Author: Scotty Beardsley
Welcome to another week with us here at Fourscore! Today we have a special author if you haven’t noticed with the new author, Scotty. You may know him as the amazing barista behind the counter that has dreads, a skateboard, and the best attitude in California. This dude is way rad and very talented in many ways including skateboarding, writing, and you guessed it… making the best damn cup of coffee you’ll ever get. Scotty is gracing us with his words and his magic, listen up folks, this here is good.
What is it about a coffee shop that makes it special? Is it the drink? The pastries? The atmosphere? What makes a coffee shop worth going to rather than just making our daily cup of coffee at home or at the office? It’s way cheaper that way. Why would we choose to spend 5-10 times more on coffee by going to a coffee shop instead of making it at home?
My love for coffee didn’t start till I was in college. My mom didn’t really make coffee at home, so I was never really around it all that much. How I started getting into coffee is that I found that I preferred to do my homework at the campus coffee shop than anywhere else. There was something about the coffee shop experience that attracted me. There was something about becoming a regular that got me to want to begin to develop a relationship with the barista and I began to feel like we were becoming friends. Just walking to the counter to see someone I could now call my friend instead of just a guy taking my order and making my drink warmed my heart. Not only that, but the casual run ins with other familiar faces coming in and out of the shop where I could take a little study break to chat a little, then get back to my homework made the experience even better. What I was paying for in this coffee shop wasn’t really coffee, it was community, familiar faces, and friendship. There is something about being in a familiar place, with familiar faces all around that allowed me to work better rather than cutting myself off from the world in an empty dorm room where the only noise heard may be the sound of pages turning and computer typing. This coffee shop began to feel like a community I was taking part in, not just a place where I was a customer doing a business transaction from time to time.
We are all made to feel connected with people. Loneliness is a real problem, and the community we can experience in a coffee shop adds value and warmth to our lives. After working in coffee as a barista for some years now, I have learned that every coffee shop is a community. They all have their regulars that come in and out that make the place what it is. It’s not the coffee, the pastries, or the atmosphere, that really make a coffee shop special, it’s the community. The regulars that come in that we greet by name and have gotten to know a lot about, the baristas behind the counter that are basically professional friend-makers to everyone who walks in the door. As a barista, it is not just coffee that I serve, but its community, and its friendship. Without that, I’m not offering anything that people can’t make at home. Anyone can make coffee and pastries at home. Not everyone can have friendship and community at home, and that is the lifeblood of any coffee shop.
Stay classy coffee tribe.