Lots of changes.
By "changes," I mean life changes. I've been listening to some old Portafilter.net Podcast episodes lately and I'm both horrified and nostalgic, embarrassed and proud. More than anything, nostalgic.
As I've shared many times, the pf.net podcast was born out of a simple idea: I was learning so much from the many conversations I was having with more experienced coffee professionals, I thought that "for the greater good," it would be helpful and compelling to take those conversations public. Add a jolly co-host, a healthy dose of naivete, and at least a couple scoops of irreverence (arrogance?) and you had the makings of a hundred or so hours of audio. The value of that audio varies from person to person, but for me, it was a lot of fun.
Today, I listen to that podcast and I miss the circumstance that produced it, and I can't help but reflect on its demise. The jolly became much less jolly. The irreverence felt more stale. The naivete, while not gone completely, felt more and more overshadowed by experience. We're talking about about 4.5 years since the first episode after all. I certainly still have so much to learn, but I'm different now.
Everything's different.
It's been almost 10 months since I closed murky coffee, and almost 10 months since I put my 3-group La Marzocco Linea into storage. I literally dusted it off last week and hooked it all back up, giving it a few new parts like long-overdue group-boiler gaskets. Damn. That machine has made thousands upon thousands of espresso shots since it was built back in 2003, and the last four, pulled just this week, tasted as sweet and glorious as any one of those thousands.
When I first bought the domain name "portafilter.net" in 2004, I had a dream for an independent community of coffee professionals... just like Coffeed.com. I was happy to see Alistair's project fill that need though, and I instead decided that the website would be a group-blog and podcast. The former didn't happen quite the way I had hoped, but the podcast, to date, has had over a staggering quarter-million total episode downloads.
I'm happy to have the Linea back up and running. Not just happy, but I'm excited to know that it has a purpose, testing, training, and learning as Trish and I are building our new roasting company.
So for a whole different set of reasons, I'm dusting off the podcast. I'm dusting off the portafilter.net blog.
I can't make any promises right now, but it will be necessarily different from the old podcast, while hopefully retaining some of what people seemed to love so much about it. Interviews. Discussion of current issues. Introductions to coffee people you might not know. I've had the idea of a more NPR-style produced-segment program, rather than the rambling free-for-all that the old podcast was. I dunno. We'll see.
I'll try to start blogging again as well, as well as providing the opportunity for others to guest-blog on here. I'm continually inspired these days by the compelling content from James on jimseven.com and by the freshness of sprudge.com, and I could only hope to have something worthy of similar attention.
Hopefully it's truly the right time. Only time will tell. Check your iTunes podcast feeds in a few weeks, and expect a redesign of the blog soon.
Here's to a fruitful and prosperous 2010!
Nick
