Boss Barista

Everyone has had a bad boss. Everyone has probably had multiple bad bosses. I had one boss tell me I was inauthentic and that he hated me, I had one tell me he couldn’t give me more money after he promoted me, I had two, a married couple, get a divorce in the middle of the cafe and put all the employees right in the center. And I too, have been that bad boss. I’ve been too overbearing, too nitpicky, too weird and mean.

I learned to be a better boss—not perfect, not great, probably not even good—but better, through reading countless articles, scouring the internet for anything I could find about how to manage better. Surprisingly, there’s not a lot on the internet about how to be a better leader. There’s tons of articles complaining about shitty employees, but there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the role of leaders and how they can improve and set examples for their staff. In a way, we don’t really expect leaders to be held accountable, and instead write off bad work environments as a result of terrible employees.

I know this is bullshit—but I have to say the only way I learned this lesson is because of my time as a middle school teacher. This is a story I tell all the time, but I’ll tell it again because it’s so vitally important to me and who I’ve become—I was trying to get my students to behave by lining them up outside my classroom, and it wasn’t working. So my principal calls me, and I’m immediately blaming the kids, blaming the fact that my class is right after lunch...and tells me probably the single-most important set of words I’ve ever heard. He told me their rowdiness—that’s my fault. I’m in control. But then he pauses, and says, “That’s meant to empower you. You’re always in control.”

So I noticed when I started seeing these amazing post on Instagram about leadership from a coffeeshop called The Peccary in New Jersey. These posts extolled the work of baristas, and talked about how it’s the job of leaders to make the work of being a barista easier. David Hu, the owner of The Peccary, does this in a number of ways. He pays his baristas more, they know their schedules ahead of time for a year, they were paid for months during training and onboarding before the shop opened, and I wanted to learn more about how David developed such an attuned sense of purpose and vision that focused on being a strong leader that put his staff first. It’s not without his ups and downs—The Peccary recently closed its doors, which we talk about, but it does force you consider what your values are, and what you do to live those values. 

If you work in the coffee industry, you might have heard of the coffee price crisis. To put it simply, we are not paying farmers enough money to grow coffee. And it’s not a little bit of money—we’re not even paying enough for farmers to cover their costs to produce coffee. It’s not just that farmers aren’t making money, but actively losing it by continuing to grow and produce coffee. This is a problem of dignity—who do we respect, whose labor is valued, where is value created—but this is also a logistical problem that threatens the entire future of coffee. 

So what’s the answer? We talk about this issue ALL THE TIME, but I know, for me, it feels like we’re not getting concrete answers. Folks like Starbucks just announced an initiative to pledge $20 million dollars to farmers, which to some sounds like a good start, but to others, sounds like lip service, especially when you consider that Starbucks is a multi-billion dollar company—that’s right, BILLION, and not just a couple billion: try $22 billion.

And what this story—the one about Starbucks donating money to farmers—attempts to obscure, is that multinational corporations, like Starbucks, actually have a lot of say in how the market acts and how prices are figured out. And that’s something Maggy Nyamumbo is incredibly quick to point out. And this point—that there are market actors that we don’t talk about, or illuminate just how influential they are—is really what Maggy wants to talk about.

Maggy is the founder of Kahawa 1893, a social enterprise aimed at connecting farmers directly to consumers in an attempt to get more money back to farmers. Maggy is a trained economist—she graduated from Smith College in 2011, went to the London School of Economics, got her MBA at Harvard, worked for the World Bank and on Wall Street—and she’s able to see beyond the problem. Yes, we know that coffee prices are at an all time low, but what happens next? How do we actually begin to solve this problem? For someone like Maggy, that means truly understanding how we got here. And that means being upfront about coffee’s colonial history, its reliance on free labor in the form of slavery, and what she calls “big coffee” and their reluctance to stabilize the market.

Maggy called this conversation her therapy, which seems like such an incredible privilege for me, and hopefully for you, because this conversation was easily the most informative conversation I’ve ever had about how the coffee market works. I’ve been in coffee for almost ten years—and finally, FINALLY, by talking to Maggy, I get it. This is the best hour of information I’ve ever recorded—so listen to this. Again and again. She talks about how sustainability is often a buzzword to get farmers to overproduce coffee, how influential multinational corporations are on global legislature, and even how American politics could affect the future of specialty coffee. 

Speaking in generalizations or platitudes is annoying. Really annoying. But sometimes easy or necessary. Think of phrases like, “go with the flow,” or “everything happens for a reason.” These statements mean NOTHING—they can even go so far as to be insulting in the wrong context.

When folks ask what this podcast is, I end up relying on some—even though I want to tell them how complex and fascinating and weird the world is, I usually end up saying something like, “this podcast is about feminism and coffee.” Sometimes that feels…callous, or wrong, or like every person who talks on my podcast has the same experience—and they don’t.

