Some of you might know I belong to a group called the Matchbook Coffee Project. Every month, we work with a roaster to release a once-in-a-lifetime coffee, and then we give them total control over how the coffee will be presented. Instead of roasting for the companies they work for or a specific audience, this is their chance to do something fun and weird and find touch points to connect the coffee they’ve chosen to, essentially themselves. We do these releases every month, and I don’t think we ever predicted just how personal they’d be.

We’ve been at this game for three years, and recently, we started interviewing our guests on a podcast, because, duh, I like podcasts, but also because roasters are the perfect audience for a podcast. They sit at a machine for hours a day—their ears are waiting for this! I host the Matchbook podcast as well, and until now, I kept both of these podcasts kind of separate. They felt like two totally different things to me, but I recently interviewed our February roaster, Candice Madison, who is the Director of Roasting for Royal Coffee in Oakland, and her stories and journey through coffee felt important to share. Hearing her tell her story, from being a person with a “respectable” job to yoga to roasting, it made me hopeful, especially in an age where it’s easy to feel like everything kind of sucks. Photo by Lindsey Shea.