Relationship Coffee

4:30 am, October 23, 2007. Chattanooga, Tennessee. I can hear my sister Eileen downstairs walking on the creaking wood boards of her house. Her adolescent golden retriever Lucy is with following, paws padding, claws clicking. I arrived yesterday flying from Orlando to Atlanta. Eileen picked me up and we drove a couple of hours back to Chattanooga. She wanted to know all about Orlando.

I’ve been in Orlando for about ten days doing my part as the Communication’s Director for the Anita Borg Institute’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. It is always fascinating to people (family included) the hear about my experience working almost entirely with, and for, women. There are always dumbfounded looks when I tell them entering a room 1500 women and being the only man, or one of only a few men, not striking me as odd. I remind them these are ‘technical women”, not just any old women or a gathering of a wide array of women, but technical women. They are their own, rare breed. After eight years with the Anita Borg Institute I’m generally accustomed to them. And I suppose they with me.

Working with the Anita Borg Institute is amazingly rewarding. It has also tapped me dry. I’m in that phase as I sat in the car with my sister yesterday, hollowed-out, fragile and yet amped-up and slightly manic. I am aware the high end of this spectrum will soon fade and i’ll just be left with the emptiness and the letdown that make up the the post conference blues. I’ve been here before. I’m aware of what is happening. I talk, she listens and asks insightful older sister questions. As we near Chattanooga I turn the conversation towards her life, her work, and what we have planned for the next couple of days.

Eileen and her partner at the Chattanooga Coffee Roasting Company, Ev, have just landed and new account in a Whole Foods-type market in town. Its a big deal for their young coffee company and they are very excited, and a bit overwhelmed too. With this account they are also announcing a new “Relationship Coffee”. At first when she is describing what Relationship Coffee i can’t decide if it is just another label like “green” or “fair-trade” but as I hear more I understand it an evolution from those now often overused and misunderstood terms. Eileen hands me a press release:

‘Pioneered by Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers in the late 1990’s, Relationship Coffee is an economic and social impact-based system that depends on strong personal bonds between all entities in the product chain from source to consumer.  Relationship Coffee is based on: quality control training; full transparency of all business, price, and quality information; traceability of the coffee from cooperative to cup; and pre-trade financing.  It is a system where the “middleman” (the importer) provides both supplier and client with more value oriented services and products as part of the business proposition.’

It is what my friend Jesse Cool would call “Earth to the Table” or being connected to the food we eat. Of course this isn’t an issue in many parts of the world where they know the person who grows their rice, have at least an inkling if not full knowledge of where their chicken was raised and butchered, and knows someone involved with growing, drying, roasting and delivering of their coffee, tea or tobacco. I could see Anita Borg (1949-2003), who loved coffee, good food, and being connected in intimate ways to whatever she did, really liking this concept of relationship coffee. Even though she has been gone four years it is still easy for me to imagine her talking about “Relationship Technology”. 

I often heard Anita making the connection between innovators and end users and the appreciation and the quality that comes when many voices are listened to, heard and understood. 

Eileen tells me more about this relationship movement I miss Anita. We are a society in search of connection and interconnectedness even as we isolate ourselves with more gadgets, mores gismos, more access to information, more shapeless speech, more food that fills and expands us but doesn’t nourish nor satisfy. End of conference blues? Yes, thats all this is.

When we get home in Chattanooga I meet Lucy for the first time. I get dogs. Dogs and kids..and technical women. I wrestle Lucy to the ground and splay my body out on top of hers. I put her big dog head and snout into my hands and knead my fingers deep behind her ears and into her neck. Lucy has been raised for the first year of her life by women. I think that Eileen and Ev are little shocked by my seemingly rough treatment. “be careful with her” Eileen keeps saying. Trust me Sis, your 90 pound animal can handle it. I tell Eileen, this is relationship dog-handling.

Lucy loves it. I know she can’t tell me, but I can see it in her wagging tail. Clearly Lucy needs a man around from time to time.

Eileen sets me up in the upstairs bedroom. I toss down my bags and feel at home. This is my favorite part of her house. A converted attic with angled ceilings, accessed by a steep narrow flight of wood stairs. I can stand full upright at the center but have to croutch at the edges. At the top of the stair is a sitting and television room. Around the corner a hallway and at the far end a bedroom. I think it is the slanted ceilings that appeal to me. We had a house in Longview, Washington growing up and one of the upstairs rooms had ceilings like this. It was my oldest brother Steve’s room. Because it was his room and because he painted the white walls with splatters of black paint I loved being in that room too. It was a combination - in my little kid-brothers mind - of secret clubhouse and strangely magical place that might, just maybe, lead me to Alice’s wonderland or Lucy’s Narnia.

I get out of bed and into a pair of jeans, a t-shirt and tie-died beanie. I duck down the hallway and turn for the stairs. Lucy is waiting at the bottom. Eileen is somewhere else in the house but I can hear her talking to the dog as I descend “he’s coming down, yes, he is here and he is coming down”.

Eileen already has the coffee brewing and within minutes all three of us get into her car. 15 after that we pull into a large brick warehouse parking lot. Sheets of rain blitz sideways through shafts of light scattered throughout the lot. Eileen brings the car to stop near a wide loading dock. There is a single door next to it. I get the dog on a leash as Eileen hurries up the four or five concrete steps to the landing and under the awning escaping the rain and wind. She unlocks the door and enters. Lucy and i follow.

