The Coffee I Didn't Want to Drink

I was sixteen years old, living in Tokyo, and I had a project.

Not a school project. Nobody assigned this to me. I had simply decided, on my own, that I wanted to learn about African cultures. I couldn't travel to Africa — that was not realistic for a teenager in Japan. But I realized something. The embassies were right there. So I started going.

I went alone. I made appointments. I showed up and asked questions and listened. My plan was to visit every African embassy in Tokyo. I never finished. Life moved on, as it does when you are sixteen. But I got through several before it did, and one visit stayed with me longer than all the others.

The Ethiopian embassy.

I remember the warmth of the people immediately. The kindness was not formal or polite in the way that can sometimes feel like a performance. It was genuinely generous. They welcomed me, they answered my questions, and then they served me coffee.

Authentic Ethiopian coffee. Strong in a way I was completely unprepared for.

I did not like coffee at that age. I had not yet become a coffee person. But I was sitting in the Ethiopian embassy in Tokyo, a sixteen year old who had shown up alone with a notebook and questions, and these incredibly kind people had served me something that mattered to them. I was not going to make a face. I drank it. I smiled. I hope I was convincing.

I am now thirty one. I drink coffee every day. I live in Thailand where cafe culture is one of the most vibrant I have encountered anywhere in the world. And at some point between that embassy visit and now, sitting in a Bangkok cafe with a cup in my hand, something clicked.

Do people know that coffee comes from Africa?

Not as a trivia fact. Not as a footnote. As a full story. As a civilization. As a ritual. As a history that deserves to be known.

That question became HUEZ MINIZ Vol.002.

THE PROJECT THAT ALMOST WAS

I want to pause on that teenage project for a moment because I think it explains something about why HUEZ exists.

I was not an exceptional student. I was not doing this for extra credit or a grade. I was doing it because I was genuinely curious about cultures that felt close to me but that I had no real framework to understand. My father is Ghanaian with family roots in Burkina Faso. I grew up in Japan. West Africa and Japan were both part of my identity but in very different ways and with very different levels of access to information.

Going to the embassies was my solution to a problem I could not name yet. The problem was access. The problem was that the cultures I wanted to understand were not represented in the information environment around me. So I went directly to the source.

Almost fifteen years later I am doing the same thing. Just with a platform instead of a notebook.

HUEZ MINIZ exists because the access problem I was navigating at sixteen has not gone away. If anything it has become more visible to me as I have moved across countries and observed how Black and African cultures are encountered, consumed, and misunderstood in places where the information simply does not exist in the local language.

That embassy project never got finished. I only made it through the African embassies before life moved in a different direction. But sitting here now I realize HUEZ is finishing what I started.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ETHIOPIA THAT DAY

Before that visit I did not know much about Ethiopia specifically. I understood in a general sense that West Africa and East Africa are fundamentally different — different histories, different cultures, different languages, different relationships to the rest of the world. But Ethiopia in particular was not something I had deep knowledge about.

What I learned that day stayed with me.

Ethiopia is one of the only countries in Africa that successfully resisted European colonization. At the Battle of Adwa in 1896, Ethiopia defeated the Italian army, a moment that sent a signal across the entire continent and the entire world. An African nation had faced a European colonial power and won. That victory became a symbol of sovereignty and resistance that reverberated far beyond Ethiopia's borders.

The colors of the Ethiopian flag, green, yellow, red, became the Pan-African colors. Dozens of African nations adopted those colors into their own flags after independence as a direct reference to Ethiopia's resistance and what it represented. The next time you see an African flag, look for those colors. They are there more often than you might expect.

A country that gave the world coffee also gave the African continent its most enduring symbol of freedom and self-determination. That is not a coincidence. That is a civilization.

THE COFFEE CEREMONY

The coffee I was served that day was not what most people think of when they think of coffee.

The Ethiopian coffee ceremony is one of the most intentional communal rituals I have ever encountered. Green coffee beans are roasted fresh, ground by hand, brewed slowly, and served in small cups across multiple rounds. The ceremony can last hours. It is not about caffeine. It is about time, presence, and togetherness.

In Ethiopia coffee is not a morning rush. It is a gathering. It is a reason to sit with people you love or people you are meeting for the first time. The ritual itself communicates something that no amount of explanation can fully capture — that some things are worth doing slowly, that the time you spend with another person is the point, not the product at the end of it.

I was sixteen and I did not fully understand what I was being offered. I understand it now.

GLOW FRAMEWORK LENS

When HUEZ looks at coffee through the Cultural GLOW Map, several dimensions emerge at the same time.

Food & Drink — Coffee is one of the most consumed beverages in the world. But its story as a cultural artifact, as something rooted in a specific place, a specific people, a specific ritual, is almost entirely absent from how most people encounter it. The Starbucks cup and the Ethiopian coffee ceremony are separated by more than geography.

Rituals & Everyday Practices — The Ethiopian coffee ceremony is one of the world's great communal rituals. It transforms a beverage into a practice of presence and connection. Most of the world has inherited the product while leaving the ritual behind. Understanding what was left behind changes how you see what remained.

Migration & Diaspora — Coffee traveled from Ethiopia to Yemen, then to the Ottoman Empire, then to Europe, then through colonial trade systems to the Caribbean, Latin America, and eventually Asia. Every stop in that journey changed coffee and was changed by it. The global coffee culture you participate in today is the result of centuries of movement, exchange, and transformation.

Labor & Industry — The global coffee industry generates over two hundred billion dollars annually. The countries that grow the most coffee, Ethiopia, Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, receive a fraction of that value. The gap between what coffee producers earn and what coffee consumers pay is one of the most striking economic imbalances in global food systems. This is not unique to coffee.

In Japan, there is a growing conversation about matcha. About how a deeply ritualized Japanese cultural practice has been commodified by the global wellness industry, with profits flowing far from the farmers and tea ceremony traditions that developed it. The pattern is worth noticing. When we apply the same lens consistently across cultures the picture becomes clearer. Not to assign blame but to develop a more honest and more consistent understanding of how culture and commerce interact.

THE BANGKOK REALIZATION

I am writing this from Southeast Asia where cafe culture is one of the most vibrant I have encountered. Thailand, in particular, has developed a coffee scene that is genuinely extraordinary. Beautiful spaces, carefully sourced beans, real craft. Coffee here is taken seriously.

And sitting in those cafes, drinking coffee that often traces its beans back to Ethiopia or other African growing regions, I kept coming back to the same question. Does anyone in this cafe know where this started? Not the brand. Not the roaster. The origin. The goat herder legend. The ceremony. The Adwa colors. The civilization.

Most people don't. Not because they don't care. Because nobody told them in a language they could access.

That is HUEZ MINIZ Vol.002. And this is why it exists.