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My friend Rachel produces corporate events for a living and she has a specific relationship with catered coffee that she describes as a managed disappointment she has made peace with over twelve years of event production. The managed disappointment works like this. You book a venue. You book speakers or programming or whatever the event…

My friend Sam has twenty two minutes in the morning. Not twenty two minutes of free time. Twenty two minutes total between the moment his alarm stops being ignorable and the moment he needs to be on the bus to make it to his office in the Financial District by nine. He has run this…

My friend Lena is the person in her friend group who plans things. She didn’t volunteer for this role. She didn’t campaign for it or express particular enthusiasm for event logistics or indicate in any way that she wanted to be the person who figures out where twelve people are going to have brunch on…

My friend Diana plans a lot of meetings. Not because she loves meetings. Nobody who plans a lot of meetings loves meetings in some abstract category sense. She plans them because she runs a small consulting firm in San Francisco and running a small consulting firm involves a continuous series of conversations with clients and…

My friend Marcus has a wallet that tells a story about optimism and disappointment in roughly equal measure. The optimism is represented by approximately eleven loyalty cards from various coffee shops and cafes around San Francisco accumulated over about four years. Each one was accepted at the moment of initiation with the specific hope that…

My friend Clara has a theory about outdoor seating in San Francisco that she developed through years of optimistic attempts and subsequent meteorological disappointment. The theory is that outdoor seating in this city is a promise that San Francisco makes and then renegotiates the terms of without warning. You sit outside because it’s sunny and…

My friend Jonah has been working remotely for three years and has developed what he calls a cafe taxonomy that he maintains with the precision of someone who spends a significant portion of his working life in places that are not his apartment and has strong opinions about which ones make that working life better…

My friend Elena has a specific relationship with online tutorials that she describes as productive procrastination. She watches them. She watches a lot of them. She has watched pour over tutorials, espresso tutorials, latte art tutorials, cold brew tutorials, and at least two tutorials specifically about the bloom in pour over coffee that went into…

My friend Daniel has been trying to make good coffee at home for about four years and has approached the project with the systematic frustration of someone who knows the gap between what he’s producing and what he wants is real and has not been able to close it despite genuine effort. He’s not someone…