James Freeman > Quotes

“Making coffee is a simple art, yet it also has so many aspects: practice, precision, and the sheer pleasure of making something you know you’re going to enjoy. It’s an expanding universe of wonderfulness; you never run out of things to get better at.”
― James Freeman, The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes

“Espresso is a physical act: a manifestation of will, effort, and desire exerted upon a machine and an agricultural product. Every espresso you make will be slightly different.”
― James Freeman, The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes

“Making an espresso is a performance that lasts ninety seconds and then you’re done. You go on to the next performance. You may get applause or you may get boos, and then you move on.”
― James Freeman, The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes

“If it’s a drug, then it is the best drug. Good coffee makes us curious about pleasure. It makes us who we wish to be.”
― James Freeman, The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes

“People will wake up in the dark and pad to their kitchen needing strength, and the reassurance that something delightful is about to happen—and hoping that this small chore of making coffee might set the tone for a day filled with difficult, wonderful things.”
― James Freeman, The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes

“Warren Buffett likes to say, “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”
― James Freeman, Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts, and Bailouts at Citi – The Untold History of Financial Crisis and Government Rescues at Citigroup

“The moment when it crystallized for me was in early 1999. Due to the vicissitudes of my freelancing schedule, I ended up playing Holst’s The Planets three times with three different orchestras in a six-month period. Maybe you know that piece. There are recycled versions of it in everything John Williams swiped for the Star Wars movies and everything bombastic and shallow you’ve ever been annoyed by in every action movie of the last twenty years, plus the horrible Phrygian raised fourth that was everywhere in early twentieth-century English classical music (I’m talking to you, Gordon Jacob, and you, Edward Elgar). The Planets, along with Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, had been grating on me more and more with each passing year of being a musician. Playing The Planets with three orchestras within a year, this time as clarinet two in the Modesto Symphony, made me realize that if I played it one more time, I would go on a rampage and hurt people with my clarinets. I needed a plan B, and coffee was all I could imagine.”
― James Freeman, The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, with Recipes