Coffee People Are Hot Stuff!
Rachel Apple is a Cup of Excellence Head Judge, photographer, and co-founder of Raise the Bar, a community and education platform for specialty coffee professionals. She loves bin diving for vinyl, viewing Waffle House as egalitarian praxis, and people who remember to play.
Published in Standart Issue 43
To work in coffee demands that we work with, in, around, or near heat. When I’m not overflowing cupping kettles onto my asbestos hands or adding a fresh scar to my ever-growing collection from a careless moment at the sample roaster, I find myself volunteering to schlep my unwilling ass to the tropical verdant mountaintops where coffee grows. And up there, in the midst—and the mist— of it all, the marketing team remembers it needs a new hero image for the website. Producer and buyer, arm in arm, in a sea of coffee trees… and cherries or flowers if they’re lucky.
So there we are. Me, trying to wipe away the salt deposits from beneath my sweaty eyebrows, fruitlessly attempting to rub off the rubber-cement-like film that accrues after hours bumping up unpaved roads in the back of a single cab ’90s Toyota with the equatorial sun’s strength mocking the efforts of my many reapplications of 100SPF. Endlessly damp and sticky (thanks to my barely functioning thyroid and over functioning Taurus placements), I stand among the trees with my hosts. My hosts—who were also in the back of the Toyota, also covered in sweat and grime and in their farm attire—stand on either side of me and we put our sticky arms around each other and squint smile into the sun and THAT’s our marketing photo?! I mean come on! What this style of photo lacks in originality it makes up for in its capacity to reduce everyone’s worth to what they produce for a living.
Listen bitch I want to LOOK hot, not be hot.
I want whole ass photoshoots with my producer friends when we DON’T have to be ready to slip and slide up the side of an Andean finca. I want marketing photos documenting my remarkably talented colleagues who are yes, agronomists, processors, exporters, but also whole and HOT human beings! Shoot us when we’re all headed out for pizza and negronis and dancing to thumping reggaeton under the stars—that is who we are and THAT is what I want to celebrate.
You already SEE the coffee—it’s in the bag that’s in your hand. Yes yes, coffee trees are beautiful— but let the people be beautiful too. Hot even. Iet us all look fucking hot and like ourselves outside of just the work that we do. May we all be given the dignity to be defined by more than our pit stains, chub rub, and bangs stuck to our foreheads, for Christ’s sake?!
So while we can’t escape the heat of our work, we deserve to be defined in the moments when we look and feel our hottest. Amen.
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