#leave the country and move to amsterdam working remote from coffee shops?

[only-when-i-write]

Spring = my yearly existential crisis

[qqueenofhades]

Ahem. As discussed, a prompt my good lady...Lucy and Flynn + fake married in Dubrovnik + the inevitable shenanigans...

Okay SO. On the plane over, there was something in the magazine about a website where tourists can go to Amsterdam and fake-marry a local for a day, so their new “spouse” can take them around the non-tourist parts of the city, and then they go their separate ways at dusk and it’s fun etc. I immediately decided that this needed a Garcy AU, for obvious reasons.

Lucy Preston wasn’t really planning on going to Croatia. In fact, she wasn’t exactly planning to go anywhere. But it’s been a rough few months to say the least – tenure meeting cancelled at Stanford, breaking up with Noah, Mom has to go back to the hospital for more tests and it isn’t looking good – and in a fit of late-night frustration, she decided to just fly somewhere over Thanksgiving break and forget about the clusterfuck that was her life for a bit. Somewhere warm, she wasn’t picky. She suggested that Amy go with her, but Amy had work and couldn’t get away, and by then, Lucy had already booked a ticket. She’s heard that Dubrovnik is beautiful, there is a university and a state archive there so she can theoretically disguise it as a research trip, and when she was running through the apparently deeply cursed Frankfurt airport to catch her connecting flight, a text popped up from Amy. Something that she thinks Lucy should try, just for shits and giggles. Some kind of app called Untourist.

Lucy took a look at it and decided that it was basically Tinder for tourists, even if the premise tried to be more classy than that. In short, you can pick a European city from the list (More Locations Coming Soon!, promises the popup), fill in some brief preference Q&As, and be matched with a local, who will fake-marry you in a ceremony complete with photos and then take you on a “honeymoon” for a day in the city. The idea is that you get to have a personal guide, explore places off the main drag – and presumably, if you hook up at the end, that’s a nice bonus, but not one that the app strictly advertises. It sees itself as promoting intercultural connections and lived experiences, rather than anything so ignominious as arranging casual sex with a hot foreigner. Apparently it got its start in Amsterdam, though, so this would not be surprising.

The split with Noah is still raw, and Lucy isn’t planning to use the app for that purpose – or indeed, at all. But after she has landed at the surprisingly tiny airport and has boarded the bus for the drive along the coast road to the city, she downloads it on a whim that she shouldn’t think through and decides it might be fun to have someone to travel with, even briefly. After she’s signed up, created a profile, and filled in her details, she is given two options to match with, and ends up going for the latter: Garcia from Dubrovnik. She thought about Marko from Zagreb, but his profile says that he’s a Dinamo Ultra, and she decided that she didn’t want to spend the day getting a crash course in the finer points of Croatian football hooliganism. Garcia it is, apparently.

Dubrovnik is insanely beautiful, with crystalline turquoise water lapping at towering medieval city walls (souvenir shops every few streets will proudly remind you that they filmed Game of Thrones here), palm trees, red-tiled roofs, old golden-stone buildings, winding side alleys, and sunlight that pours down as rich as olive oil. Since it’s November, it’s not quite as hot as in high summer, and the tourist rush is somewhat dimmed. Lucy sleeps late at her Airbnb high on a very steep side street, as the city is spread out over several hills on the side of the tall blue mountains that rise out of the water, and almost forgets that her fake wedding is today. She jumps out of bed, puts on some makeup (just because she’s not actually marrying the guy doesn’t mean she has to look completely trollish), grabs her bag, and heads down into town, following a winding alley of staircases that are probably going to be a pain to climb back up. She hopes this was a good idea. It was mostly to appease Amy, anyway. Can she cancel, or would that count as leaving Garcia at the (fake) altar?

What the hell, she’s here now, and maybe if she shows that she’s receptive to new experiences, the universe will give her a break. Lucy trots along the palm-treed square above the city walls, finds the door with the Untourist logo by the bell, and steps inside. “Dobro jutro,” she says, which is about all the Croatian she speaks, and most people have been happy to use English anyway. “I’m Lucy Preston, I have an appointment today?”

The slick Unreceptionist greets her, gives her a waiver to sign (bad experiences and/or unsatisfactory spouses are not their fault, any meeting beyond the day is done on personal terms, etc) and they await the arrival of her dashing groom-to-be. It is twelve minutes past their scheduled start time, and the Unreceptionist is making apologetic noises, when the door opens with a bit of a crash and a man who must be Garcia ducks in. He’s tall, dark, and craggy-handsome, probably in his forties, wearing aviator sunglasses, and clutching a takeaway coffee. He addresses the Unreceptionist in rapid Croatian, looks up, sees Lucy, and nods shortly. “Ah,” he says, switching to English. “Right, you’re here. Let’s go.”

“Sir,” the Unreceptionist says, looking as if he’s wondering if Garcia himself read the details and/or the release forms before signing up. “You’re supposed to…?”

“What?”

“You’re supposed to have the wedding ceremony first?”

“I’m supposed to have the what?”

At that, Lucy winces. Feeling as if this might be an opportune moment to interrupt the conversation, and wondering if it’s too late to switch to Marko from Zagreb and risk dying at an Eternal Derby game, she stands up. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Lucy Preston?”

“I know.” Garcia glances at her briefly, up and down, and then away. “What’s this about a wedding?”

“That’s the whole point of the app,” Lucy says pointedly. “Fake-married, take me to places that aren’t touristy, then at the end of the day, go our separate ways?”

Garcia looks briefly pole-axed, then seems to decide that right, well, this is on him for failing to read the terms and conditions. “Fine,” he says impatiently. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

Lucy’s cheeks sting. Making a mental note to give him a zero of five stars on any feedback form that she might have to fill in to rate her experience today, she follows him into the back, where they are joined in a very non-legally-binding ceremony, have their photo taken (Garcia looks like this is a real funeral rather than a fake wedding) and finally are released into the wild, as Garcia (who is a good foot taller than her) strides ahead without waiting. When Lucy runs to catch up, he says, “Nobody told me there was a wedding involved.”

