Note: This is the unedited, raw version of my essay 'Kissaten'. I release this version, because I quite like it, but not as any sort of slight nor protest against the edited one. The originally released version, was released as the first ever piece of writing published by the Nomu Specialty coffee magazine, and all edits made by the extremely talented Nomu founder, were made with my full consent and collaboration, and I am very happy with the final version. I just thought it would be fun to share the original, unedited version as well, for those who are interested in seeing the evolution of the piece. To read the original, edited version, click here.

Introduction

There’s plenty to be said about the relationships between startup co-founders, but one thing is a given: There will be plenty of chances for conflicts to arise. Discussing topics like investment rounds, future product direction, the overall company strategy, and exit strategies, is almost guaranteed to involve some disagreements, or differences in vision. When combined with the high emotional investment most founders will have in their company, and tempers will sometimes rise.

That doesn’t mean that any meaningful heated discussions will have to come of it, and I’m happy to say that things generally stay pretty calm within the Tryp.com founding team. So much so, that the first, and so far only time, I’ve ever properly snapped at my co-founders, wasn’t even a discussion about our company - it was about coffee. My coffee-brewing habits, to be exact.

I can’t remember how we originally got onto the topic, but we somehow ended up discussing the viability of automating the, to some people seemingly excessively laborious, process of my coffee brewing. And the thing that got me fired up was, rather embarrassingly, that I struggled to argue against the points being made. Because why wouldn’t a machine be able to consistently hit exactly the pouring patterns and flow rates, that I’d spent years practicing - and without ever screwing up, or introducing little differences. Just a perfect pour, every damn time.

Long story short: I got angry, lashed out, and subsequently apologized (as I damn well should, I was way out of line for some good-willed banter).

But why did these slight jabs at my coffee rituals trigger such a reaction in me? The answer took me a while to arrive at, despite being incredibly obvious. But before dropping that particular rant, let’s dive into my journey with coffee first, to set the stage a bit:

My Coffee Journey

Being Danish, I never really had to make an active effort to be introduced to coffee - we’re the country in the world with the 2nd highest coffee consumption per capita, and along with alcohol, coffee serves as a core pillar of our social culture.

However, the typical Danish coffee experience at the time (and most likely still to this day), is one of preground coffee from origins unknown, made in a batch filter brewer - ideally the timeless Moccamaster, if one can find the funds for the Bentley of batch brewers. It was quantity over quality in a lot of cases, and there was no real regard for the origins nor tasting notes of the grounds - they just tasted like “coffee”. So, the avenue into coffee was crystal clear, but the one into specialty coffee? Much less so.

18 year old me initially put his eggs in the basket of becoming a wine snob (coincidentally another vice where Danes are among the per-capita world leaders). However, being deep into wine proved to be a suboptimal play both financially, and in terms of my health. As luck would have it, an odd mish-mash of my interests would organically hurl me into specialty coffee, which would become my obsession for the next almost 10 years of my life, of course still counting.

The 3 main influences that would initially send me on this journey, are all closely related: Tokyo Ghoul (the manga and anime), Persona 5 (the video game), and the culture that these pieces of media contained representations of: The Japanese 喫茶店 (kissaten - coffee shop) culture.

Without getting too nerdy about it, as a part of my lifelong interest in Japanese pop-culture, I at one point ended up watching the Tokyo Ghoul anime, where a substantial part of the plot is centered around a Japanese coffee shop, doing hand-drip coffee. That exposure led to me wanting to experience this style of coffee (not yet a thing in the boonies of Denmark), which I’d eventually end up doing during my first trip to Japan.

After returning from my first trip to what would eventually become my home, having experienced both Japan, and a classic kissaten, I was already an easy victim for the final blow: One of the video game Persona 5’s main settings, the kissaten LeBlanc. In the game, you will on occasion brew coffee at the shop, subsequently receiving tidbits from the owner of the shop about various bean origins, and their associated flavour profiles. This would be what finally pushed me over the edge, and led to me investing in some brewing gear: A plastic V60, a Wilfa Svart grinder, and a gooseneck pouring kettle.

All I needed was a recipe - some direction about how to actually produce good coffee with these new toys of mine. Enter the man, the myth, the legend himself: James Hoffmann.

Discovering Hoffmann, his videos, and his books, was my point of no return, and how coffee went from a curiosity of mine to an obsession. Because as it turned out, coffee was not only a craft - it was also a science. Somehow existing at the intersection of the two, it scratched every itch of my extremely romantically geared mind, and my nerdy, obsessive brain.

