#2 the why.

A while back, my wife (who shall be referred to from now on as Bones, because she's a doctor dammit, not a featuring character in a blog) and I were away in Norwich. Coincidentally, we were both looking to learn more about our favourite hot drinks: her tea, me coffee.  We were on holiday and in a spending mood so we figured it was a good time to start and ducked into the nearest posh looking tea merchants.  I don't remember who they were, and I probably wouldn't mention them if I did as the whole experience was pretty negative and that's not what this is about. But it went down a bit like this:

Bones: "Hi, I'm looking to learn about tea."

Merchant:  "Humph."

B: " Um, I've tried some white teas and I liked those so I thought that might be a good place to start."

M: "..."

B: "Er, and I've had some toasted rice tea before and liked that too, do you..."

M: "This white tea is the expensive one."

And so on.  We left with some small bags of expensive tea and a sense of disappointment, non the wiser.  

More walking and more shopping later, it's coffee time and we decide to search out a nice looking independent place for a treat, maybe one of those pour-over things I've heard about.  The place we find happens to be Strangers on Pottergate, it's busy but not packed out, in we go.

Me: "Hi, I'm looking to learn about coffee."

Barista: "Oh great, what do you want to know. Here, try this one. Come look at all this cool kit."

And so on. Ok, so that's not verbatim, but that was the gist and that's how excited they were when someone keen to learn came in with questions. A bit of a difference right? I still have the little bit of paper with 'James Hoffman cafetière' that they gave me to remind me of what to look up so I could start making better coffee at home.  Now I have an increasingly well thumbed copy of J.H's excellent book and I'm embarking upon this blog.

And Strangers is not an isolated example, back home in Sheffield, I've had a mini Aeropress tutorial from the guys at Tamper and a really memorable coffee flight from Upshot after I came in asking for something I clearly didn't understand.  The commonality here is that universally, the coffee community are welcoming and happy to share, even when there's no incentive for them to do so, other than the love of the stuff. 

So here I am, buzzed with enthusiasm and a fair bit of caffeine. I've a half decent palate and I think I can line words up together in ways that are pleasing. I'm going to get things wrong, I'm probably going to talk with absolute confidence about things that are total nonsense, but bear with me.  I might get a few things right, hopefully more and more as I go on, I'm going to learn new things and if I'm lucky, you might too.