In the coffee industry—and probably all industries—we use generalizations all the time, but the world is way, way more nuanced than summations about the world around us like, “we need to pay more for coffee,” or “women in coffee producing countries are often overlooked.” And that’s something my guest, Amaris Gutierrez-Ray, noticed quickly. We speak way too generally about women in coffee.

Amaris, who is the Director of Roasting for Joe Coffee in New York City, started the Women in Coffee Project as a way to shine a light on the complex and nuanced world of coffee growing for the women who live in producing countries. The Women in Coffee Project centers around narratives and storytelling, often inviting coffee producers to speak about their own experiences. It sort of makes sense someone like Amaris would crave this type of primary research—she has a background in museum science and archival information, and has always questioned where facts and figures come from.

Imagine reading a study about water from Nestle, who has gone on record saying they don’t believe water is a human right, versus a non-profit whose work centers around accessibility to clean water for all. They’d likely produce some very, very different facts and figures. We get into these ideas of complexity, nuance, and what it means to find solutions to conceptual problems like how we represent members of our community—all in this episode. Here’s Amaris.

Sometimes I wonder what you folks think about interviews. What you think about the guests, what you think about the questions, what you internalize and take with you as you put your headphones away and think about what you’ve just heard.

This interview with Sasha Wheeler is one of the most nuanced interviews I’ve ever aired. Sasha is a trans woman based in New Orleans—she built her first roaster when she was 15 from an aluminum can. As I re-listened to this episode, which I have to admit I don’t do very often because I hate the sound of my own voice, I found myself rewinding backwards, listening to answers that Sasha gave over and over, taking in the larger context of what her answers meant.

This episode is slower than most, but I hope the slowness gives you space to really deeply listen to what Sasha has to say. As she tells her story—one of customer service, one of self-discovery, one of pursuing passion—really listen and consider what her answers mean. Hopefully you’ll leave this episode with a lot of answers, but also with some more questions—you can find Sasha on Instagram at @whevyrn or as part of the very first Brewers Cup Glitter Cat cohort.

Do you know that feeling when one memory sparks another? I was in Austin, Texas, recently, at a brewery called Austin Beerworks. I went to the bathroom and there, in a small basket, were tampons, pads, and hand sanitizer. Then, I went to another brewery—I was there for my day job as a producer of podcasts for a beer website—and there was the same set up. Tampons, pads, hand sanitizer.

Seeing these reminded me of this one time I was working behind the bar. It was 2014, and I was working with this woman named Hannah. I mentioned that I got my period, she said she was on hers, too, and the next person that walked in was another one of our coworkers. She took $20 from the register, gave it to our coworker, and asked him to get us tampons.

I remember feeling that her act was so…brazen. I couldn’t believe it. Five years later, looking at the bathrooms in Austin, I was oddly reminded of that shame I felt.

Ashley Novoa is looking to dispel that shame. Ashley is the founder of the Chicago Period Project, a non-profit aimed at providing homeless and underserved people menstrual products. Along with providing resources, Ashley also works to normalize discussions around menstrual health, and expand the terminology and scope of issues of menstruation. People have looked at her work and said, “this is a women’s issue,” and her organization is working to show folks that it’s not just women who bleed, and furthermore that menstrual health affects all members of society.

I wanted to talk to Ashley about access—how do we, as folks who work in public-facing jobs—provide menstrual products to everyone? Not just sheepish baristas like I was in 2014, but to community members? Why doesn’t every coffeeshop provide menstrual products for free? What stigmas do we continue to uphold that keep us from providing resources equally? My conversation with Ashley begins to shine a light on these things. Here’s Ashley:

This summer, Rancilio set out to host the Ramp Up Tour, which featured sessions on espresso tech, espresso theory, and a community panel about careers for baristas at every date. The tour kicked off in Chicago, and Rancilio reached out to have me host a Boss Barista session, so obviously I said yes. This event let me put together a short presentation about how baristas can become their own advocates in the workplace, regardless of how positive or toxic your work environment may be. 

To round out the presentation, I invited Melissa Stinson from Everybody's Busy to discuss how starting your own business can be a struggle, but that doesn't mean you can't make it happen. Everybody's Busy is a pop up coffee bar on the Southside of Chicago, and Melissa launched it as a career change after spending many years working in film and television. To finish off how these ideas might apply in the workplace, I invited Ari Sofiakis who wears many hats at 4 Letter Word to chat about finding your place and asserting yourself while building your own role at a new business. 

I'm grateful to Rancilio to invite me to speak about real issues and real ways to address them at a community event, and if you'd like to follow along with the presentation, the slides will be available soon on the Boss Barista Instagram page. 

