I subscribe to a coffee roastery — Senzu, out of Porto. Every month, 4 bag arrives in the post, and tucked inside is a card: origin, farm, producer, variety, tasting notes, altitude, process, and a short blurb about why they picked this lot.
I love the design and the notes – it helps me better understand flavour profiles and have better awareness of coffee flavours. For a while I put the cards in a drawer, without any purpose. Then one morning I opened the drawer and counted them. Thirty-seven.
That’s not a collection. That’s a dataset.
I obviosuly regretted all the other cards, post-its and flavour profiles I threw away since I fell in love with coffee, about 15 years ago in London.
At this point, the cards stopped being keepsakes and became rows on a spreadsheet (thanks for your help, Claude). Once I had rows, the question became: what could I make with this? A coffee art project.
I gave myself a couple of hours and a constraint — everything would need to be worthy of hanging on the wall. No spreadsheets, no dashboards. Just things I’d be happy to print, frame, and hang.
Five pieces came out of it. I didn’t really like 2, so I discarded those. Here are three that resonate.
The maps
A triptych — East Africa, Central America, South America. One colour per region, pulled from the cards themselves. Country outlines, a pin per finca, fine-print callouts in the margin with the producer’s name and altitude.
It’s the simplest piece, and probably my favourite. Every pin is a coffee I’ve actually drunk from Senzu. The map stops being abstract, and has a personal touch.
While it didn’t resonate with my wife, and might not end up on the wall next to my coffee stand, I really like the idea of building a library or dataset of all the coffees I tried, and continue to expand the map.
The word cloud
This is probably a bit 2010’ish, but I went for it anyway. Every tasting note from every card, packed into a coffee-bean silhouette and sized by how often it appears. Chocolate dominates, as expected (if you want to learn more about why cholocate notes are common in Arabic beans, check out this ICT blog post). Then citrus, then stone fruit. A faint backdrop of countries, varieties and processes sits behind the notes, at a third of the scale.
I learned more from building this than I expected. Six near-duplicates that I’d been reading as distinct flavours (wine and winey, cacao and cocoa) turned out to be the same note written two ways. I then had to pad it with other coffee-related words from the cards to make it into a reasonable shape. I think the coffee bean silhouette does show up nicely, but I’m not sure this one will make it to the wall.
The micrography
I then tried to use an existing coffee-related image, and add a touch related to the cards I got. I ended up with a top-down view of an espresso cup on a saucer. The shadow, the cup interior, and the crema disc are all filled, line by line, with the names and origins of the 37 coffees.
You only see the shapes from across the room. Up close, it’s just text.
I didn’t set out to build any of this. I set out to drink coffee. The art is a side effect of paying attention to something I was already doing.
That’s the part I want to remember. Side projects don’t need a thesis or a market or a roadmap. And a personal touch.
The cards are still in the drawer, though – let’s see if I manage to continue growing the dataset, and come up with new ideas.
If you liked this project and want to share any feedback, drop me a line.
