What Roasting Coffee Has Taught Me About Starting Again

Life is often like roasting coffee beans. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the roast level and the output of the beans just don’t match your expectations.

We can build up all these expectations: buying the best-quality beans money can muster, single origin, farmer met, farmer-direct. Then, no matter how hard we try, that roast just isn’t what we expected. We get defeated and want to give up.

But that is a lot like life. We expect these milestones, compare ourselves to others, and even work harder than our neighbors and friends, only to not get the result we wanted.

Sometimes we don’t feel like our effort matches our output. That doesn’t necessarily mean the effort or the investment was wrong. With coffee, sometimes it’s the technique. Sometimes it’s the equipment. Sometimes the flavor profile we want simply doesn’t match the beans we’re trying to bring it out of.

But you know what? In the end, it can be an opportunity. A learning experience.

We need to take a step back. A big step back, to realize a few things. Sometimes, to move forward, we must move back, and even stay there for a while.

Even single-origin coffee can contain different varieties, such as Bourbon and Caturra. One lot may differ from the next in its varieties, moisture, or density. The roast profile, the heat, the fan, all those numbers on the computer can be the same, yet the cup comes out differently. We have to adjust to what’s actually in front of us.

And that can feel defeating. We want things to stay the same. We don’t want to change the profile or reinvest that energy. But sometimes, once we make those changes, we end up with a sweeter cup and more clearly defined characteristics, closer to what we wanted in the first place even if different.

In our case with coffee, we’ve learned that all that data, all that work, all that research, cost, and effort paid off. We learned a hugely valuable set of skills: about roaster cleaning, bean characteristics, roast times, rate of rise, and how they all come together.

That knowledge is later fed into our next project. We carry it with us, even when the outcome wasn’t what we expected.

Life has those happy mistakes, too. Things we never would have planned for ourselves. And then there are genuinely awful things, things we would never choose. We don’t have to pretend they happened for a reason or find some greater meaning that makes them okay. But, in our own time, we can choose to say: I’m going to use this energy. I’m going to make this thing matter. I’m going to make it count. I’m going to invest it forward.

Sometimes we have to step back far enough to see what we’ve learned. Life won’t always work out exactly as we planned, and sometimes we will have to readjust our expectations—and even know when it is time to move on.

Maybe that’s something to sit with in those quiet moments over a cup of coffee, when we’re alone with our thoughts. We can be disappointed in how something turned out and still give ourselves credit for the care we put into it. We can let go of an outcome without leaving everything we learned behind.

And when we’re ready to try again, we aren’t starting from nothing. We’re bringing everything we’ve learned to the next roast.

Co-founder, Equal Roots Coffee Co.