Hi there! This storefront was started to supplement my goal of producing rigorously dialed roasts. First and foremost, I am a coffee enthusiast. Everything that I say or do here should be measured in accordance with my love for coffee (which I'd like to consider as a specific manifestation for my love of the world writ large).
My current approach to roasting is as follows: the roaster ought to intervene as little as possible in bringing out as much of the desirable qualities of the coffee. My roasts are and will be, consequently, as light as I think is possible for a given crop. I currently roast on a Roest L200 Ultra, which means my batch sizes are incredibly small. Please be patient with me as I fulfill your orders.
I think that coffee is a ritual. What this means for me is that I will try to be as transparent as possible in disclosing my costs, sourcing, suggested brewing parameters, and approach to sourcing. With this degree of transparency, it is my hope that those who purchase the coffee here will possess the possibility of approaching the coffee in its totality. This may reasonably be considered an approach exactly antithetical to C-market coffee, where the conditions that render possible the finished product (e.g., the seasonally flavored shaken espresso from a major chain) sit behind a sea of corporate mist.
This brings me to the inspiration behind the name of this project. Noumenon (νοούμενoν in Ancient Greek) is a word used by Kant in first Critique in developing his metaphysical system of transcendental idealism. Noumenon is the name that he gives to things-in-themselves, entities posited to exist independently of our sense or experience. For Kant, our sensible faculties are only receptive and therefore never allow us to know things-in-themselves. As I am not a devoted Kantian, my intuition is that this notion of a thing-in-itself produces its own undoing. Here is my pragmatic argument for this intuition as it concerns coffee. When describing a coffee noumenally, I do so in a partly ironic manner. Since we are sensible beings, there would be, strictly speaking, no way for us to engage with coffee in-itself, for we cannot intuit the coffee independently of our sense experience. I think, however, that an attempt to engage with the coffee in-itself on the sensible level (if you'll allow my fracturing the aforementioned conceptual scheme), by supporting sustainable growing practices, by roasting it precisely to bring out its inner essence, and by brewing it meticulously, we come to understand that the coffee in-itself is the totality of it. This totality, or universal, lies within each coffee itself just as the particular coffee is embedded within the totality of world. The point of calling this project Noumenon Coffee is thus to represent the need for overcoming the solipsism of "private pleasures" and to demonstrate that our particular, individual, and seemingly insular pursuits necessitate the existence of our social world's totality. This is a totality that the particular coffee enthusiast can sculpt and mold in accordance with their own reason, in accordance with the conditions of freedom and dignity that render the particular possible in the first place. This totality is simultaneously one which distinctly and characteristically expresses reason as it shapes us in our being particular coffee enthusiasts. What this always and immediately demands is a robust, doubled recognition between ourselves as persons, passionate about coffee, and the world in which we are embedded (and possess within ourselves).