BOSS BARISTA
BOSS BARISTA
Julien Langevin believes there's a place for everyone who wants to be here
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Julien Langevin believes there's a place for everyone who wants to be here

He's also the nation's best coffee taster.
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Hi, hello! If you’re here for the first time, welcome! Your contributions make the show possible, so if you can, please consider supporting the show financially by subscribing below and picking one of the paid subscription options:

Today, I’m sharing an interview with Julien Langevin, a production worker for Coffee by Design and the 2022 United States Cup Tasters Champion. If you’re a longtime listener of the show, you’ve probably heard us talk about barista competitions, but maybe you didn’t know that there are contests designed to test and celebrate pretty much every aspect of how coffee gets to your cup. From brewing and roasting to latte art, coffee cocktails, and tasting, these competitions occur annually in conjunction with the World Barista Championship.

The World Cup Tasters Competition asks competitors to taste a set of three cups of coffee: Two are the same, and one is different. Though that may sound simple enough, this is an extremely challenging task. Competitors are also timed and perform in front of a screaming crowd, so Julien’s accomplishment is no mean feat.

When you win a competition like this, there’s an idea that you have to capitalize on it—that you have to take the opportunity to move your career to the next level. But as we explore in this episode, linear career trajectories often fail workers, particularly those of marginalized identities. To compete in the U.S. Cup Tasters Competition, Julien had to qualify at a regional event, which took place before COVID; for a long time, it was unclear whether they would even get to compete on a national stage. During that period, while waiting to hear about the fate of the competition, Julien actually left coffee because they were forced to step behind the bar again and work as a barista, a job they didn’t want to do and which didn’t line up with their interests or personal needs.

Julien’s interview will make you question why we often fall into very typical, very linear modes of upward mobility, and how we view the dignity of work. For example, most people in coffee start off as baristas, but there’s truly no reason for that. Now that Julien is a national champion, there are expectations that he’ll do something “big” next—but he’s quite content to learn and grow in his current position. As Julien says in the interview, “There is a place for everyone in coffee who wants to be here,” and this requires thinking critically about how we view work, what career progression actually means, and how we can find space for everyone to express their skills and be happy at work—whatever industry they’re in.

Ashley: Julien, I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself.

Julien: Hi, thank you so much for having me on the show, Ashley. My name is Julien Langevin. I am a production worker and roaster and I live in Portland, Maine.

Ashley: I like that you giggled to yourself a little bit there. It's just funny, because we've been talking for like the last 20 minutes before we even started recording. And then the minute recording starts, it's like a totally different game, but I feel like I don't help it because I put on, like, my podcasting voice, and it just feels different.

So I apologize for setting that scene in a funny way, but here we are.

Julien: I also always feel weird, like, introducing myself. I'm like, how much information should I give right now? Because they're going to know a lot by the end of this. So how much do I really need to say right now? But I guess just name, job description, location. Probably? Yeah.

Ashley: I do a fair amount of freelance writing. And at this point, I feel like the longer I've been writing, the shorter my bio has gotten—to a point, I'm sure at one point it's gonna be like, “Ashley is a person who wrote this article,” and that's it. That's all I'm going to have on there.

Julien: That would be such a power move. You're just like, “Yep. This is just me. And I just wrote this.”

Ashley: Yeah. You don't need to know anything else about me.

Julien: Yep.

Ashley: Did you grow up with coffee in your life?

Julien: I did. My dad actually just quit drinking coffee, but I grew up drinking coffee—I didn't grow up drinking coffee, but I grew up watching him drink coffee, and he was in the Navy and he always would tell me, it was like a quintessential phrase: “The best cup of coffee tastes like the bottom of a dirty ashtray.”

And I was like, okay. Obviously, following that, I was a dark roast drinker for most of my life up until 2018. In high school, I would go to Tim Hortons all the time in the morning and get like, a hazelnut hot coffee with like cream in it. That was just like my comfort drink before school sometimes.

Ashley: When did you start working in coffee?

Julien: I was 18 and I was in college and I got my first apartment and I needed a job. So I applied at the Starbucks down the street and I started at nine bucks an hour, 40 hours a week, and I worked at Starbucks for three-and-a-half months.

It was great. I mean, the job was wild and so overstimulating and me, just like a little 18-year-old who had really only worked at a movie theater before that, it was like, “Whoa, okay, this is a real job.”

