperfect and willing warriors.

Cultural movements have always come about with an element of hostility, fragility, and often times seeing a leader go out into a place far from the shore of our expected humanity.  The anger is real and it is powerful, but to dismiss it is to miss a profound opportunity to engage the roots of that, which has created the food and cultural poverty structure we all currently participate in.

The cooperatives, the farmers markets, the community dinners, and coffee filled CSA’s are beholden to a greater decree of social allegiance now more than ever.   It is the small-scale producers who must learn to collaborate around a single principle, just as the mighty McDonalds, Starbucks, and team have already done so.  Over the past year I have been in contact with small-scale coffee producers on all levels of the supply chain, banging a drum in their ear as a battle cry for the fourth wave of coffee to begin through a concentrated collaborative effort centered around slowness.   The go has been at times disheartening and overwhelming, but I push on for I believe it can begin here in Athens and spread like wild-fire across the globe.

The memories of humiliation, doubt, and fear finds voice in saying what is needed only for me, and not that which is good for the collective system.  Let them laugh!  Let them call the Police!   We are programmed somewhere to cash in, before returning out to the unforgivable storming sea once more…but I say RESIST.   Throw on your true self and riot.

There is a wolf under the feathers of the peacock.   That wolf has 1000 Faces.

END. BM

Calling all you coffee people.   We are now accepting applications for Round 4 of our Internship/Work-Scholar program. This round will begin August 15 and conclude November 15.  We are excited to to bring on some new talent and further grow our awesome and buzzin' 1000faces family.   Please email a cover letter (make sure to tell us why you want to work with 1000faces Coffee!) and a resume to roasterben@gmail.com.

1000 Faces is proud to embark on another effort to raise $1000 for a local non-profit.   This is the fourth in a series of fundraisers that have raised $1000 for AIDS Athens, Bottles for Babies, and Nica-Hope.   This time we are directing our efforts towards a the local chapter of Nourish International.  

Nourish International's mission is to eradicate global poverty by engaging students and empowering communities.  We became familiar with Nourish International when their chapter President started coming by the roaster and telling us some stories about the work that they were engaged in both locally and internationally.   We felt somewhat enamored by the fact that they embodied the best of the Athens community spirit.  We are a small town, though our hearts bend deep before the winds of the world.   1000 Faces has decided that we want to do whatever we can to give them encouragement in their endeavors.  More information about Nourish International at www.nourishinternational.org.

We will run this much like the other fundraisers we have completed.   30 day operation.  The end of the fundraiser will culminate in a evening of celebration at the Tuesday Night Downtown Farmer's Market on 6/15/2010.   In the coming days we will launch a program through Chip In where you can donate money that we will send to Nourish.   

http://widget.chipin.com/widget/id/b533845859d81e2f

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=114537981914890#!/event.php?eid=114537981914890&index=1

Everything is something more.   There are more small wonders than the eye can catch.   Though sometimes, just for a moment you get a glimpse of the good the world has to offer, and it is in these moments of refreshment we find reason we keep our maps up and our coordinates steady.

It is with both joy and sadness that we bid our fair maiden Emily Brock good-bye.   Joy that she will travel off into the world and continue to shine, sadness that the our little roaster will reflect a space she once held so well with a emptiness.   Emily was the first of our brave interns.  She grew into a wonderful friend to us all and one of the many unsung heroes of the coffee world.   The hero does have one thousand faces, Emily was one that even Ancient Athens would have adorned as a goddess.   Simple, brilliant, caring, thoughtful, sweet, steadfast, and a pure bread hustler of the good.

Cleveland look out!  Good bye Emily.   We love you.

Team 1000 Faces