The industrial space is divided haphazardly into private cubicles with tall plywood and 2x4 walls. We walk down a wide awkward hallway to the Chattanooga Coffee Roasting space. A palette of 50 pound burlaps bags sits shrink wrapped and waiting outside the door. I have an immediate desire to claw the plastic from the pallet and dig my nose into the course hairy bags each holding raw coffee beans from around the world. Eileen unlocks the padlock and swings the door open.

Lucy dutifully finds her spot on a pad in an open dog crate near the door.

Centered along the far wall like an alter is Eileen’s elegant but industrial grade Spanish made Roure coffee roaster. Along the right wall smaller palettes and atop each open and unopened 50 pound bags of green coffee beens. Like a seasoned cook who knows the first thing you do when you enter a kitchen is to start water boiling, Eileen heads directly to the machine and fires it up. The sound of the gas furnace fills the room. This is the engine of her business.

I look at the heavy bags and the red and silver roaster getting to life and feel like a railroader or a welder. I’ve never been either. I’m romanticizing. Maybe I’m a cook, or a cyclist. Who knows, but I have an immediate connection to the soul of what this behemoth does. There is something macho, robust and artistic held within it. There is also something financial. The more hours a day this machine runs and roasts, the more successful Eileen and Ev will be.

Eileen has a list and we start to work through it as the machine heats up. She gives me one job and then another. I place a large five gallon plastic bucket on a scale and zero it out. She walks along the wall telling which each bean is and where they are from. She need 20 pounds of Guatemalan, 15 pounds of Columbian, 10 pounds of Brazilian which they roast for their espresso, 10 pounds of Sumatran, 20 pounds of decaf Sumatran, and 10 pounds of decaf Ethiopian Fancy.

I’m portioning coffee and examining and comparing seeds. The Guatemalan’s are smooth nearly perfect lady bug shaped verses the rugged pockmarked Sumatran. The decaf Ethiopian’s are arid rusty and imperfect verse compact intense looking Brazilians. Eileen is doing paper work and occasionally checking the roasters temperature. She checks the temperature again and then again. She confirms the beans with me verbally and then places her hand in the bucket doing a visual confirmation.

She takes the first bucket and pours it into a conical shaped funnel on the top of the roaster. She checks the temperature once again and then releases a latch as she starts a timer. The sound of 20 pounds of coffee rushing into a spinning roaster follows. I’m reminded of rain on sheet metal, coins in dryer, rocks in rock polisher, fish dangling on a fish chain, the murmur of voices in a crowded room, a heated conversation in an adjacent room...coffee roasting.

10 or 12 minutes later we hear “first crack” as the first of the roasting beans pop. Eileen makes a note in her log book. Then her twists and pulls our a small dowel with trapped beans from the drum. She examines, replaces, twists and pulls and quickly examines another sample. It is the coffee roasters equivalent of a wine thief, the long baster that wine makers use to do barrel tastings.

A few minutes later she unlatches a steel door on the front of the machine and out pours dark oily hot beans. They cascade into a hoola-hooped sized perforated stainless steel cooling bin directly below the roasting drum. Rotating from and 18 inch pole in the middle of the bin are three arms. On the ends of these rotating arms are metal shovels that push and sweep the beans around and around like mounds of snow. This is a machine that is all about movement. Movement of the beans during roasting and movement of the beans durning cooling.

The beans cool sufficiently and I begin portioning 1/2 and single pound bags for delivery to the Chattz Coffee Shop and a variety of Chattanooga restaurants, businesses and grocery stores. Eileen checks the temperature of the roaster and begins the process again. Later we are all loaded back up in the car. We make deliveries and rotate stock in grocery stores. We stop by the new Whole Foods-like store and Eileen shows me where the bins of “Relationship Coffee” will go. She tells me they have a soft opening in a week. I’m doubtful. Half the place looks nearly finished, product on shelves, aisles full off food, other areas are under full construction. Still, it looks like it is going to be a very very nice Whole Foods-like store.

We finish our deliveries and head back to Chattz, the Chattanooga Coffee Roasting company, coffee house. Ev is there. Earlier in the day she opened the shop. Business was good but now it closer to lunch and pretty quiet. That is good with me. I need a break. I need to develop a short but meaningful relationship with a strong cup of espresso. The barista quickly portions, tamps, and extracts my espresso. I take it by its tiny demitoss handle thumb and forefinger and get comfortable in a high bar chair and a one of the tall cocktail tables. Its a perfect espresso. The head of espresso golden brown and creamy and under that poignant black.

Eileen, Ev and I have lunch at a classic southern hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon. We eat our fill. Ev heads back to the store and Eileen and I take Lucy out to the Civil War Battlefields just outside of Chattanooga. It is raining but warm so we don’t care. Lucy runs through open fields and the forests. She races out from the two of us through Union and Confederate lines foraging, chasing deer, and retreating back to us for safety and encouragement. Eileen and I walk through the fields and forests and talk as we cross these ancient fronts, across lines of retreat and advance, over lands where men fell defending what they held dear, over what divided and connected them.