I think I went to work at a soup shop after that, but—

Ashley: I think it's interesting that you mentioned it's overstimulating, because I imagine—I think about myself as like an 18-year-old—I also worked at a movie theater when I was 18. And I was an usher, so I didn't have to talk to anybody. I didn't sell tickets. I didn't sell concessions, but even that I would look at the menu and I'd be like, “Okay, there are like nine things on this menu. That's a lot of things.”

And then going to Starbucks where there are 8,000 things on the menu and you can make any custom ridiculous drink you want. I have to imagine at 18 that must've been such a cognitive overload.

Julien: It was, but I feel like it was good for me in a way, because I feel like I learned bar flow real quick, kind of out of necessity. There was no real training. They just kinda throw you on the floor and were like, “Sink or swim bud.” And I was like, okay.

After that, after Starbucks, everything else, every other coffee job kind of seemed manageable, you know?

Ashley: Fair. My first coffee shop job was in Times Square in New York.

Julien: Oh my.

Ashley: And nothing holds a candle to it in terms of difficulty. I'm like, if I could work at this place, I can work anywhere. Like try me, give me 20 drinks to do, and I'll do it.

Julien: Line them up all the way down the counter. I don't care.

Ashley: I got this. This is fine. This is like, an easy Thursday.

At what point did you realize like, “Oh, this is a thing that I kind of like. Maybe I can do this in a different job, or maybe I could do this as like, a career for a little.”

Julien: It was probably after I graduated school, college. I had worked at a couple shops, like on and off through school. And then I started working full-time as a barista after I graduated in 2018.

The shop I worked at, they were sending us to SCA [Specialty Coffee Association] events, so I started witnessing the national coffee community and I was like, “Oh, okay. This is actually something people do for their whole lives.” And I was like, “This is kinda cool.” I started like tasting more, I started cupping for the first time, and I was like, “Whoa, wait, okay. This is actually a really cool thing that I can nerd out on.” I think then I was hooked.

Ashley: So you mentioned cupping, you mentioned tasting, which I love.

It's fun that you were thinking about, like, how do I introduce myself? Because I'm going to do an intro where I introduce you, and I'll introduce you before we start this episode as the current United States Cup Tasters Champion.

So I was wondering, for listeners who maybe don't know what that competition is—it's kinda like the Wild West, I think—but can you describe what it's like, what this competition is?

Julien: It's the only U.S. comp—and I guess, global competition, without judges. So it's pretty sudden-death of the results [coming in] immediately, which is kind of terrifying, but also pretty exhilarating.

So basically—at qualifiers and nationals this year, there were six sets, but at worlds there will be eight sets—but six sets of what they call triangulations, which is pulled from a test, it's part of the Q grader certification. It's one of the many tests that you have to take to become a Q grader.

So basically a triangulation is three bowls of coffee. One is different and two are the same. And you have to pick out the different coffee in the shortest amount of time. And there are two factors that can help you succeed or fail you: You have to be fast and you have to be accurate.

Ashley: I feel like you say that, and I feel like people will listen to it and be like, “Oh, okay. So three coffees in front of me, one of these things is not like the other,” is essentially the game you're playing. And I feel like people will listen to this and be like, “Oh, that's easy.” It is not fucking easy.

Especially cause you can really vary it, like maybe you can speak to this from your experiences, but maybe you can tell the difference between a Sumatran coffee and an Ethiopian coffee. Those have very different flavor profiles. But as you get deeper and deeper into the competition, they're giving you like, “This was roasted two days ago, this was roasted six days ago.” The differences can be that subtle, right?

Julien: Yeah. I've been talking to a few people who have competed at the world level and it only gets more wild there, but they do the difficulty, it does increase per round.

The sets we were tasting in round one were significantly less—not, I wouldn't say they're still challenging, but less challenging than the ones we faced at finals.

I mean, they'll pull coffees from the same country of origin sometime. I don't know what they throw at you at nationals, but I've heard things about worlds. Well, it'd be, it may be the same region, with the same processing method—they'll throw like natural coffees against each other, which, I've been working on it, but those are what kind of stumped me. At least in one round in nationals was a natural coffee against another natural coffee, because the fermentation flavor kind of clouds a lot of what you would taste from the terroir. And so it's really interesting.

It's also interesting contextually—a set of naturals on a table of all washed will be considerably more difficult than a full table of naturals, because you kind of calibrate to the similarities in the coffee. There's a lot of factors that make it a really—not to mention you have to do it on a stage.

