From Berries to Brews

Sometimes human creativity really baffles me. I've been getting into home espresso brewing recently, and one thing that I find incredibly shocking is the shear number of processes that coffee goes through between getting picked as a berry and getting brewed into a delicious drink. Generally speaking, in order to make coffee out of coffee berries, you must:

1)pick the berries
2)separate the beans from the pulp
3)dry the beans
4)roast the beans
5)grind the beans
6)pour hot water over the ground beans to extract the flavor of the grounds into the brew.

The thing that's really interesting about this is that without any of these 6 steps you don't end up with coffee in the end. It makes me really wonder how humans ever discovered coffee. Did someone just look at a coffea plant one day and say, "I wonder what it would taste like if I took some of those relatively bland-tasting berries, extract and dry their seeds and roast them and gridn them up and brew them in hot water..."?

The vexing issue here is that the complicated process of coffee making does not lend itself well to discovery by parts. In many other areas of science and engineering, new discoveries are made on the shoulders of older, well-established, and useful discoveries. Think of the modern automobile. Cars weren't invented overnight. Someone discovered the wheel long before anyone was thinking about combustion engines. So there were intermediary steps. First, carts with wheels. Then horse-drawn carriages, then motorcars, then cars with automatic transmissions, power stearing wheels, alarm systems, air bags, and all the other modern luxuries. The point is, at any point between the initial invention of the basic cart and the development of the modern automobile, each step was its own finished product, with its own intrinsic utility.

This is not the same with coffee production. Getting halfway there doesn't get you a finished product at all. Say one person discoveres how to de-pulp and dry coffee beans. That's not a finished product! It's not something that others can say, "wow, that's good, but I wonder if we can make it better." With things like the coffee process, it's all or nothing. Either you end up with coffee or you end up with something totally useless, like dry beans. This makes the entires process much less probable to be discovered, because it's all or nothing. There's no half way.

It makes me wonder what other potential delicious bevarages are you to be discovered. There are countless varieties of beans and seends to try similar processes on! After all, who would have expected that something as delicious as coffee would come from something as unsuspected as a bland-tasting cherry-looking berry? It's entirely likely that there are more such discoveries to be made.

That's the thing about the human creative spark. It enables us to think of the most uncanny ideas that end up being totally rewarding!

New Years and God's Grace

I know it’s late, and I have an 8:00 am flight tomorrow morning, but I had a fun New Year’s thought that I wanted to share. I love New Years. There’s something great about fresh starts, new beginnings, clean slates. Thinking about all the possibilities for the new year, I find myself reflecting on some of the really great things I’ve heard said during this holiday Season, particularly things that have to do with God’s grace. I’d like to share two:

This morning, at church, my Pastor made this analogy about God’s grace being like shaking an etch-a-sketch. Over time, we write lots of stuff on our etch-a-sketch. But God comes and shakes your etch-a-sketch, so you can start over with a fresh slate.

A lot of people have trouble with the concept of God’s Grace. They argue that if God forgives all your sins, why bother changing? Why bother trying to living a good life if you know God will just forgive you for everything you did wrong anyway? But if you go down that road, you really miss the whole purpose of Grace. Grace isn’t just washing your past away. It also provides the opportunity for new, better beginnings, and God is constantly inviting us to start over with Him.

Regardless of whether you think a New Year really provides a clean slate, we can always find peace in God’s eternal grace, which always provides us an opportunity for real, meaningful change.