A Label Worth the Coffee
A label seems so small. It's just a slip of paper riding on the side of a bag. But for me it carries the whole promise of the project. It has to tell our story in a single glance: hand‑craft, contrast, quiet curiosity. It also has to survive the inglorious journey from roastery to countertop without bleeding, smudging, or costing more than the coffee inside.
A few months ago I told myself, half‑jokingly, that I would try lino‑printing again—something I hadn’t touched since high‑school art class. That same evening, on the way to dinner, I passed a shop that sells nothing but professional lino supplies. Serendipity yanked me off course. I rearranged my roasting schedule, squeezed through their door the next morning, and spent an hour with a lino artist who spoke about gouges and brayers the way farmers speak about weather. When I explained our coffee project he nodded and said, almost off‑hand, “Why not make paper from your old jute sacks?”
That one suggestion detonated weeks of experiments. I soaked and hacked burlap in our kitchen sink until the apartment smelled like wet rope and ship’s hold. The result looked less like paper and more like a wilted leaf clinging to a dream of usefulness. Certainly nothing that would hold up to any sort of ink.
The lino prints were bold but heavy. Good for posters, maybe, but stiff on a bag. So I pivoted to watercolor. My usual fear kicked in: I will inevitably ruin every good part of what I created. The workaround was to paint each element—jasmine blossoms, a regional bird, even the negative space—on separate sheets, then stitch them together on the computer like a paper quilt. It let me push colors further without fear of everything collapsing into mud.
Finding a scanner that could see every granule of pigment turned into its own city‑wide scavenger hunt. Paris is full of printers, yet very few can read a rogue splash of cobalt the way the brush intended. Eventually I found one that could.
The composite design does something lino stamps never could: it bends. Swap jasmine for hazelnuts and the label whispers “nutty profile.” Trade berries for citrus and it brightens the promise in the cup. The wildlife can migrate too, following us to whatever corner of the French countryside we finally claim. The frame stays constant; the details shift, like seasonal produce on a menu.
I tracked down a mill in Europe that transforms spent coffee grounds into paper—no bleach, no plastic film, no glue that smells like a chemistry exam. Next step: print tests on different weights of that paper. Real paper, not the leafy burlap tragedy drying under our radiator.
If the tests pass, we’ll have a label that is handmade twice: first by the brush, then by the very material it’s printed on. Waste becomes medium; medium becomes message.
Now I’m back where I started, cradling a stack of trial sheets, wondering if the next brushstroke will be the one that ruins everything, or reveals what the label wanted to be all along. The work continues, but at least the label now carries a faint aroma of roasted coffee and a story worth telling.
Artwork by Benjamin Schwartz.