« Back to blog

Amazing coffee and the power of ritual.

This weekend I had the best coffee I've ever had.  My good friend Wil has a large bag of unroasted, green coffee beans from Kenya, and I watched as he prepared a cup for me.  The whole process took about 30 minutes -- from roasting the beans in a popcorn maker, to grinding them as fine as possible, and then finally brewing the coffee in a stove top espresso maker.  It was so much more than just another coffee.

I told this story to a friend at work today, and he sent me this quote in response (my emphasis added):

Another important element of addiction is ritual. Something as simple as eliminating the rituals that accompany the addiction can be enough to cause the addiction to lose appeal. Powerful aspects of the addiction are obtained from the ritual itself, such that without it, the behavior or substance no longer is accompanied by euphoria. Heroin is a good example. The ritual of injecting heroin and the lifestyle involved in the pursuit and use of the drug is a part of the addiction. Taking away these components, as is done in methadone clinics, often reforms addicts on these bases alone.

If I arrived too late to be there for the preparation of the coffee, would it have tasted differently?  Would vinyl LP's sound as good as they do if there wasn't so much work involved in maintaining and playing them?  Are we really this predictable, this easy to manipulate, that the lead-up to an event can have such a big impact on the enjoyment of it?

Yes, yes we are.