I recently met two interesting individuals. The context in which I met each of them were remarkably similar: each was running a small business selling a specialized boutique commodity. The first was a man operating a small vineyard and winery on the property of his exurban home. The second was a man running a coffee roasting operation out of a small warehouse in an industrial park. Both were producing a commodity for which the high quality was a major selling point. Both were passionate. Both were eager to tell us the details of their respective process. Both were nearly overflowing with detailed knowledge of their industries. Both were petty capitalists under siege from the pressures of the market. Both of them were, only somewhat surprisingly, engineers.
The winemaker offered cheap tours of his operation alongside a tasting of his wares. Perfect for a Saturday afternoon date! Upon arriving, my girlfriend and I were surprised to find we were the only attendees. The winemaker, our host and guide, informed us he prefers to do private group tours as to have a more conversational experience where he can explain the nitty gritty of grape varietals, soil quality management, effects of wind, sun, and temperature, and so much more on the wine-making process. It was less of a conversation and more of a one-sided info-dump in which our probing questions launched the host into detailed and esoteric tangents. Interwoven in the technical exposition was a palpable zeal and clear sense of vigor about winemaking. A recurring theme was how other winemakers produce wine “incorrectly.” These scorn-worthy methods were invariably cost-saving shortcuts that he could, down to a molecular level, link to specific degradations in the quality of the final bottled product. Of course, at least per his own narrative, he took no shortcuts, and spared no expense.
This all sounds like the rhetoric of someone who is, above all else, an excellent salesman. That may not be false. However, when it came time to do the tasting, I can say without a doubt his wine was far and away the best wine we had ever tasted. Each expression was hauntingly beautiful on the palate. The depth of flavor and defect-free complexity were in a league of their own. To this day I still struggle to enjoy cheaper wine, knowing how much better it can taste. Per milliliter, his wine is expensive, although not absurdly so; affordable as a special-occasion bottle. Nevertheless, it seemed to me his prices were likely still too low to cover the costs of such a perfection-minded operation. He confirmed that my suspicion was not far off, and that he only just brings in enough revenue to keep the operation going with barely any profit and no employees. The flip-side to perfectionism for a capitalist (and that’s what he is, a capitalist) is a constant war against input prices, labor costs, and the temptation to take quality-sacrificing shortcuts. In typical boomer fashion, he complained about his wife’s constant nagging over his tactics in this war. Her role was to manage finances and reign in his more lavish spending habits. In this sense, she was the personification of these abstract pressures, her nagging simply a conduit for the law of value to punish obsessions that resist the process of real subsumption.
The coffee roaster, like the winemaker, offered an educational experience paired with the opportunity to taste samples. His lesson, by contrast, leaned further into the scientific. It was more of a seminar on how different parameters in the coffee-making process, from bean1 to mug, can drastically alter the flavor of the final beverage. Rather than tour us around his facility (which would have been a short affair given its compact size), he sat us at a table and prepared us different permutations of coffee. At one point, he provided four different beans that were all roasted, ground, brewed, and poured identically to highlight the range of taste derivable from simple differences in bean terroir. Next, he kept the beans identical but prepared samples with different roasting methodology, brew style, or serving vessel. Each time the complexity of the particular scientific variable was explored and discussed alongside careful sipping to really understand the effects. At certain points small fruits or an amazing homemade pastry were provided such that the pairing brought out new flavor combinations from the coffee. With just one procedural difference, we could note differences in acidity, flavor complexity, character of finish, and even texture.
The coffee roaster’s seminar was, in many ways, an economics lesson just as much as it was a lesson in heat transfer or coffee history. Much like the winemaker’s tour, descriptions of growing techniques, bean testing, or buying/selling of product were undergirded by a discussion about the economic and supply chain considerations that go into each of these steps. His website featured transparency reports on the prices he pays to farmers for beans. We were treated to anecdotes of his time spent living among farmers or harvesters of various countries learning not only the art of producing coffee, but the impact that neo-colonial systems have on these producers. He was less forthcoming about his operation’s financial health than the winemaker was about his, but I cannot imagine that his highly-involved manual process was bringing in huge wads of cash. The business model relied on boutique product sold in low quantities, after all. His website featured a staggeringly large series of deep-dive podcasts and videos on numerous aspects of coffee production and consumption. These media productions, with their low view counts and highly niche content, resembled a passion project far more than they resembled a structured marketing campaign. Unless I am drastically underestimating the demand for specialized and artisanal coffee beans, everything indicated that his real goal was to pursue his passion for coffee. The business aspects were seemingly incidental.
Engineers
To an engineer, it may not be too surprising to hear that these men were both trained and worked as engineers prior to the establishment of their respective businesses. The winemaker was an electrical engineer, the coffee roaster a thermal systems engineer. In a way, both of them still were working as engineers. While both left their positions as engineers working engineering-oriented jobs to focus on their respective businesses full-time, both of them brought their engineering methodologies with them into operations not typically associated with engineers.
