How You Take It

Ask someone how they take their coffee and you learn more about them than you'd expect from a question that small.

Some people answer before you finish asking. Black, no room. Oat milk, extra hot. Two sugars, always two, since college. Those are the ones who know themselves, or at least know this one thing about themselves, and say so without apologizing for it.

Then there's the other kind. "Oh, whatever's easiest." "However you're having it." I used to take that as politeness. Mostly it still is. But sometimes it's someone who hasn't been asked what they want in a while, not about coffee and not about much else, and the question catches them a little off guard.

I notice this more now than I ever did before I was the one doing the pouring every morning. It's a small thing to pay attention to, and that's exactly why it matters. Anyone can manage a big gesture once. Remembering that someone takes it with cream, or that they switched to black last spring and never mentioned why, is the kind of attention you can only give over time.

This week it was Velvet Tide, our Bali Blue single origin, that opened one of those conversations. It's a medium-dark roast with a round, almost syrupy body, and it's not a cup most people reach for on instinct the way they'd reach for a breakfast blend. Someone tried it because I handed it to them and said, just try this one, and the first thing they asked was what made it taste like that. Not a complaint. A real question. That's the whole opening you need.

A cup of coffee is a strange, small vehicle for connection, but it works. It gives you something to do with your hands while you talk, and it gives you an easy question to ask that isn't really about coffee at all. How do you take it. What are you in the mood for today. Have you tried this before.

Three sugars, always.

That's a whole relationship in four words, if you're the kind of person who remembers it the next time.

I don't think generosity has to be large to be real. Most days it's just noticing. Pouring the cup the way someone actually likes it instead of the way that's quickest for you. Asking a second time when the first answer was a shrug. It isn't a grand act of hospitality, it's just one person deciding to pay attention to another, and I happen to think that's most of what hospitality is.

So, however you take yours. Ask someone today how they take theirs.

Choose to be kind. Choose to be grateful. Choose to be happy.

— Nina of GiaNina Collective