The Coffee Shop

At twenty-six I left the bowling alley and went to work at Press Coffee in San Antonio. I was there from 2016 to 2020, until the pandemic ended it.

That sounds like a sideways move on paper. It was the most important change I have made.

The environment did the work

I have written elsewhere about how leaving that building got me away from using. The short version is that a coffee shop is the opposite kind of room. Early hours instead of late ones. Regulars instead of strangers. Caring about a product instead of managing a crowd.

Nobody tells you that the main variable is often the room you are standing in. You think it is willpower. Willpower is real, and it is also much easier to spend in a building arranged to help.

What a local coffee shop actually is

It is not a place that sells coffee. That is the mechanism, not the function.

The function is that the same forty people come in every week and you learn their drinks and then their names and then their circumstances. A regular tells you they got the job. Somebody's dog died. Somebody is in every morning at the same hour because the apartment is too quiet.

A chain can make a fine espresso. What it cannot do is remember you, because remembering is not in the operating model.

That is the community thing people mean when they say support local, and it sounds abstract until you have stood behind the counter and watched it work. It made me a lifelong partisan of local coffee culture, and it is the reason GAMFC is roasted by Pulp Coffee on Chestnut Street rather than by whoever was cheapest.

Latte art

The craft side got me too. I ended up hosting latte art competitions as part of @tntsatx on Instagram, alongside Henry Berrios, the 2020 World Latte Art Champion.

San Antonio has a genuine coffee scene with genuinely world-class people in it. That is not a thing most people outside the city know.

The part I did not expect

I stopped making music for a while in there.

And instead I found myself going to the studio — a different thing from recording on an iPad in a back room between shifts. How that happened is its own story, and it involves a diner at two in the morning.

Press Coffee is where I stopped being someone who made demos and started being someone who made records. The coffee came first. The album came out of the same years.

Ten years later I sell canned cold brew named after one of my own songs. It is not a brand extension. It is just what my life has been made of.