All posts by Colin Mansfield

About Colin Mansfield

I'm a college student born in Boise, Idaho who loves coffee. BoiseCoffee.org was birthed out of a desire to share my passion for coffee with others through reviews and tips. It has since evolved into a discussion of like-minded individuals. We all seek to make the world a better place through our unique talents and goals. Coffee can help.

The Subculture of Specialty Coffee

Thrash Lab put a great video together which profiles three specialty coffee roasters/houses. LAMILL Coffee, Handsome Roasters, and Blue Bottle Coffee. Without giving too much away, it’s a great look into what it takes to create great coffee, and the types of people that work together to get the bean to the roaster, to the mug, to your hands. Check it out!

The Coffee Guy

New Look, Same Great Taste

Welcome to the new, improved, BoiseCoffee.org! If you’re coming from the old BoiseCoffee.wordpress.com, you’ll notice a few changes. I’ve updated a few aesthetics of the blog to reflect the type of environment I enjoy when drinking coffee – simple, clean, and homey.

If you were subscribed to the rss feed of my wordpress.com site, you don’t need to change anything. I’ve updated everything through feedburner, so you’re good to go.

There are some great things on the horizon for BoiseCoffee, so stay tuned! I’m currently working on a project that could make some fun ripples in the coffee community. As that project moves toward testing and finalization, you’ll be the first to know.

For those of you who have followed this blog since its beginning, thank you so much for your continued support. For the newbies who are reading this post as their first – welcome! This blog very much reflects my evolution from coffee consumer to coffee enthusiast – and the transformation is far from complete. I invited you to join me in this conversation about coffee – a beverage that brings people together from all parts of the world in community. I look forward to future adventures and memories.

The Coffee Guy

Also, here’s a cool Vine I just made!

 

The Coffee Experience: Passion and Stumptown

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Passion is one of those free-radicals in life that is hard to define, and even more difficult to harness. It is often the reason, the why, behind what makes something that is great, great. While it might be hard to explain, we know it when we see it.

Stumptown Coffee Roasters is one of the biggest names in the third wave of coffee, and they are unquestionably passionate about what they do. But passion isn’t derived from a business as a whole, it comes from each individual person.

Stumptown released a video where they highlight just that: the people that make them who they are. Each person tells their story of why they love what they do, and why they think it’s important to the coffee process as a whole. Katie Berstein, a barista at Stumptown, gives a particularly powerful quote that she got from her dad. “How you do anything is how you do everything.” Check out the full video below.

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STUMPTOWN from Stumptown Coffee Roasters on Vimeo.

And that’s it, isn’t it? Coffee is worth being passionate about because in all the details about roasting, brewing, grinding, tamping, and pouring it becomes clear that this process is a reflection of a much larger lesson. Working with others to create something beautiful  is a part of the human experience that makes living truly worth it. It connects us all.

The next time you purchase some coffee and brew that first drip or take that first sip, take a moment to appreciate the many individuals that went into putting that cup together. That coffee has been hard-earned by the passion of many sets of hands.

The Coffee Guy