The Chic Guide: What is Enneagram Coffee?
Jessica Beans, Co-Founder of Namesake Coffee Roasters & Enneagram Coffee: As coffee roasters, we wanted to celebrate our wonder and awe with the impact the Enneagram can make and pair that with our extreme love of specialty coffee to produce something beautiful. So we embarked on the journey to create Enneagram Coffee; we thought that each of the nine distinct Enneagram types deserves to be celebrated with a unique coffee roast. Each coffee origin was meticulously chosen to best fit the enneagram type it represents, roasted to perfection, and packaged with extreme intentionality to showcase the complex characteristics of each individual. This is the perfect personalized gift for someone beginning on the road to self-discovery or as a gift to yourself to honor your own journey. Basically, it’s just really tasty coffee that should make you feel all types of understood and make all types feel understood.
The Chic Guide: What’s the inspiration behind it?
Beans: This project can be described as a labor of love from two enneagram junkies, mostly because the Enneagram has actually impacted and changed our lives. The knowledge of the Enneagram has helped us reshape our marriage, impacted our family interactions, and contributed to our striving in building an intentional business. We are a husband and wife owned coffee roastery in Dayton, Ohio (Namesake Coffee) and we decided we wanted to celebrate our deep appreciation for the impact the Enneagram can make through this project. This project was our gift to the Enneagram community and our effort to make something worthy of gifting to others entering into this journey of self-discovery or honoring your own struggle of being the most integrated you-you can be. This project is not to make light of this tool or to be reductive, but to encourage the journey and spark an interest in deeper self-discovery through the Enneagram, which we ourselves have deeply experienced.
The Chic Guide: Who’s behind it?
Beans: Myself and Michael Beans, the owners of Namesake Coffee, launched Enneagram Coffee as a second line in November 2019. Namesake Coffee is a wholesale roaster in Dayton, Ohio. We host pop-up coffee shop events, wholesale accounts for coffee shops and restaurants, and offer retail bags online and for resale in local businesses.
In 2017, we had the idea to create a second coffee line that would take this concept of intentional living and self-growth and make it more applicable to share through our business. We sampled dozens of coffees to choose the nine roasts that we felt represented each of the nine Enneagram types either through the flavor notes or the country of origin. We worked to identify the color and bag design that we thought best represented each type. We intentionally included over 20 people in the making of the project to keep our own intentions in check. Each Enneagram Coffee bag was reviewed by members of that type to make sure we accurately described and honored each type. We wrote and rewrote content that would become our “morning affirmation” – an encouragement printed on each bag that would spark inspiration or introspection for each type to read as they enjoyed their morning cup. Finally, after two years of working on it, we launched Enneagram Coffee in November 2019.
The Chic Guide: Can you tell us more about the coffee you created for each type?
Beans: Each coffee was sourced intentionally from specific regions and for possessing certain flavor profiles to highlight each Enneagram time. We offer origins such as Brazil, Ethiopian, Tanzanian, Peru, etc. As speciality roasters, we always strive to source fair trade and ethically sourced coffees, roast them well and get the beans to you fresh. We make sure to do the same for Enneagram Coffee. Some custom gifts like this come in beautiful packages but the product itself is low-quality; we make sure the coffee is absolutely delicious through quality sourcing and craft roasting in small batches. We also tried to make our packages really intentional as well from the colors chosen to the “morning affirmations” written on the back of each bag that are intended to be read in the morning as you sip on your coffee.
Our Type 4 roast is an example of how we paired specific coffees to celebrate each type. We specifically sourced a Tanzania Peaberry for this type 4 roast. The Peaberry coffee is created when a single coffee seed develops in the fruit where two would normally be. Because of this, the flavor profile is diverse, artful and can be more intense than other types. The Peaberry bean is a rare mutation (around 5% of the worlds coffee beans) which creates the singular oval shape and uncommon taste.
The Chic Guide: What makes Enneagram Coffee unique?
Beans: We continue to hear that Enneagram Coffee is such a great personalized gift for people that are excited about self-growth, love speciality coffee, and enjoy supporting small business owners. People love that it is such a high quality project that is so uplifting with the “morning affirmations” being a unique addition to the coffee bag.
Here is an example of our Type 9 morning affirmation:
“As you start your day, remember…You are peace. You are light. You are a quiet forest filled with the smell of pine and morning air. You are earth and rain and stars – the stuff of the universe. You are bigger than you think. Quit holding hostage the thing that is trying to tell you something. It holds a secret that your peaceful mind tries to suppress. It is there to guide you and bring you what you ultimately seek. Can there be calm without a storm? You can hold everyone’s truths better than they can. Speak YOUR truth. Speak up. Be heard. Let your anger free. You have a voice that is worth hearing. You are glorious – a breath of fresh air in a world that is suffocating. Speak your dreams and then pursue them. Actually, run after them. No, really, get up out of your chair right now and run after them, even if it means running into someone – conflict isn’t always the enemy. Good is the enemy of great. Now awaken that greatness and set it free.”
The Chic Guide: Is there anything new on the horizon?
Beans: We launched an Enneagram Coffee subscription for those that want to try all 9 coffees! We sent you a different roast once a month for nine months until you’ve tried them all. Other than that, follow us on Instagram for further pop-up shops and collaborations. We love collaborating with other Enneagram creators.
The Chic Guide: Where can readers go to learn more and follow along?
Beans: Instagram is the place we update the most and continue to post giveaways and highlights. We love seeing people tag us in their posts to share their morning coffee routines.