The methodological applications are obvious upon closer inspection. To produce wine or coffee requires a process with a significant number of adjustable parameters. The plant cultivar, growing conditions, harvesting conditions, and processing method for the grape/bean each contain countless input parameters. Like the manufacturing process of a more industrial commodity, the number of parameters affecting the character of the final product is larger than can be detailed here2. The coffee roaster’s seminar was instructive: the qualitative and subjective aspects of the final product can be demystified via the scientific method. But is this demystification absolute? Of course not. Deeper knowledge is unattainable not only because of the limits of known chemistry, physics, and biology, but because of procedural limits as well. It is rare3 for a given output parameter in a physical process or system to be totally and completely controlled by a single input parameter. All phenomena is contextual, and causality is not as easy as identifying one single variable from which phenomena predictably flow. Realistically, a given characteristic such as the sweetness of bottled wine or acidity of a cup of coffee is determined by a huge number of variables. Scientists and artisans alike have, over the course of centuries, been able to develop a workable sense of which inputs in what combinations have what outputs, but the knowledge is never total or perfectly capable of prediction. Full industrial control over wine or coffee production is similarly unattainable, not that capitalists don’t attempt it. There are too many bio-ecological processes simply operating on levels of causality far outside the ability of industrial capital to fully dominate. Try as they may, capitalists cannot control the weather, geological processes, or the endlessly intertwined interplay between countless species within and above the soil ranging from microscopic to macroscopic. This includes the variability of human labor, for we are not machines capable of perfectly predictable and manipulable behavior. Nor should we be! Science and engineering can be brought to bear to influence and account for systems outside the realm of more direct control, but it will always be partial and an uphill battle.
Artisans
Of course, this is what makes fine wine and specialty coffee ultimately the realm of art rather than engineering, right? Does this inescapable indeterminacy latent in the production process not require the subjective judgment of the master artisan in order to yield an equally subjective piece of art to be consumed? Of course it does! I don’t mean this in a romantic sense either. To abstract phenomena into variables and parameters is to create a gap between what happens and how these happenings are conceived in the mind. Within this gap is where the artisan plays. Judgment, a collection of mental heuristics that may or not be articulable, is brought to bear to make the decisions (educated guesses, really) outside the reach of scientific rigor.
This, however, is also the case with even the most industrial production processes producing commodities with the most objectively-defined characteristics. The difference, at the level of scientific characterization of the production process, is simply a matter of degree. Judgment from machine operators and engineers alike is used to bridge the gap between what can be confidently predicted with science vs what cannot be, or what is too painstakingly laborious to study scientifically. In an industrial process, causality is sometimes treated as a black box where a handful of input parameters interact with each other in an opaque way to yield a certain narrow range of output parameter values, much like processes typically associated with artisanal production. So long as the output parameter is within the acceptable range, the exact relationship between these inputs and causality can be left a mystery. For example, chemically coating a surface on which an electrochemical reaction will be performed can have all sorts of effects on the character of the reaction. The formulation of the coating (proportion between different parts of the mixture), coating spray parameters (nozzle shape, spray time, droplet size, deposition pattern), and curing process (temperature, time, humidity, ambient air pressure) all together have some sort of effect on the character of the reaction.
The contribution of each individual input parameter is mutually conditioned by the other parameters without any clear way to characterize this multifaceted relationship without extremely time-consuming tests, and even then the conclusions might be ambiguous.4 This is further complicated by the fact that the coating characteristics are only one part of the whole picture. The chemical reagents, the electrical functions, coating substrate properties, and other aspects of the system and process each bring a myriad of input parameters that all interact in a plethora of ways to determine the output parameters of the electrochemistry being performed in the device. The only way to workably surmount this ambiguity is through the usage of both the scientific process to uncover correlations with a certain minimum confidence threshold, and informed judgment borne from experience. In this way, managing this electrochemical process is not too dissimilar from making wine or coffee. Even the most data-driven and iron-willed scientific rigor is directionless without the subjective judgment of a human practitioner.
Passion
All of this is to say: the difference between the modern artisan and engineer is not as pronounced as many would believe. In a way, our two engineer-artisans embody the unity between art and science that capitalism typically tends cleave apart with a profit-shaped wedge. The character of both of their enterprises is necessarily capitalist, for it could be nothing else in a capitalist society. This is not a defense of the petty bourgeois class or of any sort of romantic idealization of resisting the abstract imperatives of capital in one’s small business. Rather, I think this minor case study helps dispel the notion that artisanry and engineering as processes are diametrically opposed rather than being dual expressions of the same epistemic framework. Furthermore, the uphill battle these two men fight in order to create damn good wine or coffee exemplifies a creative impulse whose pursuit should be accessible to all, not only those blessed with the capital and opportunity. If you strip out the commodity form and market pressures, the attempted sublation of art and engineering into a unified practice by these engineer-artisans might somewhat resemble the raw human creative passion that only a communist society can truly actualize.
We revisited the winemaker recently to purchase a particular bottle we thoroughly enjoyed. The grape vines were bare. Assuming the harvest had already happened, we asked how this year’s batch would turn out. He regretfully informed us that the harvest did not happen at all. A sequence of rains and dry heat had eliminated his chance to harvest during a very small optimal window of time.5 Should the grapes be harvested even a day outside this window, the quality of wine would suffer to a degree he deemed unacceptable. Rather than create wine that he felt was less than perfect, he decided to let the grapes rot on the vine and fall to the earth, their nutrients feeding back into the soil to be reclaimed in a future harvest. Surely the fruits of an entire year of agricultural labor could be salvaged in some form, we pondered. For him this obviously did not matter, only the perfect wine did. It is only in this society ruled by the commodity form that clear-eyed passion for perfection appears insane. For the winemaker, any action besides the one he took would have been insane.
Footnotes
1 It is not actually a bean, but rather the seed of the coffee plant fruit.
2 Not that I would have the expertise and knowledge to do so anyways!
3 Arguably it is impossible, depending on your philosophical inclination.
4 On this I speak from experience, but I do not discount the possibility that I am simply a shitty scientist!
5 I do not know enough about wine grape stewardship to understand the details of this decision.
Leave a Reply