Pecha Kucha – a Philosophy of Coffee in under 7 minutes

A recent trip back to Cambridge happened to co-incide with the latest volume of Pecha Kucha taking place at Espresso Library. It’s an event were a few people each give a talk made up of 20 slides, each of which automatically moves on after 20 seconds. It’s a fast, concise format that exposes both the speaker and the audience to new experiences.

I could talk about the viture of being concise for days.

The plan was that sticking to coffee and philosophy as the topic for my talk would keep me on safe ground. As it turns out, trying to pack my entire undergraduate degree and over a year of professional barista experience into 20 slides was going to be canutian.

Now, coffee and philosophy are two things I’m rather passionate about. But the reason I get so excited about coffee (and my philosophical approach to it) is its complexity and nuance. You can’t finish learning about coffee, every avenue you pursue turns into another rabbit whole, forcing you to dive into organic chemistry, business practice or existential musings. In hind sight, this breadth makes it a crap topic for Pecha Kucha – it would have been so much better to just focus on one really specific part of coffee.

So here you go: my hyper-speed attempt to define speciality coffee, not in terms of product or business strategy, but as a philosophy.

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