Pass the love

You make coffee the weekdays and you drink coffee the weekends (sometimes also beer). That’s pretty much my life in Stockholm.

After brewing same few coffees for customers for five days it’s good to be able to go and have a cup of coffee yourself, too (and something different this time!). There are a few nice cafés around Stockholm I’ve spent my weekends and become somewhat a regular. The thing I really love when I go around other cafés is the community feeling – other baristas, though working for competitors, are really welcoming and friendly. They, as do I when working, want me to try their new coffees, give feedback about their new iced coffee drink and chat about next year’s competitions. Should I get a bag of exciting coffee I want to share it with other coffee lovers – that’s how you get more out of it yourself, too.

For example I got this lovely Kenyan coffee from Melbourne (via David Walsh’s blog post that deserves a post of its own) and went to Espressino, a café with monster 5-gruppo Linea, to try it out with Kiril, an Aussie guy who used to work in Melbourne. While brewing the coffee with Clover it turned out that the guy who had roasted this coffee had been in Stockholm just a few days earlier and Kiril had showed him around the town! What a coincidence. Oh yes, the coffee was amazing – some mind-blowing passion fruits tones with nice hints of vanilla and it definitely tasted better when I could share it with someone who knew the roastery.

Kiril kindly gave me some of this Haugaard's new Kenyan to try out.

There has been a lot discussion going on about whether you should or shouldn’t ask money for the coffee from another barista/friend and I won’t go into details now. My opinion is that it’s okay to “comp” another barista. It creates the community feeling and feels nice when you don’t have to pay for your coffee (there are, though, many opinions regarding this questions, for example in James Hoffmann’s blog. It is a very interesting and difficult questions). You should never assume that there’s no need to pay though – after all you are eating that company’s profit. I try to pay like normally but if the barista refuses to take my money I won’t insist him/her, usually leave a little tip though.

Today I was at Drop Coffee, one of my favorite cafés, chatting with Oskar, tasting new coffees and having fun. I gave him a bag of Stumptown’s Guatemala I got yesterday, we’re trying it out tomorrow. He gets to taste a new coffee, I get to share it. To quote that old pun, sharing is caring. I just love this community thing, it should be something undetachable from coffee business. Unfortunally we don’t have quite a such in Finland just yet but I really, really hope there will be something that could be referred as barista community one day.