How Do We Know What We Know About Coffee—And Life? (Part Two)

Failing to understand our predecessors dooms us to repetition—but repetition can also be a joyful tool of learning and discovery.

Photo by Ihor Malytskyi on Unsplash

This story is part of a two-part series exploring how knowledge is built. Read part one here. 

In my 14 years working in coffee, nine of those actively behind the bar, I’ve probably pulled 100,000 shots of espresso.

And yet, espresso can still confound me. Sometimes, I’ll pull a shot, taste it, and still have no idea what the espresso is saying. (Back when I was a coffee trainer, I’d try to get people to articulate what they tasted in the espresso by asking them: “What’s the espresso telling you?”). Sometimes, I’ll make the wrong call, tightening the grind setting when I should have made it coarser, pulling a shot longer when I should have pulled it for less time. Everything I have learned about coffee has come from repetition, and repetition will continue to teach me into the future.

Last week, I asked a big question: How do we know what we know? In exploring this topic—both as it pertains to coffee and to wider life—I talked about how much of what we think is new knowledge is actually repeated, taken from the past or from other people and groups without credit. I also discussed how refusing to examine the source of our knowledge can lead to misinformation, which leaves us ill-equipped to solve the problems in front of us.

In a way, my argument last week could seem like an indictment of repetition, but that’s not quite right. Yes, if we fail to understand the knowledge and history of those who came before us, we’re doomed to repeat ourselves, as the well-worn saying goes. But there’s a difference between repetition without context and repetition for the sake of developing depth and education.

In the second piece in this two-part series, I argue that just as querying the source of our knowledge is an essential habit of the mind, so is repetition. If there’s anything the last 14 years have taught me, it’s that making coffee over and over is a never-ending journey of discovery.

Like a Science Experiment

The analogy I repeat most when I teach someone how to make coffee is that coffee is like a science experiment—one that is immediately gratifying, because the results are apparent within minutes. If you’re unsure whether changing the grind setting will actually solve the problem you taste in the cup, you’ll know within a brew cycle.

This idea—of seeing various habits and practices as science experiments—first became ingrained in me during a summer intensive teaching course I took 15 years ago.

In one class, our professor continually asked us how we knew something was true. We couldn’t simply say, “East is this way”—we had to prove east was a particular direction. (This involved standing outside and using rulers and other objects to measure the distance between the Earth and the sun, as evidenced by the photo below.)

(My teaching cohort and I are holding up rulers, using the shadows to try to tell how far away the sun is. I’m in the bottom right corner, in the blue dress and flats.) 

Every scientific concept we learned had to be proven empirically, meaning we needed to use observational skills as the source of our knowledge. It was through this class that I learned that the scientific method—a set of tools that allows us to acquire knowledge through tactile, empirical observations—isn’t just for lab experiments. Instead, it’s a mindset that applies to nearly everything in life, and it gave me the basis to question and affirm my beliefs about the world around me.

When I first started learning about coffee, this background training really helped me: Instead of leaving all my learning to guidebooks, I’d experiment on my own, tinkering with espresso settings repeatedly, trying to discover what would happen when I tweaked certain factors. When I became a coffee trainer, I’d teach people how to pull shots by changing a variable and having them taste the difference: What happened to a shot if we pulled it for 20 seconds versus 30? 

I’d try to instill in them that, while I could teach them how to pull a shot in a matter of hours, they’d never really finish learning everything there is to learn about espresso. As long as they were paying attention, it would continue to unfold and offer them something new every time.

We’ve all heard platitudes about how learning happens throughout life, but what kind of learning? From my experiences with students of all ages, I think many of us are led to believe that learning something means either knowing it or not. I’ve seen my fair share of frustrated faces when students don’t get a concept right away, or get a question wrong unexpectedly.

But that’s not how learning works, and I think that’s where the pleasure of making coffee crystallized for me. No matter how much I think I know about coffee, or how repetitive it might seem to pull the same shot over and over again, each day represents a different challenge. The motions feel repetitive, but there’s always a new outcome, something new to glean.

I think the most concrete proof we have that learning deepens through repetition can be observed by watching experts. Have you ever noticed that when someone is truly skilled in a craft, they often take longer to do something? Or perhaps they become more meticulous, paying attention to small details a novice might find useless because they don’t understand the impact of those finer points?

I feel this a lot in my writing and editing: There are certain things, like throwing together a draft or knowing where to look for research insights, that I’m much faster at than I used to be, but there are also things I’ve slowed down on because experience has taught me to give them more time.

Relearning the Same Lesson Twice (Or More)

This piece was partly inspired by a quote from Maggie Nelson’s “The Argonauts,” a sort-of memoir in which the author explores themes of intimacy and self while recounting her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge.

When I first read the book about seven years ago, a particular passage stuck with me:  

“The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”

I still remember the moment I read this quote, flabbergasted that I could recognize a feeling on the page that I had never been able to articulate. This quote seemed to capture a collection of amorphous ideas about the world, and solidify them into something comprehensible. You don’t learn things once; you learn them repeatedly, and that doesn’t make you dumb.

I often wonder if what I write for Boss Barista feels repetitive. I think I once joked that I could replace every article I’ve written here with “It’s not about money; it’s about power,” and that’d be a good summation of the theme of each story. But we don’t learn things once; learning them again isn’t just about reaffirming what we learned in the past (although that’s part of it), but it’s about taking more from the lesson.

Even rereading this quote now, I’m struck by how little weight I gave the last part of this passage: “...but because such revisitations constitute a life.” A few weeks ago, I wrote about finding joy in coffee, and how linear my life felt before I became a barista. About how breaking apart my linear life helped me finally live in three dimensions, experiences extending outward in all directions versus in one straight line. That last line speaks to this experience, but when I first encountered this passage, I focused entirely on the “relearning” part. Even in the margins of the book, I wrote, “You don’t always learn things once." I had more to take from this quote. I’m still untangling it.

I can't think of many things I've done 100,00 times. If I had to count all the individual actions I’ve taken in my life—how many times I’ve gotten behind the wheel, or gone up the stairs, or walked my dog—I don’t think they’d ever get close. Pulling 100,00 shots of espresso might sound like repetitive drudgery, but really it was a gift/opportunity—it gave me a new way of seeing every day, and taught me that repetition is a lifelong project.