I can't say enough good things about Anita Tam. She's the owner of Slow Pour Supply in Houston, Texas and has made social justice and advocacy for baristas part of her business model. 

Anita is a musician by training and is keen on tools. What are the tools you need to be successful and how can tools help you get better at your craft? After making the switch from music to coffee, she noticed that she was hitting a plateau with her latte art, so she went abroad to learn more and noticed the best latte artists used pitchers that were way different than what she had seen before. 

Slow Pour is the sole American supplier of the WPM Pitcher, which is narrower, bigger, and slightly slanted. But the mission of Slow Pour isn't just to make latera better. It's to empower baristas to take control of their craft. Anita's company provides latte pitchers to pretty much anybody who needs them—no matter what. 

She personally helps competitors whenever she can, as created a number of scholarships for folks who want to compete but maybe don't have the financial resources to do so. Along with that, Anita is the Co-Founder of the Houston Coffee Collective, which brings baristas together through educational initiatives and a free job boards for folks looking to post new opportunities throughout the Houston area. 

So how does she do it? For Anita. It's more of a question of how can she not—she's someone who can't help but want to help. In this interview we give the microphone to Anita, a person who normally doesn't like to be in front of others and is usually behind the scenes and we learn what it takes to keep her going.

I studied Sociology in college. Sociology is basically just a fun way to say I studied people and why social structures exist. And the biggest thing I learned is that nothing is pre-ordained. Everything in the world is based on complex social structures, but none of them are necessarily good or bad—they’re good or bad based on the meaning we assign them. 

This mode of thinking would sometimes get me in a rabbit hole of nihilist thinking—if nothing matters then what’s the point of anything, really—but it also helped me realize that we have an immense amount of control of the world around us. Not always, and not over everything, but if there’s a system in place that we’re unhappy with, we can work to dismantle it. There’s nothing that says this system has to be the one we use—especially if it’s broken. 

Dismantling existing systems is an interesting idea, and something the coffee world has been talking a lot about, especially in light of the coffee price crisis. So I decided to talk to a sociologist, Noa Berger, to see what she thought about the structures and systems that we use to understand coffee. I met Noa at Re:co, which is a lecture series that focuses on big problems in the coffee industry, and while I was traveling in Paris, I got a chance to learn more about her work and how she takes her sociological lens and applies it to the world of coffee. 

Have you ever felt invisible? 

Gyalene Torres, who goes by Gya, is a barista living in Carmel, Indiana, and in this episode, we talk about what it means to feel overlooked, and the challenges she's faced emigrating from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria to the United States. Self-reflection, rebuilding your life, and dealing with feeling lost or overlooked are all touched upon in this intimate and candid episode—if you don't know Gya, this episode gives a beautiful glimpse into her life. @invisiblebaristagirl

A few weeks ago, I was honored to attend Re:co, a coffee convention that invites speakers from all over the world to talk about these big ideas in coffee. This year's conversation was focused on coffee prices and the crisis that we face as the price of coffee dips lower and lower. I talked to the head of the Coffee Price Crisis Response Initiative a few weeks ago. If you want more context on that, listen to the Ric Rhinehart episode, a couple of episodes back.

But at one of the lunches during the conference I met Karla Boza, a third generation coffee farmer in El Salvador. And the way that she spoke about the coffee prices was in a way that nobody else was at this conference because it affected her everyday life. She was one of the handful of coffee farmers at this conference talking about coffee prices. Don't you think that maybe more of the players affected by the crisis should have been in that room talking about this crisis?

In this conversation that I recorded with Karla, which you'll hear in a moment, we talk about the flaws in coffee buying. We often applaud coffee roasters, the folks that are on the other end of the supply stream for being transparent with their prices, but are the prices that they're paying actually changing the lives of farmers? Mostly no. Being transparent doesn't make a price fair and oftentimes the business of paying a higher price comes with a demand from a coffee farmer to do something extra for their coffee to stand out or taste different, which ends up costing the producer even more money.

In this episode, I urge you to rethink the way that you consider quality, not just in coffee but in every realm. Karla's experiences with coffee buyers ranging from being tricked by an importer who told them that their coffee was shit to another noting that it was a standout from the samples that they were sent, question where quality really comes from and if we should be basing our price standards on arbitrary markers of quality.

This is easily one of the most informative and remarkable conversations I've ever had, and I promise we'll be hearing more from Karla in the near future. Before we begin, I should note that the term coffee stream comes from Keba Konte, owner of Red Bay Coffee in Oakland, California, who used this term during his talk at Re:co, which is the event that Karla and I met at. Without further ado, let's listen to our conversation with Karla Boza.