What I've learned... (Part 1)
We all have our ups and downs, our successes and failures, our finest hours and hours we would rather forget. For every Highway 61 high there is a Saved-like low to restore the balance, and even the most accomplished director will usually have at least one turkey to his or her name. Furthermore, were it not for a string of ill-considered chick flicks in the early 2000s, Matthew McConaughey’s career might never have stalled the way it did, and then we might never have invented the term “McConnaissance” to describe the return to form that followed. (I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as a sad prospect.)
But I’m not Matthew McConaughey. And, as much as I wish I was, I’m not Bob Dylan either. I’m just a person who makes coffee. But even a person who makes coffee is able to mess up every now and again – whether it’s something minor like, I don’t know, pouring a wonky rosetta, or something major, like getting yourself disqualified from the UK Brewers Cup only a year after placing second. This is something I “achieved'' last week and, while I know it’s not the end of the world, I’m still pretty disappointed in myself and am still trying to figure out how I managed to engineer such an outcome.
I have a few ideas. Some relate to my previous experience in competitions, some relate to where I’m at in my general coffee career, and some relate to me just being, well, me. If the navel-gazing gets to be too much then, by all means, feel free to stop reading, but hopefully other competitors and would-be competitors can take something from this, too.
So, competitions. As I’ve mentioned, I came second in the UK Brewers Cup last year. And, although I worked hard and had a strong support network in the run-up, this still came as a surprise to me. Me? Second? What? I even got a trophy, something which has never happened before. I didn’t win, of course, the lovely Jeremy Challender of Prufrock Coffee did, but this was still a definite “win” for me. I remember being thrilled just to be in the top 12 and through to the semi-finals. This was my only real aim as, when I first competed back in 2015, I didn’t make the cut.
Everything that happened after getting through to the semi-finals was, therefore, a bit of a bonus. It was all a bit of a blur, too. In the space of three weeks, my giant suitcase and I travelled to Brighton, Berlin and London, often with my having had little sleep, and often with monster shifts at the shop wedged in between in order to make up for my absences. It was intense and draining, and while I was in Berlin doing training with Five Elephant, whose coffee I competed with, I received word that the family dog’s arthritis had worsened and that she would have to be put to sleep that afternoon. Though this wasn’t entirely unforeseen, it still came as a bit of a shock, and after game-facing my way through a few more practice runs I left the roastery, sobbed my way home via Amsterdam, and basically kept sobbing until I was on a train bound for London three days later.
But something kept me going through all of this, something was driving me – I had to do well, I had to succeed, I had something to prove and I was sure as hell going to prove it. Even when the aforementioned giant suitcase and I were getting stuck in the turnstiles at St Pancras, or causing a huge obstruction on a packed Thameslink train, that drive never left me. Even amidst dead dogs and delayed flights, it never waned. Something was spurring me on.
And that something, that unquantifiable drive or determination or conviction or whatever you want to call it, is ultimately what was missing for me this year. Yes, things went wrong on the day, but the overriding issue is that I just didn’t want it enough. In theory, this year should have been much more straightforward. All I had to do was get on a train to Leeds – which takes about an hour and a half from Newcastle, not long – and brew three of the best cups of coffee possible. This shouldn’t have been too difficult, but I failed. But I didn’t just fail, I failed with aplomb.
This piece was originally published on blkcoffee.co.uk in 2017.