25 Years of Coffee Writing

By way of celebrating 25 years in the coffee industry (July 8th is my coffee anniversary), I went back through some of the coffee writing I’ve done over two and a half decades. Regardless of my job title or where I was working, writing has been a part of every job I’ve held in the coffee industry, and I’ve been lucky enough to write for some trade journals along the way. The folks at Sprudge.com have even published some coffee fiction written by yours truly. It’s almost unforgivably self-indulgent, I know, but I hope you’ll forgive me anyway on my silver anniversary in coffee. Below, a few excerpts from over the years, presented as written when written, even if my point of view has changed, or maybe “been refined” is more accurate, since. I've included links to the original piece where avaiable.

Mike Ferguson | Chief Storyteller | Covoya Specialty Coffee

From Not All About Mr. Ukers, published at Coffeegeek.com on August 9, 2023:

Photo by Mark Prince

“You don’t need to be involved with coffee very long, as a profession and/or a passion, to discover that coffee attracts interesting people, many of whom could be or are successful in other endeavors. But coffee tends to sustain their engagement. It’s tempting to imagine this level of engagement is something new, an outcome of the specialty coffee industry where things are, you know, special. Well, maybe it’s more pronounced in specialty coffee, but I suspect this level of fascination has always surrounded coffee, as exemplified by both our once and future kings of all coffee media, Mr. Ukers and Mr. Hoffmann.”

From A Brief History of the Price of Coffee published at Sprudge.com in 2022:

“Which brings us to the modern day. Why were prices so high throughout much of 2022? They weren’t. Sure, a severe drought and a frost in Brazil, container shortages, fertilizer shortages, shipping bottlenecks, labor shortages at every point in the supply chain, COVID. Yeah, but prices were not high. If you started buying green coffee between the spring of 2012 and the summer of 2021 you entered that bit of business during an elongated valley, when green prices were abnormally low if not truly anomalous, and the truth is the 2022 “peaks” were not very high in the scope of history. If, like the pricing charts in the offices of the Colombian Coffee Federation that ran out of room at $1.20, you acclimatized to an environment where $2.00 was a psychological or budget barrier, most of 2022 was not easy. And yet, this is the business you entered when you started buying green coffee. Always has been.”

From Remembering Erna Knutsen, published at Sprudge.com in 2018:

“I am writing in the past tense because Erna died in June of this year. At 96, she was well past the age when we ask what it was that caused her death. Enough was enough. She had already lived more than one life by any measure and for those of us who claim coffee as a living, it was her second life that meant the most, her coffee life. Erna’s father, Edwin, died just three months before his 100th birthday. Long life was in her blood, is one way to put it. Another way would be to say that long life was in her spirit, and her spirit was needed to launch an industry. To give away the ending, that is what Erna Knutsen did.”

From The Haunted Cappuccino, published at Sprudge.com in 2018

“That’s a pile of bones with skulls on top,” he said, as if it was exactly what he expected to see on his cappuccino.

“What you are now, they once were; what they are now, you shall be.”

Billy looked up at Raffi but then let his gaze drift from his eyes to his shoulder. “What the hell does that mean? What are you talking about?”

“I said, we call it a bellflower,” said Raffi. “It’s only a bellflower, nothing more.”

“Bellflower,” said Billy, nodding as if this made perfect sense. “Sure. It’s a bellflower.”

From Slinger, published at Sprudge.com in 2015:

“After drinking their espresso or sipping their cappuccino, they would say something like, ‘I’m not sure where I am.’

‘I know. It’s okay, just keep driving,’ he would say.

‘I don’t think this ends well,’ some of them would add.

‘It ends as well as it can but not as bad as you imagine. Just keep driving.’

He did his job. Some people were clueless. They ate because there was food. They stopped because there was a diner. They kept driving because there was a road. Others had inklings and it was his job to keep them moving. His coffee helped them face the road ahead. Hadn’t it always been so?”

From Once Upon a Coffee published in the October 2013 Specialty Coffee Chronicle:

“Our stories, the stories that we relate to because they are about coffee, are important for many intellectual and psychological reasons – the reasons that stories have been a part of life since we drew on the walls of caves. For me, it’s simple. A good story will possess me, consume me, and reshape me. But when the story is about coffee – the people, the plant, the product – there is always a common thread, the Siren Song of coffee. Whether the story is ancient or about those we know, coffee calls them, it calls us. We all survive, or don’t, the seduction of the Siren in our own way and ultimately the stories we tell about our lives in coffee are shared empathy over our failure to escape.”

