Member Spotlight: An Interview with Arno Holschuh
/By Hylan Joseph
Arno Holschuh is an incredibly fascinating individual. A consummate conversationalist, he was one of the early hires at Blue Bottle and has been involved with the specialty coffee community since early 2004. He now works with roasting innovator Bellwether Coffee.
Arno was an early member of the guild and has been a great contributor. He has also served the role as my co-educator for the barista basic services at The Crown in Oakland and, to date, has taught five classes with me.
Hylan Joseph: Tell me about yourself.
Arno Holschuh: Let’s see. I’m a nerdy, technically minded, lifelong coffee person. I first roasted in about 1995 on a homemade Sivetz roaster in my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. I really launched my career at Blue Bottle, where I started in 2004, and where I stayed until 2014.
I’ve worn a lot of the hats there are to wear in our industry – roaster, green buyer, barista, production floor worker, and a long stint as an espresso tech. I used to joke that the only job I’d never had was as a delivery driver, but that’s not strictly true: I actually have delivered a couple totes of coffee at times. I ended up in the management lane because I saw the damage bad managers could do, and I wanted to do better.
Now I work at a roaster manufacturer. It’s fascinating to experience the equipment industry from the other side, and really empowering to be in discussions about how to make our roaster reliable and serviceable.
HJ: What is it you find most fascinating about the service business?
AH: I have always been passionate about demystifying things. Being a tech, you get to understand why espresso machines perform the way they do on a much deeper level than is experienced by the average barista. Most baristas working on E61 clones know some rudimentary stuff about how to get good shots from their machine (like dispense water through the group until it stops hissing). But you have to really understand a heat exchanger to know why. Similarly, unless you’re disassembling that E61 lever valve and servicing it, you don’t really get what’s happening when you turn the lever, and how you could use it to pre-infuse a puck.
There all sorts of examples like this. Why does a San Marco lever group make better shots than an Astoria lever group? Why do heat exchangers in Kees van der Westens’ machines work so well for temperature control? And, along my path, I started to peek under the hood of roasters. What makes a Probat UG-22 a more commonly desirable roaster than an L-12?
HJ: Where do you see the service industry going in the next five, ten years?
AH: Young, diverse, and proud. The entire industry has been dominated by – to be totally honest – guys like me. Just for clarity, I am white, middle-aged and male. And dorky. That’s not going to do anymore. We need to make sure the cadre of techs reflects the world we live in. This career path is awesome – you can step in with little or no formal knowledge, get educated, and make a living wage for the rest of your life. It should be open to everyone.
And if we don’t open it, everyone loses. We don’t have enough techs, and the techs out there need to expand their knowledge to include the new devices manufacturers are producing. There’s a clear problem when a broad, diverse group of people want skills that lead to high-quality jobs, and employers are desperate for skilled professionals to do that job. That’s where vocational training comes in, the kind of training we’re delivering through the CTG.
HJ: What do you think of the changes over the last ten years in the specialty coffee industry as a whole?
AH: As an industry, we have realigned ourselves. Back in the “oughts” we all used to just chase quality as the number one thing. Quality was that thing we were busy defining while we were pursuing it. It turns out that we may not mean the same thing when we say “quality” as our customers do.
And over the “teens,” some people are still forged ahead with a quality-first approach: Ever higher cup scores, exotic processing techniques, discovery of heirloom genetics. I’ve tasted some amazing coffees. Temperature and pressure regulation were essentially solved as engineering problems by espresso machine manufacturers, which opened up new vistas for this group. But they must face up to the fact that quality and the third wave did not fix everything like we thought it would.
Other companies added a second value to manage: Fixing things. They wanted to solve the systemic challenges we face as an industry. People started to get real about our relative lack of diversity in our staff and customers, the inequities in farmer payments, and the worsening climate crisis.
And, it has to be said, a third group of companies has been purchased in a wave of consolidation. This has extended their reach (and allowed their founders to access some transformative wealth) but reduced their ability to do nimble, innovative things. Sometimes being bought makes a company more responsible – I mean big companies often do have really great buying practices. But so far, this bunch has not taken any drastic action to shore up farmer livelihood or diversify our market. I think that’s actually going to change as players see what will happen to their game if they don’t act.
And finally, we still have a tribe of weirdos, bless their hearts. These companies are sometimes reaching new markets, selling new products, doing things in cool new ways. I loved the Locol $1 cup. Back in 2016, Tony Konecny figured out how to sell a good cup for just a dollar. It’s so cool that you could have a mass-market, sustainable coffee that anyone could afford, and such an antidote to this notion of ever-higher prices here and ever lower prices at the farmgate.
HJ: Where do you see specialty coffee going in the next five, ten years?
AH: I’ll tell you where we will land if we play our cards right: We will be running carbon-neutral cafes, staffed by skilled professionals, devoid of snobbish snark. We will be present in our communities as a place to bridge cultural divides. Like that whole “third place” idea Starbucks champions? I actually think that’s real and necessary. And finally, we will have figured out how to craft a sustainable relationship with our farmers.
Or, if we continue to act like we have no problems to solve, we will divide ourselves along the same lines the rest of humanity seems to be breaking down along. Imagine roasters that cater to nostalgia and others that are focused on virtue signaling. That is kind of already here.
What else in the dystopian universe? We’ll offer baristas wages that cannot sustain them. Good coffee will be a luxury good for the wealthy. And we’ll keep burning gas in our roasters and delivery vans while watching farms and cafes be destroyed by climate and weather events. Dark stuff, right? But it doesn’t have to be that way.
I have to give our parent organization a plug: The SCA is getting itself together to help us face down the scary stuff. They are starting to really blaze the trail. More and more, it’s clear what to do if you care. People just need to start acting.
HJ: What steps did you take to become a tech?
AH: I took the classic, time-honored path of completely disassembling someone else’s La Marzocco Linea. And then almost completely reassembling it, about 75% correctly. I owe a lot to that machine’s owner. I probably owe even more to my friend who let me install that wildly unprofessional rebuild in one of his best shops. I owe a lot to peers who used to give me gentle nudges on what I was doing wrong.
Photo courtesy of Bellwether Coffee