“Did you even read what they wanted?” Lucy’s tone is slightly waspish, but then, he isn’t exactly showering her in that supposedly famous Slavic hospitality. The sweet lady at the Airbnb was much nicer than this. “It was right there in the entire premise. If you don’t want to spend a day taking me around the city, fine, but maybe next time, try to actually – ”

“No,” Garcia says abruptly. “You’re here now. Let’s go.”

With that, he strides off toward the gate in the towering walls, down into the Stari Grad. Lucy thinks the view from up there must be spectacular, but she’s not actually going to get a chance to find out, because Garcia derides them as too touristy and refuses to pay 200 kuna to go up them. (This is something like $30, so it clearly is a lot, but the city sees no reason not to profit off all the Game of Thrones fans.) Nor does he think much of the main drag, the cathedral square, the rector’s palace, or any of the other usual sights. He says that Lucy can call him Flynn, but doesn’t explain why. She thinks it’s his last name, but honestly, she can’t be sure. He has the social skills of a broken-down dump truck.

Finally, since there isn’t much of Dubrovnik, at least the old town, that isn’t touristy, Lucy persuades Flynn to let them go up the walls, though by the face he makes at the cashier as he pays for their tickets, the poor man might be found floating face-down in the ocean later. They climb up to the winding ramparts, gazing out over the Adriatic to one side and the crowded, tiled roofs on the other, and on one steep section, Lucy loses her footing and nearly falls. She wouldn’t have gone over the edge, there are plenty of barriers, but Flynn flashes out a hand and steadies her. It’s the first remotely human or non-dickish thing he’s done, and she raises an eyebrow. “Thanks.”

Perhaps sensing by her acerbic tone that he has not been the world’s most satisfactory fake husband to date, Flynn has the grace to blush, or at least look somewhat chagrined. “I’d definitely get in trouble if you died.”

“Thanks,” Lucy says again, even more tartly. “Guess it’s a good thing for you that you have good reflexes?”

“I fought in the Homeland War.” Flynn glances away. It’s the first personal thing he’s shared about himself, in a casual, offhand way that makes it sound no more remarkable than getting milk from the store. “Come on, let’s keep moving.”

Lucy glances at him. He’s made it clear that he’s not here for the fake marriage, let alone small talk, but she paid a decent amount of money to be here with this tall idiot and he can just suffer it. “Are you from Dubrovnik?”

“I was born in Šibenik.” Flynn doesn’t break stride, obliging Lucy to trot to keep up with him. “Lived a few places around the country. It was Yugoslavia back then, though. War started in 1991.”

“I know,” Lucy says. “I mean, I’m a historian, so I was recently doing some work on 1989 and the U.S. response to the dissolution of the Iron Curtain. Technically, Yugoslavia wasn’t Soviet, right?”

“No,” Flynn says, with a sort of grim pride. “Tito and Stalin hated each other. It was…. sort of an in-between place, I suppose. We didn’t need exit visas, there was a certain amount of social freedom, and Tito liked to market it as neutral, a third country between East and West, combining the best of both and the worst of neither. Of course, he was a dictator, but supposedly a benevolent one. Most people liked him. My childhood was – ” He stops. “Well, my mother was American, anyway. Maybe that was what drew her here. Running away.”

Lucy glances up at him. She has a sense that Flynn doesn’t often talk much about his past, and decides that since they are, after all, only fake-married, she doesn’t need to pry. However, since the subject of his mother has arisen, she holds back as best she can, not wanting to dump the fraught subject of Carol Preston on a strange man who has only just met her and treated her one step above gum stuck to his shoe, but finally needs to talk about it with someone who isn’t Amy. She still isn’t sure Flynn gives a damn, but too bad for him. She mentions that it’s been hard, with the Stanford legacy and the cancer and the expectations that she would accept Noah’s proposal, and she just – well, she doesn’t know. Maybe Lucy understands a bit of Flynn’s mother, whoever she was, whyever she came here. Maybe she too was, or is, running away. Even if she has to fly all the way back to San Francisco at the end of this week, some part of her would be more than happy to fling all her responsibilities to the wind, move into some picturesque old flat in one of those tiny streets, and stay.

They descend the walls after completing their circuit, and Flynn deigns to buy her lunch at a small cafe where the menu is only in Croatian and a sign informs customers that they don’t take euros, only kuna. Lucy allows him to order something for her, and they sit there eating in semi-awkward silence. Then Flynn says, apropos of nothing, “Maria.”

“What?”

“My mother’s name.” He shrugs. “It was Maria Tompkins. She was from Houston. She moved to Yugoslavia in 1970, after the death of her first husband and son. She was traveling through Europe, I don’t know that she intended to stay here, but she met my father, so she did.”

“Oh.” Lucy wonders what it would have been like here in the seventies. Probably still beautiful, though much less developed. So Maria Tompkins fell in love, that was what made a young American woman go Red, a move that must have been regarded dimly by her friends and family back in Texas. With that sort of tragedy shadowing her past, maybe it was easier to cut all ties, to get a new passport, to learn a new language, and never look back. Lucy feels a sudden pang of sympathy with this other woman, this unknown fellow traveler, who too found herself in this corner of the world wanting to leave it all behind. Lucy has responsibilities at home, not least her job (even if they didn’t give her tenure, or at least it’s very much in academic bureaucracy limbo), her sister, her sick mother, all the encumbrances and trappings of real life. She can’t do what Maria did, no matter how much she wants to. And for some reason completely unknown to her – it certainly isn’t the pleasure of Flynn’s company – she does.

