Tony “Tonx” Konecny is a bit like the Forrest Gump of recent specialty coffee history: if you look hard enough, chances are you’d find him somewhere on the scene, sipping coffee quietly in the background, observing the events he helped frame.

Oof, that’s good, wish we’d thought of that. As is often his wont, Tonx treads on the subtly controversial when discussing recent trends and vogues in the specialty coffee world:

“The pendulum has swung too far in the direction where, from the public’s perception, we fetishize the craft, we fetishize the equipment,” Konecny says. “We made it more confusing, and we’re not teaching customers to understand that they can better coffee themselves.” As a result, “The story often ends up being too much about brands, and machines, and expertise, and not very often about what’s in the cup. And why what’s in the cup is good….We figure, we’re going to learn a lot of stuff in the beginning and make a lot of mistakes, and there’s no reason to publish any manifestos or blow any trumpets until we know what we’re doing,” Konecny says.”

Read the full article here, and bear witness to Nguyen’s valiant attempt to photograph Tonx’s nigh-unphotographable Silver Surfer coffee bags, the best available photo of said having been snapped for Sprudge by @smoovebcoffee back in August.

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