By These Pickers and Stealers

I learned the rudiments of coffee cupping from Don Holly and Ted Lingle thirteen years ago. Along the way I have learned from some of the finest palates in the coffee industry. I have been fortunate, sitting at the cupping table with many of the most successful entrepreneurs and renowned cuppers and green buyers in specialty coffee, all of them showing great tolerance for the marketing and communications guy with the weak slurp.

One of the things I learned from Ted Lingle and Don Holly was the concept of “quiet cupping.” They were not referring the slurps, some of which can be startlingly loud, they were referring to talking, at least talking immediately.  Lingle, especially, believed everyone should have time to form their own impressions without influence from others at the table. And generally, I found this to be more or less the norm: smelling, cupping, considering, taking notes, listening to others and offering my own thoughts when the time came. I became so accustomed to this mode of cupping that I was a bit startled the first time I sat at a cupping table and someone began describing fragrance immediately upon smelling the grounds, and did the same with aroma for the wet grounds and then for tasting.

At the time, this was an exception, but I have noticed over the years that it has become the norm.

While I do believe quiet cuppings are better cuppings, I’m not getting on a cupping soapbox here. It is clear to me that people are influenced in what they might say, or not say, when a “big name” is at the table offering their opinions quickly and often. But ultimately everyone is responsible for their own impressions and sharing them regardless of what other might say. If you’re shy or uncertain, a “cupping bully” will cure you of this one way or another.

Although I am myself an introvert, I have learned to ignore comments about taste made during, or even before, a cupping or tasting and will form my own opinion, thank you very much.  Then I listen and try to understand how all the descriptions at the table come together or where the outliers are. 

My concern is how this practice of frontloading impressions carries over into coffee cupping and tasting with retail staff and customers. To me, the magic moment in tastings with retail customers is watching their face as they sip or slurp and then asking them what they taste. They are uncertain and lack confidence at first, but like the very best teachers, you don’t given them the answer, you begin to explore with them. As their nervousness fades and they begin to focus they begin to offer descriptions. You encourage and coax, perhaps refine a little, and eventually offer your own impressions, but not as corrections or in contrast to theirs, but as a fellow explorer. In this way customers come to appreciate the complexity of flavors found in coffee and become true participants rather than students in your lecture.

Anytime I see a coffee professional hand a customer or new barista a cup of coffee and tell them what they are about to taste I wince at a magic moment lost.

Note also: As always, views, opinions, attitudes, typos, and grammatical errors found on this blog, whether emanating from Mike Ferguson, one of his split personali…uh, alter egos, or one of his many celebrity guest panelists, real or imagined, belong to Mike Ferguson and are not necessarily shared, acknowledged, or even understood by anyone else, including those who employ him, have employed him in the past, or who gave birth to him.

by Mike Ferguson

They will eventually fit together
the lonely pieces
into a whole map.
Being smarter, being the future,
being devoted to their work they
will consult available experts and
reach a consensus.
They will eventually figure us out.

This is my left hand waving to strangers,
my right hand touching your cheek.
Don’t tell me
you were expecting red-ruby slippers.
These are my eyes.
Here,
take a look at them. Keep one
if you need.
Or don’t.
But never say I didn’t offer
to go blind
at the first sign of surrender.

Your favorite love-disaster metaphor
is: ripping the heart out. Violence.
I’ve been impressed by this.
Your are easy with absence or
never quite motionless or
never caught waiting with your face exposed.

These are just samples,
hairline fractures.

Without a fist we circle each other.
Famously non-combative
we avoid the throat.
The path worn in the grass is our witness,
explaining each incomplete moment.
Exhale.
This is how they will find us.
The only mistake they will make
is in naming our reason.

Buy My Coffee

Notes from the Fractal Frontier of Coffee Marketing

by Mike Ferguson

This article, excerpted below, was originally published in the January/February 2009 issue of Roast Magazine

I want to state my bias at the beginning. I don’t believe in the science of marketing, and I believe less in the art.  Like the false dichotomy often drawn between the art and science of roasting coffee, the terms of the question must be refused. As an activity, marketing certainly incorporates aspects of science and art, but to no greater degree than it includes divination and sorcery. And if marketing is a discipline at all, it is a discipline on par with fractal mathematics, understandable in single pieces or as a beautifully complete outcome, but chaotic and practically unfathomable on the journey in between.

There are countless books on marketing and over 700 million hits on an internet search. One can acquire college degrees in marketing or hire dozens of different marketing consultants to give you 100 different pieces of advice, each expressed in a four-quadrant grid. There are the “4Ps” of marketing, the “7Ps,” and the “New 4Ps.”

Marketing is, according to the American Marketing Association, “an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”

What? 