They finish lunch and head out. It’s warm enough for November that Flynn suggests they can go for a dip, though he gives her a no-clearly-not look when Lucy naively thinks this will be at Banje Beach, the main spot just south of the walls. He leads her up to the street, where they find his car and get in. It’s an Audi, and she wonders what exactly he does for a living. He has a habit of scanning their surroudings, casually flicking his gaze at passersby, in a way that she doesn’t think stems from his military service alone. In fact, she’s starting to wonder if he joined the Untourist app to case the city and/or scope out people without it being too suspicious. Maybe it’s better for everyone if she doesn’t ask about his job. He might have to suffocate her and bundle her up in a black plastic garbage bag in the boot.

Flynn, it transpires, drives like a bit of a maniac, a habit he shares with most of the other road users (especially the scooters and motorcycles). Lucy has already noticed that Croatians seem to have a rather laissez-faire attitude toward personal safety, as evidenced by their tendency to stand outside guardrails overlooking steep drops, walk the wrong way along busy highways, dart across roads in front of oncoming traffic, and jury-rig anything that isn’t actively falling apart. When she mentions this to Flynn, he shrugs. “Slavs are like that,” he says matter-of-factly. “Especially Croatians. Though if you think we’re bad, you should meet the Poles.”

Lucy laughs despite herself, since that’s the first time Flynn has loosened up to flash any bit of actual humor. Well, that’s not quite true; he is remarkably sassy, has a sarcastic comment for most occasions and especially anything involving a tourist making a fool of themselves, but this is the first time that his humor has seemed gentler, more like he’s actually enjoying himself and poking a bit of self-deprecating fun rather than lashing out at the world. They drive along the cliff road for several miles in silence, until Lucy asks, “When did you move to Dubrovnik?”

“About…” Flynn hesitates, and she senses that there’s more riding on the answer to that question than he wants to let on. “Well, I lived in Zagreb until 2014.”

“And you moved here after that?”

“More or less.” Flynn adjusts the rearview mirror, which doesn’t really need it. After a long pause he says, “My wife and daughter died in 2014. I came here for – well, I didn’t want to stay there anymore.”

“I’m….” Lucy feels taken aback, almost guilty that she’s been so derisive of his inability to read app terms and conditions, his clear aversion to the whole fake-married part. Not that they’ve really been acting like it, anyway, but still. She can imagine it wouldn’t be easy for her, if that ever happened, to stand up and play-act some stupid charade for an American tourist hiring you like a beast of burden, not when you’d had the real thing, not when it was gone. “Garcia,” she says, the first time she’s used that since he told her to call him Flynn. She has a sense that he prefers that, that Garcia is some place too personal where he doesn’t let people go, not any longer. “I’m sorry.”

He glances at her, and for a moment she thinks he’ll snap at her, but he doesn’t. He keeps his eyes on the road, navigating the tight turns with ease, until at last he says, “I’m sorry I haven’t been very much fun.”

Lucy opens her mouth by polite reflex to say that he has, and settles for a noncommital hum. Flynn seems to sense that while he might have worked his way up from zero stars, he’s still a way off from five, and parks the Audi in a pullout. They descend a narrow cliff path to the sea, he reaches out to catch her arm when her feet skid again on the pebbles, and Lucy decides she should probably warn him that she’s clumsy before she really does accidentally kill herself. But if she fell into the sea from here, she has an unaccountable sense that he’d dive in after her, no matter how odd and brusque and grumpy he is. It’s less clear whether this is because he’s starting to like her a little, or because it would be an insult to his professional competence. Maybe he’s in the Mafia.

They reach a small quay where a catamaran is tied up, Flynn strides to it and produces two life jackets, and once Lucy has climbed aboard, he swings on, undoes the ropes, and angles the sails out into the wide blue water, endless as a reflected sky. It must be a busy harbor in summer, and there’s still a decent boat traffic now: ferries, jet-skis, a few sailboats and pleasure yachts. Lucy holds on tight as Flynn carves an expert white wake. “Is this your boat, then?”

“No,” Flynn says. “But I borrow it from time to time.”

“Did you – ” Lucy gives him a very narrow stare. “Did you steal this boat?”

“No!” Flynn looks miffed that she would ask. “I know the owner, he lets me use it when I want to. What kind of man do you think I am?”

Lucy opens her mouth, starts to answer, and stops. Truth is, she isn’t sure. An hour ago she would have said a raging, self-absorbed dick with no social skills and possibly black-market employment, and parts of that are still true, but the rest, well… she can’t say exactly. He keeps letting slip these odd, vulnerable parts of him, almost in spite of himself. His past in the war, his mother running away from her old life, his dead wife and daughter, everything else. She isn’t certain what she thinks of him, exactly, but she isn’t wishing that she picked Marko from Zagreb anymore. If nothing else, Flynn is complicated, and challenging, and oddly easy to talk to, and he hasn’t told her to shut up about the family/work/life drama that she occasionally returns to venting about. Lucy thinks she’ll take that, at least. 

She looks at his hands, large and sun-brown and expertly pulling and tying the knots to trim the sail, as he pulls them to a bobbing halt in the sparkling water and asks if she wants to swim. Lucy didn’t put on her bathing suit under her clothes, but she doesn’t want to go to the bother of making him drive all the way back to the Airbnb. So she strips off her shirt and jeans, and, in just her bra and underpants (hey, they’re married, even fakely), she dives in.

The water is chillier than she expected – this is the southern Mediterranean, it’s never cold no matter the season, but it is November, and she splutters and gasps as she bobs to the surface. Flynn, observing from the high-and-dry comfort of the catamaran, smirks at her, and Lucy gives him the finger. “You dick,” she shouts. “You could have warned me.”

Flynn shrugs, apparently utterly untroubled either by this accusation or by her attitude; indeed, he grins as if he appreciates this feistiness, her willingness to talk back at him and tell it like it is. Lucy spends so much time biting her tongue around absolutely everyone else that this reaction is both unexpected and deeply liberating, and once she’s swum around the catamaran a few times and adjusted to the water temperature, she takes a deep breath and dives down under the pontoons. Then she surfaces on the far side, reaches up, and just as Flynn senses danger and whips around, she grabs him by the back of the shirt and jerks him backward.

