Pure Happiness Coffee Brent Michael Cox

On this episode I am very excited to present an interview with Puerto Rican coffee producer and roaster Domenico Celli, founder of Forgotten Forest, one of the most exciting projects in contemporary coffee. For reasons historical, economic, and political, Puerto Rico has not been a large part of the specialty coffee industry. Forgotten Forest's overall ambition is to change that, with the socially-minded objective of providing an economically viable future for Puerto Rican coffee farmers. To do so, Domenico has been building out specialty coffee infrastructure in Puerto Rico, including farmer trainings and education, constructing a world-class processing facility, and learning everything he can about the specialty coffee world. On this episode, we talk about the origins of Forgotten Forest around the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and we get deep into Domenico's hope for a better coffee horizon in Puerto Rico's future.

Onyx Coffee Lab is an undeniable powerhouse of US specialty coffee. In this episode, leaping off from co-founder Andrea Allen's remarkable World Barista Championship performance in 2021, a performance that won her the US competition and earned her second on the world state, I meditate on coffee and the social world, in homage to Allen's beautiful poetic gesture of washing the judge's hands in rosewater to conclude her presentation.

Loveless Coffees is doing some of the best coffee in New York City, and their cafe is a wonderful spot to hang out, drink some amazing coffee, and read poetry. When I first visited Loveless Coffees in Bushwick, it was actually called Spectrum. This change becomes the occasion for a pure happiness meditation on names, language, memory, and virtual reality.

On this episode I revisit a trip to Boxcar Social in Toronto. I was visiting Toronto to see Michael Holboom's important film, Free From Everything. As I was reading around for this episode, I was thrilled to discover Subtext Coffee's videos with producers they work with in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Guatemala. It's this kind of evolution I love to see in the industry, where we are better using the tools available today to bring us all closer together.

On this episode, A Matter of Concrete's wonderful roast of I Wayan Parum's Indonesian Natural becomes an occasion to continue to expand on some of my thinking around coffee, taste, and writing. I present "non-representational coffee writing" as an early invention at pure happiness, one that encourages a meandering, discursive, poetic investigations of coffee as an alternative to the quippy kind of discourse encouraged by scores.

Color Coffee Roasters had been one of my favorite roasters for some time, with coffee that was always bright, clear, and expressive, when I got the exciting opportunity to visit their cafe and roastery in Eagle, Colorado in 2022. On this episode, I talk a little about that visit and the wonderful Kolla Bolcha Ethiopian coffee I drank there.