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My very first memories of coffee are inseparable from my dad, his 1975 Forest Green Ford LTD, and cold Indiana mornings. I’d sit in the front seat, my small hands wrapped around a steaming mug filled with his Folgers. Cream and sugar already stirred in, the kind of coffee that smelled like the start of the day. Windows fogging up, frost thick on the outside. He scraped the windshield in his flannel coat, I held the cup like it was sacred. Sometimes I’d sneak a sip. It was bitter and sweet all at once. Grown-up tasting. Mysterious, comforting. I didn’t know it then, but I was already hooked.

Years later, coffee would mean something else entirely.

I was sixteen or seventeen when my brother Jim took me to the Blue Mountain Coffee Company. This spot on The Landing downtown, tucked away like a secret. That place was a whole different world. Mildew flavored couches, dusty and sunken-in, with stories to tell. The Clash, Riptides, The Moderns, Nikki and the Corvettes…different than what WXKE played, hinted adventure…clove cigarettes, rebellion, and black denim. There were girls who looked fast and gorgeous and uninterested in high school boys who wore uniforms. And the coffee? It tasted bitter, burned. Honestly, kind of awful. And I loved it.

It was dangerous. It was clandestine. It was revolutionary.

It wasn’t Bishop Dwenger High School or the coffee my dad drank before work. This was something else. Something bigger than caffeine. This was about identity, about stepping out of the expected and into the unknown.

These early introductions to coffee, a beverage that would eventually become a cornerstone and central force in my life. Not just a drink, not just a job, but a lens through which I’ve seen the world, built a career, made a life and learned about others, thousands of miles away from me.

It didn’t start with quality. It didn’t begin with single-origin beans or calibrated extractions. It started with the feeling that I belonged, first in the warm front seat of my dad’s LTD, then on the ragged couches at Blue Mountain, surrounded by clove smoke and the suggestion of something different.

It started with counter-culture and ennui. Late night deep conversations. Trying to figure life out. With a cup of something that tasted a little too bitter, a little too strong, but somehow just right.

Quality came later.

It wasn’t the point in the beginning. But it became the point as my world expanded, as I learned to pay attention. First to taste, then to technique, then to the entire system behind a single cup. And still, through it all, the core remained: coffee as connection. Coffee as culture. Coffee as a kind of quiet (or sometimes loud) revolution.

The next major turning point in my coffee journey came at White River Coffee Company. Early twenties.  More focused on becoming a chef than anything else. I had tunnel vision. Food, kitchens, the hustle. But somehow, coffee kept showing up. Coffee was my second job so I could pay the rent and have beer money.

At White River, I worked with Quigley, one of those characters who teaches you more by osmosis than instruction. He was passionate and particular, and for the first time, I started hearing words like origin and terroir. I learned the basics of roasting. I started to taste differences in coffees, not just good or bad, but fruit-forward, chocolaty, smoky and grassy. I was introduced to the idea that coffee didn’t have to be burned and bitter, it could have nuance.  Quigley referred to Kenyan coffees as the Chardonnay of coffee.  And it would be years before I understood this.

We made origin trips. We cupped. We brewed. We smoked pot in the morning behind the dumpster. We listened to Charles Mingus. I started to see that there was a whole world behind each bag of beans. And still, I didn’t quite get it. I was naïve. I didn’t yet see the full picture. I was just moving through it, collecting experiences without realizing how they were shaping me.

Looking back, this is where it really began to click. Coffee stopped being just a beverage or a job. It started becoming an addiction. A daily rhythm marked by regular customers. This is where I first began to understand that how you roast and how you brew could highlight flavors not hide them. That coffee wasn’t static, it could sing, if you paid attention.

I wasn’t ready yet to name it, or to claim it. But the seeds had been planted.

Even this condensed version of my personal journey with coffee, I can’t help but see how closely it tracks the broader cultural arc of coffee itself.

My experience started with utility, my dad’s Folgers, hot and sweet. Then it became about an alt-universe of dingy couches and conversations with punk-girls and overly smart intellectual boys at Blue Mountain. Later, at White River, it became about flavor and origin and nuance. That shift from unconscious consumption to intentional experience is the same shift coffee has undergone in the last 50 years.

Coffee in America was mostly utilitarian. It came in cans. It was boiled, reheated, forgotten. It lived on kitchen counters and in office break rooms. It was a delivery system for caffeine and utility, not flavor or story. It wasn’t meant to be interesting. It was meant to be consistently mediocre.

But in the 1960s and 70s, that started to change. Coffeehouses, especially in urban and university centers became places of conversation, of (counter) culture. They were where people gathered to write poems, organize protests, listen to jazz. Coffee became more than a drink, it became a setting a backdrop to revolution. A place to be seen. A place to connect. A place of dissent fueled by (probably) over roasted bitter coffee. And a place to wear a beret.

By the late 1980s and 90s, coffee began to borrow the aesthetics and rhythms of Euro-chic. That you “made it.” Espresso gone mainstream. Leather armchairs, Manheim Steamroller and dark roast blends. It wasn’t quite about quality, at least not by today’s standards but it was a step up from a styrofoam cup. It was experience-oriented. It was aspirational. It was status, which gave coffee a new kind of platform: accessory.

Then came what we now call the third wave. A new generation of roasters and baristas started to ask harder questions: Where did the coffee come from? Who grew it? What varietal? What elevation? What roast curve? What flavor notes? Suddenly, the cup told a story. The barista was no longer just pouring a drink they were translating a seed’s journey from origin to experience. This was the rise of intentionality. Transparency. Artistry. Microfoam. Coffee became a craft.

And now? Well, we’re even now well beyond that.

We’re in an era where coffee is more than beverage, more than brand, more than craft. Artisanal roasting. Direct trade. Baristas as craftspeople. The word terroir drops in the conversation. Coffee took on the language of wine. Origin matters. Extraction matters. TDS matters. Acidity is a good thing. The cup holds a story. And the narrator of that story and those who knew it? They are among the smart-small-elite, the performative enthusiast, the name-dropper, the foodie who gets a side-eyed look from me.  Are they sharing or are they gatekeepers? But does any of that help out the farmer? The ones doing the hard work. The income for farmers hasn’t exactly taken the same path. There’s some hard conversations to be had around this.

It’s a signal. Coffee as a maker of taste? Not just sensory taste, but cultural and social taste. Of judgement. Coffee is embedded in wellness culture, sober culture, tech startup  culture. It’s simultaneously elevated and politicized. It lives in fine dining and in the convenience of RTD cans at gas stations. It is analog, it is digital, it is ritual, it is rebellion.

Coffee, in 2025, is as complex as wine, as widespread as bottled water, and as intimate as a love letter. And somehow, it’s still it continues to evolve at a pace that’s hard to keep up with.

We’re in an era where coffee is a cultural marker. It’s tied to identity, to values, to social positioning. It’s taste, not just flavor, but aesthetic value. It’s a symbol of political consciousness, affluence and excess-have you had that $100.00/lb Gesha?  Coffee is a creative medium, a social tool, a business card, a personal brand, a refuge, it’s protest and counter-protest…anti-Colonialism, Patriotism, boycotts, labor rights, climate activism…And we’re just scratching the surface. Coffee is an actor in the broader non-alcoholic beverage revolution, one that prioritizes experience, connection, story-telling and wellness over intoxication as a caffeine driven mocktail. In short, coffee is alive and well as the vehicle of subversion that I first became acquainted with as a 16-year old kid at Blue Mountain back in Fort Wayne.

Let’s explore it together.