You see, marketing and marketers occupy something of a mysterious and overblown niche in the business world (pay no attention to that man behind the curtain).  As a result, intended or not, there is a sense in many small and medium sized coffee companies that marketing is something they will do someday, when they are bigger, when they can afford it. In larger businesses, there is a sense of guilt that they are not doing it better or with more…Apple-like verve. But marketing happens. By design or default, marketing happens in every company that sells anything. It’s happening in your company right now, whether you planned it or not, whether you control it or not.

Peter Drucker said, “Marketing is a fashionable term. The sales manager becomes a marketing vice president. But a gravedigger is still a gravedigger even when it is called a mortician – only the price of the burial goes up.” So, this is not an article about marketing, not really, though I will use the word. This is an article about the many ways we ask people to buy our coffee.

In a recent survey, roasters were asked to choose from three descriptions for their marketing plan. Only one out of four (26%) indicated they had a “formal, written plan.” Over sixty percent (62%) describe their marketing plan as informal, with clear direction but no detailed planning, and 12% chose the answer, “What’s a marketing plan?”

–

… roasters gave relatively high priority to community involvement (7%) and promoting the fact that they are a local company (7%) as part of their marketing.  In fact, 95% of respondents indicated that “local event participation” was relevant in their marketing efforts.

–

Surprisingly, some of the activity roasters often cite as differentiating them in the marketplace make an appearance but are mentioned less than might be expected. Social and sustainable issues, and customer education, were each mentioned in 5% of responses. Relationships with origin (including various direct purchase programs) were referred to in 3% of answers.

Rather than conclude that this signals a change in emphasis in the roasting sector, I believe it is a symptom of how we understand, or don’t understand, marketing. Roasters often consider these issues to be operational and/or part of their company philosophy. They’re right. It’s also true that how you operate and behave as a business creates a framework for how potential customer view (and maybe even taste) your coffee and other products. Whether how you buy coffee or run your roasting plant is intentionally part of your marketing efforts or not, it is part of your marketing efforts. I have heard roasters say they don’t talk about some of the charitable organizations they support because, “that’s not why we do it.” That’s fine, but the fact that you don’t talk about it is part of who you are and how you sell coffee. The balance between hiding your light under a bushel and cynically exploiting every dollar you give to charity in a press release can be determined only by you, but determined it should be and not haphazard.

–

The specialty coffee sector emerged in opposition to poor quality and grew by demonstrating that coffee is not a commodity but a highly differentiated product. For years, quality in broad terms was the primary differentiating factor. There was us and there was them. But as the specialty coffee industry grew and competition increased, it became necessary to begin differentiating within the quality driven sector. Quality may be identified as the primary descriptor of marketing in our survey, but if we were to send the best coffees from each company that stated that priority to a quality assurance laboratory for objective analysis, the results would be varied, perhaps dramatically so. Everyone says I love you and everyone says they have a quality product. But what do they mean by that?

–

Outside of local event participation (95%), the most popular ways to spend marketing dollars among roasters were website (92%), membership in associations, chamber, etc. (88%), and sponsorships (84%). Although roasters place a wide variety of importance on these activities, these numbers represent inclusion in their marketing efforts.

Despite the titles of marketing books in the business section of the bookstore, there is no one “killer ap” when it comes to marketing, and what works for one company may not work for another. I believe this is perhaps more true for coffee than other products. In our survey, for every respondent who praised a method, there was at least one who tore it down. People come to coffee as a profession for many different reasons and they stay and fall in love in many different ways. Some people will wince at that last sentence and say it’s not love, it’s business. But I’ll bet they are small in number. Can you tell me why? Yes? Then you know how to ask people to buy your coffee. Let me know when you figure it out because, when it comes to coffee, it’s probably a one-of-a-kind strategy.

But we should celebrate the fact that specialty coffee is, once again, at the cutting edge

Eleven years ago the specialty coffee industry, via both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (nice way of saying that some companies moved forward on their own while many were pushed, pulled, blackmailed, bullied, and cajoled) became an early adopter of the fair trade certification in the United States. I remember having lunch with a leader of the fair trade movement and asking him why they had targeted specialty coffee. If the entire specialty coffee industry had miraculously adopted fair trade certification overnight it would still be a drop in the bucket of coffee production world-wide. If they wanted to change the world, I thought they should target the largest coffee roasters in the country. He admitted that this was true but added that specialty coffee, with its high public profile, was worth more than traditional coffee in terms of reaching consumers and shaping their opinions. He was right. And fair trade has since moved on to larger roasters and other products.

In the U.S. the specialty coffee industry was a relatively early adopter of fair trade and sustainability in general. At the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) conference in 2000, where sustainability was the theme, keynote speaker and sustainability pioneer, Paul Hawken, praised the specialty coffee industry for taking a leadership role and told us that few industry segments were making the kind of uniform strides that the specialty industry was in terms of adopting the principles of sustainability into our business practices.

This week, a group of extraordinary baristas from all over the world, using extraordinary coffee from a group of US and UK coffee roasters brewed coffee for the attendees of the TED conferences in Long Beach and Palm Springs California. They are part of Coffee Common (@coffeecommon).

