I had a dream last night that I started blogging.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Reading Austin Kleon’s small but potent books while in the bathtub, reading this blog post from writer Robin Sloan (who is also my fancy Olive Oil dealer), and generally going quarantine crazy trying to figure out where and how to turn my ideas into content.

I have a lot of things on my plate. Yes Plz is ambitious and mighty but we’re a small team that has to pick our battles — and we’ll never say yes to any distractions that might compromise our coffee. But I suffer from common maladies like untreated ADD, imposter syndrome, and perfectionism that keep me slipping before the finish line.

…anyhow, look for my “Making a Chemex is easy” tutorial coming in late 2023 to Oculus 3 and Apple VR headsets.— Tonx (@tonx) March 21, 2021

Blogging offers a way for me to work out some ideas in a lower stakes environment. I already do a lot of idea journaling, but putting things out in public adds some accountability for follow through. It also helps me come to grips with the fact that some of the inspiration rattling about in my head is still less than half-baked.

There’s a case to be made that blogging will make a comeback as there’s a growing glut of email newsletters and our inboxes are surely not the best place to curl up with a couple thousand words. The era of thriving blogs ended with the murder of Google Reader and the period where Facebook (briefly) favored content from major media companies tricked into played along with its world domination schemes.

I was a blogger in the distant past. In the beginning of my coffee journey in the early 2000s I built a blog for Victrola as I began exploring coffee roasting and the emerging barista scene and kept a more opinionated blog at my own domain (which eventually morphed into Tonx Coffee, my first foray focused on getting the best beans to the best customers). Back in the days of saner and slower social media, a handful of blogs, a couple of web forums, and a few Flickr streams were the watering holes where coffee’s emerging “third wave” came together to hash out its conceits and contradictions. Today the coffee world is booming and some of the same conversations from decades ago and many new (and often important) ones are happening all over the map. The gatekeeping and grandiosity of that earlier era seemingly tempered today with a bit more wisdom, experience, and inclusion.

The purpose for getting back into blogging is that content creation is critical to connecting to new audiences and keeping this business sustainable — and aside from making coffee, one of the few things I’m (maybe) good at. But the bigger motivation is that I have a lot of stories, notions, and arguments that could become essays or videos that’d benefit from first being shared with the small audience of people inclined to read stuff like this. Some of it might get a little bit personal, or inside baseball, or self-indulgent — but hopefully shine some light into the unshakeable coffee obsession that drives me and our team to keep chasing the best cups of coffee.

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