When I began my coffee career, I had a seemingly limitless fascination with the world I had stumbled into. I spent countless hours on threads of the old community forums like alt.coffee and Coffeed.com as well as CoffeeGeek.com. I drank coffee with a mind that was both sensitive to the rush of the caffeine and the story and world behind the cup and the cafe I was in when I drank it.

If you knew me back then around 1999/2000, unless you too were a coffee geek, you would have said I was fanatical and quickly be looking for the ways to exit the conversation. I was seeking affirmation. As though I was saying, “Look what I found! Did you know this was here? Do you see it too?”

Coffee itself is a communal drink, and so also is the love of the world it is produced in a communal experience. This is why we have a need for connection to others and why at various stages of our lives we need to renew our energy through conversation, connection, and rekindle what was lost through the years of working in the world we loved.

I say “loved” because I myself have very few moments where I feel the same thrill of the industry as I did when I was new (and naive). The years of thankless work, mistakes, hollow praise, and increased knowledge of the issues within the industry have taken their toll. Being an issue myself (if we are honest we have all contributed) is the hardest thing to move past. However I refuse to believe in the nihilism that grows in the periphery of my vision is the truth that I must focus on. I feel the love loss, as I write this I feel even depressed at the mechanical nature of what life as a coffee professional has shaped up to be. The transactional nature of work can either grow us of kill us. I am ashamed to say I have let it erode much of my enthusiasm. I accept the readily available bad, and have not grown my strength to search for and maintain the positive, the praiseworthy, the light and glow of what I first saw.

That seems to be the trick. As we grow in knowledge and responsibility, we have to grow in our ability to protect and not sell out the spark. All we are left with if we do, is the easy despair of doom scrolling that has replaced the excited, fascinated, and optimistic deep dives we used to engage in.

Even my own show, now almost 10 years old, having started after 17 years of bar work, has taken on this tone of warning, foreboding, defensiveness, even anger. Sure there is room for all of that, and in the service of protecting the good it is needed! However, without platforming, focusing on, and drinking deeply from the good, the praise worthy, the positive, we will be consumed.

Writing this was a whim. As the morning broke on a restless night, neighbors partying until 3am, my mind racing about nothing in particular (decaf too close to bed. I sucks getting old), I decided I needed to stop trusting impulses that come from habits developed in a positivity vacuum. Foolish as it feels, the rekindling of old flames needs to come back. Imperfect as it may be, as long as I don’t compare it to the original and let it be its new and mature self, it feels like a worthy pursuit.

Keys to the Shop is only a fleeting blip of a platform that at its best can and has directed the attention and affection of thousands. That is terrifying considering it comes from the back office of a little house in Kentucky and from a guy who is just as much a mess as any of us are.

But that is the beauty of coffee that captured ,me to begin with.

It is not our story. It is bigger than that, it cannot be reduced to an event, an op-ed, a podcast, or whatever we try to capture it in. It begs to be stewarded, helped, not owned or branded.

My challenge to myself is to enter into joy. To do so with abandon, and rediscover the thrill of the world of coffee that I have been privileged to be a part of. Let what good there is and can be be my fuel.

We are all just struggling through the details, but let’s not forget the big picture and how to smile because we are in it.