The power of a global coffee community, words by 2017 World Barista Champion Dale Harris.
Coffee is a beautiful industry. It's also one full of contradictions and challenges. The issues facing specialty coffee, and the world more broadly, won't be solved by individuals or single companies. They'll be solved by shared goals, honest dialogue, and people choosing to work together. When Dale Harris, 2017 World Barista Champion, spoke at Tamper Tantrum right here at our Auckland eatery, it got him thinking about the collective power we all hold.
I fell in love with coffee, and eventually chose it as my career, not because of its flavours or the warmth of the café, or even the satisfaction of adjusting a brewing parameter and watching it shape a guest's experience. I chose it because coffee is a remarkable lens through which you can understand the world a little better.
The story of coffee runs through exploration, empire, religion, democracy, the Enlightenment, and the rebuilding of Vietnam. The path from a farm at origin to an espresso in a café depends on a tangle of road systems, ports, shipping containers, and financial instruments that simply didn't exist sixty years ago. The social impact of coffee today shows us urbanisation, gentrification, the greying of farming communities, and shifting work patterns for demographics of people nobody would have predicted. Every farm, every producing region, is a living example of what climate change is doing to livelihoods and yields, and therefore to the price of coffee for drinkers on the other side of the world.
Coffee connects us all. But the community that sees it this way is small. Baristas and roasters in Auckland, London, or Lima spend most of their time talking to customers, and very little listening to each other or working with counterparts in other cities. The internet and social media have enabled more connection than ever, but let's be honest, they've done more for marketing and pretty pictures than for meaningful conversation between like-minded people.
Speaking at Tamper Tantrum gave me a chance to share ideas I rarely get to air in my daily work, and doing it in Auckland, in a room full of people who really care about this industry, made those ideas feel a little more urgent. Having spent most of my life behind a bar, I know this career can be a real vocation. But it can also feel like a role that doesn't let you make an impact on a bigger scale, or push back on the problems facing the industry. What I've come to understand is that, despite those limits, the ability to network and communicate as a collective has never been more powerful. If we use the tools we have and work together, the global barista community can influence consumer choices, help educate people on the impact of those choices, and help them understand the connection they share with coffee producers at origin.
It has never been more expensive to produce coffee. Yet the price achieved on the market, inflation aside, is lower than it was ten years ago. That's not sustainable. Rising temperatures will shrink viable growing land. But the reality is more nuanced than the headlines suggest, and just as serious: it's not so much that coffee will disappear, but that better-tasting coffee will. The kind that needs investment, stability, and a reliable growing season. The only viable model left, if nothing changes, is high-volume, low-quality, and that's a future nobody in this industry wants. By exploring different ways of buying and serving coffee, and farming practices that allow net positive carbon capture, every part of this industry, particularly farm and café workers, who've historically had the least power, can take a meaningful step in the right direction.