Ashley: Oh yeah, you're doing it in front of people.

Julien: In front of a bunch of people. Yeah!

Ashley: If you go to these coffee competitions—so we've talked a lot about coffee competitions on the podcast, so people listening are likely familiar with them. We've mostly talked about barista competitions, where they have a person on a stage with a routine and they're talking and they're making coffee and there are these judges and it's all very quiet.

You're essentially doing a one-person show for 15 minutes. When you go to the Cup Tasters Competition, it is loud. People are cheering. It is a raucous affair. And then when you're, like you said, you find out the results kind of in real-time.

So you finish your set, you finish all your sets of cups and then there's an emcee who's pulling up the cups and yelling really loud. Like, “You got it!” or “Oh no!” Like I said, it's like the Wild West of coffee competitions, just because it's like—it's fun and it's raucous.

But I have to imagine when you're on the other side of it doing the actual competition, it's like, “Oh shit. There are a lot of people just yelling at me and it's wild.” What made you want to compete?

Julien: I started tasting coffees and cupping and I was like, “Okay. Maybe I do have a good palate,” and the company I was working for at the time had sent me to judge— sensory judge—barista [competitions] before. And they were like, “Do you want to compete in Cup Tasters?” And I had a friend who had competed in Brewers Cup and Barista before. I was like, “Sure, why not?”

It was wild because we didn't even know if we would get a spot at a qualifier, like let alone qualify to go to nationals. That qualifier was in 2020, and I was like, terrified. I competed, and then I got four out of six [sets right] in two minutes and 30 seconds. And I had no idea if I was going to move on.

I was so terrified. I just stayed in the Airbnb the whole time, but I ended up placing 11th and like the top 16 or 17 moved on and I was like, psyched. I was so happy that I had just moved on and accomplished my goal of just getting to nationals.

[Nationals] was scheduled for Portland, Oregon, and then obviously that didn't happen [because of COVID-19]. They kept rescheduling it and I was like, I had left coffee and then obviously came back and got the email that it was happening. And then I was—I just knew instantly, as soon as I got the email, I was standing in my kitchen and I just like … you know, when you say yes and you clench your fist and you like, pull it into yourself.

I just reacted. I knew that I had to finish it to compete.

Ashley: It sounds like if this was a movie, that moment, the Rocky theme would have started right then.

Julien: Yeah, totally.

Ashley: Something that you said before we started recording was that you had to compete to close this chapter of your life. And I wrote that down ’cause I was like, “I'm going to ask Julien about that, what that means.” I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.

Julien: I played sports in high school. I did a little bit of ski racing, so I did some individual sports, but it's strange when you’re a competitor and you have a team of people around, cheering you on, that you really don't want to disappoint, but you also know that you can't put too much pressure on yourself or throw yourself off.

There was a lot of pressure for me, I feel like, be it internal or external, to qualify and to compete. I put a lot of weight on that training, on going in off the clock, doing sets at night—like we were setting up sets at night and it was just a lot of mental weight in this tasting competition. I would tell people, “Oh yeah, I'm competing in a tasting competition.” They're like, whoa, that's wild.

It was a lot of just buildup, and then to have that taken away by COVID … like I found my passion through tasting. I'm passionate about tasting coffee.

And I felt like that chance to prove myself on a national stage was taken away forever because no one knew what was going to happen. I went on unemployment for two months, and then I was being set up to work in the QC [quality control] lab and that kind of got taken away too.

I was just put back to being a barista and it was just really troubling. So to get that email in the fall that Coffee Champs is happening at [SCA] Expo, I was like, this is my chance. This is my chance to finish it and no matter what happens, just get up there and see that stage that I never thought I would.

I was talking to a lot of the other competitors that showed up and they all had the same—it was the same vibe. It was like, “We didn't think this was going to happen, so why not do it?” And you know, not all of us showed up. If everyone would have showed up, there would have been at least 35 people, but there were like 21, 22 people in round one.

Ashley: Just to go with the movie theme—I feel like every movie has a beginning and it's really exciting. And then there's a dip, like a low point, that's where the tension comes. And I'm imagining that COVID delaying the original competition date is like that dip.

And then of course there's the moment it all changes. And that's when you get the email and that's when the movie picks back up again, and then the ending—I guess, I don't know? I guess this movie is still happening, because you're going to go to the World Competition and compete pretty soon.