Although I had heard a few rumbling about this Coffee Common thing before TED, it wasn’t until TED opened and the tweets started that I really began to pay attention and became both thoroughly intrigued and enchanted.  The presentation of coffee, espresso and hand-brewed, against a keenly designed serving area was in keeping with the spirit of TED (which, stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design). But in some ways, the presence of the Coffee Common group was cutting edge, even for TED in two ways: 1) The attendees were tasting truly remarkable coffees brewed in remarkable ways by the world’s best baristas and…well, that doesn’t happen every day, and 2) The COMMON concept around which or upon which or with which the Coffee Common was created would be considered radical, is my guess, by a majority of the TED attendees.

I won’t spend time here explaining COMMON. You can learn everything at www.fearlessrevolution.com. It might be even better to start here , where Alex Bogusky, one of the thinkers behind the COMMON idea, talks about how a call from Stephen Morrissey at Intelligentsia Coffee not only initiated Coffee Common, but, as Bogusky writes:

Figures it would take a coffee guy to wake us up to the full potential of our collaborative brand concept. It wasn’t the kind of engagement we’d ever considered before. But as we played it out it seemed to fit under the idea of a branded event that could over time become something much more. We’ve been so focused (blinded) on entrepreneurs that we may have missed a big idea that Stephen saw. Thank goodness for people that shake you out of your preconceived notions. So could COMMON brand a movement? Why not?

My company was not asked to be a part of Coffee Common, and yet as I read this I felt both pride and ownership on behalf of the specialty coffee industry. Once again, the specialty coffee industry is exploring if not adopting a cutting edge concept.

I have no idea what happens next. I hope that Alex Bogusky and his COMMON colleagues at FearLess will write about Coffee Common and explore this pioneering effort and that the work our friends did and will continue to do informs, expands, and brings greater definition to the COMMON concept.

Bogusky’s battle cry for this revolution is “Collaboration is the new competition.” Although I was born on the tail-end of the baby-boom, this concept is not as hard for me to grasp as it might be for those who spent more formative years under the influence of the cold war of the 1950’s than they did the 1960’s and 70’s.  Still, the statement has the feeling of faith about it, that is, the feeling that I may need to believe it before I see it. I have no doubts about the idea or hesitation in pursuing real-life applications. The whole thing fits neatly within my world view. Where my curiosity and desire to read more notes on what they have actually experienced so far gets piqued is real-world-on-the-street-bumping-heads-while walking-through-the-door execution that is specific to coffee.

Bogusky is a former, or perhaps reconfigured, adman and branding maestro.  I suspect his newest venture, FearLess, holds the answer to some of my desire to understand more. I suspect that he will tell me, when we meet, that how to handle competition on the runway with someone I collaborate with at 20,000 feet is a topic that must be approach without fear and a belief that there is more than enough business out there, especially for an industry segment that began life by driving a wedge into a tiny crack and hammering away until it became a niche before it became a segment. That’s the sort of answer I would like because if there is anything I believe about the coffee industry it is that the specialty coffee segment created itself inside a space that was so small and so improbable that those who occupied it 30 years ago would never believe you if you travelled back in time to tell them what happened. Of course, I believe that because I have seen a good portion of that growth with my own eyes.

What I try to imagine now with my interior eyes is what a time traveler from 30 years hence would describe to me about the coffee industry in the future. I have a few ideas, but I am certain she would tell me about things I can’t quite conceive of right now. And I have a feeling that within the ideas behind COMMON can be found more than a few seeds of things we cannot yet imagine.

Note also: As always, views, opinions, attitudes, typos, and grammatical errors found on this blog, whether emanating from Mike Ferguson, one of his split personali…uh, alter egos, or one of his many celebrity guest panelists, real or imagined, belong to Mike Ferguson and are not necessarily shared, acknowledged, or even understood by anyone else, including those who employ him, have employed him in the past, or who gave birth to him.

Let us depart for the grocery store, shall we? You drive. Bring your grocery list.

Ah, you have kids I see. What? Well, the Cheerios on the floor…dead give away, but relax, I have kids too.

No, it doesn’t matter; whatever grocery store you normally use will be just fine.

I see, yes it is a little crowded right now but I’m not in a hurry. This store will do. Are you familiar with the prices? Sure, I understand, some prices remain roughly the same, others change a lot and you won’t really know until you’re inside. Let’s go.

Okay, so here we are, we have our cart and we enter the store. If you don’t mind, can I have your list? Just looking it over it appears that this is a stream of consciousness list, yes? Right. That is how I usually make my list too, I think most people do. But let’s take just a moment to apply some order, if it’s okay.

First, we’ll put a star next to the items that are generally found in the center aisles, excepting the frozen foods, things like canned goods, cereal, paper towels, and all manner of stuff you don’t mind leaving in the car while you run into the yogurt store on the way home. We’re speaking in broad terms, but let’s call these dry goods. Okay, done. Look over the items I have marked and tell me what you think the prices will be. I’ll wait.