He’s wearing a life jacket, of course, so he doesn’t go too far under, but the expression on his face is worth every penny that she paid to the stupid app. He shakes his wet hair like a dog as he surfaces, and she has to say, he looks really good while doing it. “Excuse me,” he says, in a tone of deep umbrage. “Who told you that it was a good idea to start a marriage off by throwing your husband in the drink?”

“Maybe if I’m drowning you for the life insurance,” Lucy shoots back, before she can stop herself. She has no idea who this woman is, who has gone from being exasperated and shut off with Flynn to – well, she did in fact just throw him in the ocean, but there’s definitely something different about their dynamic now. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call it flirty, whether or not this is listed in Untourist’s terms and conditions (and as well established, Flynn did not read them anyway). “After all, I think we can say that you deserve it. Tragic boating accident?”

Too late, she wonders if this is a bad idea to joke about, since she doesn’t actually know how his wife and daughter died (she hopes it wasn’t that, anyway) but Flynn actually laughs, and it transforms his whole face. They spend a very enjoyable forty minutes swimming around, splashing each other, and hanging onto the side of the catamaran and letting their legs sway in the current. They’re close alongside each other as they do, Lucy is conscious of only being in her wet underwear (it’s not like he can see anything while she’s submerged, but still), and something passes between them as their eyes meet. His throat moves as he swallows, and after a moment too long, he looks away.

They climb back on the boat, Flynn looses the sail and steers them back toward land, and they disembark, Lucy once more watching for investigative purposes as he ties up. They dry off and she pulls on her damp clothes, as Flynn decorously turns his back and waits until she is done. Then they tramp up the bluff to the car (Lucy was thinking about retiring here, since it’s warm and sunny and beautiful and all that, but if she is elderly, all the climbing might be too much) and drive back toward the town center. The sun is getting low, her paid-for day is almost done, and despite the total disaster that was it starting out, Lucy is oddly reluctant for it to do so. As Flynn pulls up in front of the Untourist office, she says convulsively, “Maybe we should… I don’t know. I think they’re closed, anyway. You don’t have to drop me off here.”

Flynn glances at her, then considers it. He could offer to just take her back to her Airbnb (those streets really were not designed for sane drivers, and Lucy can see why tiny Smart cars are popular around here, but Flynn would absolutely not fit into one) and he still might. Then he says, “Well, technically, the day isn’t over. Do you suppose I could take you out for dinner?”

“You….” Lucy coughs. “I suppose you could.”

They find parking, and walk down into the old town, as the moon is rising over the walls, the towers are floodlit, the city gleams in the cooling dusk like its nickname, the “Pearl of the Adriatic,” and they find another cafe where the clientele is mostly local. They linger late over dinner, and Flynn says that he will in fact drive her back when they’re finally done, and as she’s about to undo her seatbelt and get out, Lucy hesitates. Then she screws up her courage, leans over, and kisses him very fast on the cheek. “Thank you,” she says. “I had – I really did have a great time.”

Flynn looks as surprised as her to hear it, but somehow and shyly gratifeid as well. A fugitive smile plays at the corner of his mouth, tentative, tender. For a moment, she thinks he might be about to kiss her back for real, but he clears his throat and holds out his hand instead. “Er,” he says. “Thank you, Dr. Preston.”

Lucy hesitates, fighting her disappointment, and shakes it back. Then she steps out of the car and unlocks the door of the apartment, as he waits to see that she gets inside without random Ragusan fiends materializing from the shrubbery. Even when she does step in, the car idles a few more moments, and she glances back, wondering – or perhaps it’s only hoping – that he’s chastising himself for letting her walk away. Then the car starts again, she can see his dark figure sitting too stiff and straight at the wheel, and she watches until the taillights vanish around a steep turn, and fade into the night.

[michaelfallcon]

In The Netherlands, Touring The Giesen Roasters Factory

Last fall, I finally got the chance to visit Giesen Coffee Roasters. Almost two years of intermittent emails, calls, texts, and mild-mannered coffee festival doorstepping had transpired between my first interview request and the morning I found myself journeying from home in Amsterdam to Giesen headquarters in Ulft. A bike, three trains, and a bus got me to the town, located in the province of Gelderland and, more precisely, within what is known as the Achterhoek, the country’s “back corner;” Germany is just a half-hour walk east.

That Monday was so chilling that most horses in fields along the way were draped with blankets and the still-erect sunflowers were suddenly shriveled. But as I would learn while sitting comfortably in the Giesen showroom that overlooks their production line, the visit’s timing was favorable. Many of their buyers want new roasters before Christmas or year-end, so I was seeing the factory in full flourish. What’s more, there was news for the new year.

In early 2019, Giesen unveiled its largest industrial-scale roaster: the W140A, which has been in development since 2017 and is named for its 140-kilo batch capacity and its automatic controls. Also due to debut is Giesen’s new roast profile software, promising to be more advanced, user-friendly, and remotely monitorable than its original version.

The Giesen W140A

Giesen is officially 12 years old, though it emerged from another entity that, in more ways than one, was its parent company. De Eik, as it was called, was a metalware factory that made parts and products for businesses in the area. One notable customer was Probat, the century-and-a-half old roaster manufacturer in Emmerich am Rhein, Germany, for whom De Eik made complete machines. De Eik was founded in 1988 by the father of Karin Bussink, who married Wilfred Giesen. When Bussink’s father died at age 50, about 25 years ago, Karin and Wilfred took over. They carried on with the metalsmithing, but in 2006, Wilfred decided to make his own fully realized roaster.

“We thought we could make a better roaster because we had the knowledge of how to build it, and we saw potential for a lot of improvements,” says Davey Giesen, Karin and Wilfred’s eldest child. “That was the point that my father designed the first roaster, the W6, and also put it on the market.”

