I think a perfect cup of coffee is one way to make the world a beautiful place. At the end of the day, our goal is to get more great coffee into the hands of more people. And that is precisely why I emphasize coffee culture and hospitality at the beginning of our technique training sessions for baristas.

Training a barista does not mean teaching technical skill sets to extract coffee or making a pretty drink. Some Blue Bottle people are interested in barista competitions, but I’ve never been drawn to them. Coffee is not a performance. It’s about building relationships, and there’s no one size fits all solution when it comes to relationships. In a nutshell, hospitality is a close study of what is not said as much as it is about what is said.