Edumucation

Today I delivered the first live version of the revised coffee education I've been working on for a while, Power-Point & hand-outs & all; four new employees got to be my test subjects. We came out to about an hour even, which is probably a little longer than I'd like. All in all it went very well, though, and I'm looking forward to revising the program further. Given how much I'm into coffee, it's a little terrifying to be the main conduit for all this information. Basically I'm just trying to get new hires started on the road to coffee-geekdom; I feel like the time I spent in coffee before getting the bug is kinda time wasted, and I'd like to get them there faster.

Head Roaster Michael Burke leads the newbies' first cupping

Trying to condense every book/forum I've read and every workshop I've attended down to 40 slides or so is pretty rough. It often seems to come down to a choice between simplifying things to the point that they don't convey anything useful, or just skipping them entirely so we can focus more on a few things. Well, I guess that's what the hand-outs will have to evolve to cover.

It's been a long time since I've done this kind of structured, lecturing teaching. I used to do various kinds of tutoring and some student-instructor kind of things back in college, something I've always really enjoyed, and it's really nice to get back in the swing of it.

Teaching this stuff really gets me to think about the areas I don't know enough about in coffee, which can pretty much be summed up in one word: origin. An origin trip is probably on every serious barista's to-do list, but until I really started evaluating the gaps in my knowledge I never really put too much priority on it. I've read books, looked on the internet, kinda-sorta have a clue about farming and processing, but I can just tell that I don't really get it, and I probably won't until I get there. Interesting.

Work has been pretty busy of late; there's a lot of pretty exciting stuff coming up, ArtFest, new locations opening, lots of training & education stuff to do. I haven't been able to do as much with the blog yet as I'd like to, but I'll be getting around to other cafés soon to try to set up some community stuff. If you're reading this and you'd like to help set something up, let me know! That's it for now.