In 2025, Get Weird With Your Coffee
Every January, I give Boss Barista readers a recommendation for how to approach the year ahead. This year, I think we could all stand to get weirder.
Immediately after the 2024 presidential election, I wrote about the problem of power and how I saw it influence both political parties. Specifically, I thought a lot about the Democratic Party’s problem with power: “a party concerned much more with preserving old, neoliberal structures of power and funding a genocide than listening to constituents’ needs, a party that then turns right around and believes itself entitled to people’s votes unquestioningly,” I wrote.
Or, as I later quipped to a friend, the party didn’t need to further shift to the “center” to attract “moderates.” What it needed was to get weird.
Of course, it is not weird to ask leaders to stop sending money to fund a genocide, or to actually follow through on legislation that would positively impact people’s lives (student loan relief, for example). And I also meant weird differently than how the word was used by Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz when describing Republicans.
Instead, by “weird” I meant throwing away the playbook—discarding old structures meant to preserve control and taking action that would actually reflect the needs and wants of the party’s constituents.
I’m just a coffee writer, not a politician—but I think the advice above would also be fruitful for many members of our industry. Every year, I make a recommendation for Boss Barista readers. In 2022, I said start a union; in 2023, I asked you to get closer to your coffee; and in 2024, I encouraged all of us to stop expanding.
This year, I want coffee to get weird.
Furthermore, I want you to look around your favorite shops and brands—or pan out to consider industry conventions and frameworks for buying and selling coffee—and ask, “What would it mean for coffee to get weird?”
Same Old, Same Old
Last July, I wrote about coffee’s “age of average.” So many brands do the same things: They look the same, source the same kinds of coffees, and borrow from the same script, repeating words like “intentional” and “innovation” without actually doing anything different than what we’ve seen before.
This happens in capitalism. Instead of promoting novelty, capitalism trains us to believe that new ideas are risky (and they are in this economic framework, to an extent). As a result, individuals and companies tend to copy what they’ve seen work for others.
Brands eventually cannibalize one another in their efforts to target the same consumers and market standing, because nothing differentiates them from the rest of the pack. It’s wild that this pattern has only seemed to accelerate over time, and it’s one of the reasons I think the idea that market competition is a threat to businesses is overblown. (If your customers cannot differentiate between what you offer vs. what other companies provide, then either you need to communicate your values better or your business doesn’t need to be in operation.) We blame competition instead of identifying what makes us stand out, or seeking out sectors of the market that aren’t being served.
I’m not saying that opening a business isn’t hard or risky, and I don’t mean to limit my focus to small business owners. Coffee as a whole is an incredibly risk-averse industry, by which I mean that buyers, roasters, and other companies in consuming countries tend to shift risk to growers and producers through contracts and mechanisms like the C-market. Instead, I’m looking to the part of the industry I have the most access to (retail stores) and wondering if we can extrapolate this idea of weirdness across the entire industry.
Could we place more value on doing things that might feel strange or odd instead of reinventing the same thing repeatedly, like opening the same kind of coffee shop or reimaging the same type of tools? By now, we collectively have enough brewers, kettles, and grinders. I’d like to see folks launch crowdfunding campaigns for innovative tools that could positively impact people, not for a grinder with one or two more bells and whistles than previous models.
This weirdness could extend to the trenchant problems of coffee growing and sourcing. Many roasters use the same catchphrases, like “ethical sourcing” and “paying more for coffee,” even though we know that these frameworks haven’t solved the issues plaguing farmers. (We only seem to panic about coffee prices when they affect consumers—just look at how the recent spike in arabica prices has garnered hundreds of “why is your coffee going up in price?” articles over the last few months.)
What would it look like to get weird in this context?
Small Scale, Big Ideas
Being weird with coffee doesn’t mean throwing out all conventions, nor does it necessarily mean taking big swings. (That said, I’d encourage trade organizations like the Specialty Coffee Association to use more of its resources to push the industry forward rather than increasing its CEO’s compensation nearly 80% from 2022 to 2023.)
I think being weird can be as small as offering something unique that speaks to your own passion. For example, there’s a coffee shop here in Madison that I love going to because I know I’ll get signature drinks I can’t find anywhere else (the coffee is also great).
Being weird can also mean basing your sourcing model on the small and sustainable. In a few weeks, I’ll be publishing a written interview with Kevin Joanisse of Lulo Coffee1, who sources coffee primarily from Colombia and Costa Rica. We discussed how that approach allows him to invest deeply with producers, versus offering myriad coffees from all over the world to meet some invented idea of “consumer demand.”
I also need to think more about what being weird means for Boss Barista. I’ve been focusing so much on how this platform can be more sustainable (i.e., not contribute to my already overflowing workload and mental fatigue) that I haven’t thought about what would push the boundaries here. Usually, those ideas come from reading, and I hope to invest more time in books and articles in 2025—and translate what I’ve learned into articles here.
A few years ago, Ruth Reichl—a food writer and former editor of the now-defunct “Gourmet” magazine—gave a talk to a group of grant recipients that I was part of. She spoke about how she’d try various experiments within the confines of food writing, like pretending she was an alien visiting a restaurant for the first time and writing a review from that perspective. I no longer recall exactly why she did this, or if the experiments went anywhere. But I imagine the tactic was designed to shake something loose, and to imagine something wholly new within the beats and repetitions of everyday life.
Fun things come to those who are willing to experiment, and real change can, too. So in 2025, I urge you to get weird—and to make your coffee weird, too.
This conversation will be presented as a Q&A, not a podcast: I don’t think I’m going back to the podcast model anytime soon. If that’s an update you’re looking for, please leave me a message in the comments below.