If It's Going to Happen, It's Going to Happen in Coffee

Why cold brew exemplifies specialty coffee's ability to inspire change—plus, a Boss Barista stats update.

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Photo by Armin on Unsplash

Sometimes I reflect on the topics I discuss in this newsletter and think, “I’m a buzzkill.”

A lot of what I write is, well, pretty critical of the coffee industry, and how we think about hourly labor and equity. Recently, this has been weighing on me. I wondered: Was I really doing anything more than pointing out negative aspects of an industry I care deeply about? To what end do these criticisms even serve? 

Some of my guilt—if I can call it that—is being unable to divorce Ashley the Writer from Ashley the Human Being. As a writer, I’m supposed to ask hard questions and avoid accepting things at face value—being critical is part of the job. As a human, I carry the emotional weight of drawing negative conclusions and wonder if I’m doing enough.

But just when I worried that I was dumping on coffee too much, I remembered something a friend once told me: He said he also felt increasingly critical of the industry, but that his criticism came from a place of great hope and optimism. “If huge, societal changes can happen within any industry, it’s coffee.”

I returned to this moment because of something coffee trader Stephanie Alcala said in this week’s podcast conversation: 

The specialty coffee industry is at the forefront of innovation. And it wasn’t until I started working at my job now that I realized, “Oh my goodness, the coffee industry is huge, and the specialty coffee industry is just a drop in the bucket.”

But what I then realized is how the specialty sector is the one that’s really trying to innovate and change constantly, find and tweak what is quality, and then the larger industry takes from their findings. And the best example that I can say is of cold brew. The specialty coffee industry was like, “This is where it’s at,” and now you see cold brew everywhere.

That’s where I see specialty, and that’s the importance for us working in the industry to introduce new concepts and ideas to the consumer in a more approachable manner, meet them where they’re at, and then push ‘em a little.

I remember working at a small New York coffee chain in 2010 and using paint buckets and cheesecloth to make batch upon batch of the newly popular cold brew. Sloshing around wet satchels of ground coffee was worth the promise of a cold drink that was smoother and more flavorful than the “iced coffee” we’d previously made by letting hot coffee chill in the fridge before pouring it over ice. 

That said, cold brew has actually been around for decades. Starbucks sold Toddy brewers, which are one of the most popular brewers for cold brew, in its stores as far back as the 1970s, and quick-chilled methods, which involve brewing coffee directly over ice, have also been around for a long time. But cold brew wasn’t a household word, and it owes its ascendancy to small, independent coffee shops. Cold brew became so popular that by 2015, it was introduced to the Starbucks menu. You can now get cold brew anywhere, from gas stations to Dunkin’—even McDonald’s is trying out cold brew for its McCafé menu. 

I think that cold brew’s exploding popularity had a lot to do with the concurrent expansion and adoption of specialty coffee around the world. Previously, you could only really get cold brew from independent shops specializing in quality coffee—only later did big chains and brands catch on. But cold brew’s rise didn’t just change how we drink cold coffee—it influenced how we drink coffee, full stop. In 2021, Starbucks reported that nearly three out of every four drinks it makes are cold. That’s wild: Imagine typing the word “coffee” into Google, and instead of a photo of a steaming mug appearing, the default image is a tumbler with a straw.

Cold brew’s rise demonstrates a promising truth: We can do extraordinary things in the specialty coffee industry, things which can graduate to mainstream adoption and broad cultural change. As Stephanie said, specialty coffee is a space for innovation, and a fertile ground for strategies that can be executed beyond its borders. 

But that’s not all that specialty coffee can do. I think of my friend’s words—that if big changes can happen, they can happen in coffee—when I think of the Starbucks union movement. Before the first Starbucks location unionized in December 2021, a handful of small, independent coffee shops had already begun unionizing. Even if these smaller stores didn’t directly inspire the union movement at Starbucks, they provided the foundational belief that hourly coffee workers deserve to unionize. 

And it’s not just about small, independent coffee shops influencing big chains—it’s about the coffee industry as a whole influencing popular culture. Public support for unions is at an all-time high, and one in five union petitions filed in 2022 was from Starbucks workers. I firmly believe we’re witnessing the biggest public change in how we feel about work, and workers’ rights, in living memory, and that’s primarily due to the public-facing nature of barista work. We see our baristas every day and witness their struggles in real time—those observations will continue to reverberate outward and morph our perceptions of work, worth, and value. 

So anytime I believe myself to be a buzzkill, I try to remind myself of my friend’s words. Coffee is capable of so much, and I know this because I’ve seen it happen first-hand. I’ve witnessed change—and I know that continuing to be critical is core to mapping a better vision for the future, one that can really be enacted.

An update on numbers!

At the beginning of the year, I set myself a challenge: get to 4,000 subscribers. I knew that it was ambitious, but I figured there would be a few moments of momentum to help make that possible.

I started last year with under 900 subscribers, and roughly doubled that by the beginning of 2023. I thought aiming for a number that wasn’t quite double would be achievable. However…

As you can see, I’m nowhere near my goal. I started 2023 with about 2,200 subscribers, and I haven’t yet had a big boost since.

As someone who has been critical of growth mindsets in coffee before, this can feel like a weird goal to aspire to—but I also have to acknowledge that I’m not on a sustainable path if I continue without increasing subscribers. I don’t have an exact figure for what “sustainable” looks like for me, but if the current free-to-paid conversion rate of 4.5% holds, getting to around 15k subscribers feels … comfortable? (For transparency’s sake, paid subscriptions don’t just support my work—Substack also takes 10% of writers’ revenue; I pay an editor; and I also earmark 30% of my income for taxes.)

Amidst this drive to increase subscriptions, I’d love to hear from you: What factors make newsletter subscriptions feel “worth it” to you? What would you like to see from Boss Barista as a paid subscriber, and what do you think might boost subscriptions more broadly?

Given my focus on labor in my writing, I also want to be transparent about my own working life, the mechanics of the newsletter, and the logistical questions I grapple with. Thank you for reading, and for your support—in all the forms that it takes.