Hi everyone. I’ve wanted to find a way to diversify my ~digital storytelling~ a little bit because I’ve found a lot of this year I’ve felt stuck in feeling like I need to just talk about coffee brewing tips and the like. I find places very easy to talk about, as there are so many coffee experiences I think people should have to help them get better bearings about what makes good coffee. Unless you exclusively buy coffee online and drink it at home, place, service and atmosphere in a cafe can be just as important as whether or not you spin your v60 cone (you should).
Here’s how JPC Faves works: there’s now a link at the top of the site that says “JPC Faves” (or you can just click here), click that and you’ll be taken to a portal, a list of all my favourite coffee experiences sorted by country/state/city. This list will change and grow, and I’ll be making pages for places as I write them, talking about what makes them so special. As of today, the list is just Australia, I'm still figuring out what I find important in places I've visited overseas.
Yes, you would have seen snippets of my own favourite coffee experiences here and there on my Instagram, but I’ve wanted to explore these a little more and talk about service, atmosphere and hell, maybe a bit of tea food and sweets where I can. Make it about the place, the feeling.
I see this unfolding across the website with a little bit of recycled photos here and there but I also see this as a big opportunity to get a little bit more into a style of storytelling I really love: talking more about places I’ve been. This for me is an excuse to take photos going out and enthusiastically share stories of service. Hopefully there will be some extra visits to some of my favourite places will be in order too.
There's also this: I've been struggling a lot emotionally since the move. Everyone gets homesick, and maybe this is just my way of reconnecting with my favourite places, and another way to think about what keeps me inspired around the world. Committing to blogging is hard and I’m honestly impressed anyone wants to trawl through some 20-something guys thoughts about coffee on a minimalist website. In an ideal world I would have committed like I did at the start, ticking things off the list like I started this year, updating people every couple of weeks. The past five or so months have taken a big toll on me, but I'm getting better and better. For now, enjoy my first article about one of my favourite old locals, Dulwich Hill's Small Talk. Hope you get there for brunch soon Jimmy xx