From Fighting the Good Fight, How to Deal with Dishonest Competitors, published in the June 2013 issue of Roast Magazine:

“I stand there for several minutes trying to imagine the entire supply chain for this coffee and what it could possibly look like in order to deliver 12 ounces of whole bean coffee in a nice-looking package for a retail price of $3.99. I close my eyes and step back into this coffee’s timeline: the distribution, the packaging, the roasting, and the sourcing. No matter how hard I try and imagine the very cheapest process at every point, I can’t do it. I can’t even fictionalize a $3.99 bag of coffee.”

From And the Coffee Farmers Thrived, Coffee Kids newsletter, la voz, 2011:

“All of these stories, in fact, every coffee story begins with the same people, whether we include them in the telling or not. Every coffee story begins with the coffee farmer, the coffee farmers family, and the coffee farming community. But when we are talking about people for whom growing coffee is their only source of income, very few coffee stories, almost none, end with and the coffee farmers thrived. And the coffee farmers thrived. Seems like a simple thing, to thrive. We’re not talking about living happily ever after. We’re not talking about growing wealthy. To thrive is simply to grow and do well, grow and be healthy and successful and often, but not always says the dictionary, be profitable. But perhaps most importantly, to thrive carries within it the idea of holistic and sustained growth, sustained health, sustained wellness and success. To have a good year is not to thrive. To have a good crop, do well with a few bags at an auction, dig a well, add a patio, see a doctor, all of these things can contribute but none alone equals to thrive.”

From Mike Ferguson’s Preface to the book Essential and Effective Marketing for the Specialty Coffee Retailer by Bruce Milletto, 2004: 

“If you purchased this book looking for a few good marketing tips while cutting quality corners, do us all a favor, put the book on the shelf and spend 12 months focusing on improving quality in every aspect of your business except marketing before you pick it up again. I just might walk into your coffeehouse one day and I would hate to have to write on a comment card, as I have on occasion, ‘Great logo, too bad about the coffee.'”

From The Micro-Chain Link: Branding, Community and Quality, published in the April 2003 issue of Fresh Cup Magazine: 

“How many? It’s a question as deeply embedded in American definitions of success as ‘how much?’ If you own a single coffeehouse, you’ve probably been asked numerous times when you plan to open your second location. If you already own multiple shops, you’re probably asked regularly when you plan to open the next one. After all, Starbucks has nearly 5000 stores in North America and everyone wants to know when you’re going to catch up. But the harsh reality is that success with one coffeehouse does not guarantee success with multiple stores. That’s because beyond the basic operational and financial issues of opening additional stores lie more subtle questions related to identity, image and branding.”

From The Supersizing of Specialty Coffee: Is Bigger Really Better?  Published in the June 2003 issue of Fresh Cup magazine: 

“In the distant future, archaeologists will dig us up, looking for clues they can decipher in their studied hindsight as indications of the decline of western civilization. In the same way that we reflect on the Romans and wonder why they couldn’t see that feeding people to lions was not a sign of good things to come, historians will one day look back at us and think, ‘All you can eat? Double Big Gulp? Super-size it? A 24-ounce coffee?’ The writing, they’ll say, was on the menu.”

From The Quality / Price Puzzle published in the July/August 2002 issue of The Specialty Coffee Chronicle:

“Heaven save us from coffee that is good enough. You either believe that consumers can tell the difference between great coffee and just good coffee or you don’t.  If you don’t believe that consumers can tell the difference, what is driving your business model?”

From Uncharted Territory: Exploring the Possibility of Specialty Coffee Origins, published in the July 2001 issue of Fresh Cup Magazine:

“Exceptional single-origin coffees create a connection to far-away locations–places unknown to most people in any tangible sense except through the cup. Specialty coffee is about coffee that could not have come from just anywhere. We carefully prepare and serve single-origin coffees: ‘This is what the foothills around Mt. Kenya taste like.’”

From Impact at Origin published in the November/December 2000 Specialty Coffee Chronicle: 

“Perhaps no other word in the coffee industry carries with it so complex a mixture of passion and promise than ‘origin.’ There is the history and romance of the coffee farm, the tangible sense of every cup of coffee being descendant from the soil. There is the connection, so critical to the success of the specialty coffee sector, to places far away and exotic, endlessly unique and unknowable except through the cup: the earth of Yemen, the mean seas off Sumatra, the rain forests of Guatemala. Then there is the dependency inherent in the word itself. The livelihood of every single person in the coffee industry originates in coffee lands, is born of the plants and those who tend them and harvest their fruit.”