Your houseplants have been holding a meeting about you. They've reviewed the evidence, taken notes, and reached a unanimous verdict: you are absolutely winging it, and they know it.
Think about it. Plants are creatures of habit. They want the same light, the same water schedule, the same energy in the room. When you drift in looking like a question mark in human form, forgetting if you watered them yesterday or last Tuesday, they feel that. They droop a little extra. That's not thirst. That's disappointment.
Plants respond to consistency the way a good espresso responds to proper technique. Get the routine right and everything thrives. Mess with it and things get brown and sad around the edges.
Here's what's funny to me: the people who tend to be the most consistent, the ones whose plants are practically doing a little victory dance on the windowsill, are almost always coffee drinkers. Not because caffeine waters anything but because a solid morning coffee ritual is basically a gentle alarm bell for your brain. It says "hey, we have a routine, we have standards, we are not chaos gremlins today."
One good cup in the morning and suddenly you remember the plants, the to-do list, and the fact that you are a functioning adult who has their life somewhat together.
That's kind of the whole vibe behind Black Coffee Please, a newsletter built for people who take their coffee seriously, enjoy a good conspiracy about why gas station coffee is secretly underrated, and genuinely want to know which roasters are worth your time and money.
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Roaster/Cafe Notes:
Prototype Coffee (https://www.prototypecoffee.ca/ )
Vancouver, BC
In their own words: "What makes our roasting style most unusual is that we have designed our production roasting around a roasting bar in the same space where we brew our coffees. In our Strathcona Roastery and Tasting Room, all our roasting for brewing, retail, and wholesale happens in four small Aillio Bullet R1 roasters located right behind the counter in the tasting room. It’s a transparent and lean production system that allows us to carry a large selection of different coffees without the waste that can result from committing to bigger batches. At the same time, the system of four roasters can efficiently produce a lot of coffee quite quickly and gives us incredible control over the roast profile during the roast.
As we design our roast profiles, we spend time learning what each coffee has to offer and how it behaves in the roaster. Once we have an understanding of each coffee’s potential, we create a roast profile that showcases its origin flavours in the most flattering way, maximizing sweetness and balance. For us, that means that we tend toward a medium-light roast profile for most of our coffees."
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