Voice: DCILY

When you're reading about specialty coffee on the internet, or anywhere for that matter, you're bound to run into scientific terms, industry jargon, maybe little to no personality, and overall fairly "flat" writing.  In my experience, authors writing about coffee are more interested in talking about the coffee itself and its characteristics, rather than their thoughts or revealing their personality.  At best, they might post about how they believe different methods affect brewing.

So as I perused the internet for some evidence of voice in coffee writing, I initially came up dry.  There's a great blog called Dear Coffee, I Love You, but even DCILY tends to write about coffee and coffee products and coffee professionals and all other things coffee in a fairly dry tone.  By the way, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I kind of prefer it personally.  But other people may like or expect to see some show of personal thought or opinion when reading blogs.

However, I did find a recent post on DCILY that I wanted to profile for its voice.  It's about the return of 2008 WBC Champion Stephen Morrisey, and you can find it here.  The title of the post initally grabbed my attention - "The Quiet Sound of A Flyingthud." What the heck is a flyingthud? Turns out, that's the pseudonym under which Morrisey writes on the internet.  I'm still not entirely sure what that means, but I can tell you that when I hear the sound "thud" I'm definitely not thinking "quiet."  The post, written by "bwj" is littered with other dry humor.  He begins with:

"While everyone was fawning over the New Year return of James Hoffman..."

In the world of specialty coffee James Hoffman is kind of a big deal, bwj completely belittles the coffee community's obsession with Hoffman.  The implication is that Hoffman simply isn't worth fawning over.
As he introduces Flyingthud's return to blogging, bwj writes that Morrisey is writing again:

"after nearly 20 months of silence."

Oh my goodness! Twenty months of silence?! It's almost like he died! Oh wait, Morrisey is just as active in the coffee community as he's always been.  bwj is bringing attention to this fact, highlighting its sheer absurdity.  There's a wonderful image that bwj includes further into the post:

"Like a small gift left unopened behind the Christmas tree..."

I really enjoyed this analogy that he makes in reference to Flyingthud's return to the internet.  I felt this sort of mild excitement when I learned that Morrisey was once again blogging, and it seems like bwj felt similarly.  There's this sense of joy that you get when you realize that there's one more little present that you forgot about.