A few years ago I attended a coffee course in Trieste. Not as a professional. Not with any particular plan. Just as someone who had always been drawn to coffee — the ritual of it, the precision, the way a single variable changes everything in the cup.
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"Coffee is the common man's gold, and like gold, it brings to every person the feeling of luxury and nobility." — Ernesto Illy, founder of illycaffè, Trieste |
Two of my classmates already had credentials I did not. One held a degree in coffee science. Both competed at international level. They were serious in the way that people are serious when something is both a passion and a profession. I was there because I wanted to understand what I was tasting.
I continued at a second course in Bucharest — green coffee selection, roasting, brewing, cupping. Different classmates this time. Some of them eventually opened their own roasteries and coffee shops, built careers around what we learned in that room. I stayed at hobby level. I have no regrets about that. What I gained was something different from a profession — a way of thinking about quality, potential, and what happens to a thing when you change the conditions it grows under.
Coffee has been teaching me things about people for years. I am only now starting to write them down.
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Before a bean becomes anything, someone has to look at it raw and make a judgement about what it could be. Green coffee — unroasted, unremarkable to the untrained eye — already contains everything the final cup will be. The origin, the altitude, the processing method, the density of the bean. None of it is visible on the surface. You have to know what you are looking for, and you have to be honest about what you see rather than what you hope to see.
I spent twenty-five years hiring people. The parallel is precise and uncomfortable. Most hiring processes look at the roasted bean — the polished CV, the prepared interview, the performance already produced in someone else's conditions. The real skill is looking at the green coffee. What is the origin? What conditions produced this person? What is the density — the substance underneath the surface presentation? What defects are there, and are they the kind that roasting will eliminate or amplify?
Most hiring managers cannot do this. They have not trained for it. They look at the surface and make a decision based on pattern recognition — does this person look like the people who have worked here before? That is not selection. That is repetition dressed as judgement.
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Take the same green coffee and roast it two different ways. Light roast: high heat, short time, the origin character preserved, high acidity, complexity, the bean still tasting of where it came from. Dark roast: longer, hotter, the surface oils emerging, the origin masked, the defects hidden but the character flattened. Both are coffee. They are not the same coffee. And you cannot go back. Once you roast a bean, the decision is made.
I have watched organisations do this to people consistently and without awareness. A person arrives with genuine complexity — particular strengths, particular ways of seeing, the character of where they came from. A certain kind of management preserves that. Different roles, genuine challenge, the conditions that allow the origin character to develop. Another kind of management roasts dark — standardise, flatten, make everyone more uniform, eliminate the acidity that makes some people uncomfortable even though it is also what makes them interesting. The person becomes more manageable. Also less themselves. Also less useful, though this takes longer to notice.
The managers who roast dark are not usually malicious. They are often just optimising for the wrong thing — comfort in the room rather than quality in the cup.
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Even a perfectly roasted bean fails without the right extraction. Water temperature too high and you pull out the bitter compounds. Too low and you never get to the sweetness. Contact time too long — over-extracted, harsh. Too short — thin, sour, unfinished. Grind too fine or too coarse and the water moves through wrong regardless of what you do with everything else.
I have seen talented people completely fail in organisations not because of who they were but because of the extraction conditions. Wrong role, wrong team, wrong moment in the company's history. Overextracted — demanded too much too fast, burned out the complexity. Underextracted — never given real responsibility, never allowed to develop past a certain point. The person was the right bean. The process was wrong. And in most cases nobody connected the failure to the conditions. They connected it to the person.
Cupping — the formal evaluation of coffee — is done blind. Identical cups, no labels, no information about origin or price or producer. Just the liquid and your honest assessment of what is in it. Score it against objective criteria: aroma, flavour, aftertaste, acidity, body, balance, uniformity, sweetness. The score is the score regardless of what you paid for the bean or how much you want it to be good.
Corporate performance reviews are almost never blind. They are almost never objective. They are almost never evaluated against criteria that everyone agreed on before the person was hired. They reflect the relationship between the reviewer and the reviewed, the political positioning of each, the mood of the organisation at that moment, and dozens of biases that nobody acknowledges because acknowledging them would require changing the process. I have sat on both sides of performance reviews for twenty-five years. The cupping table is more honest.
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The thing about coffee that none of this captures is what happens when you stop thinking about it technically and just drink it with someone.
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"Behind every successful person is a substantial amount of coffee." — Anonymous |
After everything I have written about the corporate forest — the monkey kings and the snakes and the jackals, the utility relationships dressed as friendships, the emails being read in someone else's bedroom — I want to say something simple. Coffee is one of the few contexts left where two people can sit across from each other with no agenda and just talk. No positioning. No performance. No calculation about what the other person can do for you. Just the cup and the conversation and whoever is on the other side of the table.
The classmates from both courses — some of whom built serious careers in coffee — I am still in touch with some of them. Not because they are useful to me or I to them. Because we sat in the same room and learned something together and then went in different directions and both of those directions turned out to be right. That kind of connection does not happen in many places. It happened over coffee.
I think that is what I was actually looking for when I booked the course in Trieste. Not the certificates. Not the technical knowledge, though that stayed with me. Something simpler — a room full of people who cared about the same thing with no hidden calculation underneath it.
It is harder to find than good coffee. And good coffee is already hard enough to find.
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This week's insight The same green bean roasted differently, brewed differently, evaluated differently produces completely different results. So does a person. Most organisations never learn to read the green coffee — they hire the surface, manage for uniformity, extract wrong, and evaluate without objectivity. And then wonder why the cup never tastes like it should. The conditions matter as much as the bean. Sometimes more. |
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