If you have a social media and follow coffee brands, you’ve no doubt by now seen hi-res action photography depicting dramatic arcs of coffee being flung high into the air from a Chemex or once-mighty latte art cascading towards the ground and not its actual home: someone’s mouth. If you dig a little deeper into coffee Instagram, you’d find @wastingcoffee, a satirical account by Umeko Motoyoshi, a Sprudge Twenty inductee and Sprudgie Award winner. Gathering literal far flung coffee images, @wastingcoffee uses dry, tongue-in-cheek humor to highlight one of coffee’s most confounding marketing practices.
And now, the Instagram account is going analog with Motoyoshi’s brand new book The @wastingcoffee Guide To Not Wasting Coffee. Building off the popularity of the Instagram, the book will use wasted-coffee-as-marketing to expand upon conversations about waste taking place in the digital space as well as present ideas on more mindful sustainability practices.
Sponsored by Faema, The @wastingcoffee Guide To Not Wasting Coffee is a complete labor of love by Motoyoshi, who is solely responsible for every step in the publishing process. In the book, Motoyoshi discusses the “value of coffee,” an idea seemingly at odds with throwing the end result of many people’s hard work up in the air just for a cool snap (and one that everyone already has anyway). From there the book dives into strategies for reducing waste at the cafe. According to the press release, it also “introduces a holistic operational approach to reducing waste and lowering costs, while increasing quality, customer experience, and team morale,” including exploring the green coffees that roasteries choose to purchase and from there moves into roasting, brewing, the math behind extraction yield, barista training, latte art throwdowns, and more.”
Corresponding with the June 15th release of The @wastingcoffee Guide To Not Wasting Coffee, Faema will be hosting Motoyoshi at 198 Allen Street in New York City as part of their month-long Pop-Up Coffee Shop. Taking place at 6pm on the release date, Motoyoshi will “lead an in-depth class exploring sustainable alternatives to the coffee industry’s more wasteful practices.” Tickets for the event are $20 and can be purchased on Eventbrite. Included in the cost of admission is a copy of The @wastingcoffee Guide To Not Wasting Coffee.
For those unable to attend the NYC event, The @wastingcoffee Guide To Not Wasting Coffee will be available for purchase via Motoyoshi’s website Umeshiso.com, your one-stop shop for “gay spoons,” zines, buttons, and wildflower seeds.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
Top image via Umeko Motoyoshi
