Ten years is a long nap, even for a bear.
Bear State stopped in December 2016. This journal did not, quite — it carried on at about one entry a year, written by somebody with no company to promote and no bag to sell, which is the purest possible state for writing about coffee and also the least useful one.
That changes now, and here is what is actually true about it.
What we are, this time
The same thing we were in 2013, which took us an embarrassingly long while to notice. The founding plan said it plainly: bring the very best coffee produced by California-based micro-roasters to a broader audience. The 2016 brief said it again — curating the California coffee experience. It is written on the front of this website in a script drawn in 2013 and has been the whole time.
We do not roast. We never did. We taste a great deal of coffee and we choose. That is a smaller claim than the one most coffee companies make and it has the advantage of being true.
What has changed while we were out
A great deal, and the honest position is that we have been catching up in public. Processing went somewhere we did not anticipate — anaerobic tanks and carbonic maceration now dominate the competition table and barely existed when we last had an opinion. Home brewing got dramatically better, largely because James Hoffmann spent a decade explaining it properly to several million people. Cold brew stopped being a summer novelty and became a year-round staple, which is either vindication or irrelevance depending on how generous you are feeling.
We have also gone back through our own archive and found two things we got flatly wrong in 2013, which we have corrected in public rather than quietly edited.
What we are not going to do
Pretend the gap did not happen. It is in the name, it is on the landing page, and it is visible in the shape of this journal — nine years of one entry each, which is what a company looks like when it is asleep and a person looks like when they are not.
Claim we were always about to come back. We were not. There was no plan for most of that decade, and the only continuous thing was the six-forty kettle.
Say “never settle.” That is the other lot.
The bottles are still hibernating. The kettle never stopped. Everything else follows from those two facts.
