I was standing in line at a third-wave (specialty) coffee shop recently when I witnessed something I've seen and heard far too many times before. When the barista, clearly knowledgable in her craft, listened to an uneducated customer place his order, I saw her glance at her fellow barista with the most condescending look you could imagine. What elicited such a response? The man asked if they had a dark/french roast.

I kid you not when I tell you this man was visibly nervous with so much as a slight shake and difficulty even getting words out. He had surely never been in a coffee shop like this before, so when he looks around and notices the lack of to-go cups, syrups and creams, and other things you'd find at a Starbucks, knowing what to order and how to order it would surely be daunting. This might be especially true with a line of hipster-looking people standing there waiting for you to finish your order. The last thing this man needed was a know-it-all barista to subtly (though not-so-subtly) snicker at him.

To the barista: you are specialty coffee's representative of every step of the process the coffee you're brewing has been through before it even reached your hands. You are a representative of the farmers and their families who have likely grown, harvested, and processed coffee cherries for generations. You are a representative of the relationship between those farmers and the people who sourced the beans in order to get them in your hands. You are a representative of the roaster who spent hours upon hours, batch after batch, roasting to bring out the unique and brilliant qualities of the coffee you work with. Being a barista in third-wave coffee is not just making great drinks, it's respecting the process and representing the industry as a whole to those who partake from the other side of the bar from you. So, if it's that person's first time, your interaction with them is what they will take away from specialty coffee. For this man, I wouldn't blame him for returning to the burnt beans of Starbucks simply for the reason that he doesn't feel inferior.

Part of the reason why this bothers me so much is because I've been in that man's shoes before. I know what it's like to walk into a place like that, see the regulars there, and feel inferior. The only difference in my experience was the barista who, rather than making me feel like an idiot, helped me through my order and my understanding of what "single origin" coffee is. What makes me so passionate about specialty coffee is only partially the coffee itself, but also largely the people involved in the industry. The man in the situation I described may have a bit of a different feeling toward third-wave coffee after his first encounter than I did, which is unfortunate because baristas like that are the minority, and I hope he gives specialty coffee another shot.