I first met Brian Gaffney while working at an unobtrusive coffee shop in Brooklyn called Daily Press. This wasn’t the kind of place you’d go out of your way to visit—it was located right on a busy street in the southeast corner of Bed-Stuy—and mostly, it attracted folks who lived locally.

Instead, the fact that it was a neighborhood spot made Daily Press what it was. Almost every customer was a regular, someone who at least one of the baristas had built a relationship with. I remember Brian distinctly—he was friendly with everyone. He worked out of the shop pretty often, and was always curious about the types of coffee we were pouring.

Although Brian doesn’t work in the coffee industry as we traditionally think of it—he even describes his relationship to the industry as being “coffee-adjacent”—he’s continued to pursue his interest, writing about coffee for publications like Standart and serving on the board of the Coffee Coalition for Racial Equity (CCRE).

In this conversation, we revisit our nine-year-long friendship and discuss how to find ways to connect with customers. I continue to come back to this phrase that I think James Hoffmann, owner of Square Mile Coffee and former podcast guest, said once—one you’ll hear in this episode—that coffee is bad at telling its own story. Brian’s background is in marketing and brand strategy, so we talk about what it means for coffee people to take ownership of their own narratives.

But we’re not just talking about coffee shop owners when we say “coffee people.” When it comes to coffee’s narratives, Black and Brown people are all too often left out of the equation, even though their labor, both historically and today, continues to be the backbone of our entire industry—and yet the stories and ways we talk about coffee center affluent, white consumers. Brian and I discuss what a coffee industry led by Black and Brown people could look like, and how centering the perspective of the laborers in coffee has the potential to completely rewrite the industry’s future—and reverse the descent into sameness we seem to be experiencing now. Here’s Brian.