What hospitality can teach the world

Most people don't know that I was a coffee roaster for a part of my life! Even more so, only a few know the story of how a love of kiwi coffee and cafe culture was my way into understanding the relationship between design and behaviour/culture.

When I went to the Netherlands to play hockey (shout out to Hattem Hockey) and connect with my dutch heritage back in 2011, one of the sub plots was to understand why the dutch didn't have specialty coffee culture like NZ, and if there was a market for it. A result of some wild dreaming Michael Goldstein, Jamie Patton and I had done during the PureGolf 2010 adventure (a whole other story).

In between trainings and games I would jump on a train and travel all over the Netherlands to hit up cafes people would tell me about, or go to barista events and meet like minds in a very early specialty coffee scene. Through this I met wonderful people like Catherine Schook, Luite Snijder, Wendelien van Bunnik- Verver (and many many more!) and went to epic pioneering cafes like The Village Coffee & Music and hang out with the folks at Giraffe Coffee Roasters. I would hang out and see how the layout, the hospitality, and the music was or wasn't promoting the right vibe. A vibe conducive to community, connection and throughput. I would often end up creating playlists for cafes, moving tables around and reading about the influence of design on behaviour and culture development.

Then my hockey club found out.

Only to inform me that a major sponsor of our wee club was one of the OG's of the specialty scene in the Netherlands. The De Eenhoorn koffie & thee had been roasting single origin coffee since the early 2000's and had a cup of excellence judge as the lead! I got an invite to Monday cuppings and met incredible people like tineke jansen (the coffee queen), Binet Brasser-van der Sluis, Thomas Klaphake and Ronald the Roaster! I learnt all about their single origin only, analog roasting process out of the tiny and beautiful Probat and how to taste where a coffee came from. They are purists.

I kept turning up. Loving all of the process from working with small farmers, cup of excellence coffees, processing, regionality, roasting and cupping. When I look back, this was my first introduction to the ethical business scene. Social entrepreneurship I would later learn this was called, and it felt good. No, it felt GREAT!

Even though Ronald The Roaster didn't speak much English, and I didn't speak much dutch at that time, we got on so well that somehow we figured out how to communicate (caffeine induced body language) and he offered to teach me how to roast. "Fuck YES" I thought. I was there a lot more after that.

As luck would have it, that lead to me eventually being the head roaster for a year as Ronald was needed in other parts of the business. I would turn up at 6:30am on a Monday and Tuesday and have the place to myself for a couple of hours. I would turn the Probat on and as it got up to temperature I would check the humidity ratings, the room temp and make myself a cup of tea (there were some incredible teas on offer, every now and then the 86' Puerh would make it into by cup, not sorry!) and play jazz funk as loud as I could. It was excellent.

I'd take a bag of my favourite roast for the week, age it a little, and then go on missions giving it to any roaster, barista or coffee fiend that would share a cup with me and show me what they were up to. A way to make friends quickly I found.

Those times sitting in cafes, taking in the design, watching the movements of people and the interactions with the staff and each other lead to my interest in behaviour change and design. I started to ask myself how do you change or effect behaviour? How is culture created? What is culture, really? Why do some songs get head bops and others nothing? I would also meet so many others in the scene who loved thinking about the same things. It was a lot of fun.

I think the hospitality scene has a lot to teach the world. More than any other area I know of, there is an obsessiveness about what goes into creating the perfect human (customer) experience, with all our diversity. The perfect first connection with a newb, a returner and an old time regular. The path to a feeling of comfort in yourself, comfort in the space and comfort in the company of, well, strangers.

Imagine if this was how our hospitals and healthcare clinics were designed.

Recently I had the luck to go back to the Netherlands and to take my wife Rachel. She got to meet the people I played hockey with, see the roastery and meet the people who were so incredibly welcoming and wonderful to me during that part of my life. It's incredibly gratifying to see and feel that some bonds don't wear thin with time, and also for Rachel to hear the stories of how they remember my time there, down to the tunes that were their favourite on a Monday! I think people who work in hospo know these kinds of relationships well.

One of my favourite cafe experiences in Wellington is Customs Coffee House by Coffee Supreme. The first thing Rachel and I did on arrival back to New Zealand was head to Customs with my dad for a coffee and sandwich in the morning sun. The sense of joy for me in this is irrational, and I am here for it.

PHOTO: This is me, happy as a pig in shit, with my probat, roasting up a storm. My favourite coffee to roast was a Guatemalan coffee that smelt like Manuka honey in between the first and second crack. A beautiful encapsulation of where I was at the time, a scent of home and a place I wanted to visit in the future (and still do).