Good, you did that quickly. Let’s go shopping and see how you did.

=============

That took about ten minutes and we now have all the dry goods, or center aisle items,  from your list in our cart and you were very accurate in anticipating the cost of these items. I don’t think you were off by more than about 15 cents on anything, and in most cases you were within five cents if not spot on. Nicely done.

Let me have the list back. Now, I’m going to go through and circle all the items that are meat and dairy. There, that was easy. Now, go ahead and note your best guess at the prices next to each item. What? Well, yes, meat and dairy prices can be more variable than the dry goods, but go ahead and make some educated guesses. Excellent. Now we leave the center aisles and move to the outside sections of the store. Oh, look, cheese samples.

=============

Well, that was fast, some cheddar, milk, eggs, a whole chicken, which, I assume, will soon be home to one of those cans of beer in the cart. I see you decided on some pork loin, even though it wasn’t on your list. No, no, that’s okay. So you did alright anticipating the prices, you were within five cents on the milk, you nailed eggs and cheese, and you were off by almost a dollar on the chicken. Well, when is the last time you bought chicken? Yeah, you see, almost a month so no surprise. Prices change, especially on items that occupy the outside aisles of the store.

So, I have your list and we are ready for the last group, produce. I am putting a box around all the produce items, and there are several. You like your fruits and vegetables I see…or is this just because you knew I would be shopping with you today? No, just kidding. Now, look over the boxed items and take a guess at what the prices might be.

Okay, it’s taking you some time to guess at produce prices. No, it’s okay, but you should just make a guess if you’re unsure. No, really, go ahead, just do your best. Seriously, I don’t want to be here all afternoon.

No, I think it’s better if I don’t help you. Look, I’m going to go get some more of those cheese samples while you work on that. What was that anyway? Gouda?

I’m back and it looks like you’ve finally come up with some prices for the produce on your list. It looks like you crossed a few things out and made corrections. That’s okay. We don’t have a lot of rules in this game. Let’s go to the produce sections and see how you did.

=============

I don’t think it will come as a surprise that you didn’t guess one single price right in the produce section, although you were very close with bananas, off by only 10 cents per pound. Everything else, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, well, wait, you nailed the prepackaged baby carrots. But otherwise you missed by at least 20 cents on everything else.

Well, that was very interesting. I appreciate you allowing me to tag along and quiz you on your knowledge of prices.

What’s that? Coffee? Let me see. Yes, coffee is on your list but you’re right, I did not include it in any of our categories.  Well, you don’t want to go home without coffee, so which category is the right category for coffee? Ah, you are correct, coffee does grow on trees…well, a bush actually, but point taken. Yes, as an agricultural product, coffee is subject to the same seemingly endless list of variables affecting supply and demand as other foods that are grown under the big wide sky. I detect reluctance on your part to guess at a price.  You see where this is going. Still, let’s finish the game.

Before we walk down the coffee aisle, take a guess at what the price might be. No, it’s usually 12 ounces at the grocery store, actually.  Okay, write it down and here we go…and, we are standing in front of a large selection of bags and cans and little tins and…I guess you would call that one a bucket. What brand do you usually buy? Really? No, it’s okay, we can talk about that later. There it is, and your guess was off by 70 cents, you guessed too low.

Well, the timing of our little game was working against you.  The price of green coffee has gone up more than 100% in the last 12 months, almost doubling since summer, and no one can really say when it will stop rising, at least in the near-term. And for the foreseeable future, predicting the prices you’ll find on this aisle, or at your local coffeehouse, might be a little more difficult. People generally think of coffee like they think of most things they find on the center aisles, but the truth is coffee has more in common with those products you find on the outside aisles.

You’re right, I sort of tricked you to make a point, but guess what. For participating in our adventure on the grocery aisles, we’re going to give you free coffee for a year…or say, $1000 worth, whichever comes first.

As always, views, opinions, attitudes, typos, and grammatical errors found on this blog, whether emanating from Mike Ferguson, one of his split personali…uh, alter egos, or one of his many celebrity guest panelists, real or imagined, belong to Mike Ferguson and are not necessarily shared, acknowledged, or even understood by anyone else, including those who employ him, have employed him in the past, or who gave birth to him.

Stop writing about magic on my blog…

or  How to clear a room: Introduce your friend, the vocalist.

So you’re at a party and a friend walks up with someone you don’t know.

“Mike,” she says, “This is my friend, Malini, he’s an accountant and an amateur vocalist. Malini, this is my friend, Mike. He works in the coffee industry and, well, he’s interested in a lot of different things.”

“Coffee,” says Malini, raising an eyebrow in feign interest. “Well, that’s sort of cool. Accounting is my day job but I am actually a vocalist.”  

“So I’m told.”

