Bash and Information Accessibility

Favorite drink: Probably an oat milk cortado right now. I’m kind of stuck on those. I feel like it’s a great way to taste espresso, but sometimes straight up espresso is a little harsh for me, so just a little splash of oat milk makes it that much nicer.

favorite album to play at work: I really like Young the Giant’s very first album.

favorite origin: Nicaragua. Specifically, The farm Finca San Jose de las Nubes. I worked for them for about two months, so I'm completely biased, but I think their coffee is amazing.

“I met the owner of Finca San Jose de las Nubes through my last employer, even before I started working for them. I went up to him, introduced myself, and let him know I really wanted to work on a coffee farm. I gave him my WhatsApp phone number, we got in touch, and then six months later I was working on his farm. It was awesome. I paid my way to get there, got free room and board, and then volunteered for them for about two months. I did whatever they needed me to do. I don’t speak Spanish though, and I regret that. I think it was sort of imperative for me almost not to though because it forced me to realize how much of an impact that makes and how cocky and naïve I was in doing that- going to work in a country where I don’t speak the language. I think if I were to go back, I definitely would make it my mission to try to learn Spanish first.

Being able to talk to the people you're working with is really important, obviously, and I think not being able to do that made me realize just how important it really is. In the Portland coffee scene, everybody knows so much and we're all so linked and interwoven. It's easy to have conversations and know the context and be able to talk more in-depth. Whereas being on a coffee farm, I was going in blind. I knew nothing about how to pick coffee, how to sort coffee, how to wash it, what the processing was like. I think in my head when I imagined what a coffee cherry even looked like was completely different. I remember being so shocked, like ‘this is a coffee cherry?! The pictures don’t match up!’

Not being able to ask all the questions that I wanted to ask or get all the answers that I wanted because of the language barrier made it tough. But it also forced me to realize that part of the conversation is being able to have a conversation in the first place. Almost all of the countries that produce coffee don't speak English. I remember calling my friend and saying ‘I haven't said a single word to anybody all day today because I just can't.’ That makes you feel really lonely. The first night that I stayed on the farm I cried myself to sleep, because I just felt so far away from the world, and so out of touch. My world view was being blown wide open. I had this idea of what coffee was ‘supposed’ to be. In my mind I was like ‘I'm going to go down there, and run through coffee trees, and everybody will think it’s so amazing that I’m there!’ Instead it was very humbling to realize, oh I know absolutely nothing, these people have been doing this for years, it’s part of their family, their tradition and culture. I think it's really easy to be blind to a lot of that; we get to serve coffee, but we don’t get to do it from where its grown. And those are very different experiences.

I think in the same way that it was humbling to not be able to speak, essentially, while I was there, I try to keep that same humility when I'm talking with people here across the bar. Just realizing that everybody has a different background and a different lived experience. I still have customers that come in and don't speak English. That is something that happens pretty consistently and every time it's a gentle reminder that coffee is not just for people who speak English. It's not just for white people. And it wasn't even started by white people.

Coming back to the states after having worked at Finca San Jose de las Nubes made me look at things differently, even coffee beans in the hopper. I look at the beans and think oh that’s what happened to this one, and that one looks this way because of this. Before I had gone to the farm, I wouldn’t have been able to do that. And then on a bigger scale knowing that where I work now and the community that I serve is nothing like me, makes my work feel more important. I have the ability to continue to learn from my customers, from my co-workers, from the world around me, from the farm that I was on, from places that I will go to, and the places that I have been. I am able to learn and to teach, and also able to let other people teach me.

That was the most valuable lesson I learned working on the farm. Being able to listen and being forced to do the work without just talking about it.”

Bash got her first coffee shop job about four years ago: “I started at this teeny tiny teeny hole-in-the-wall shop in Multnomah Village. It wasn't specialty by any means. It was literally just put a bunch of grinds in the porta filter, tamp it, and shots pulled for like ten seconds or less. But it was my first taste of the over-the-counter connection, which is part of why I stay in coffee. I tell people that I am an introverted extrovert. I like my alone time, but I crave those really quick five-minute interactions with all different kinds of people. It makes my job really fun because every person I meet has a different experience and is doing something different with their day. Every coffee shop also has its regulars and no matter where they're from or what they're doing, they come in every day and it feels good to have that community of mutual care.

At the time of starting that job I had just moved to Portland. I started at PSU but dropped out after about three months. It got really expensive and I didn’t want to be in school anyway. At the time I had no money, could barely afford rent and was working like three or four jobs. Dog-sitting here and babysitting there, and working at the coffee shop. And then when I made the connection with the coffee shop job, I was like, I think coffee is what I'm supposed to do. From there I thought, what's the next job that I can get in coffee? There was a pie shop across the street that was a wholesale account of a popular roasting company in Portland, so I applied and got hired to work there. I stayed for an obnoxiously short amount of time.