Julien: Yeah, very soon.

I feel like even with worlds, I feel like this is a beginning, still. It was like a chapter closed and now I just got a new chapter.

Ashley: So it's like we're watching “Star Wars.”

Julien: Yeah. It's like a sequel, I guess.

Ashley: We'll see if there's a trilogy. Maybe you come back in 20 years and then we are, I don't know—we go back in time and then you add movies at the beginning. I don't know.

Julien: Yeah, definitely.

Ashley: So you talked about how you left coffee and then you came back to coffee. Why did you leave?

Julien: I'd been a barista for like four years. I started as a barista as a cisgender girl when I was 18, I came out as nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns after I left Starbucks.

This was like, 2015, so this was kind of before people really knew what gender nonconforming people were like, popular? I don't even know how to—

Ashley: By and large?

Julien: Yeah, by and large. It was kind of the culture at the shop I worked at where—there were a few trans people working there, and the culture was like, if someone misgendered your co-worker and they didn't correct themselves, if you were at the end of the bar, you would correct the customer.

So I had people telling me, “‘They’ isn’t a pronoun. Like you're not—what is that?” Basically saying that how I identified wasn't a thing, and that was constant. That was just like all the time. I hadn't had top surgery yet, so I was binding my chest. I bound my chest for four years. There was a period of time when I was like only wearing button-up black polos because it was the only thing that I felt okay in. And, um, it was just like really hard being nonbinary as a barista.

I came out as male in the spring of 2019, started hormone replacement therapy and still hadn't had top surgery at that point. You know, the conversation around transness in the U.S. was definitely changing, and people started to know what it was, but that didn't really change much for me. I still had people gendering me as she, even though I was wearing men's clothing, banding my chest, shaving my head. It was really hard.

And you know, every time you correct someone and they look at you weird or they apologize too much, or they make you feel, sometimes unintentionally, just weird about it, you're like, “Wow, I hate this.” And it was just like every day, like it was every single day I would go to work and it was because I was front-facing, public, and my body was changing. I'd also been working there for like a year and a half. So people knew me as this, and then I was that, so it was just like a whole thing.

And also like watching my friends. One of my friends, close friends, was a trans girl, and just watching her get misgendered even more than me … It's like going to cry. It was really hard.

That coupled with COVID, I was just like, “Yeah, I'm done. Like I can't,” and that's what I thought—I was like, “Oh, okay. So I am like damned to being a barista or I leave,” and I just left. It's not worth it. I was done.

Ashley: It seems like we don't really build in the idea of respect and dignity, especially in front-facing positions like this. And it feels like you've touched on it in a multitude of ways: That you are front-facing and people would constantly misgender you or misgender people around you.

And it's an everyday thing. Like you said, it never stopped. But then there's also the dignity of like, just being able to go to work and do your job.

Julien: Yeah.

Ashley: And it seems like a lot of that was taken away from you.

Julien: Yeah, that's why I think I latched on to roasting and production. I can just show up and do my job and go home. I see the same 10 people every day and I know that those people aren't going to disrespect me.

But you know, when you have hundreds of people—and a lot of the times it was with regulars who would just continually disrespect me and the people around me, but then still be allowed to come into the space. But a lot of the time it's tourists or people from out of town and they don't even know you, so they're just banking on what their first impression is. So it's like, you can't—unless, say, they act aggressively when you correct them—you can't really blame them, I guess.

I'm a big believer in that there is a place for everyone in coffee who wants to be here.

I think that being a barista was one of the most challenging jobs I've had for many, many reasons, but I think any kind of front-facing job where you have to not only defend yourself but also coffee, I think it carries a lot of weight that many people don't give a second thought to. They're like, “Oh like, you’re a barista.”

It's like, well actually, being a barista is sometimes very hard. And I feel like that's something that a lot of people don't really realize.

Ashley: Especially when you have to be a person in a place where people feel entitled to consume you, essentially.

Julien: Yeah.

Ashley: So much of barista work and so much of why we love coffee shops in general as a culture is when we go into a space and we feel a certain way. And I think that kind of muddles the idea of being a consumer and going to a place and consuming the physical items there versus going to a place and consuming the identity of the people who've made that place.

And that's a very scary line because there are moments where I'm sure you've probably had, like, an awesome customer service interaction and you're like, “Yeah, I did that. Like I made that fucking shit happen.”