“Do you like songs?”

“Well, sure, I mean–”

“Because,” says Malini, “I have a song I could sing for you right now.”

“Oh? Uh…”

At that point, Malini starts singing. It’s a song you think you’ve heard, or maybe you’ve heard a song a lot like it. Actually, you know the tune but the words are different. It’s not that he’s a bad singer, he’s just not a very interesting singer. In any case, Malini is quite enthusiastic and when he finishes, he starts another song, which sort of reminds you of the first song, and then, another…

Oh wait. Did I say vocalist? I meant magician. Malini is a magician, an amateur magician or maybe a part-time professional magician.  And unfortunately, he’s not an uncommon magician, in any sense.

I am, of late, returned after a long sojourn to the world, or perhaps a neighborhood, of magic.  I wonder what you think when you read that? I mean the magic part specifically. What comes to mind when you think of magic? Do you think of Malini? For my part, I wonder what form my re-ignited interest in magic will take. Malini is out of the question, so here is my first rule:

Not only will I never do magic uninvited, I will not do magic out of context or with a presenting premise I alone manufactured, even if waiting for the right context means I know and practice effects  that are never performed in public. Nothing about magic is pure, but the moment itself can be if I wait for it to come to me.

Notes for January 2011: With the recent announcement that a mermaid (with make-over) will soon appear on a 31 ounce cold coffee drink cup, I decided to open the vault and retrieve the article below, which first appeared in Fresh Cup Magazine and sometime after was reprinted in The Specialty Coffee Chronicle.  I am sorely tempted go through and change what has changed (Remember the word “Baristi?” Yuk.), but I’ll let to go. Even some of my opinions have changed over the last seven years.

I suspect that a little snooping would reveal that “portion distortion” is an ongoing phenomenon and that some of the sizes mentioned in the opening section have grown even more. Also, I wrote this from my desk at The Specialty Coffee Association of America, where there were many things I said that I then had to do something about, but this was not one of them. Now that I am actually in the coffee industry (as opposed to the association industry) I look back at myself on a few points and think, “Easy for you to say, Bubba.” Note, I hardly ever call myself Bubba.

The Supersizing of Specialty Coffee: Is Bigger Really Better?

By Mike Ferguson

Published in the June 2003 issue of Fresh Cup Magazine

In the distant future, archaeologists will dig us up, looking for clues they can decipher in their studied hindsight as indications of the decline of western civilization. In the same way that we reflect on the Romans and wonder why they couldn’t see that feeding people to lions was not a sign of good things to come, historians will one day look back at us and think, “All you can eat? Double Big Gulp? Super-size it? A 24-ounce coffee?” The writing, they’ll say, was on the menu.

Those who study consumer psychology call this phenomenon “portion distortion.” I call it a world gone mad. In the 1950s, a medium popcorn at the movies contained three cups of popcorn; today it’s 16 cups. Vending machines (three million of them) that once dispensed 6.5-ounce bottles and then 12-ounce cans, now spit out 20-ounce bottles. And consider this: Over the last two decades, the average circumference of a restaurant dinner plate has gone from 10 inches to 12 ½ inches, the average fast food hamburger patty has grown from two ounces to four, the average bag of French fries has swelled from two ounces to five ounces, and the average size of a candy bar has increased four times since 1970. And how is it that the same recipe for Nestlé’s Toll House chocolate chip cookies that listed a yield of 100 in 1949 now lists a yield of only 60? It is the same madness that causes someone to fill a 24-ounce cup with coffee. Whatever happened to coming back for another cookie or a second cup?

If I were king, I would declare a large coffee to be now and forever 12 ounces. Anything beyond 12 ounces is what I would call inelegant. And that is, in essence, my entire argument against the inroads super-sizing has made into the coffee industry. Few things in coffee are as elegant as a demitasse cup filled with 1.5 ounces of properly prepared espresso, or the perfect triumvirate of a six-ounce cappuccino. A 16-ounce cup is simply unbecoming, a 20-ounce cup ridiculous and a 24-ounce cup absurd. There are wild tales of convenience store cups that are even larger. These are the inelegant ounces and harbingers of the ordinary, the commonplace and commodification. Each ounce beyond 12 has less to do with specialty coffee and more to do with concepts that fit uneasily into the specialty experience: convenience, value marketing, bigger is better, up-selling, volume, and demand.

Whatever happened to the truly small cup of coffee to go? Twenty years ago, a regular coffee to go came in a six-ounce cup with a little paper handle. If it was good enough then, why not now? Chances are most of the coffee mugs in your kitchen, when filled to a point where you can walk and read this article at the same time without spilling, hold around seven ounces. And if you like to pick up old coffee cups at thrift stores or have inherited coffee cups from your grandmother, they probably hold only four to five ounces. Seventy percent of coffee is consumed in the home, but for some reason, leaving our house requires a doubling or tripling of our coffee serving size.

