Some coffee careers start the “classic” way — behind a bar, learning the rhythm of service and operations. Others arrive by detour, through architecture and urban planning, coral conservation research, documentary filmmaking or even a traveling circus.
In 2025, our Three Questions conversation series with coffee leaders kept reminding us that work in coffee remains deeply personal, with no two paths following the same line.
Some of the people featured below are building cafes in places where coffee culture already runs deep, while others are helping create it nearly from scratch. Coming from Cusco, La Paz, Paris, Addis Ababa, Kandy, Bentonville and points in between, all these people do share a kind of coffee-centric curiosity that is helping them expand the boundaries of what coffee can be, and for whom.
Daily Coffee News’ 2025 Year in Review is our annual look back at the people, places and ideas that shaped coffee this year. Read the full series. Note: The DCN editors would like to extend a special thanks to freelance writer Jen Roberts, whose reporting made this collection possible. Learn more about Jen and her work here.
Three Questions With Carolina Peralta of Florencia y Fortunata in Cusco, Peru
When Carolina Peralta, the founder of Florencia y Fortunata Café in Cusco, Peru, celebrated good news or received a good grade in school as a child, it was always over a cup of coffee. Her mother would take her to a local cafe to commemorate the occasion. For Peralta, coffee meant celebration… read more
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Three Questions With Sergio Hernandez of Gratitude Specialty Coffee in La Paz, Mexico
Not all coffee stories begin with a traveling circus, but that’s precisely how the married owners of Gratitude Specialty Coffee Roasters (Instagram) in La Paz, Mexico, first met. Gloria Olivera Bassi, who hails from Argentina, was working at a resort in Cancún when the circus came to town, featuring an adventurous trapeze artist from Mexico City named Sergio Hernandez… read more
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Three Questions With Emmanuel Bushiazzo of La Claque Cafe
In 2012, while completing his second postdoctoral fellowship in California researching coral conservation, Emmanuel Bushiazzo came across a library book about how to open a coffee shop for dummies. When he wasn’t in Mexico collecting samples from coral reefs, Bushiazzo spent a lot of time in coffee shops, and the book lightly piqued his curiosity. He flipped through a few pages and decided to check it out. Then he read it in one day… read more
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Three Questions With Rod Johnson of BLK and Bold Specialty Beverages
The concept of community has always been at the heart of BLK & Bold, the Des Moines, Iowa-based coffee roasting and beverage company founded by Pernell Cezar and Rod Johnson in 2018… read more
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Three Questions With Coffee Expert Beamlak Bekele
One of Beamlak Bekele’s earliest memories of her father is watching him cup coffee in a laboratory. Growing up in a coffee-centered family in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Bekele never imagined she would end up pursuing the same work — let alone become the second-place finisher in a national barista championship. Instead, she studied architecture and urban planning… read more
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Three Questions With Paris-Based Coffee Freelancer Mark McKinney
Mark McKinney’s unconventional professional journey in coffee has included biology textbooks in Paris and hazmat suits in Boston. Yet McKinney first entered coffee the same way thousands of career coffee folks have, as a barista at Starbucks. “I was a baby barista and became the store coffee master, which means I got to wear a black apron instead of a green one,” McKinney, who a decade later would be competing in the French Barista Championship, told DCN… read more
Photo by Claire Migeon, courtesy of Mark McKinney.
Three Questions With Dilshan “Arty” Ranaweera of Cafe Secret Alley in Sri Lanka
When Dilshan “Arty” Ranaweera opened Cafe Secret Alley in Kandy, Sri Lanka, in 2017, he knew next to nothing about coffee. “Sri Lanka didn’t have a coffee culture,” Ranaweera said. “Coffee was a home remedy for stomach aches or if you wanted to spend the night working or studying … and it was really bitter coffee.”… read more
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Three Questions With Ryana Kuruvilla of India’s Kelachandra Coffee
Representing the seventh generation of family members as part of the Kelachandra agricultural group in India, Ryana Kuruvilla keeps one foot moving toward the future while the other remains grounded in the past. “I have always been drawn to the intersection of business, strategy, and legacy,” Kuruvilla, the head of people and culture at Kelachandra Coffee, recently told Daily Coffee News… read more
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Three Questions With Filmmaker and Third Space Coffee Owner Brooke Bierhaus Sutton
Opening a coffee shop might seem like an unlikely path for a documentary filmmaker, but for Brooke Bierhaus Sutton, the connection is clear. Connection is at the core concept of Sutton’s own documentary film, “The Connected Cup,” launched in 2019, and inside her new vegan cafe, Third Space Coffee in Bentonville, Arkansas… read more
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