There’s a roaster I follow on Substack. Every post does the same three things. He writes about the origins of the coffees he’s roasting. He writes about his roasting process. And then he writes, at length, about the taste profile of each one.
There is nothing remarkable about that. It’s what every roaster does. Origins, process, roasting and tasting notes are common pillars of coffee content, repeated across a thousand newsletters that all blur into one.
And yet I would recognize his writing anywhere.
How come? Because when you read his posts, the man is so obviously, helplessly in love with what he does. The enthusiasm flies off the page. There’s an energy to it that is his and no one else’s. He could be describing the same Colombian lot as the roaster down the road, and you would still never confuse the two.
One of them sounds like a spec sheet. The other sounds like a person who can’t quite believe he gets to do this for a living.
That’s the story. Not the origin. Not the process. Not the tasting notes. The voice.
We’ve been looking for the story in the wrong place.
I spend a lot of time telling roasters that their story is their differentiator, and that it’s hiding in the facts of their business: the founding, the sourcing, the place, the craft. That’s true, and it’s useful, and I stand by it.
But it’s only half the truth. Because two roasters can share an almost identical set of facts. Same growing region. Same processing method. Same careful, small-batch approach. Write both stories down as bullet points and you’d struggle to tell them apart.
But when you put those same two roasters at a table and let them talk about the coffee they love most, you would never, for one second, mistake one for the other.
The facts can be matched. The voice cannot. That’s the part no competitor can copy. Not because they lack a story, but because they aren’t you, and they don’t sound like you, and they never will.
Enthusiasm is something we dilute by wanting to sound professional.
Here’s what usually happens. A roaster who is genuinely, visibly passionate in person sits down to write the copy for their website. And somewhere between the keyboard and the screen, the passion drains out. It gets replaced by the voice they think a business is supposed to use. Measured. Professional. Artisanal, carefully sourced, small-batch.
In our audit of fifty specialty coffee websites, those were among the most repeated phrases we found. Not because fifty roasters felt the same flat way about their coffee. But because fifty roasters reached for the same safe, professional-sounding words and, in doing so, filed the personality off the page.
The tragedy is that the enthusiasm you edit out in the name of sounding professional is the asset that helps you stand out from the crowd.
How to get it back onto the page.
You can’t fake this, but you can’t run out of it either. It isn’t a technique. It’s just you, unfiltered.
So the goal isn’t just to write better copy. It’s to write the way you sound when someone gets you going about a coffee you love, and you forget to be careful. Notice what you say and how you say it when you’re not performing. That’s the voice. That’s the power behind the story.
A quick test. Read your homepage out loud. Does it sound like you at your most alive, or like a committee trying to sound like a coffee brand? If it’s the second one, you haven’t necessarily lost your story. You’ve just buried it under the voice you thought you were supposed to use.
One more thing… Energy attracts energy.
When that roaster expresses so much positive, passionate energy, you can be sure his coworkers pick up on that feeling.
And when one of those coworkers steps out from the roasting room and into the store to serve a customer, that positive energy is going to be shared.
And when that customer goes home, or to work, she’ll tell family and friends that the coffee at your coffee shop has a little extra something, and that they should try it out.
Long story short… the work isn’t only about finding a story no one else can tell.
It’s about finding your story first, and then sharing it with an unfiltered enthusiasm that sets your voice apart from everyone else.