SEASONAL EDITION - 001. DRIFT

DRIFT

Drift arrives quietly, gradients shifting so slowly you barely notice, until suddenly everything feels different. Falling into coffee was like that. Opening the café was like that. Time moves, and when you look up, you realize you’ve already changed.

Falling into coffee started with one simple thought: “I want to make a better cup of coffee.” For years, the competition stage was the only place I could serve the best version of my coffee. I wanted to close the gap between competition-level precision and everyday service, so the café could deliver that quality daily, without the rules and limitations of a stage. Step by step, we improved our process, our training, our experiments. Today, I can honestly say we serve better coffee in the cafe every day than what I could serve in competition under rules and regulations.

That journey connects to the origin of Paradigm Spark itself. There was a question I used to fear because I didn’t know how to answer “How can I prove I’m a better barista?”. For a while, competition felt like the only proof. I competed intensely. I earned results. But over time I realized winning can prove you’re a strong competitor but it doesn’t automatically prove you’re a better barista. That realization pushed me into bigger questions, ‘What is the role of a barista? Where are the boundaries? How do we expand them? What becomes irreplaceable in an era of automation, and what element should I keep as a barista and what should automation take over?’ Answers didn’t arrive all at once. They came as small pieces collected over years. And then, almost without noticing, those pieces connected. Seasonal Edition became the answer. A barista-curated program where we showcase personality, design flavours with intention, and build a concept that becomes a complete experience. Something only our team can serve, in the way we serve it.

Big questions aren’t solved in one moment. You stack small answers patiently, keep your direction, keep moving forward until one day, the shift happens. Like static friction turning into kinetic friction, what feels stuck suddenly begins to slide. Once it starts moving, it moves fast. That is DRIFT.

This season’s coffee reflects a decade of change in the industry. The focal point has drifted from drying alone to fermentation as a creative tool. By blending a natural process coffee with an extended fermentation coffee, we built a cup that’s soft and smooth, with gentle mango notes and coconut-water-like sweetness. But the DRIFT drifts once again, guided by our team’s flavour preference for spice. With chilli and ginger, the coffee gets another layer of feeling and lifts into a wider spectrum, adding energy and complexity without losing its centre.

And then there’s Soulmate, a drink that drifts in the opposite direction. Most iced coffee loses character as ice dilutes. Soulmate begins soft and clean, then grows stronger over time: extended fermentation coffee flakes slowly melt into the cup, intensifying the flavour, becoming wilder and funkier until the last sip.