The most common excuse for super-sizing is convenience. Customers often demand larger cups because they commute long distances and only want to make one stop for coffee. Fair enough. But if as a retailer you buy into this, you’re saying that customers buy coffee from you because of your selection of cup sizes, and if you don’t offer anything above 12 ounces they will buy coffee from one of your competitors who provides 16- or even 20-ounce cups. But is your competitor’s coffee as good as yours? This is the same thinking that causes retailers to compete on price rather than quality. Customers expect larger cups because they’ve been trained to expect larger cups. But attentive retailers are perfectly capable of encouraging customers to concentrate on the quality rather than the quantity, making them more loyal in the process. It really comes down to how much you trust your coffee and its preparation. Your customer might finish his coffee while he’s still in the car rather than after he’s reached his desk, but he may not even notice because he was so satisfied. Attempting to please a customer with volume rather than taste takes one foot out of the specialty coffee business and plants it firmly in “commodity-think.”

I challenge the argument for convenience in hopes that your coffee is so good that your customers will take it however they can get it. Maybe it will be so good that they’ll make room in their day to stop and enjoy it in a porcelain cup while sitting at a table, and then order a second for the road.

Thirty years ago, McDonald’s reluctantly increased the size of their large order of French fries to 3.5 ounces (smaller than a medium order today). The reluctance came from founder Ray Kroc, who believed that if people wanted more French fries, they should buy two bags. I agree. But “value marketing” is seductive to both retailers and their customers.

I purchased my first 32-ounce soda along with some friends at an ice cream parlor 25 years ago. We thought of it as a joke, a novelty. People stared at us as we walked down the street with our obscenely large cups. We thought it was hilarious. Who would ever drink so much soda? We could have shared one among us. But within a few years, 32-ounce cups began to proliferate through convenience stores, eventually finding their way into fast food locations where they were identified on the menu as the “best value.” It’s hard to deny. For only a few cents more, you can get twice as much beverage. Never mind that what I wanted, and what had always worked for me in the past, was a 16- or 20-ounce beverage. For retailers, the cost of adding a larger size is small compared to the added cost to the consumer. To consumers, it’s only 30 or 40 cents, so why not? It’s because we consume food and beverages in relation to what is available and not in relation to what we need. Unlike babies and toddlers, who stop eating or drinking when they are full, adults in a society heavily reliant on meals prepared and served by others depend on visual cues as much as the “feeling” of being full. The once impossibly large 32-ounce soda is now a medium drink in most convenience stores. The six-ounce coffee to go is extinct in most regions of the country for no other reason than because we were told we needed to drink from larger cups.

But we don’t have to serve coffee in giant cups any more than our customers need to drink from them. Nothing about this evolution in portion size is appropriate to specialty coffee. We do not roast coffee continuously in factories, turning out three or four variations on a theme. We roast in batches. Maybe some of our batches are big, but even they are distinct in countless ways from the coffee that went before and the coffee that will come after. Most specialty coffee retailers still prepare one espresso drink at a time. Drip coffee must be ground correctly and measured precisely. Everything about the proper preparation of specialty coffee, from the day it was born on the tree to the day it is poured, speaks to the singularity of every cup worthy of the name. To equate value with volume degrades not only our product but the sophistication of our customers, a sophistication that helped build the specialty coffee segment. We must trust both the coffees and the customers.

I had thought I would conclude with the idea that we should look to our friends in the specialty tea industry for inspiration on cup size and ignore what happens in convenience stores and fast food chains as irrelevant to our interests. But I was presented with dramatic evidence recently that we need not look beyond our own industry for inspiration. The best baristi in the world gathered not long ago in Boston to compete for the title of international champion. They each prepared espressos and cappuccinos with great skill and attention to detail. When it came to the signature drinks, not one prepared anything larger than 12 ounces. In fact, many of the signature drinks were less than eight ounces, and they were some of the most elegant ounces I have ever seen.

I’m not a magician. Look, you might see me do a magic trick at some point because the moment is right and the moment demands it. This makes me a hobbyist. But it is important to me that you understand that professional magicians are remarkable creatures (emphasis is on the word “professional”). Most of them, if magic is the only thing they do to earn a living, are making less than your average CPA, probably a lot less, even if they appear to you to be a successful performer. You might want to make fun of them and some of them deserve it. But many of those who leave you wondering and asking and imagining how, they are not rich entertainers if performing magic, magic in front of real live people, is their only  revenue stream.

If you are one of my coffee comrades, we have much in common with the magicians I admire. The world may think differently, but not many people get rich chasing their passion for amazing coffee.  

Rich magicians, like rich coffee professionals, are rare indeed. This is why some of the most amazing magicians you might ever meet are also lawyers or anesthesiologists or actors or magic merchants or something else in addition. They may dream of having a room at the Waldorf-Astoria where they perform miracles a few times a week for a small appreciative audience, and they might even be relentless in their practice, but supply and demand are working against them. I only bring this up to make it clear that when I talk about learning and re-learning magic, there is nothing really at stake here except my own enjoyment and the occasional enjoyment of a few friends.   

