Poster based off of a line in the D&D Community episode, trying to start screen printing a small run of these.
intersect chicago on Flickr.
One of the many pictures taken with my new camera, it’s so nice to be able to walk around and take pictures again.
About six months ago I managed to snag what is essentially my pre-career dream job. In all honesty I would be perfectly happy keeping this job even during my (hopefully successful) career as a cinematographer. This job is at what is, arguably, one of the best coffee bars in the states - Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea.
To preface this post I should probably explain a bit of my history with coffee. I have had a pretty interesting relationship with coffee throughout my life, I was raised a Mormon and in Mormonism there is this idea that all “mind-altering” chemicals or substances are bad - that includes caffeine. So until I was eleven I saw coffee, and really any caffeinated beverage, as being bad. Then my family left “The Church”. My father firmly embraced the once taboo world of caffeine, and a few years later I had my first cup of coffee. I distinctly remember my mother mentioning, well before I started drinking coffee, that she had heard in some NPR story that real coffee drinkers drank their coffee black.
I have always been of the opinion that if you are going to do anything in life, you should do it well and true to form. So here I was, drinking my first cup of coffee - black. It was horrible, but I stuck with it. I was lucky in that my father had at least somewhat decent coffee, specifically coffee from Jittery Joe’s in Athens Georgia. Now, this was not the best coffee (their quality has gone up since then) and it was brewed in this horrible auto drop brewer, but it was better than the Foldgers and Maxwell House that most people get introduced to coffee with. As I grew older I never really increased my knowledge about coffee, but I always had this latent interest in the culture that surrounded it.
Cut to July 2007.
One of the things I love about the coffee industry is the excess of passion, almost everyone who works in specialty coffee is absolutely in love - dare I say obsessed - with what they are doing. This is a wonderful thing for an industry, it allows innovation to happen quickly and almost always for the better. However, despite all of this passion, there are few places baristas can meet up to discuss their love and their ideas for coffee. Sure, there are barista jams every now and again, but most are concentrated on competition or skills workshops.
So here’s my idea. I would love to start what would essentially be a gym/club for Chicago area baristas. Open to any barista from any coffee house in Chicago (or even state wide). Stock a location with all the equipment a barista could dream about using or playing with but can’t afford, things like the newer pressure profiling espresso machines, every manual brew method you can think of, and all the equipment needed to analyze what is going on. In this sense it would be less of a club or gym and more of a lab, thus the name.