From that point and onwards, I must have been to hundreds of specialty shops, brewed thousands of cups of coffee, spent fortunes on equipment, and watched every video produced by Hoffmann almost religiously. I’ve bought several books on coffee brewing, the most aggressively nerdy of them being “The Physics of Filter Coffee” by Jonatan Gagne - an incredible read, that I highly recommend, but also more or less where I found the limit of how nerdy I felt like going with coffee brewing.

I’ve owned all sorts of manual brewers, counting the humble plastic V60, the Hario Switch, the Clever Dripper, mokapots, syphoons, AeroPresses, Vietnamese phin brewers, the Hario woodneck cloth filter brewer - the list goes on. Throughout the years, no matter what new brewer I acquired, I’ve always found myself returning to the plastic V60. Somehow, I just can’t seem to beat the cup quality produced by a V60, good coffee, and a good grinder. I did recently receive an April dripper as a gift, which I’m quite excited to play around with as well - maybe the dripper invented for use in Denmark’s most famous coffee shop, can finally dethrone the V60 as my daily driver.

After my move to Sapporo, Japan, my passion for coffee would also end up being how I met most of my closest friends over here, either directly or indirectly. And Sapporo’s incredible specialty coffee scene is still one of my favourite features of the city.

These days, I’m significantly less intensely nerdy about my coffee than I was a few years ago. I’m really happy with the coffee I’m producing at home, and I’ve found an equipment lineup and a flow I’m very comfortable with. I pride myself in a decently deep level of knowledge about coffee brewing, and various bean origins and processes (although the latter is for sure where my knowledge is the most lacking), but ultimately, the quality of my day-to-day brewing is more a product of lots of practice, and just using good coffee, along with a baseline understanding of which factors in brewing effect extraction, and how extraction affects flavour. So aside from the practice, it really isn’t anything an afternoon consuming Hoffmann videos wouldn’t teach you.

But despite taking my foot slightly off the gas in terms of nerdiness, coffee is still one of my main passions, and an important part of my daily life. And that finally brings us back to what coffee is to me, and why the conversation about automating all my very manual processes ended up riling me up to that extent.

Conclusion

I’m a software engineer, both in terms of my academic background, and my career. This is also reflected in my life as a startup founder, where I’ve always been a more product-centric founder. I love software engineering, but it does undeniably sometimes produce value that doesn’t translate to the real world in a clear, tangible way - as much fun as it can be, spending a 12 hour workday on something that maybe only translates into numbers on a screen, can sometimes feel a bit hollow.

And that’s what coffee has become to me, aside from “just” being one of my main hobbies: It’s the one, guaranteed tangible thing, that I put into the world in a day. It’s a ritual to start my day with, where I get to feel like I’m good at something that isn’t digital. It’s one guaranteed act of love towards my partner, even on the roughest, longest days of startup ownership - come hell or high water, I will make her a good cup of coffee in the morning. Us analysing the brew of the day in the morning, is a guaranteed moment of togetherness, even when we’re both at our most busy with work - regardless if the brew came out good or bad. People love talking about cherishing the little things, and coffee is my most important “little thing.”

That discussion all those years ago, should have ended before it even began, because we weren’t really even discussing the same thing. I didn’t realise it at the time, and thus failed to verbalise it, but for me, it never mattered whether or not my coffee brewing ritual could be automated and improved or not - I never wanted it to be. And to this day, I still have zero interest in having it taken over by any sort of machine - despite my process somehow getting more manual throughout the years.

It can feel like the world’s obsession with automating everything is growing more intense by the second. This was already the case when I started my software degree almost 10 years ago, and it has exploded even further in recent years, in the wake of the massive leaps forward within generative AI, and especially within Large Language Models (LLMs). At this point, it feels like there’s nothing people won’t outsource to various LLMs and other generative AI-based tools. What’s worse is, that the way people communicate about these opportunities heavily imply that you’d be wrong for not following suit. That if you’re somehow not automating every automatable piece of your existence, you’ll be left behind - and deserve to be so.

Luckily, there are also plenty of people preaching the opposite, and for my conclusion to this extended coffee ramble, I’ll join that choir. Even as the co-founder of an extremely automation-focused startup, and as a software engineer, I can not stress this enough: Protect, and cherish the small things in your life. Heck, even the big things. Just make informed decisions about what you want to outsource to machines, and what you want to keep for yourself.

There are so many dull, uninspired tasks that I am happy to let a machine do. But art, music, craftsmanship, and indeed, coffee? I’ll take the real deal, even when flawed by human errors, every day of the week. I continue to find more joy in analysing a pisspoor, over-extracted brew with my partner in the morning, than I ever could get from a consistently acceptable output from a machine.

I can promise that I’ll keep brewing specialty coffee in the most obnoxiously manual, nerdy, and fun way I can imagine. I hope you too, will keep your little things and your rituals safe, and cherish them - they have never mattered more.