Our Thoughts

Everything you need to know about coffee's most opinionated brewer — the good, the gritty, and the glorious By the Bark & Beans Team·9 min read·barkandbeans.org Ask ten coffee drinkers what they think of the French press and you'll get ten different answers. Some swear by it as the purest, most honest cup they've ever tasted — rich, full-bodied, unapologetically bold. Others gave theirs away after six months of muddy cups and sediment-speckled sips. Both groups are right, which is what makes...

On the quiet art of reading with coffee — and why Project Hail Mary might be the best book to start with By the Bark & Beans Team · 8 min read · barkandbeans.org Some of life's great pleasures arrive as a package deal. Coffee and a good conversation. A dog walk and a podcast. A rainy afternoon and a novel you can't put down. This last combination — the book, the brew, the unhurried hour — is one we think about a lot here at Bark & Beans. It is, in its quiet way, a perfect thing. Reading with...

A love letter to tea, masala chai, and the art of brewing loose leaf the right way By the Bark & Beans Team · 9 min read · barkandbeans.org Coffee gets the romance. The origin stories, the single-estate obsessions, the barista competitions, the Instagram aesthetic of a perfectly poured rosetta. Tea, meanwhile, has been quietly doing something far older and, arguably, far deeper — weaving itself into the daily rhythms of billions of people across every culture on earth, asking for nothing more...

There's a particular kind of morning that doesn't announce itself. No agenda, no alarm with a purpose behind it. Just the sound of the grinder, the slow exhale of the kettle, and the person you love still warm from sleep, settling into their chair across from you. Two cups on the table. Nowhere to be.

If you're a dog parent in the Pacific Northwest, you already know the feeling — that moment in early May when the rain softens, the rhododendrons burst into bloom, and your dog stares at the back door with an expression that can only mean one thing: let's go.

I have a varied taste in books. Growing up, I was a fantasy and science fiction nerd. I needed the escapism of those books, while enjoying the moral and philosophical challenges presented by that genre of fiction. From my college years, I have various philosophical works, biographies, modern novels etc. In the last decade, I’ve picked up reading stories of real-life spies. Not semi-fictional works of authors like Le Carre; but non-fiction spy stories. The first was The Billion Dollar Spy ,...

The same week I turned 51, Blake had his last chemo treatment. My cup has been overfull for too long.