Fulfillment

Fulfillment -- heralded by religions and self-help books, achieved, today, by yours truly.

It was minor fulfillment, more in the sense of fulfillment of a mission than the sort of deep fulfillment promised by the above. But there is a consonance, and one that should be neither overlooked nor over-exaggerated.

It is important, for this story, to know that pour-over coffee is a brewing style currently all the rage in the coffeehouse scene. It allows the barista to control, via speed and timing of pouring, the flavor of the cup of coffee, in addition to the usual parameters of temperature of water, and the relative and actual amounts of water and coffee grounds.

All that to say, it's a way to make really good coffee or really bad coffee, and the finished product can be mostly credited to (or blamed on) the skill of the barista.

It was with a pour-over that I found fulfillment.

I poured the last bit of water through coffee grounds, let it drip into his cup, and handed it off to him. He sipped it, paused, and sipped it again.

"Ehh?" I said, asking for confirmation of what I had told him before he ordered: this was going to be good coffee.
"That is good," he said. "In fact," he paused again -- he is a very precise type of person, not one to say something unconsidered, "This is the best cup of coffee I have ever had. This--" by this point I was beaming "--is coffee non plus ultra."

Thus, I fulfilled my barista role, by making the best cup of coffee ever.

I was, it should be noted, working with great coffee to begin with: Counter Culture's Kilenso Mokonisa. Most of CC's coffees are great, but this one is the kind of coffee that makes even the untutored sit up and take notice. It is a "natural sundried coffee," which means that the fruity part of the coffee (the cherry) is left intact (surrounding the bean) while the coffee is dried in the sun for a period of a few weeks to a few months. This process allows the natural fruit flavors of the coffee cherry to leach into the coffee bean, producing a flavor like the artificially-flavored coffees (blueberry, raspberry, etc.) found in so many coffeeshops, yet far more complex and subtle.

All that to say that he was more likely to notice this coffee than any other coffee, that the pump had been primed by his awareness of pour-over as a method endorsed by the coffee-geek subculture; all that to say that he's a regular, and could have been flattering me.

But I saw his face when he first sipped that cup, and I knew then that I had done exactly what this job is all about. The idea that life can be surprising; that another world is possible; that a cup of coffee can be so much more than a cup of coffee; these are tenets of my faith, and central to my vocation, and to find them expressed so clearly in so mundane a moment at work was inspiring.

Life will go on; the struggles at the bookstore/coffeeshop are not resolved, nor is anything outside of work, but I have done it. I have made the perfect cup of coffee.