Source: http://www.marco.org/

We’re the ones who keep creating, replacing, Kickstarting, and spending top dollar on ever-more-specialized equipment, even when it differs from established products only in arbitrary or purely decorative ways that have no discernable effect on the actual coffee (except maybe prolonging the process of making it).

Maybe we’d get some of the Keurig fans to use our methods if we weren’t so pretentious, wasteful, expensive, and inaccessible ourselves.

Maybe we need to tone down our obsession on the hand-crafted, hand-made, artisanal, and ritual. Sorry, your coffee isn’t an artisanal ritual. Making great coffee is not inherently romantic, noble, or even difficult. There’s nothing wrong with using a $30 French press, a $25 plastic plunger, or a $35 cold-brew basin in the boring, simple, as-directed ways. Plenty of people don’t have burr grinders and are perfectly fine with the spinning-blade ones. Your kettle doesn’t even need to look like a beehive.

Our obsession with gear and “rituals” is only distracting them — and us — from the real problem: old, mediocre, or badly roasted beans.

We’ll only fix the real problem and get more people back to our side if we drop the pretention, ritualization, and gear obsession and recognize why so many people opt out of our fancy coffee methods and into Keurig’s.