I don't know why I'm cursing so much—

Julien: I don’t mind.

Ashley: But you know what I mean? There's like this real beautiful sense of pride and ownership in certain ways.

But then in other ways, it's like, “I just want to do my job. All I want is to do my job. And you are not letting me do that. You are making me have to do so much more because you feel entitled to myself and my person.”

Julien: Oh, yeah. Like people—the thing about customer service is that you can’t have an off day. You can't shut it off. You can't like, tell your boss that you want to go do something else for the day. Like you have to be on bar. You have to be on register. You have to be like, expediting.

I have a lot of mental health issues. I have borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder, and I get triggered—like very real, seriously triggered a lot of the time at things.

I feel like this is also a conversation—like the toll that emotional labor takes on people's mental health is, I mean, obviously known—I feel like I've joked with my friends about putting on the customer service persona—but it's like, the difference between doing like a 3,000-pound production day or doing a $3,000 retail day is pretty massive, but in one where I'd be physically exhausted and maybe another where I'd be emotionally and physically [exhausted]…

But it is something to talk about where every single person in this supply chain, every single person in this industry, faces challenges in the position that they're in and that no position should be looked down upon or discounted because—I mean, I'll bring up what I just accomplished, but I'm a production worker. I don't taste coffee every day. I go to work, I put beans in bags.

Sometimes I get to roast coffee, but ultimately I am doing manual labor every day, 40 hours a week. And I just won a national tasting competition. So I feel like we have to open our eyes to that: Everyone in this industry is capable, I think, of more than they give themselves credit for. And a lot of that comes from the discourse we have around each other's positionality within this industry.

Ashley: Absolutely.

Julien: If that makes sense.

Ashley: No, that totally makes sense. I think there's this idea that … I don't know, even thinking about your career, just what you said right now, you mentioned being a barista then moving into production. And that was, it seems like that was the right move for you. And I would think most people would read that as like a promotion, or you're working on your career, but like, it shouldn't have to be that way.

Like there's dignity in every position within the coffee industry, there's dignity in being a barista and being a service worker. There's dignity in bagging coffee, like you mentioned—there are people whose sole jobs is to do that, is just bag coffee. And they've never worked as a barista, but like, we still seem to put almost like a stink upon certain positions in the industry, and expect there to be a certain level of upward mobility in this very linear, very boxed-in way.

I was wondering, since you're thinking about it, what has that felt like, thinking about, “Where I belong in the industry,” or like, “What am I supposed to do next? Are there these expectations of me to do a thing because now I've won a thing?”

Julien: Yeah, definitely. I've had a lot of people talk to me about what to do next. Or like, what do I want—now that I have this, what do I want? It's interesting because I had a career before I won. I was learning how to roast coffee and I was doing my job.

I think now I just get to have a lot more options in terms of geographically where I could see myself, or who I get to have access to now. I was happy before I won, which was not something I've ever felt in my life. I very recently started to feel like I was content.

We were talking a bit before we started recording about the timeline or the celebrity of winning a coffee competition. I definitely felt that pressure. I think in the weeks after I won where I was like, “My whole life has to change and it has to change now and I have to make moves now.”

But then I took a deep breath. Then I realized I was like, “Julien, you're turning 26 at the end of June. You have been in coffee for under five years. You have time. And just because you achieved this title and are working very hard to like, do well at worlds, I still have time.” Even if I wasn’t young, and even if like, I had been in coffee for 20 years and I won, I'd still have time.

I found a national community and a global community through these competitions and I feel very grateful. I think we need to think about, what does it mean to be an ambassador for the industry? What does it mean to be a champion? How does achieving that title actually affect a person? Because I was just a person, I am just a person. I'm just a guy living in Portland, Maine who loves coffee, and I just happened to win a national tasting competition.

There's this one person who's been competing in Cup Tasters every single year it's existed. It's like, how am I to say that I am better than that person that's literally been working every year to try to achieve this title? Like, I’m not.

Everyone who got up on that stage is a champion in my eyes, because the amount of mental stamina it takes to even walk up there is something a lot of people can't do.

Ashley: Yeah. And there's something, too, to the idea that if you didn't win, you would still be just a guy.

I have a lot of conflicting feelings, just in general, about the idea of competition. Maybe this is like putting me in an unsolvable problem, because I love competition. I live for competition. I love game shows. I'm that type of person, so I love seeing people win things and seeing people win a lot of money and them talking about that changing their life always makes me very emotional.

