writing has no tasting room

I watched a friend taste coffee once with the kind of attention most people reserve for grief. He’d left software a few months earlier for coffee, and something had changed in how he held a cup. The tilt, the pause before the first sip, the way his face registered extraction like a sentence he was still parsing. He handed me the cup afterward. I drank it. Something passed between us in the tasting, though I couldn’t name what.

I left software too, around the same time, for a different kind of craft. Writing, synthesis, building a system for thinking. We were both chasing something we’d call taste if pressed. His taste was in the cup. Mine was in a vault of notes no one else could see.

The thing I notice about his craft is what the medium offers. You roast a batch, you brew it for someone, they take a sip and their face changes. The feedback loop closes in real time. The tasting is shared. The skill is visible in the drinking. The whole practice points outward by design. The meal, the bar, the tasting room — social forms that double as creative forms. The act of making and the act of being with people happen at the same table.

Writing has no tasting room. The essay arrives complete. The song arrives complete. You can discuss them afterward, but you can’t participate in the making. The taste that produced the work stays invisible, and what the reader encounters is the surface, polished and sealed. Book clubs try to open it up. Writing workshops try. The gap stays. The reader engages with the product. The years of accumulated observation that produced it — threads followed without knowing why, images that kept returning, the slow accretion of what matters — all of that lives inside.

So the writer sits with developed taste and no structural way for that taste to produce company. You publish and hope. Or you stop publishing and carry the archive privately. Either way, the distance between having something real inside and being found through it stays open.

I’ve been sitting in that distance for a while. Years of notes, observations, connections between things I didn’t know were connected until I wrote them down. The archive keeps growing richer and more isolating at the same rate. I built it through friction — the specific friction of noticing what others take for granted, of choosing this over that until the choices compounded into something I’d trust enough to leave a career for. The taste is real. The depth is real. And the depth produces a particular kind of loneliness.

Buechner wrote something that keeps finding me: “My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.” It finds me every time. The stories that matter produce recognition. The reader thinks “that’s mine too.” That’s what literature does when it’s working. And recognition operates on different material than publishing does. A finished essay, a mixed song, a bound book — those are the package. The material of recognition is rawer. A half-formed observation, a thread followed for months without knowing why, an image that keeps returning. The stuff that lives in the notebook.

Right now the last mile between carrying something and being recognized by someone who carries something adjacent depends entirely on publishing. Finish the thought. Package it. Put it somewhere public. Hope the network delivers it to the right stranger. That’s the interface we have for the thing Buechner describes. A compression of years of discernment into a finished surface. The reader encounters the conclusion. The person who might have recognized themselves in the raw material of the thinking never gets to see it.

I visited a working garden in Kona once, on a campus where students tended the plants. The keeper said at the start: “This is a working garden, and it’s not user-friendly. Please be careful.” Our knowledge is not user-friendly. The things we carry — observations, connections drawn over years, questions we sit inside without answers — none of it is designed for easy access. The garden blooms because someone has been tending it.

The vault is a working garden. Every writer’s notebook is. Every songwriter’s voice memos, every thinker’s margin notes. The material accumulates through patient attention, and patient attention is exactly what makes it invisible to anyone who isn’t doing the tending. Writing, when it finally ships, is the garden photographed from above. The photograph travels. The garden stays where it is.

A tasting room for thinking. A place where the accumulated threads could be encountered by someone carrying adjacent ones. Where your fragment meets their fragment and what passes between you is that recognition. Where the notebook finds the person who needs it, the way a book sometimes finds you on a shelf you weren’t browsing with any intention.

My friend is still figuring it out too. But his craft has a counter to stand behind, a cup to hand someone. Mine keeps its depth inside. I keep building the archive deeper instead of figuring out the last few feet. The distance is the thing I keep building around.