He was just about a year old back then, but now, at age 26, is Giesen’s COO. Davey has been with the company for six years and has clearly been keeping notes.

“I think I was number 18,” he specifies, referring to where in the sequence of staff hires he falls. “So I saw the company grow.”

Studying IT and, on nights and weekends, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in management have helped prepare him for daily company duties, though his coffee education began much earlier. He got hands-on training working full-time for a year at the micro-roastery and shop that his parents ran in the nearby town of Doetinchem. They opened Koffiebranderij Venetië in 2008 “because they wanted to show how it should be done in the field,” says Davey. Besides providing a setting to test out Wilfred’s earliest products, the venue gave Giesen customers real-life, real-time lessons in running a roastery.

“But after some time,” Davey explains, “we didn’t have any time to run a roastery because of course we were getting better and better at building roasters. And we want to put the energy more into the factory than the roastery.”

Though they sold the shop about eight years ago, it still exists, and the current owners continue using the original W6A that Wilfred installed there. A souvenir from that chapter in the family’s entrepreneurial history appears in the form of the Koffiebranderij Venetië-logoed cup in which I am served coffee shortly after arriving at Giesen headquarters. Ebullient sales representative Miguel de Boer has prepared the drinks, and I talk with him before heading into the factory itself.

“We started 10 years ago with 10 people, and up until two years ago, in 2016, we had 50. In the last two years, we really expanded a lot,” he says.

Like the majority of Giesen’s staff, De Boer is a relatively recent hire. He appreciates the sales culture at Giesen after spending years as an account manager for PepsiCo, overseeing the Benelux sales of Tropicana, Gatorade, among other Big Bev and snack brands.

“In the fast-moving consumer goods, it’s hurry, hurry, hurry and small margins,” De Boer says. “Here, it’s: take it easy, big margins, no discussion about one- or two-dollar discounts. No. People might want to have a discount, but it’s not the most important thing when they want to buy quality.”

On that note, I follow De Boer on a tour. He begins in the electrical department.

“We make everything wire by wire,” he says. Here each order gets assigned a serial number and each machine-in-the-making is placed on a cart. As parts are amassed, they get checked off on a list. A photo documents the list and gets archived; this process is repeated elsewhere along the production line to ensure completeness and to keep record of what has been done when.

To expedite repairs, the warehouse shelves stay neatly stacked with piles of spare parts. In a fluorescent-lit office, a 24-hour service support staff sits, ready to field calls, emails, or Skypes from six continents. Visitors to the Giesen stand at World of Coffee 2018 may have noticed on hand some VR goggles and screens; a sales tool, they encourage prospective buyers to cozy up, virtually, to the various machines and envision how they might fit in their own workspaces.

The next department through which we wend is welding. Bodies of the roasters—as well as Giesen’s destoners, green bean conveyors, cyclones, filters, afterburners, presentation tables, and coffee bins—are made of steel. I see huge sheet metal rectangles resting on sawhorse tables, as casually available seeming as reams of paper might be in photocopy shop. Most materials are sourced from within Europe, and some come from very nearby. Ulft is situated in a region known as the Oude IJsselstreek, where the soil contains high amounts of iron, leading to a locally quite prolific industry; the earliest blast furnace is recorded as first appearing in 1689.

After assemblage, attention turns to surfaces. In the degreasing and painting department, a chemical scent hangs in the air, fittingly. Roasters come in standard black or customers can request a special paint job in up to three tones with a glossy or a matte finish. Lately, there has been demand for the unpainted raw look, which results in a griege coat that shows all the welding marks. Roofs come in stainless steel or hammered gold, and handles are made of olive, bubinga, or zebrano wood. Logos are not the only way to customize. De Boer is not being hyperbolic when he tells me anything is possible.

“You can have sparkles on it; you can even have Swarovski diamonds,” he says.

At the end of the production line, it is time for testing. This final step is usually executed by Wilfred, Davey, or Marc Weber, Giesen’s global sales manager. After three successful roasting sessions, a roaster is deemed ready to leave the factory.

A wall-mounted map in the front office is marked up with red and green radii showing the varying costs of delivery according to distance. The machines have all been assembled by hand in the Netherlands, and a bucolic Dutch touch travels with outgoing W1, W6, and W15 roasters. They reach their destinations by horse trailer, pulled by cars driven by the very mechanics who handle the installation. Larger machines go by truck while their mechanics catch a flight. Roasters bound for destinations that fall off the map are flown or sent by sea container. The company relies on 35 trained agents around the world who assist with sales, installation, and repairs. Where there are none regionally (for example, in Argentina and Maldives), Giesen headquarters deploys its own mechanics. These days, their market is wider than ever. I’m told that South Korea, China, and Germany are among the top purchasing countries. Roasters are still being shipped to Iran and Syria. And as of March 2018, Giesen appointed Pennsylvania-based agent David Sutfin for the US and plans to expand the Stateside team with three more agents.

The W6A remains the most popular model. Next is the W15A sold with an external cyclone (which permits less interrupted roasting because it does not require a user to stop mid-session to remove bean chaffs from inside the machine). The smallest-capacity model is the WP1, intended for sample roasting. What must be the very smallest Giesen ever made, however, stands on a table in the showroom where I begin and end my visit. Built in honor of Wilfred’s 50th birthday, in 2016, the delightful little dummy is, literally, fit for a Barbie Dreamhouse.

Human-size Giesen equipment is also exhibited in the showroom, as is a vintage sample roaster. Between that set-up and the espresso bar, featuring a two-group Synesso MVP, the back wall displays a collection of T-shirts lately being promoted by the new marketing department employees. A recent addition is a black fitted V-neck with the company name in swash-heavy font scripted over the fuchsia outline of a W6. It makes me think of the hot pink one- and six-kilo Giesen roasters once famously purchased by Kaffismiðja Islands coffee roasters in Reykjavik. It also reflects how this once mom-and-pop heavy-metal factory is changing with the times and appealing to a broader-hued spectrum of clients.

