there are many people from whom i’ve learned many lessons i employ at the shop daily. from my first boss/biz owner bill at the dinner bell diner in prescott arizona who taught me about consistency, quality, and how asinine paid advertising is, to laura who owned the pine cone inn and assured me that as long as she had a restaurant i would never go hungry (during high school i had some bouts of less-than-stable housing situations), to this guy, sam @coffeeplusbikes during grad school i got into homebrewing coffee and upon graduation, with no further academic plans in place, i decided to pursue a proper career in coffee. i lied on my resume to check off the two-years-experience requirement and got hired at ee right after my interview. i had the pleasure of being trained by sam l and he took so much time to not only explain the brass tacks workings of coffee, but also created a great discussion on what role the coffee shop serves As Place. so much of the ethos of principles is drawn from those initial conversations about what the purpose of a coffee shop is and so many of the techniques, styles, and approaches i take to coffee are directly drawn from this guy (in addition to steven @dolorous_thespian and jenna @jennahhhhhhhhh). the whole time i worked at ee i had the strange sensation that everyone i worked with hated me and i both felt completely incompetent around my coworkers and also like i was too big for my britches. as it turns out, the place was simply a hostile work environment and when the workplace is deleted then suddenly all of those inter-barista relationships are hunky dory. all this to say, yesterday sam came by for the first time and i got to share coffee and conversation with him and that is all exactly why i went into cafe ownership in the first place.