Every Cup Tells a Story: Ivan Spasov of Story

A coffee shop called Story whose motto is "Every cup tells a story" reads like a closed loop - the name explains the motto, the motto explains the name. Across Ivan Spasov's ten answers, though, the story is almost never Story's own. It belongs to the farmer, to the person on the other side of the bar, and to the regular who has not turned up for three days.

Story will be among the participants at Good Coffee Festival in Sofia this September. What follows comes from a Slow Made City conversation ahead of the festival - ten short questions, none of them about turnover or locations.

The story he wants to hear is not his own

The first question was what he would ask the farmer who grew his beans. The answer did not head for a farm; it headed for a table.

"We would sit down over a cup of coffee and listen to his story - how he started, what motivates him, what coffee means to him. Because for us there is a person behind every bean, with a great deal of dedication and work in them."

IVAN SPASOV, STORY

Specialty already knows a fair amount about the farmer. The bag carries a farm name, an altitude, a varietal and a processing method - data that simply did not travel with coffee twenty years ago. What still does not travel is why the person does it.

The answer to "how he started" has nowhere to be printed. It does not go into the lot description and passes only through conversation - farmer to importer, importer to roaster, roaster to barista - thinning with every handover. Ivan wants it from the source, sitting down, cup in hand, which is the only way a thing like that survives.

Refuge, stage, mirror - by the clock

Asked whether a coffee shop is a refuge, a stage or a mirror, most people pick one. Ivan refused the choice and split the day instead.

"For us the coffee shop can be all three at different hours of the day: in the morning it is a refuge for the people waking up, in the afternoon it is a stage for conversations and meetings, and in the evening, when we close, it is a mirror that shows us the tiredness and the satisfaction."

IVAN SPASOV, STORY

The division is practical rather than poetic. The morning shift is a different business from the afternoon one - orders are short and repetitive, conversation is down to two sentences, and every second of delay shows up in the queue. In the afternoon the same bar runs on people staying: they sit, order a second, ask questions the morning has no time for at all.

The third one - the evening - is the only one the customer never sees. A business measures itself in cups sold, but the person who has been on their feet since six measures it by what is left of them at eight. The tiredness and the satisfaction come out of the same shift.

Self-taught, by way of curiosity

The question of who taught him the most important thing about coffee usually produces a name - a mentor, a first boss, the person from the first coffee shop. Here it produced a method.

"We gathered most of what we know on our own - from books, from the internet, from conversations, and above all from constant curiosity."

IVAN SPASOV, STORY

Bulgaria has no academy you pass through and come out a barista. The knowledge is assembled in pieces - a translated book, a forum, an afternoon with a roaster who has no reason to explain anything and explains anyway. Nothing along that route checks whether you understood it correctly. Only the cup checks, and it checks late.

The same thing came through in the answer to a question with no practical answer: what they would do with their hands if coffee vanished tomorrow.

"We consider ourselves fairly creative, and we like trying new things. But we would rather not get to the point of finding out what we would do with our hands."

IVAN SPASOV, STORY

The answer is half a joke. Someone who got this far on their own knows they would get somewhere else too, and would rather not have to.

The cup that went out too fast

We asked whether he had ever been ashamed of a cup he had served. The answer did not hide behind "everyone makes mistakes at the start".

"Yes. Anyone who cares about quality has had a moment early on when they handed over drinks knowing they were not perfect - simply because of haste or nerves."

IVAN SPASOV, STORY

The two causes are different faults. Haste is a shot pulled before the grinder has been dialled back in after a new batch - the time runs short and the cup comes out sour while it is still running. Nerves are the other one: you can see the milk has been overheated and you hand the cup over anyway, because three people are waiting at the bar and nobody wants to make a second attempt in front of them.

Whoever remembers those cups looked at them for longer than the customer who drank them.

The translation is the harder part

Which is harder, making good coffee or explaining it? The answer came without hesitation, and with a reason attached.

"Explaining it. Making good coffee is a matter of technique and experience, but translating it for the customer without offending them is harder."

IVAN SPASOV, STORY

"Without offending them" is the whole job. Behind the bar you are explaining to someone who did not ask for an explanation and often already holds a view - that sour coffee has gone off, that brewing it longer makes it stronger, that espresso is supposed to be bitter. Each of those has an answer, and the answer is rarely welcome.

So the translation is a skill separate from the craft. It asks you to judge in a second how much the person opposite actually wants to hear and to stop exactly there - one sentence further and the conversation becomes a lecture nobody paid for.

The answer to whether a bad person can make good coffee came from the same direction.

"They can execute the perfect recipe, but when the attitude is not there, the feeling of the drink is lost."

IVAN SPASOV, STORY

A recipe is written in numbers - 18 grams in, 36 out, somewhere around 27 seconds - and it does not depend on a person's character. That is exactly why it is not enough. The rest, whether they offer you something else to try, whether they admit the shot did not come out, is written down nowhere and is tasted in the cup because it is felt in the moment around it.

"Even people in a hurry deserve it"

The question of what someone loses by drinking their coffee standing up, on the way somewhere, usually gets one answer from coffee people: they lose everything. Here it came in two halves.

"They lose the chance to stop for a moment. But we work on the principle that even people in a hurry deserve good coffee, even if it is not in porcelain."

IVAN SPASOV, STORY

The first half is true. Stopping is part of the drink - between the order and the first sip there is a minute in which nothing else is being done, and that is precisely the minute missing for the person holding a cup at a traffic light.

The second half is a decision. The paper cup is usually treated as a compromise a place makes reluctantly; here it is accepted as a case of equal standing. Story also works on wheels - the cart goes out to markets, festivals and events where nobody sits down and everything is drunk standing up. Holding that the coffee has to be good there too costs more than the opposite position.

The last question was whether there is a customer he worries about when they do not come in.

"Yes. Luckily we have regulars we can comfortably call our friends, and we would be quite worried if they missed their caffeine dose several days in a row."

IVAN SPASOV, STORY

This is information only the bar holds. A coffee shop knows who comes past at what hour and when they stopped coming past - without having asked and without having written it down anywhere. The absence registers because the presence was daily.

Which closes the motto. Asked what would be carved above the door if the coffee shop had one, Ivan answered with the sentence that is also the name:

"Every cup tells a story."

IVAN SPASOV, STORY

Read as a slogan, it is a tautology. Read through the other nine answers, it is an instruction: the story in the cup is not the coffee shop's, it belongs to the farmer who got up early and to the person who stopped by. In September Story will be at the festival - the cart, the paper cup and all the rest. Ask who grew the bean and you will get more than the name of a farm.