A year on, and the useful discovery is this: almost nothing changed about the mornings.
The company is gone. There is no cold room, no distributor, no pallet of bottles going out on a Tuesday, no reason whatsoever to care what a Brazilian natural costs this month. And yet the grinder still comes out at twenty past six, fifteen grams still go in, and the kettle still gets the same slightly obsessive treatment it got when somebody was paying us for the privilege.
We had assumed — genuinely assumed — that the interest was professional. That once the commercial reason to think about extraction went away, so would the thinking. It turns out to have been the wrong way round. The company happened because of the habit. The habit was never going to notice the company had stopped.
This is not, we should be clear, a redemptive story. Nothing is being rebuilt. There is no plan. There is a man in a kitchen weighing coffee on a scale he bought for a business that no longer exists, which is either quite sad or quite reassuring depending on the hour.
What it does mean is that this journal has no particular reason to stop either. Nobody is reading it. That is arguably the ideal condition for writing about coffee — no launch to serve, no bag to move, no reason to describe anything as anything other than what it tasted like.
So the entries will keep appearing, at roughly the rate that something worth writing down happens. Which, on the evidence of the last twelve months, is about once a year.
See you in a bit.