Passionate Users of Coffee and Chocolate
Listening to Kathy Sierra’s great talk about creating passionate users, then reading Jeff Veen’s post on crafting the perfect espresso. There’s something about espresso or moka that not merely invites you to perfecting your skills, but forces you. You can’t help but experimenting and trying to improve. You’ll inevitably turn into a snob.
Kathy Sierra talked about the importance of learning, that all things that evoke passion is about learning, but also that there’s a balance between the challenge and the progress, that there’s ‘a series of regularly spaced traits’.
I also eat chocolate, of the dark kind. It’s clearly something that has passionate users (or abusers), but it’s quite a different learning experience. You could study the theory and the conditions for different cocoa beans, but I’m referring to the taste (acquired, I couldn’t stand it when I tried it a decade ago). Your taste subtly changes. Soon you can’t stand ordinary chocolate bars; they’re too sugary. Sometimes you discover chocolate that renders your previous favorites nearly inedible (this happened to my favorites among Michel Cluizel’s single-estate bars when I had spent a couple of weeks with Valrhona’s Ampamakia 2004).