On Finding Joy in Coffee

Exploring sadness, anticipation, and how we find joy in coffee—and the world around us.

Photo by Motoki Tonn on Unsplash

TW: This story mentions thoughts of self-harm. 

I spend a lot of time here talking about the things in coffee that bum me out—the union-busters, the homogeneity, the business owners who think robots can replace human baristas. Today, I’d like to take a different approach. Today, I want to talk about joy.

I’ve been thinking about joy since my colleague James Hoffmann made a video called “What Does A Great Cup Of Coffee Taste Like?” It’s a wonderfully bizarre, one-take video that playfully uses music and visuals to try to answer an ineffable question: What does it mean for coffee to taste good?

In the video (which is a gift—please do watch it), James says he believes great coffee should evoke two emotions: sadness and anticipation. Sadness to mark the moment the coffee is finished, and anticipation for the next day’s coffee.

“You see, every night, every single night, I get into bed looking forward to making and drinking some potentially great coffee in the morning,” he says. Then he gets into bed, pulls the covers up, and turns out the light.

I often tell the story of how I got into coffee as a moment of transformation. 

Before I was a barista, I lived a pretty linear life, mostly doing things because I thought I was supposed to do them. I had no idea what I liked or what I was good at. I became a barista at 23 after following a whim, a moment of unexpected clarity when I realized I could no longer return to my teaching job due to thoughts of self-harm. 

I had normalized these thoughts so seamlessly: I told myself it was OK to wish a car would hit me on the way to work. It wasn’t until years later that I realized these thoughts were destructive. I think my subconscious protected me by telling me to quit my job even though I didn’t really have a reason why at the time.

I had no desire to work in coffee—I simply became a barista because someone I knew was one. One day at work, my manager, Rachel (who I’ve mentioned before in the newsletter, and who is one of the most influential people in my life) saw me counting sleeves of coffee cups, moving them across shelves when I noticed two different cabinets had the same 12-ounce cups. She said, “It seems like you like to consolidate.”

That became a joke. Whenever I was on the floor, I’d find things to consolidate. Eventually, Rachel thought I’d be good at organizing inventory, and she trained me to be the store’s assistant manager.

This story feels small when I write it out, but I think that moment unlocked the idea that I could find pleasure in doing things I liked.

In elementary school, we were given puzzles called Mindbenders that were laid out like logic problems. For instance: Five students are sitting in a row behind one another. Adam can’t be next to Tracy; Casey cannot be the first or the last in the row; Jason sits directly behind someone whose name begins after theirs in the alphabet; Leslie is fourth in the row. Where is everyone sitting?

I used to revel in Mindbenders. But it wasn’t until that moment with Rachel nearly two decades later that I connected that early joy of solving a puzzle to my work.

Unlike James Hoffmann, I don’t actually go to bed anticipating making a cup of coffee in the morning. But when I was a barista, I did go to bed thinking about juggling a rush of drink orders. I marveled when my hands seemed to be ahead of my mind, making decisions about which drinks to make first to maximize efficiency. I found deep satisfaction in working alongside people who seemed to know precisely the moment I needed them to jump in behind the bar, who’d take over milk steaming as I pulled shots, who knew to hand me a cup or lid at just the right moment. (Perla and Trevor, I’m thinking of you.) It didn’t just feel like we were problem-solving—it felt like we were making art.

I started seeing other satisfying puzzles in my working life. I usually led cuppings at work, for instance, because I liked the puzzle of assessing how interested a group of people were, and which tools they’d need to be successful at tasting. 

Writing, too, offers a puzzle, the opportunity of finding solutions. I like taking in information and analyzing it, poking holes at logic and trying to see the bigger picture beyond the details. I think that’s why the fight for unions in coffee has compelled me so much—and also baffled me. I can’t puzzle out why business owners would fight against a system of governance and power-sharing that is about giving people a voice, and would prefer to spend their money on high-powered lawyers to combat collective action instead.

Instead of this piece, I almost wrote a response to an SFGate article about how drink deals are hammering baristas. Unyielding lines at Starbucks during buy-one-get-one-off deals are causing baristas to quit in droves because working during these promotions, often announced without notice, is grueling. Author Ariana Bindman details this deteriorating cycle, in which Starbucks runs promotions to get people in the door because sales are down, baristas get burned out working such busy shifts, customers get frustrated with long wait times, and the cycle repeats.

I kept trying to think of a new angle on the topic to unpack, but Bindman did a good job covering the key talking points. And yet, the article wouldn’t leave my mind. I realized it tickled that puzzle sense, that need to point out how utterly inefficient this system is, and how easily it could be solved by increasing staffing during periods when the company runs promotional deals. I wanted to know if these promotions even work. (They do, but none of the studies I read considered how employees are affected, which is essential: Turnover and recruitment can cost a business “one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary,” according to Gallup.)

Ultimately, I can’t solve this problem for Starbucks, and I found myself feeling frustrated as I thought more and more about it. Eventually, doubt about my own writing, and the work I do here, crept in. It was then that I remembered James’ video, and how he described anticipation—the feeling that keeps him coming back to coffee every day. 

It’s easy to forget what makes us happy, especially when we look around and feel the grimness of the systems we engage with every day. I’m glad for videos like the one James made, a simple ode to the ineffable pleasures that coffee gives. What keeps me coming back to coffee every day? Often, it is the joy of solving those puzzles—working out thorny problems in the clearest and most satisfying way, and, in the process, unearthing an original joy I found decades ago.