“You will fuck up the thing if you try to perfect it. But you can perfect it from the point of completion.”

Jason E. C. Wright

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​Relaunching my website wasn't on my 2026 bingo card, and yet, here we are.

I spent the first ten weeks of this year as a student, undergoing a transformation that was Dante's Inferno-levels of deep, in a program called the Burntsienna Calibrations. I learned how to apply slow research methodology using my own project, Ghost Town Oats, as the case study.

To describe my work and the people I'm aiming to reach, I now have a visual reference library, enterprise-level contemporaries with aligned strategic values to point to for understanding what I've built, and an internal vetting system through which anybody and anything requesting entrance into my universe are now filtered.

Next to maintaining the discipline of protecting time to invest in the development of my projects, one of the biggest takeaways from the experience was clarifying my connection to hospitality—and thus, The Chocolate Barista.

For a moment, I believed my true destiny lie in building out Ghost Town's world into the Les Clefs d'Or of specialty coffee with a special events & marketing arm; the product remaining as a consumable manifestation of my service.

But, Ghost Town was actually nothing more than my program case study. It is a proven product-based framework for culturally-informed hospitality. (And probably, one of many.)

I launched The Chocolate Barista in 2016. My intention, then, was to show the world that specialty coffee baristas also included someone like me. And because there was a specialty coffee barista that looked like me, sounded like me, and came from where I came from, how I therefore approached my job was inclusive, thoughtful, and patient by nature. At the time, it was all wildly revolutionary.

So much so, that my June 7, 2016 essay attempting to understand the notion that "Black people don't drink coffee," and how the intersection of my race & gender beget unsavory café workplace experiences went viral overnight.

Even in its profound impact on the industry—still felt today, mind you—that essay was actually nothing more than an example of how coffee desperately needs culturally-informed hospitality.

I've killed and re-birthed The Chocolate Barista so many times, I've lost count. In every iteration, I felt a step closer to figuring out The Entire Point™. As if immersed in a vivid dream, unaware I've been sleepwalking for miles, clarifying the root source of my work is what led me over the course of a decade; unconsciously, until now.

The work is embedded in a cross-cultural fluency applicable to hospitality, but designed for coffee.

The work isn't even groundbreaking—coffee culture is an abundance of well-established examples of it already in practice: CXFFEEBLACK, Kohiko Coffee House, Recuerdos Cafe, Driftaway Coffee, to name a few.

My recent revelation of The Entire Point™ is actually nothing more than a completed milestone of a discovery process I started ten years ago in search of defining what a culturally-inclusive, coffee-specific hospitality approach even looks like. But still, I tried to perfect it in practice, without that clarity, numerous times over.

It's only now from this point that I can continue this work properly—still with my own lived experience as the case study and a refined intention of holding the industry to a higher standard of belonging.

In service,