Pure Happiness Coffee

On this episode I am very excited to present an interview with Puerto Rican coffee producer and roaster Domenico Celli, founder of Forgotten Forest, one of the most exciting projects in contemporary coffee. For reasons historical, economic, and political, Puerto Rico has not been a large part of the specialty coffee industry. Forgotten Forest's overall ambition is to change that, with the socially-minded objective of providing an economically viable future for Puerto Rican coffee farmers. To do so, Domenico has been building out specialty coffee infrastructure in Puerto Rico, including farmer trainings and education, constructing a world-class processing facility, and learning everything he can about the specialty coffee world. On this episode, we talk about the origins of Forgotten Forest around the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and we get deep into Domenico's hope for a better coffee horizon in Puerto Rico's future.

Onyx Coffee Lab is an undeniable powerhouse of US specialty coffee. In this episode, leaping off from co-founder Andrea Allen's remarkable World Barista Championship performance in 2021, a performance that won her the US competition and earned her second on the world state, I meditate on coffee and the social world, in homage to Allen's beautiful poetic gesture of washing the judge's hands in rosewater to conclude her presentation.

Loveless Coffees is doing some of the best coffee in New York City, and their cafe is a wonderful spot to hang out, drink some amazing coffee, and read poetry. When I first visited Loveless Coffees in Bushwick, it was actually called Spectrum. This change becomes the occasion for a pure happiness meditation on names, language, memory, and virtual reality.

On this episode I revisit a trip to Boxcar Social in Toronto. I was visiting Toronto to see Michael Holboom's important film, Free From Everything. As I was reading around for this episode, I was thrilled to discover Subtext Coffee's videos with producers they work with in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Guatemala. It's this kind of evolution I love to see in the industry, where we are better using the tools available today to bring us all closer together.

On this episode, A Matter of Concrete's wonderful roast of I Wayan Parum's Indonesian Natural becomes an occasion to continue to expand on some of my thinking around coffee, taste, and writing. I present "non-representational coffee writing" as an early invention at pure happiness, one that encourages a meandering, discursive, poetic investigations of coffee as an alternative to the quippy kind of discourse encouraged by scores.

Color Coffee Roasters had been one of my favorite roasters for some time, with coffee that was always bright, clear, and expressive, when I got the exciting opportunity to visit their cafe and roastery in Eagle, Colorado in 2022. On this episode, I talk a little about that visit and the wonderful Kolla Bolcha Ethiopian coffee I drank there.

While many myths deal with the origin of the world and the founding of a people, at the same time, myths, unlike the past, are open to evolution. Today on the podcast I discuss an event, a tasting of Methodical's roasts of Café Tío Conejo's coffee held at drip coffee makers, that transformed the cosmology of Pure Happiness Coffee.

On this short and sweet episode, I reflect a little on one of my favorite roasters and all-around coffee people in specialty coffee: Black & White.

Take a trip with me to Galway, Ireland, where I reflect on my wonderful time visiting one of my favorite cafes on Earth: Coffeewerk + Press. This beautiful and unassuming shop is an absolute delight. Indeed, it is so delightful that I don't even know how to talk about it! In lieu of that, we take a detour into the aesthetic philosophy of James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus.

Proust had his Madeleine, and I have my Folger's. It doesn't seem fair, but that's the 21st century for you. On this episode, I raise the question of what I call "the hard problem of taste," an idea I will certainly return to. What do we taste when we taste coffee? Here, I open that question in a discussion of memory and commodities.

Occasionally everything you thought you knew goes out the window, and you're left with an entirely new reality. Join me today as I discuss a wild tasting of amazing coffee at Proud Mary PDX, along with a previous meeting I had with Proud Mary's Nolan Hirte some four and a half years earlier.

I visited Verb Coffee in Boulder, Colorado in March 2022, just weeks after they opened. And I was delighted to find a wonderful shop, incredible coffee, and a beautiful soul to share a few moments with. Verb was also one of the earliest champions of Pure Happiness Coffee, and their early encouragement helps keeps me working to this day.

On this episode of Pure Happiness I highlight artist, poet, and coffee professional Macarena Anomalia. With reference to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Ralph Waldo Emerson, I explain how Maca alchemically transformed me with her beautiful art of the cupping table.

On this episode I revisit an event at drip coffee makers SOHO with Alexander Ruas of Standout Coffee. I introduce the event through the lens of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's concept of "bad debt."

In this episode I go over the structure of the podcast. On the one hand, I will be transforming my instagram posts into listenable audible content: poetic vignettes about the coffee I'm drinking, the cafes I'm visiting, and the people I've met along the way. I will also be releasing occasional long form content devoted to subjects or people in coffee. At the end of the episode I present Alex Vargas Osorio's Pink Bourbon by Tropicalia Coffee.

On this, the inaugural episode of Pure Happiness Coffee, I share a little bit about how I arrived here today, including some of my core goals with pure happiness. From the beginning, Pure Happiness Coffee has been a project dedicated to exploring and creating coffee culture. Over time, it has evolved into a dedicated practice of community building with the aim of elevating producers. From dark days writing poetry in Buffalo New York's deepest pandemic winters to a recent trip to Puerto Rico to visit powerhouse coffee producers Forgotten Forest, the evolution of Pure Happiness Coffee has been just as surprising to me as anyone else! I'm thrilled to share that story with you.