The shape of coffee that I describe.

watanabe — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 15:00:00 +0000

08-23-2022

The shape of coffee that I describe.

I was 26 years old when I came across specialty coffee in the winter of 2008.

Back then, coffee was widely perceived as a bitter drink. It was extremely difficult to find light-roast coffee in my everyday life.

I opened HSKWKF/Hoshikawa Cafe, a cafe specializing in light-roast coffee, in the city of Kumagaya, Saitama Prefecture in March 2009. In 2012, I started serving coffees from a Norway-based roaster.

Then in 2015, I started roasting coffee myself.

Under the supervision of GOOD COFFEE in 2016, I co-hosted a guest barista workshop in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia with Mr. Suzuki of GLITCH COFFEE & ROASTERS.

There, I felt that coffee’s flavor profiles can go through subtle differences depending on your day-to-day diet and living environment.

Take Ethiopian natural for instance.

While we associated its flavors with strawberry and wine, Malaysian baristas described it as having the fruitiness of cantaloupe.

Ever since I realized that, I started to pursue “the shape of coffee that I describe,” or in other words, my own way of expressing coffee.

At this moment, the one thing that sets me apart is that I create a work of art with acrylic paint to describe my impression of coffee I roast and drink and make it into labels.

This means that I visualize coffee’s flavor profiles, something that everyone can enjoy with their own sensibilities, and express it as artwork.

This is my style. Lately, I’ve been presenting a few of my works to the public as NFT art, too.

https://opensea.io/collection/the-art-of-specialty-coffee

I hope to connect people, whether they like coffee or not, with art one day, and to visualize the invisible and realize a cultural crossover between people with different values.

Yosuke Suzuki | TYPICA Lab

The shape of coffee that I describe.

The shape of coffee that I describe.