But at the same time, when I look at coffee competitions, I'm like, nobody worked more than anybody else, nobody is better than anybody else up here.

Julien: Yeah.

Ashley: And with all these competitions too, like, it could have been anybody. If the competition had happened tomorrow, would the same thing happen again? If the competition happened an hour later, would there have been a different winner?

So it's interesting to think, going back to this idea of the dignity of work and who deserves what, it's like, we all deserve everything! This seems a little Pollyanna in a way, but we do, because we just deserve to like, go to work and be happy and feel safe.

Julien: Yeah. I always think it's interesting, because I feel like the people that really like Cup Tasters really like Cup Tasters, and the people that really like Roasting [Competition] really like Roasters, and people that really like Barista [Competition] really like Barista, and I think it's funny.

One time, someone told me that they were like, “Oh yeah, someone told me that Barista Competition is the only one that matters.” I just think that's so funny, because every single one of the competitions like CIGS [Coffee in Good Spirits] Latte Art, Cup Tasters, Roasters, Barista, Brewers—every single one of those competitions is so challenging in its own way.

I could never get up on that Barista stage. I would never. And maybe some Barista competitors would never get up on the Cup Tasters stage. I just think that they're all so interesting and what every person, every champion, and every person that even qualifies, like gets to a qualifier or competes in a prelim—

Like, I always love to learn, I'm a big nerd about anything that I can learn [about] constantly. That's why I love coffee so much, is because I could spend my whole life in this industry and not know everything.

I think that competing is a great learning experience. I love watching people compete for years and years, and then finally get the title, or watching people compete for years and years that don't get the title. As long as you're getting something out of it, I think it's a valuable experience.

I know a lot of people just want to win and that's great, and I'm like, “I hope you do if that's really what you want.” But everyone who puts time into these competitions, the volunteers, the committees, the judges, we all make this community what it is. And it's a very special and a very, very weird little community.

Ashley: For folks listening to this, as we wrap up our conversation, what would you want them to take away from listening to you? What would you want people to know about you?

Julien: I don’t know! I'd like to just let people know that I'm just a person and probably, and definitely, every coffee champion is just a person. We all have different career timelines and we all have different life timelines. If there's a champion or a person in this industry that you really identify with, or you idolized, or you really want to meet or talk to, even be someday, I think that's really cool.

One of my mentors, when I was preparing for this and I was freaking out because a certain someone was in my first seat and he was a past champion and [my mentor] was like, “They're just people.” And I think that sentiment has really stuck with me, is that we're all just coffee people. So yeah.

Ashley: I was going to close it out—I was about to do like the whole, “Thank you for being here,” but something I thought was worth mentioning before we close out was that you reached out to me to be on the show, and thinking about what you were just saying, that people are people and if you admire somebody that's really cool.

I also wonder, how can we make things feel more like everything is accessible too, because I was thrilled when you reached out to me. Number one, because I wanted to talk to you. But two, I was like, “Somebody feels comfortable saying, ‘I want to talk to you. I want to be on your show.’”

We even talked a little bit, as we were going back and forth about the things that you thought were open and accessible to you. And I hope that people listening to this feel like more is open and accessible to them. I hope that they listened to your story and feel empowered to say, “I want to do this thing. And I'm going to ask the people that I want to ask about it.”

Julien: Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. That's helped me even with prepping for worlds. I reached out to a past world champion. I've reached out to past U.S. champions. That's the thing with competing—and I feel like just life and building a career in coffee in general, it's like, you are not alone and it's almost impossible to do it alone.

If there's someone you want to talk to, just shoot them a DM or an email. If they don't respond it may not be because they don't want to talk to you. A lot of people have a lot going on. Yeah, we're just people, and it's about community.

We are a community of coffee people and it's easier to say that we should all feel like we have access to each other—and especially if you want to compete, if you want to be part of this community, do it, just try it out.

And if you don't do it all your first year and you want to go again, do it. Just try and put yourself out there, I guess. Yeah.

Ashley: Julien, thank you so much for taking time to talk with me. I really appreciate it.

Julien: Thank you so much, Ashley. This was really great. Thank you so much.

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BOSS BARISTA
BOSS BARISTA
A newsletter and podcast about a thing you drink everyday. Interviews and articles about big ideas in coffee, the service industry, and collective action.