After weeks of having Jaime constantly breathing down my neck about this, I finally present to you the hardly brief story of how I came into coffee and also my first blog entry anywhere...ever. Now you can all say you were there when I started blogging.

I was first introduced to coffee by my good friend R.J Glass about four years ago. We were always looking for things to delve into, and he told me that there was a whole other realm of experiences to be had, and a serious cult subculture that obsessed over it. However, I was hardly hooked from the beginning. While I was always down to try new things, with the exception of my occasional visit to Caffe Trieste (San Francisco, born and raised), I was the guy who got the blended iced mocha from the local coffee shop on a hot day. I thought 'coffee is coffee, what else is there to know?' I never drank drip coffee black because it just tasted bad; it was burnt and bitter, lacking any real flavor whatsoever besides, um... "coffee". Needless to say, I've come a long way.

We took a field trip to sweet Maria’s because we were lucky enough to be local and went crazy. We bought all this different green, split a little Fresh Roast Plus and started roasting as per their instructions with results that were enough to sell me on it. I was hooked. Later, we realized that there was a coffee company in Oakland roasting their own stuff with a little kiosk and espresso cart in San Francisco called Blue Bottle. When we went, the barista on bar was this bearded teddy bear of a man named Steve Ford. He pulled my first real shots of espresso. From that point on, we made an excuse to head down to the kiosk everyday. About a year later when I switched schools and needed a job, I figured I would give barista life a shot. I went to the first shop closest to my apartment with a la marzocco (a place called 1369 Coffee House in Cambridge), gave them the coffee nerd speech and got the job.

At this point, coffee really transitioned in my life from fun, part time hobby to borderline obsession. I simply needed to know everything, so I hit the internet... hard. Different sites, podcasts, articles; if I got my hands on it, I read or listened to it. I was able to pour latte art within my first couple of hours on bar and talked about coffee to anyone who would listen at work or otherwise. I quickly became the 'coffee guy' at my shop and I hit the ceiling within a couple months. I knew there was so much more that we could be doing to make our coffee better, including --but not limited to- switching roasters and serving better coffee. So I went to the management and picked my battles but all my words of advice and recommendation fell on deaf ears. They had a successful shop that worked for them, and unfortunately was one that focused more on atmosphere than quality in the cup. I knew there was better stuff out there... people who were more concerned with quality and not the bottom line, so I gave my notice, took my leave, and started having my espresso at Simon's.

After quitting my first barista job, I knew that if I wanted to take things to the next level, I would need real training, so I turned to the best barista I knew - Steve Ford. I flew home for a couple weeks and drove up to Santa Rosa to visit Steve who was now roasting at Ecco Caffe. While it was a murderously busy roast day, he still managed to give me a big shove in the right direction. I'll always be indebted to Steve for this and he remains a sort of mentor for me and despite the fact that we seem to be heading down different paths; though I hope we will have similar destinations.

When I first met Jaime, he was on bar at Simon's. We started talking all things coffee. He was just kinda shocked that there was barista in the Boston area who cared about coffee that he wasn't aware of or in contact with. He later invited me to the cupping group meetings and to be a barismo contributor. I was introduced to Silas, Ben Chen and Judson shortly after my first encounters with Jaime. Ben was skeptical of me in the beginning, probably for the same reasons as Jamie, but we got along great. He's was so into modding and reengineering everything he owned; his technical prowess blew my mind and made me want to get inside his head. Silas was the first tea connoisseur I ever came across. Tea was another thing I had never really investigated beyond your average bagged, over-steeped cup of English breakfast. Silas showed me the parallels between coffee and tea, and lets just say I now have one more thing I'm extremely picky about.

When I eventually began at Simon's I found Jaime offered a different perspective that was the perfect compliment to the training I had received from Steve. Where one leaves off, the other picks up, and visa versa. It's really ideal.

For now, I'm still at Simon's trying to refine my skills as best I can with no one but myself as a judge. And while many others are busy preparing for competition (something I really haven't made my mind up about yet), I find myself preparing for the day I can return the favor of a life changing shot to Chris Owens or Steve should they happen by our bar, because I think this is the only real measure of a barista: how good the shots are when they're pulling them back to back on a busy bar. I'm also really looking forward to whats ahead for the group. There are so many things which we hope to accomplish and are just beginning to be able to approach many of them.

The people I've been privileged enough to meet, the friends I've gained and the sensory experiences with both coffee and tea that I've had since joining the group have simply been both incredible and life changing. It is for these reasons that coffee will be part of my life forever. (I tried a million different ways to make this sound less cheesy, but it wasn't happening.)