About 12 years ago, in a past life, I was working our usual 5pm after-work rush at Dunkin. I didn’t care one way or another about coffee at the time. To me, coffee was an iced latte with caramel & vanilla, and those who drank black drip or espresso were just kidding themselves, denying themselves of a small joy to make an unnecessary point. But despite this, I cared about doing things well, and was (and still am) on a perpetual quest to be good at whatever I happen to be doing with my time.
I still remember where I was standing when my headset beeped: in the lobby, stocking mugs on the retail shelf. My coworker was busy with an order at the counter, so I answered the drive-thru. I had barely gotten my greeting out, when–
“Is your coffee Colombian??”
Internally, I said, Hell if I know, man, you’re at Dunkin Donuts; they don’t tell us these things. To the customer, though, after a pause while I racked my brain to recall whether I’d ever encountered this information, I responded, fully and entirely guessing, “....I think so.”
“Well, I hope it’s Colombian,” the guy replied, and ordered a drip coffee. I put the drink together, got him taken care of, and moved on with my closing shift. A fairly unremarkable exchange, in itself.
As stated, I like being good at things, and I like having all of the answers, so the fact that I didn’t know the answer to a customer’s question bugged me immensely. So, that night, when a more responsible person would’ve been sleeping, I was typing “dunkin donuts coffee” into Google. On Dunkin’s website, I learned that not only was their coffee indeed Colombian, but that coffee was the seed of a fruit, a flowering plant. I had never thought about where coffee came from before; maybe some more attentive Dunkins taught this in training, but my location was notoriously lax in its onboarding, so my training had just consisted of drink-building. The fact that it came from a plant was intriguing to me. I kept reading, not only on Dunkin’s website but others, and found myself learning about grind settings, that espresso was a brew method rather than a type of coffee, that the way the fruit is removed from the seeds affected how coffee tasted. It was around 4am when I realized I was still reading about coffee, and I didn’t want to stop.
This was 12 years ago. I still have not stopped.
I never forgot about this guy who came through the Dunkin drive-thru one evening and changed the whole trajectory of my life, especially as I got my first specialty barista job a couple years later and my palate was finally exposed to everything I’d been learning about. In time, the things I found myself most consistently curious about were the things happening at origin and how those factors impacted the cup I held in my hands. Even though I’d yet to gain the vocabulary to describe what my palate was experiencing, I paid attention to similarities and differences, started building a backlog of rudimentary preconceived notions. Kenyan coffees were uniquely full-flavored and satisfying–my first favorite origin. Costa Rican coffees were bright and crisp and clean. And, of course, many of us will remember the lasting impact of our first natural Ethiopian.
But Colombian coffees were only consistent in that they were delicious. Every one I encountered was different. The first one I remember tasted of sweet lemon, but then the next one blew my mind with an undeniable note of cotton candy. In my two years of reading about coffee before joining the specialty coffee industry, I read generalizations about Colombian coffee: it is often chocolatey, nutty, with a citric acidity. Colombian coffee was “strong” coffee (whatever that actually means). The guy who came through the Dunkin drive-thru that day was looking for Colombian coffee because he had a particular imagining of what that experience would look like. But in reality, I’ve tasted every flavor & quality imaginable in Colombian coffee over the last decade.
Both I and Colombian coffees seem to exist to subvert expectations, so over the course of this year I’m excited to showcase some Colombian coffees that don’t quite match those assumptions. They are delicious in their own right: not simply because they are from Colombia, but because the people at origin are determined to do what they do exceptionally well. They are innovative, exciting, constantly evolving, and always different. Colombian coffee is not only one thing, and to qualify these coffees only by their origin almost reduces this remarkable hard work & creativity.
So, to that guy who came to Dunkin 12 years ago–yeah, our coffee is Colombian. And this one tastes like cherry Kool-Aid.