“They sell like crazy—people just want a T-shirt with ‘Giesen’ on it,” says De Boer.

“Even when we are at events, when we close down for the day, we have to take away these items,” he shares as he points to roaster handles, the likes of which expo attendees have apparently pilfered in the past. Still, De Boer sounds more flattered than flummoxed.

On a daily basis, Karin and Wilfred handle general management. Davey’s younger brother, Dani Giesen, oversees facilities and building management. The youngest Giesen sibling is still in secondary school, so it is premature to say if her future is at the factory. Regardless, the family is well positioned to communicate with a major rising segment of the coffee industry: younger people and their globally, millennially minded counterparts. I ask Davey what he has observed of his peers, particularly in comparison to his parents’ coffee industry cohorts.

“They do a lot of things differently,” he replies. “The older generation still want to have manual controls and want to see everything analog, and the generation after that is more about automatization, running a better business. They really use the profile system to control the roaster and all that kind of thing, so it’s more about the digital world.”

Davey Giesen

When I inquire about gender balance among clients, Davey acknowledges that “the market is more men than women.” He adds, “But we find it really good that more women are building roasteries. We also see a lot of couples doing this together, husbands and wives.”

The life-partners-as-corporate-partners format has certainly yielded much for the Giesens. In giving a new, more narrowly defined purpose to an old factory, Wilfred and Karin have enriched the specialty coffee industry with their products and their progeny. Both contributions are relatively young, but their potential to keep upping the quality of roasting and its accessibility for everyone is profound.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

The post In The Netherlands, Touring The Giesen Roasters Factory appeared first on Sprudge.

In The Netherlands, Touring The Giesen Roasters Factory published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee

[shebreathesslowly]

In The Netherlands, Touring The Giesen Roasters Factory

Last fall, I finally got the chance to visit Giesen Coffee Roasters. Almost two years of intermittent emails, calls, texts, and mild-mannered coffee festival doorstepping had transpired between my first interview request and the morning I found myself journeying from home in Amsterdam to Giesen headquarters in Ulft. A bike, three trains, and a bus got me to the town, located in the province of Gelderland and, more precisely, within what is known as the Achterhoek, the country’s “back corner;” Germany is just a half-hour walk east.

That Monday was so chilling that most horses in fields along the way were draped with blankets and the still-erect sunflowers were suddenly shriveled. But as I would learn while sitting comfortably in the Giesen showroom that overlooks their production line, the visit’s timing was favorable. Many of their buyers want new roasters before Christmas or year-end, so I was seeing the factory in full flourish. What’s more, there was news for the new year.

In early 2019, Giesen unveiled its largest industrial-scale roaster: the W140A, which has been in development since 2017 and is named for its 140-kilo batch capacity and its automatic controls. Also due to debut is Giesen’s new roast profile software, promising to be more advanced, user-friendly, and remotely monitorable than its original version.

The Giesen W140A

Giesen is officially 12 years old, though it emerged from another entity that, in more ways than one, was its parent company. De Eik, as it was called, was a metalware factory that made parts and products for businesses in the area. One notable customer was Probat, the century-and-a-half old roaster manufacturer in Emmerich am Rhein, Germany, for whom De Eik made complete machines. De Eik was founded in 1988 by the father of Karin Bussink, who married Wilfred Giesen. When Bussink’s father died at age 50, about 25 years ago, Karin and Wilfred took over. They carried on with the metalsmithing, but in 2006, Wilfred decided to make his own fully realized roaster.

“We thought we could make a better roaster because we had the knowledge of how to build it, and we saw potential for a lot of improvements,” says Davey Giesen, Karin and Wilfred’s eldest child. “That was the point that my father designed the first roaster, the W6, and also put it on the market.”

He was just about a year old back then, but now, at age 26, is Giesen’s COO. Davey has been with the company for six years and has clearly been keeping notes.

“I think I was number 18,” he specifies, referring to where in the sequence of staff hires he falls. “So I saw the company grow.”

Studying IT and, on nights and weekends, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in management have helped prepare him for daily company duties, though his coffee education began much earlier. He got hands-on training working full-time for a year at the micro-roastery and shop that his parents ran in the nearby town of Doetinchem. They opened Koffiebranderij Venetië in 2008 “because they wanted to show how it should be done in the field,” says Davey. Besides providing a setting to test out Wilfred’s earliest products, the venue gave Giesen customers real-life, real-time lessons in running a roastery.

“But after some time,” Davey explains, “we didn’t have any time to run a roastery because of course we were getting better and better at building roasters. And we want to put the energy more into the factory than the roastery.”

Though they sold the shop about eight years ago, it still exists, and the current owners continue using the original W6A that Wilfred installed there. A souvenir from that chapter in the family’s entrepreneurial history appears in the form of the Koffiebranderij Venetië-logoed cup in which I am served coffee shortly after arriving at Giesen headquarters. Ebullient sales representative Miguel de Boer has prepared the drinks, and I talk with him before heading into the factory itself.

“We started 10 years ago with 10 people, and up until two years ago, in 2016, we had 50. In the last two years, we really expanded a lot,” he says.

Like the majority of Giesen’s staff, De Boer is a relatively recent hire. He appreciates the sales culture at Giesen after spending years as an account manager for PepsiCo, overseeing the Benelux sales of Tropicana, Gatorade, among other Big Bev and snack brands.

“In the fast-moving consumer goods, it’s hurry, hurry, hurry and small margins,” De Boer says. “Here, it’s: take it easy, big margins, no discussion about one- or two-dollar discounts. No. People might want to have a discount, but it’s not the most important thing when they want to buy quality.”

On that note, I follow De Boer on a tour. He begins in the electrical department.