I got hired for a barista position and went through the roasting company’s training program, and that was my first taste of specialty coffee. The trainer was absolutely amazing. She and I connected really deeply because I'm such a knowledge fiend and I love knowing things. I just like learning about things and being able to do them myself and she was very much the same way and she was like, ‘I'll teach you everything you want to know, ask me every question you have. Let me teach you how to pull a perfect shot and what tamping method you should use and all the different kinds of portafilters and baskets.’ Cause she wasn’t used to people asking her so many in-depth questions during their first training session! We really connected, and I liked the coffee we were working with so much. The pie shop though was a very new, and didn't really have a lot of coffee experience. Their customer base wasn’t very high yet, and so I got hired as a barista but I spent more time doing food prep than I did actually doing coffee stuff. I don’t want to work in food. Making and serving food is a totally different thing and some people love it, but it's not for me.

So, yeah, I knew I didn’t want to do food service, and I knew I had to get out of this and go to the next thing. So again, in my cockiness and naiveté, I went to that roasting company almost every single day, sometimes twice a day, for two weeks straight and dropped my resume off to whoever would take it. Maybe this is cocky too, but I think resumes are sort of bullshit. You can tell a lot more about a person by meeting them face-to-face versus just reading about them on paper. That's really hard for me because I'm not good at putting myself down on paper and I don't like being read from just what I have accomplished that is on paper. That's just a bad way to measure someone's ability. So whenever I make my resumes I make them as a resume that I would want to read out of a stack of resumes. I make them a little silly and a little dorky- I make sure there is some of myself in there so that people know what they're getting on top of my experience.

After a couple weeks of dropping off resumes, they had a farmer’s market position open up and so I started working the market and then again was working like two or three jobs on the side. I tried to do as much training as possible with that same trainer. I didn't get to do much barista work for about a year, but I still was so excited about just being in coffee that it didn't really matter. I knew that I wanted to eventually be a barista and told myself if I was patient I would learn from here first, and the rest will eventually come. I read everything I could get my hands on and the head roaster gave me this master-list of every coffee book that he would recommend to somebody. I took that list and slowly started going through it. My favorite one is a pretty thick book and I think it's called something like The Ultimate Guide to Coffee.”

Moving into more of the specialty coffee scene in some ways made some information more accessible to Bash, and in other ways she found herself running into a ton of barriers. “My personal desire to know more and to learn more and to constantly be seeking information made the move into specialty coffee feel somewhat easy. But it was really difficult at the same time because I wanted to learn even more, like for instance about roasting, but there's not really a way to get into that. Roasting classes are upwards of $1,000, and even the books for learning more are prohibitively expensive. I was looking for one recently and it was like $150 or something. I don't have that much money to spend on a book!

For a long time, any extra information I was seeking didn’t feel accessible to me. I didn't have the background and I didn't know who to ask. I didn't have the connections and because I was so new and was only working like 10 hours a week at this one specialty coffee place, people wouldn't take me seriously.

Trying to get into roasting or a barista position is sort of that catch 22: You need a job to get experience, and yet you need experience to get the job. And so even when I was asking people ‘how can I get experience? How can I practice?’ Everybody told me ‘you can’t really practice unless you buy an espresso machine, or expensive books, or classes, or you know the right person.’ People who have the information that aren't willing to share it- I get working really hard for something and wanting to keep it precious to yourself. But politically and culturally things are changing so much, and information becomes that much more important to share with everybody, especially with the people who need it the most, because those are usually the people who have the least access to it.

When I was working for that roasting company, I wanted to know more information about the farms we worked with and have a deeper understanding of coffee culture from the source. But I found that people either weren’t interested to know more, or for people who did have that information, it didn’t matter to them if we knew it. They just wanted us to make coffee, and asking questions was like coming up against a brick wall. I was like, ‘what do you mean it doesn't matter?’ How am I supposed to serve this coffee and not be able to talk about it? Customers ask all of these same questions, and not being able to answer them is not only embarrassing but also, how does that reflect on the company? Or their values? I think people view a barista position as this entry level job where you just get paid by the hour and you just make coffee. But it's so much more than that. You expect me to fill the role of making coffee, but also fill a role as teacher during small interactions. But if you're not going to teach me how to teach other people, how do you expect me to continue to do that? And I think that's where part of the disconnect is- expecting baristas to have all this knowledge, but to do it yourself.

And I think my experience getting information and training has been easier than probably most people's, which makes me really sad.”

