Why we started YES PLZ

(letter from Tonx, reprinted from YES PLZ Weekly Issue 000)

I started Tonx Coffee, my previous direct-to-consumer roasting company, because I was frustrated.

In the early 2000s, I played a small role in defining the emerging Third Wave coffee movement — blogging a bunch, chasing my own tail in front of a roasting machine, designing coffee bars, elevating the status of the barista, and fighting for coffee to get some validation from the broader culinary community — but something wasn’t right; the home coffee lover was being left out.

The coffee companies at the forefront of roasting craft and direct sourcing seemed more concerned with selling beverages than bags of beans in their shops, more interested in their product showing up in fine dining establishments than in your kitchen. Most of the beans spilling out from our roasteries went out wholesale, used to make and sell more prepared beverages. The fraction of beans that landed in our own retail spaces also largely became drinks. The true coffee lovers — our potential connoisseurs and champions — coming to our fancy shops, carefully selecting bags of beans off the shelf and paying our highest markup were the smallest part of the business. The brutal reality of running a coffeebar is that it’s essentially a fast food business clothed in slow food atmosphere. Moving the line and pumping out well-crafted drinks is what they’re built for.

The message we were giving to those few folks buying beans? Making a good cup was really hard, requiring expensive gear, and should be left to the pros or treated like a complicated hobby… don’t try this at home!

Meanwhile K-Cups and Nespresso pods appeared from some foul chamber of commercial horror, quickly conquering the planet while our coffee niche waited in vain for some anointed food writer or celebrity chef to take notice and acknowledge our limited achievements. We treated our best, most curious customers as a mute audience, pushing them to become devotees to shiny toys, hip brands, and rising-star personalities rather than handing them the keys to the still-confusing beans. Great coffee was positioned as, at best a pain in the ass, at worst unobtainable.

So, with a motley band of intrepid colleagues and a smattering of venture capital (and the strings that come with it), I set out to build a better coffee company; one completely dedicated to the home consumer. It was a wild, sometimes bumpy three-year ride, ending with us becoming an arm of San Francisco’s Blue Bottle Coffee right as they went big. Four years later, I’m left with some battle scars, an expired non-compete agreement, fresh perspective, and a laundry list of unscratched itches.

Scratching these itches is the big motivator. How do we get more people engaged with great coffee? Can we uncover fresh points of entry that don’t rely on buying into all the signifiers of the contemporary coffee bar context? Can great coffee exist as blue collar as well as Blue Bottle?

When my friend and YES PLZ cofounder Sumi Ali and I did a $1-a-cup coffee project as part of Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson’s launch of the revolutionary fast food startup LocoL, we encountered some resistance from inside the coffee world. Were we betraying the high-end niche of the specialty coffee trade we’d once helped prop up? We mostly agree with the notion that people should be paying more than they do today for great coffee and doing so can move the market and improve the livelihoods of people growing the coffee — but context matters, and perhaps other creative retail models can enter the category without cutting corners. We think the quality coffee movement needs to explore more than just one dominant, played-out strategy for reaching customers.

I can’t say I’ve figured out the entire map of the path to the top of the connoisseurship mountain, but I have some thoughts about where one might start.

Firstly, you’ve got to make peace with how ephemeral coffee is. Embrace its impermanence. Learn to love coffee in spite of it being fleetingly fresh and frequently fickle. Accept that there’s no collecting or hoarding to be done here — no cellar, no shelf, no vault. Just your experience.

Second, you must trust your own tongue. Enjoying coffee doesn’t require special gustatory training or a superhuman palate. If the copy on the bag is telling you what flavors you should taste and you don’t taste them, that bag is a liar. Your tongue will reliably guide you to what is good. While a formal tasting procedure (what we call “cupping”) exists for coffee professionals to score and grade green coffee, the jargon it has given rise to can be ill-fitting and detract from the inarticulable gestalt of what you’re experiencing in the cup. Don’t get me wrong — nuanced, descriptive language can be illuminating, whether it’s coffee or wine or cheese — but your ability to deconstruct every sip into a pile of purple prose has no relationship to your capacity for enjoyment.

Third, taste everything. The olfactory system is the oldest bit of brain matter on the evolutionary ladder and your sense memory is more than up to the task of keeping a tally of what it encounters even if the geography and jargon has you spinning. Though the world of coffee is vast and full of mixed messages in its marketing, the more you taste and explore, the more you’ll begin to turn the those daily delights and occasional disappointments into a deeply developed discernment.

But why a magazine, and a weekly one at that? We hinted at a “newsletter” but seems like maybe we got carried away? It has long struck me that a good analogy for appreciating coffee, as both a daily ritual and a product, is to think of it like a periodical — a newspaper or magazine. It’s timely, of its moment, part of an ever-shifting zeitgeist that goes stale over time. Every lot from every harvest in every season and every batch from every roast into every mug is momentary and unique. Even the most refined and well processed single origin coffee will have only a small window of availability where it peaks and shines. Whereas things like bottles of wine and beer are more analogous to books that can be shelved, revisited, and read at your leisure.

And I just think putting out a zine sounds fun! We hope it’ll mean more to you than merely some weird, colorful birdcage liner that comes with your beans.

The unifying theme of this debut issue is “gratuity,” partly in the sense of doing things that are gratuitous, like roasting top tier beans and also launching an ambitious zine, delivered at a wallet-friendly price and hooking up all our Kickstarter backers with extra shipments; and also in the sense of tipping, as in Rachel Knox’s look inside the new world of gratuity-free restaurants, Sean U’Ren’s story of tipping big for his barber, and the debut of our Tip Jar column where we’ll highlight causes and projects you might want to throw some coin at.

So here it is. Our gratuitous debut release of The Mix and The Weekly for you, our early adopters, to whom we are immeasurably grateful. We appreciate your patience and hope it’s well worth the wait. Drop us a line anytime with feedback or questions, fan mail or hate mail — and if you like what we’re doing, please tell a friend. We’re ignoring all the messy marketing best practices of the modern e-commerce startup and relying instead on word of mouth and a price that makes it easy for anybody to give us a go.

❤

Tonx