“We make everything wire by wire,” he says. Here each order gets assigned a serial number and each machine-in-the-making is placed on a cart. As parts are amassed, they get checked off on a list. A photo documents the list and gets archived; this process is repeated elsewhere along the production line to ensure completeness and to keep record of what has been done when.

To expedite repairs, the warehouse shelves stay neatly stacked with piles of spare parts. In a fluorescent-lit office, a 24-hour service support staff sits, ready to field calls, emails, or Skypes from six continents. Visitors to the Giesen stand at World of Coffee 2018 may have noticed on hand some VR goggles and screens; a sales tool, they encourage prospective buyers to cozy up, virtually, to the various machines and envision how they might fit in their own workspaces.

The next department through which we wend is welding. Bodies of the roasters—as well as Giesen’s destoners, green bean conveyors, cyclones, filters, afterburners, presentation tables, and coffee bins—are made of steel. I see huge sheet metal rectangles resting on sawhorse tables, as casually available seeming as reams of paper might be in photocopy shop. Most materials are sourced from within Europe, and some come from very nearby. Ulft is situated in a region known as the Oude IJsselstreek, where the soil contains high amounts of iron, leading to a locally quite prolific industry; the earliest blast furnace is recorded as first appearing in 1689.

After assemblage, attention turns to surfaces. In the degreasing and painting department, a chemical scent hangs in the air, fittingly. Roasters come in standard black or customers can request a special paint job in up to three tones with a glossy or a matte finish. Lately, there has been demand for the unpainted raw look, which results in a griege coat that shows all the welding marks. Roofs come in stainless steel or hammered gold, and handles are made of olive, bubinga, or zebrano wood. Logos are not the only way to customize. De Boer is not being hyperbolic when he tells me anything is possible.

“You can have sparkles on it; you can even have Swarovski diamonds,” he says.

At the end of the production line, it is time for testing. This final step is usually executed by Wilfred, Davey, or Marc Weber, Giesen’s global sales manager. After three successful roasting sessions, a roaster is deemed ready to leave the factory.

A wall-mounted map in the front office is marked up with red and green radii showing the varying costs of delivery according to distance. The machines have all been assembled by hand in the Netherlands, and a bucolic Dutch touch travels with outgoing W1, W6, and W15 roasters. They reach their destinations by horse trailer, pulled by cars driven by the very mechanics who handle the installation. Larger machines go by truck while their mechanics catch a flight. Roasters bound for destinations that fall off the map are flown or sent by sea container. The company relies on 35 trained agents around the world who assist with sales, installation, and repairs. Where there are none regionally (for example, in Argentina and Maldives), Giesen headquarters deploys its own mechanics. These days, their market is wider than ever. I’m told that South Korea, China, and Germany are among the top purchasing countries. Roasters are still being shipped to Iran and Syria. And as of March 2018, Giesen appointed Pennsylvania-based agent David Sutfin for the US and plans to expand the Stateside team with three more agents.

The W6A remains the most popular model. Next is the W15A sold with an external cyclone (which permits less interrupted roasting because it does not require a user to stop mid-session to remove bean chaffs from inside the machine). The smallest-capacity model is the WP1, intended for sample roasting. What must be the very smallest Giesen ever made, however, stands on a table in the showroom where I begin and end my visit. Built in honor of Wilfred’s 50th birthday, in 2016, the delightful little dummy is, literally, fit for a Barbie Dreamhouse.

Human-size Giesen equipment is also exhibited in the showroom, as is a vintage sample roaster. Between that set-up and the espresso bar, featuring a two-group Synesso MVP, the back wall displays a collection of T-shirts lately being promoted by the new marketing department employees. A recent addition is a black fitted V-neck with the company name in swash-heavy font scripted over the fuchsia outline of a W6. It makes me think of the hot pink one- and six-kilo Giesen roasters once famously purchased by Kaffismiðja Islands coffee roasters in Reykjavik. It also reflects how this once mom-and-pop heavy-metal factory is changing with the times and appealing to a broader-hued spectrum of clients.

“They sell like crazy—people just want a T-shirt with ‘Giesen’ on it,” says De Boer.

“Even when we are at events, when we close down for the day, we have to take away these items,” he shares as he points to roaster handles, the likes of which expo attendees have apparently pilfered in the past. Still, De Boer sounds more flattered than flummoxed.

On a daily basis, Karin and Wilfred handle general management. Davey’s younger brother, Dani Giesen, oversees facilities and building management. The youngest Giesen sibling is still in secondary school, so it is premature to say if her future is at the factory. Regardless, the family is well positioned to communicate with a major rising segment of the coffee industry: younger people and their globally, millennially minded counterparts. I ask Davey what he has observed of his peers, particularly in comparison to his parents’ coffee industry cohorts.

“They do a lot of things differently,” he replies. “The older generation still want to have manual controls and want to see everything analog, and the generation after that is more about automatization, running a better business. They really use the profile system to control the roaster and all that kind of thing, so it’s more about the digital world.”

Davey Giesen

When I inquire about gender balance among clients, Davey acknowledges that “the market is more men than women.” He adds, “But we find it really good that more women are building roasteries. We also see a lot of couples doing this together, husbands and wives.”

The life-partners-as-corporate-partners format has certainly yielded much for the Giesens. In giving a new, more narrowly defined purpose to an old factory, Wilfred and Karin have enriched the specialty coffee industry with their products and their progeny. Both contributions are relatively young, but their potential to keep upping the quality of roasting and its accessibility for everyone is profound.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

The post In The Netherlands, Touring The Giesen Roasters Factory appeared first on Sprudge.

from Sprudge http://bit.ly/2WYei6t

[uprootedandrelentless]

Catching Up - Miraya

This December while I was traveling in Budapest with Olivia we started talking about how we should continue Uprooted and Relentless. It had been two years since we’d posted last and we were all in such different places than before. While in our hotel, we had a Skype call with Elaine, fueled to get the blog going again. Then Christmas hit, then New Years, we all got busy and no one posted. Out of the blue a few days into the new year I received an email from a girl I’d met in New York; she was just dropping me a note to let me know that she’d been reading our old blog as she navigates “the struggles of 20-something adult life” and said it was comforting and inspiring to get a glimpse into our journeys, knowing where she is now, a few years behind. Well I took that as an ah-ha moment that we must start writing again! Maybe we’ll inspire others, but at very least we’ll motivate ourselves and each other as we navigate the remaining years of our 20s.

