# A Quest for Great Coffee and Analytics By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2022-10-07 About six years ago I started drinking regularly coffee for some reason. I'm not sure exactly why. Perhaps it was peer pressure. It wasn't that I didn't like the taste, but more that I just felt it wasn't necessary. So, once I started drinking it, I embraced the most typical and average coffee experience you could imagine. One cup of mediocre coffee per day with minimal effort and intention. Occasionally I would have a great cup of coffee from a coffeehouse. This was more of a luxury, and I wasn't willing to spend the time I thought it would take to make a quality cup of coffee. After all, isn't the active ingredient the same regardless of the quality rating? Caffeine is caffeine. Then a few months ago I was at a hotel where I expected to get my regular mediocre cup of coffee as hotels are not coffeehouses. To my surprise, this cup of coffee was good even though it came from a big tube of coffee and was dispensed via a facet. After several days of drinking this coffee, I felt that if a place could produce good coffee en mass then there must be a way for me to do it at home with equivalent efficiency. Thus, my journey to take coffee more seriously began. When I got home I researched coffee machines, types of coffee, and all the different processes to make coffee. There is a lot of [[information]] out there on the subject, but most of it is geared toward coffee fanatics and a culture that I wasn't willing to join. I wasn't interested in spending hours meticulously making coffee. I was on a quest to get a great single cup of coffee per day with minimal effort and cleanup. The first thing to fix was the quality of the coffee that I was buying. Instead of making an extra trip, one of my daily walks every few weeks would be to a local coffeehouse to get freshly roasted whole coffee beans. No time wasted, and I'm getting some bonus exercise. Next, I needed to improve my brewing game. After much deliberation, I purchased a fairly expensive coffee maker that grinds the coffee and automatically brews as much or as little coffee as you would like at a time. Today, it takes me about 3 minutes per day to brew a great cup of coffee and clean everything up. Mission accomplished, and I'm very happy with the results. There are several things I took away from this experience that translates into how one approaches analysis. First, there are many levels of "fandom" out there that all roughly deliver the same outcome. Luxury brands provide the same core functionality as non-luxury brands. A car is a car. With those luxury brands come some bells and whistles, but ultimately the luxury brands are about the status it brings to the consumer. The fandom makes it desirable. Within analytics, the question is how much status signaling is important to you and your organization. Much can be accomplished with a piece of paper and some well-thought-out assumptions. Second, it's often possible to get very close to the luxury brand without nearly as much effort as the fandom indicates. Having the right [[tools]] can make all the difference. I wasn't willing to spend time hand-grinding the coffee beans, so I just bought a machine that did it for me. Within analysis, how much time are you spending writing code when there are plenty of no-code tools that could do it for you? Many analysis approaches and methods aren't worth my time despite the status signal they send. I'm fine with giving away the glory or being thought of as a lesser analyst so I can focus on the hard and meaningful problems. So, the next time you are facing another mediocre analysis, think about how you can transform that into a great analysis with a few simple tweaks, a better tool, and some process improvements. You might find you can get a great cup of analysis in 3 minutes or less. #### Related Items [[Coffee]] [[Coffeehouses]] [[Analytics]] [[Quality]] [[Coding]]