About

I've had a cup of coffee every day since I was fourteen. For most of those years, that just meant drinking it. It took a coffee tree to make me actually pay attention.

My father kept a piece of land outside the city — a small weekend house, and a much bigger stretch of trees: guava, lemon, apple, berries, mango, orange, potatoes, more flowers than I can name. A few coffee trees were mixed in among them. I noticed the red cherries on the branches before I understood what they were, and once I did, I couldn't leave it alone.

My father walked me through the process himself — picking, pulping, drying, the parts most people never see because their coffee already arrives as a bag of brown beans. I processed my own batch. Then I bought a small roaster and roasted my first kilo. I was fifteen.

That's not a story about becoming a professional. I didn't go work for a roaster, and I don't have a certification to point to. What I have is closer to twenty years of drinking coffee on purpose — comparing beans, changing variables, noticing what actually moves a cup from fine to good.

Somewhere in there it stopped being about the caffeine. I built a small coffee bar in my own house, bought a real espresso machine and the accessories that go with it, and turned the first cup of the morning into something closer to a ritual than a habit. I don't drink it to wake up anymore. I drink it to slow down before the day asks anything of me.

That's the whole premise of this site. Not expertise handed down from a café job, but two decades of paying attention, starting from a tree I couldn't identify at fifteen. If you're standing where I was — curious, slightly obsessed, not sure where to start — that's exactly who this is for.