Our coffee service originates with a love story between two enterprising MBA students at the Tuck School of Business in the early 90’s. Upon graduation, in addition to deciding to get married, they dreamed of launching a new venture; a coffee shop to ride the success the sector was experiencing fueled by the meteoric growth of Starbucks. Together they hatched a plan. He would go to Bain Capital to perfect the art of getting a start-up funded and she would go to the management training program at Dunkin Donuts to get in depth knowledge of how to operate and grow the company they wanted to build. One year later, Caribou Coffee was born.
Luckily for us these successful entrepreneurs are family to our very own PocoJoe. A surgeon by trade and a tinkerer at heart, he’d had a long simmering interest in the mechanics of coffee makers. “They provide an opportunity to work on machinery that is not working on cars,” he explained. After a trial year of bringing a kitchen size espresso machine to Black Rock City, he wanted to kick his operation into high gear. Focusing on making coffee at Burning Man made perfect sense to him. “It involves plumbing, steam, fire, and an opportunity for mass casualty. You can’t get more Burning Man than that!”
With this fire in his heart, he contacted his niece and asked for a referral to someone who could get him started on learning how to source and work on an industrial espresso machine. She gave him the contact information for four different repair shops. “She didnt know which one could help me, but she knew that one of them could,” he said. Help they did! During a phone call one of the men he spoke to mentioned that he had a machine under his desk that was doing nothing but causing bruised knee caps. He offered to give the machine to Joe free of charge.
Word Play Cafe: Coffee by the numbers
- 10 Gallons of Coffee every morning
- 5 gallons in the evening.
- That’s 240 cups a day, weighing in at 15 pounds of beans per day.
- All coffee will be made with compostable filters and will be brought home from the playa and put in the green bin.
Fast forward a few weeks and a pallet arrived in his driveway. The machine was a mess but he rolled up his sleeves and got to work. His primary goal was to convert the machine from the industry standard electric motor to a gas powered motor with a manual pump. Old fashioned machines used a spring loaded piston to pump the water and he was able to get the machine working in this style allowing him to serve high quality espresso at a larger scale with no electricity.
Once he had his machine working, he started going out to the playa during build week, providing artists with high quality espresso to fuel their long hours of set up. During the Burn, he would move his operation to camp at the BLD which was conveniently located near Rods Road. He fondly remembers a friendly competition with neighboring Camp Nosefish. They also provided coffee to Burners but their campers came to Joe for their own coffee needs.
Despite a solid design, the espresso machine did not always perform as needed. Often it would get a bubble that kept water from flowing called a vapor lock. He would dramatically beat the machine with a wrench to unstick it. “It became a piece of performance art,” he recalled.
After a few years of running the espresso operation, it was time to scale up again. “I wanted to move from serving espresso one cup at a time to producing coffee multiple gallons at a time,” he explained. His next move was to build “The Big Drip”. This contraption allows him to make drip coffee 10 cones at a time in parallel. In addition to serving more Burners, this approach is greener and leads to less water waste than making espresso. The Big Drip is coming back to the playa in 2022 to brew all the coffee for the Word Play Cafe.
Over the years Joe has taken great pleasure in bringing smiles to the faces of Burners who come by to get quality coffee. He has also had a little fun at their expense, especially those who dared drop by without their own cup or thermos. He always had some cups on hand to give out with the words “Shots Fired” imprinted on the side. To get a cup they had to sing a rousing rendition of his one line theme song. “Even a fucking virgin knows to bring their own cup to Burning Man!”
We can not talk about coffee at the 2022 Burn without addressing the closure of the Center Camp Cafe. Like many Burners, Joe took the news of the closing with a heavy heart. He called upon the rich history of coffee shops specifically as places where people gather to talk about new ideas and connect with one another. For many, the cafe has been the heart of Black Rock City and there is concern that the art and performances will not be enough to draw people into Center Camp at the scale required to maintain this.
As we discussed the closure in depth, Joe also pointed out that Burning Man will lose an important opportunity for participation that is strictly egalitarian. Unlike many other departments where volunteering requires training or a selective recruiting process there was a place for everyone who wanted to volunteer at the cafe. The closure also leaves a core group of people who have been essential to the operation of the cafe without a project and without a camp. “They got the rug pulled out from under them,” he lamented.
Happily, in hopes of saving us all from a Burn plagued by instant coffee, SnoCone, the man who ran the Cafe is stepping up to provide planning and ground support to projects like ours. He is helping Joe determine what supplies are needed for the increased production this year and has introduced us to the vendor who has been the provider of coffee beans to Burning Man for over 20 years. Joe explained that they have created a custom roast for the Playa because our taste buds actually work differently out there due to the dust that accumulates in our mouths, noses and throats. Offering a brew that accounts for this is part of the Burning Man magic we will bring to Black Rock City.
Before letting Joe go, I asked him his Wordle strategy. “I try to relax with it rather than obsess over it,” he shared. He eschews the quest for perfect start words and instead picks a random five letter word and explores if he can get the answer but does not take it to heart if he does not. Interestingly, his love for Wordle is similar to the ideas we discussed about Center Camp Cafe volunteers. He appreciates that the words are accessible unlike crossword puzzles whose clues and answers can be quite obscure. “I could not solve a New York Times Sunday puzzle with three lifetimes and access to the internet,” he joked.
His favorite Wordle answer so far is one of the ones that got away; “Swill” which for someone whose playa passion is serving high quality coffee seems oddly apropos.