I have written about magic before (A Question of Magic and Remembering Magic) because it is a topic that interests me, I am a fan of the art, and I have a history with magic. But after writing A Question of Magic, my hands began to itch. This has been coming for awhile but the itch became too much. Slowly, carefully, tentatively, I began returning to a study of magic.

Signs of the disease:

• You cannot leave a bookstore without looking through the Games section, where they usually banish the magic books. Used bookstores are better.
• You start making a list of tricks you remember how to do and you start shaking off the rust. Rust is everywhere.
• Although you must have walked past a deck of Bicycle’s 125 Year Anniversary playing cards a dozen times in the last year, suddenly they jump off shelf.
• You steal the dice from your children’s board games.
• When you find an all leather vintage coin purse at a thrift store in perfect condition you don’t say, “What a great deal,” you say, “Hello darlin’.”
• Your new playing cards are evil incarnate and refuse to bend to your will. Rust is everywhere.

So here I am, reintroducing myself to magic like an old friend. And like an old friend, there are things I know about magic that I forgot I knew, and things I thought I remembered that are wrong, and things I simply see differently because I’m older now. This process, this relearning and learning anew feels like something to share, for no particularly good reason, as befits the whole blogging impulse.

One of the things that I am relearning now is that magic hands are not jazz hands.

When I was sixteen I worked at a magic shop. While a small magic shop can be a busy place at times, a great deal of the time it is less than busy. I spent many hours alone in the shop practicing, making sure the display glass was clean, and reading reading reading.

One Saturday, a girl came into the shop alone. A college girl. A pretty college girl. I began to sweat and stutter and stammer and all but drool all over myself. And that was before she even smiled at me. When she smiled, I felt certain I would pass out. But then she asked me to show her a magic trick.

When you work at a magic shop you learn to do a handful of tricks that most people can do with a reasonable amount of practice, tricks that have some degree of impact if done well and that don’t cost too much. The shop will be well stocked with these tricks and sell many of them to people who want to learn magic. When the pretty college girl asked to see a trick, I reached for an old stand-by, Peter Rabbit.

If you have ever been in a magic shop there is a better than good chance you have seen a performance of Peter Rabbit. The small sponge rabbits magically vanish from the magician’s hand to appear in the spectator’s hand and at the end the two adult bunnies make baby bunnies. I chose this trick because I had performed it so many times that it was essentially full proof, even though it required some sleight of hand. If there was any trick I performed by rote, it was Peter Rabbit.

But I did not consider two things as I chose the trick. First, it is vaguely sexual (the adult rabbits create the baby bunnies while inside the spectators hand) and, the magician has to touch the spectator’s hand several times.

By the time these things occurred to me, I had already begun. The pretty college girl smiled at me as if she knew what was coming. Fortunately, the sheer number of times I had performed the trick took over. Still, as I placed the rabbit in her palm, closed her fingers over it, and turned her fist over, I felt dizzy.

The trick went off without a hitch and she was surprised by the ending and laughed and I was in heaven. As I started to put Peter Rabbit away, she took my hands and turned them over.

“You move your hands like a magician,” she said. “You have amazing hands.”

At this point, the story takes two separate paths. One path is the story I have told in my head countless times since that day and involves me closing the shop for an hour…well, 20 minutes anyway.  The other story, a.k.a. reality, involves her boyfriend walking into the shop at that moment from who-the-hell-cares. She says he should watch me do a trick. He says something Neolithic, and they leave. She doesn’t even buy the damn trick.

Despite how brightly this moment still burns in the adolescent recesses of my mind, the real effect it had on me came from the words she spoke. She told me my hands moved like the hands of a magician. I took this as a compliment, which it must have been. But the longer I thought about it, the more I wondered if it was a good thing.

I watched my hands performing coin and card magic in the mirror and, I had to admit, they looked good. They moved with style and a little flourish that was, unmistakably, magical.

This was all wrong and I knew it. That wasn’t the magic I wanted to do. I wanted to arrive unexpectedly. I did not want to announce with my hands that I was up to something. I wanted the spectators to feel that I was almost as much of an observer as they were.  I wanted the pretty college girl to tell her boyfriend that I was a great magician, not that he should watch me.

I began to un-train my hands: Hey pinky, get in line. And all you fingers, no fanning. I mean, what is that anyway? You’re pluming like a peacock. Look, fingers, we’re not posing for Michelangelo. Please, try to look normal and stop channeling David Copperfield’s eyebrows.

It was hard. I can’t say why other people who practice magic might make their hands look so artful and precise. I was doing it because I had seen others do it. That was how magicians did it. They presented.