So how to start? Two years ago when I last posted I was just launching my events company, Pop Productions. Now two years later I finally feel like the pieces are starting to line up, but still there is so much to learn and figure out. Each day and month have been so different, with the uncertainty of client work and project deadlines. I’ve gotten to organize some pretty incredible events all over the world from a Kiva launch for 1000 community members in Oakland to The ShopUp boutique children’s shopping fairs in LA, NY and London and Airbnb host conferences in Chicago and New York. I also partnered with my friend Liang to launch New York’s first dessert festival, Dessert Goals, which wildly exceeded our expectations. If you had asked in the beginning of 2016 what I would be doing at the end of the year, I never would have guessed I’d be planning a dessert festival, but now I couldn’t imagine not doing it.

I’m still figuring out what Pop Productions is and the types of events I want to focus on but along this journey I definitely feel like I’m getting closer to creating the life I want to live. In March I moved into my own one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and created a Pop Productions studio out of the living room, with crafting accessories, storage for event supplies and decor galore. I wanted to create a living and working environment for myself where I could be productive from home while making my own coffee and lunches. In the beginning of the year I had two contract employees and it was motivating creating a team, then a few months after that it was back to just me. In June I hired my first full time contractor who would work from my home most days. As we entered into the busy fall season of events, we divided outreach and tasks. Then at the end of the event contracts, it was back to me myself and I. With all the travel this year for work, I extended my trips to see friends and family. While running Pop Productions solo I have much more flexibility to work remotely. Right now I envision two futures for Pop Productions; in one version I imagine a team of us working out of an office but I also see another version where it’s just myself, bringing contractors on for specific events, with more freedom to travel. For now I feel like I can’t really plan out one over the other, I just have to see what happens with the clients and events I work on and when/if it makes sense to grow my team.

At the end of October I wrapped up all of my events for the calendar year except for The ShopUp in December in London. It was the strangest feeling from the weeks before not being able to sleep because of to do lists running through my head and calls all day, to then having no concrete deadlines or tasks. I knew I’d be planning The ShopUp twice in 2017 and Liang and I had plans for growing Dessert Goals, so there was plenty I could be doing, but since The ShopUp was flying me to London for the event and I had this break in my schedule, I decided to take some time to travel. What I thought would be a solo trip turned into a 23 day whirlwind in 11 cities and meeting up with friends and family along the way. 5 nights in London, 2 in Budapest, 3 in Amsterdam, 4 in Belgium, 5 in Spain and 3 in Portugal. As usual on my trips I often think I’ll have some great revelation, discover something about myself, be inspired - and as usual this didn’t happen. I ate so much amazing food, explored castles, relaxed in ancient baths, devoured chocolates, and enjoyed life. I slept peacefully each night with the only stress of what time to catch a flight or re-packing my suitcase, no emails and contracts to dread. Occasionally anxiety would hit that I needed to be planning, but I tried to remind myself that after a year of hard work I deserved this break to unplug.

2017 is about to bring a lot of changes for me, the biggest is this April I’ll be leaving New York to move to Los Angeles with my boyfriend Matt. I never thought I would leave New York, especially for a guy, but here I am. Even though I’ve been here for almost 5 years, I don’t feel like I’m done with New York, I still love the energy and the people, and I know I’ll be back lots. As cliche as it sounds, my love for Matt exceeds my love for New York. When I’m with him I feel at home more than I do in New York. Matt is moving to LA to pursue screenwriting and I’ll be joining him to expand Dessert Goals, The ShopUp and whatever other event opportunities come my way on the west coast (or elsewhere, as I can still travel for events!).

Matt and I have known each other for 12 years, we went to high school and college together, and have been dating since May long distance (he’s in Oakland). I’ll be moving all my belongings across the country and moving in with a guy for the first time. After being long distance for almost a year and seeing each other for a few days every month, it’s going to be quite the adjustment of seeing each other every day and both of us working from home. I’m definitely nervous but I’m mostly excited. It feels like the perfect next step for us to go to a new city together as opposed to sliding into one of our own cities and lives. We’ll decorate our home, discover restaurants, establish friends, together.

I just finished reading the book The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them about how your 20s are your most important years of your life. A friend suggested I read it and instantly I thought that it sounded stressful, but decided to give it a shot. The book is broken up into three sections, work, love and mind & body as the author, Meg Jay who got her PHD in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley (Go Bears!), chats with clients, recites stats and shares advice on navigating situations in your 20s. One of my takeaways was about how influential your 20s are in gaining experiences to navigate the rest of your life. The connections, the capital, the learnings will be what impact the next steps. I always have felt by 30 I’ll have it all figured out, a common feeling amongst the subjects in the book, but as long as we’re taking active steps towards figuring it out, we’re headed in the right direction.

With the upcoming move to Los Angeles, constant uncertainty of client work or my daily schedule, it’s easy to stress. I’m honestly not sure what Pop Productions will look like when I’m 30 (which is only 3.5 years away) or even the end of this year. But I do know I’m meeting so many people, gaining valuable experiences and putting on events I am proud of. I’m excited what the future unfolds… and to share the journey here.

I got to see my Uprooted ladies more this year than ever before! Claire, who lives in Oakland, where Matt lives, jokes that Matt is good for our friendship which is true because I get to see her so much! I visited Elaine in Irvine when I was in LA for meetings and saw Olivia in New York, London and Budapest. Here are some photos of us that make me smile :)

-Miraya