Getting access to the information she needs to do her job right is very important to Bash. It is an integral part of feeling supported at work. “The coffee world can feel very singular, very lonely, sometimes. And I don't know if that is a gender-specific thing. I want to think that it isn't but I'm willing to bet that it is. It feels like standing on the precipice of a void and asking questions and sometimes the answers come back, and sometimes they don't. A lot of my support comes from co-workers and friends that I have picked up along the way. Which has been both really awesome and frustrating. My circle is so small- I only have so much access to so much information. I don't have any friends that are roasters so I can't ask the roasting questions that I want to know. I don't have any friends that are importers, so I can't ask the importing questions that I want to know. I don't want to just know where the coffees come from. I want to know what container it is in, what ship it’s on, and who's tracking it and whose hands are touching it. People don't have those answers and I don't know who to ask and neither do they.

At my last employer, I had my own reputation which made getting information a little easier for me. Once I broke through that ground-level, I was able to find people to ask more questions that actually seemed to take me seriously because I had been working there for x amount of time or because I had done x amount of things. I needed to prove myself in some sort of way. Like once I went origin and came back, people took me more seriously. But it’s infuriating that I had to do that to be seen or be heard, or have my questions answered.

That’s one of the things I really appreciate about my current employer; she's one of the only people I have ever met that doesn't seem to require that you prove yourself before they share information. I think that's becoming more commonplace, but it's happening very very very slowly, like glacially slow. It's so frustrating to want to make this my career, my life, but not always knowing where to go for support.

Sometimes the amount of support you get depends how big the company you work for is or how many people who have more information are accessible to people who have none. One of the things that I also like about working at my current job is that it’s a smaller company. The owner, who has an overwhelming amount of information to share, can share it more easily because she has only 15 employees. Versus working for a bigger company when there are 25 baristas, on top of the 30 employees that do something else, that makes information sharing a little bit harder because everybody is sort of doing their own thing. There isn’t that same level of connectivity.”

Bash’s advice for anyone looking to get into coffee: “Finding the right coffee job is almost like finding a therapist. Not every place is going to do the same things for you, and you aren't going to want to do the same things for every place. Making sure to find a job where you as a person are comfortable is more important than finding a job with a roasting company that has really fancy cafes. Finding a company that fits you versus you working to fit into the company is important. I think you’re able to do more meaningful work when that’s the case. It’s not very easy and it is a lot of trial and error. Make sure you find somewhere where you feel comfortable.

Recently I did two working interviews for a local roasting company and didn’t get paid for either of them. It’s incredibly abusive of a company to take advantage of people knowing that not everybody can afford to work without pay, even just for a ‘working interview.’ I worked six hours in total for free, two of their rushes- like 9-11. After the first trial, I didn't hear anything back and so I was like, okay, you know, I will wait a couple of days, they're very high-volume, so maybe they're just too busy. I waited 2 or 3 days, finally gave them a call myself, got no answer. Called again the next day got no answer, called again the day after and left a voicemail. Got a call back when I was at work so I couldn’t answer it. We basically played phone-tag for a week and then they asked me to come in again for another working interview. I wanted to work for them, and I needed a job, so I agreed to come in very short notice for another working interview. And again, the same sort of thing. Worked my shift, thought I did ok. Left the shift and didn't hear anything back and then got a text along the lines of ‘hey, I think we're going to go in a different direction.’ Not only is that rude, but I worked two shifts AND I knew a lot of those baristas personally. Two working interviews to me sounds like you're basically going to hire me because why would you waste my time or your own, and then to get a text back? It was so unprofessional. But still, I wanted to use it as a moment to grow, so I texted back, thanked them for their time and asked for some feedback. After all, I had given them so many hours of my time. I never heard anything back from them. It left such a bad taste in my mouth. I know it’s the norm, but it shouldn’t be. It made me question my skill level and my value- like maybe I’m not as good as I think I am, or my work ethic isn’t as strong as I think it is. I had to talk myself out of that though, and just view it as not the right fit. And at the end, them texting me indicated that it isn’t a place I would want to work anyway. Not if that is how they treat a person interviewing for them.”

Four years in to this career, Bash is seeing room for improvement: “From the outside looking in at one of my former employers as I was just beginning there, things looked amazing. Like, this company is doing things so differently, they are on the front lines of all these different things, and then when I left I realized, yeah they are, but they're not doing enough. They're doing it the easy way and tiptoeing around all these really difficult topics and trying to make them seem smaller than they are. We know there are difficult things to tackle; step into it. Embrace it. Be willing to do that work, to listen and learn, and be taught, and to teach. Be willing to listen to people that are trying to help you. I think a lot of the time though people just think it’s a difference of opinion and they feel attacked and like they don’t want to listen.

I think something that all companies could do is receive and offer Safe Space Training for all employees and management. People have different backgrounds and different ways that they move through the world and we need, especially in the service industry, to be able to see that and embrace it and make people feel safe. Coffee shops should never feel unwelcoming. As an employer, you should be providing your staff with all the tools they need for doing their job. And safe space training is a necessary tool.

Coffee is such a communication-based industry: you meet and interact with people every single day. If you can't interact with people in a safe way, you can't do your job.