The espresso machine at the place on the corner went quiet in the third week of March. So did everything else. What was left was a kettle, a bag of beans going stale faster than anyone wanted to admit, and an extraordinary amount of time.
A strange thing happened. People got good at this.
Not everyone, obviously. A great deal of pandemic sourdough went in the bin, and so did a great many pour-overs. But something about the ritual turned out to be the point rather than the coffee. Fourteen grams. Water just off the boil. Thirty seconds of bloom while the kitchen filled with a smell that meant a normal morning, at a time when very little else did. Four minutes a day when the news was not on.
We have always been suspicious of the idea that coffee is a practice. It is a hot brown drink. But 2020 made a reasonable case for the other view, which is that the value of a small, repeatable, slightly fussy task goes up sharply when everything around it stops being repeatable at all.
What everybody learned at once
Three things, mostly, and they all happened in about six weeks.
The grinder is the machine. A decade of people being told this politely by baristas achieved less than one month of drinking their own coffee every single day. When the café is not there to correct your mistakes, the mistakes become very obvious very quickly, and almost all of them are grind.
Water is not neutral. The second most common complaint of that spring — after “my coffee tastes like nothing” — was “my coffee tastes like my tap.” Which it did. We wrote about this in 2013 and nobody cared, which was fair enough. In 2020 people started buying filter jugs for reasons that had nothing to do with hydration.
Scales are not pretentious. They are just a way of making Tuesday taste like Monday did. That is the entire argument. It took a global emergency for it to land.
Meanwhile, us
Bear State had been asleep for four years by then. No bottles, no boxes, no roasters to call, no reason to write anything down. The company had stopped in 2016 and we had been fairly clear-eyed about why.
The kettle did not stop. It went on at six-forty the same way it had in 2013, in a quieter kitchen, for an audience of one. Some mornings that felt slightly absurd. Most mornings it felt like the only part of the day anyone had designed on purpose.
We drank a lot of other people’s coffee that year, which is a habit we would recommend to anyone who used to sell it. You learn more from a bag that disappoints you than from ten that do not.
The honest bit
Coffee is not important. Let us be very clear about that. It is a hot brown drink and it did not fix anything, for anybody, at any point.
What it did was give a great many people something to do properly at a moment when doing anything properly felt like a genuine win. You could not fix the year. You could nail the bloom.
That will do. That is enough for a drink to be asked to carry.
Artwork to come
A kitchen counter set up for pour-over, spring 2020
Brief · Mid-century travel-postcard illustration in the Bear State house style. Coarse halftone dot screen across the ENTIRE frame — visible print dots, the texture of cheap vintage four-colour printing. Fine stipple and engraved detail beneath the screen; no bold black outlines. Scene: a domestic kitchen counter in morning light, seen straight on. In the RIGHT THIRD, a gooseneck kettle, a dripper on a carafe, a small scale and an open bag of beans arranged with slightly obsessive neatness. The left two-thirds is an empty counter and a window with flat morning light coming through it — quiet, uncluttered, nobody in frame. Palette: warm cream-sand #f0d8c0 with one dusty pale teal #90c0c0; muted and sun-bleached, not vivid. One small red accent permitted — a single stripe on a tea towel. No text, no lettering, no brand marks; any label panel stays blank. 2400x1600 (3:2).