But there was this guy I knew when I worked at the magic shop and was involved with The Long Beach Mystics. I can’t remember his name, which bothers me because I was fond of him. He had a nasal voice and the skinniest fingers I have ever seen. His fingers never “flourished,” they never appeared to be works of art or precision instruments. In fact, his hands appeared so unsuited for handling cards that you expected the deck to fly from his hands at any moment.  When he did coin magic, it seemed so unlikely that a coin could hide anywhere in those hands that even magicians who knew what he was doing had trouble following. But he was a master magician and always flawless in his execution.

That’s what I wanted. But my hands kept “striking a pose” every chance they got. I worked to unlearn.

Eventually I taught my hands to not look like magician’s hands and, to always look as natural and relaxed as possible. Unfortunately, it appears, my hands have forgotten these lessons over the last 30 years. This is most apparent when I handle a deck of cards. As soon as the cards are in my hands, my hands become dancers and try to steal the show.

To my mind, a deck of cards is problematic for a magician. Amazing things can be done with a deck of cards, but too much card magic is like too much pie. Yes, it tastes very very good but I cannot eat another bite.  And why do we need a deck of cards anyway? Should we not be able to perform some demonstration of magic with anything in the room, anything in your room? But we keep pulling out these cards and it’s all a little suspect.

On the other hand, especially when it comes to mentalism, a deck of cards is an expediency, somewhat in the same way that the futures market is an expedient price discovery mechanism for commodities. If you need to prove your ability to accurately manipulate (physically, mentally, secretly, psychically) the world, what better than a small box of apparently limitless possibilities that fits in your pocket.  

My ambivalence regarding playing cards has been evident in that I did not pick up a deck for weeks after deciding I would begin again to study magic. But some of the things I want to do require playing cards, at least for now. Opening a new deck of cards was at once familiar, nostalgic, comforting, and slippery as hell.

The first thing I did was drop the cards, attempt to catch them and trap one at the edge of the table, bending the seven of clubs ever so slightly. Now it’s a game deck, I thought/remembered. Deck two.

I was pleased to find my hands remember a few things. My fingers still have the touch for fanning the cards, a utterly useless skill unless it’s 1958 and you’re a stage magician or unless you want to demonstrate for your spectators that you can manipulate cards so that they should attribute anything you do to your hands being instruments trained to fool them.

I was not pleased to see that my hands, perhaps out of insecurity, had reverted to being “magical.”

I wish I could think of a better way to describe what I’m talking about. When comedy sketches parody stage magicians, they exaggerate random and dramatic posing. I’m talking about the same thing, except with hands. Imagine viewing three videos of three different people shuffling a deck of cards and all you can see are the hands. You’re asked to decide which hands belong to a magician and it’s obvious. That’s what I’m talking about.

Okay, so this whole blog entry is just about me trying to get my hands to calm down while I do something as simple as cutting a deck of cards. Yup. Are there any wider implications related to other aspects of life? Not really. No moral to the blog.

Except maybe this. I don’t want to hear that my hands look like magician’s hands because it’s the wrong thing. It’s not the point. Just like I don’t want to hear:

“Great logo (package, label, website), too bad about the coffee.”

“Great latte art, and the coffee’s pretty good too.”

“Great manual brewing set up…” (says nothing about the coffee)

I want to hear first about how remarkable the coffee is. I want to hear you blinking at the cards or the page or the empty hand as if the moment snuck up on you. There is nothing worse than being complimented for the wrong thing.

I fall from the sky with the lightning into New Orleans, two hours from the funeral.  A bad flight, a flight that causes sudden infatuation with trains. I consider the idea that tragedy leaves echoes,  like shockwaves, creating random unsafe zones in all directions for hundreds of miles, even up in the air, but this thought is cured by the feel of solid ground.

No one meets me because no one knows I have come. Of course, my grandma knows because she is dead and the dead know. This I was told, perhaps by my grandma Dette herself, when I was young. Beliefs like these, beliefs gathered in childhood, have left imprints my adulthood cannot completely erase: God knows and Santa Claus knows. No one else knows I have come. I remain unexpected, and so not missed.

The Louisiana summer air. I feel the weight of humidity before I feel the rain. It is claustrophobic like fevered dreams, like waking from nightmares to blankets and sweat. Now, I am sweating in the rain.

Outside the airport, everyone is moving slow. Careless and slow. It takes five minutes for the air conditioner in my rented car to kill the heat and begin chilling the damp patches around the knees of my pants. My trousers, she would say. Normally, I’d wear tan shoes against a charcoal suit, but not today. Black wing tips.

On the highway I lose the city, its wounds lingering on my peripheral as I watch only the road at first, heading inland. I savor this distance from suffering, give safe harbor to my practiced indifference. I’m not really here. This thought has been negotiated.

 Eventually I will look through the trees as I drive for the brown bayou water and wonder about alligators. This thought, this thought about alligators, embarrasses me. I think about this and don’t think about the funeral, beyond wondering if that is where I am going.