What does Eremos even mean?
Photo taken in the Ohio wilderness by Ally Griffin
At Eremos Coffee Company our conviction is to do everything the way it should be— from the farmers we choose to work with to the way we roast the coffee and all the way down to how coffee is prepared and enjoyed.
Photo taken in the Ohio wilderness by Jace Abshire
We believe coffee should be roasted and enjoyed for the pure delight of it, rather than for a quick buzz of energy. Because we believe delight is a better pick-me-up, we roast our coffee to be enjoyed slowly and in the company of great friends. While we are certainly guilty of filling our big ole Stanley tumbler with coffee for a road trip or other adventure, we believe that the coffee-as-merely-caffeine craze is bad for coffee and bad for us. For too long coffee has been a means to an end for frenzied living. This is not the way it should be.
Eremos is an ancient Greek word meaning wilderness or desolate place. Not only in coffee, but in all of life, many of our lives are getting faster and faster paced, and it shows in the forms of rising mental health challenges and lower happiness according to many national and global studies. Enter: wilderness. The wilderness is both the perfect antidote and the perfect metaphor for how to engage our current situation. Every wisdom tradition handed down throughout our history, from Islam to Buddhism and Judaism to Hinduism, places a high price on separation from busyness. In many spiritual traditions, there has been a literal escape to the wilderness from the busyness of life. For instance, devoted Christians remembered as the desert fathers and mothers as early as the third century were fleeing the city for the wilderness, convinced that the busyness of the city and “modern life” was incompatible with becoming deeply formed.
We still live in cities (guilty!) but feel the strain. We need to reclaim places of stillness wherever they may be found. No product captures this quite like a great cup of coffee, preferably drank where birdsong can be heard. Eremos Coffee, like the actual wilderness, offers an invitation to slow down and enjoy simple delight, the way it should be. Because delight is a better pick-me-up than any caffeine buzz.