Coffee Conversations: The Joy of Blends with Tony Konecny of Yes Plz

Tony Konecny is one of the O.G. third wave coffee people. Well, as someone who wasn’t there, he sure appears that way to me. He was head roaster at Victrola Coffee in Seattle in the early 2000s, helped launch Intelligentsia in Los Angeles in 2006, and founded the subscription service Tonx Coffee in 2011 before selling it to Blue Bottle three years later. He also self-describes as holding “the dubious distinction of being among the first coffee bloggers, for which he sincerely apologizes”. 

I first spoke to Konecny for an article on coffee’s purported fourth wave, and then later for my piece on venture capital and private equity in coffee last year. (It’s also worth noting that he is a paid subscriber to The Pourover.)

His latest venture is Yes Plz, another subscription service that bills itself as “a weekly pursuit of the perfect cup”. To this end, Yes Plz releases new variations on its blend The Mix every week.

Every week! That’s mind-blowing. I’ve helped create a few blends in my time (shout out to Glen Lyon Coffee’s Christmas blend, Figgy Pudding) but doing it on a weekly basis? I am in awe. Blends are, as a relative novice, incredibly tricky: you have to meld multiple, often very different coffees together, accentuating their best elements while trying not to let one overshadow the others. Too much of this could mute that; does this washed-processed coffee work with this other washed coffee and also maybe this natural coffee? It’s a minefield.

I wanted to learn more about how Yes Plz manages to create so many tasty coffees week after week. I spoke with Konecny a couple of weeks ago, and we ended up chatting for nearly three hours—about lots of other stuff, like Expo in Houston and Trump’s tariffs, but eventually we got around to discussing blends and blending coffee. To that end, this conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you tell me a little bit about your history and inspiration around blending?

When I first started roasting in the early days of Victrola [Coffee] in Seattle, we were an Espresso Vivace customer. We were their biggest wholesale account, and then we started roasting. And the first thing was, we wanted to make sure the coffee didn't taste very different than what we'd been serving people before.

So we reverse engineered Espresso Vivace, and we roasted that, which meant that I went from a five bean to six bean to seven to eight bean blend—all post-roast blended. It was a Monsoon Malabar and an Indian Robusta and all of these very challenging-to-roast coffees and you kind of built this thing, and then you would play with the ratios.

And because I was roasting three days a week, I'd be like, well, if I rest the Monsoon Malabar for the blend two days longer, and then throw it on bar on day five... And I just assumed that this is what every good shop would be doing. That just seemed like natural best practices.

So I was always comfortable with blending, and then the pendulum swung—correctly—all the way towards single origin and filter coffee and the third wave thing really kicked into gear. At Victrola, I would argue—I'm waiting for somebody to dispute it, so I'm afraid to say it too loud—but I think we were the first people to do single origin espresso in 2005. We put a Rwanda up, and that was this aha moment. During Coffee Fest that year people were tripping out because Rwanda was still this new origin. Victrola had this reputation with coffee people outside of Seattle and it was most people’s first experience of single origin espresso. 

And I don't say it started a trend, because I think the trend was inevitable, but I think there's kind of this what I would call single origin puritanism that arose that just became the floor. Like, if you're serious about coffee, you have to have fresh-roasted beans, and they have to be single origin.

And now you’re back to blending again.

It’s crazy, and I wouldn’t recommend other people do this fast-moving merry-go-round. I can tell you what single origin coffee I'm going to release next week, because I'm itching to get it in the roaster again, but I couldn't tell you what the blend is going to be.

You don’t plan it in advance?

No, so on Friday we’ll cup everything post-roast and we’ll have sort of an idea, what we have in our inventory—there’s a million combinations. But generally we kind of know this is what we have to work with, let’s validate that and see if it works. Or we’ve been doing a Colombia and Guatemala with a little bit of East Africa thing, and we can swap out what those pieces are and maybe the ratios. So we’ll kind of riff on a theme for a few weeks.

I’m not trying to surprise people or throw a curveball every week, or make something radically different. If we have something that’s working, let’s just keep iterating on that. Or sometimes we find a thing that’s working and then we’ll hit it on the cupping table and be like, last week it worked better. What was different about last week versus this week’s version of the same premise, and how can we get back it? So I think that actually the lack of planning and the seat-of-the-pants-ness of it is sort of a strength.

How many different blends have you done with Yes Plz?

This week will be our 322nd edition of The Mix.

Back when we were only doing The Mix and we didn't have also a single origin—we added the single origin mostly as a signalling thing; a lot of coffee nerds would just bounce off us, like, “You only offer blends?”—a lot of those early releases were just, it’s going to be this coffee this week.

Do you have a blending philosophy, if there is such a thing?

I've always felt like blending is are where you should make your strongest statement. Especially as the narrative is—and it's a narrative that I've promoted and accepted and believe in strongly, but I think is also a self-defeating narrative—it's this idea that it's all about just what's intrinsic to the coffee. All we're trying to do, all we can do as roasters, is just try not to fuck up [the green coffee] too much before we shepherd it into your hands. And it's like, yeah, that's kind of true. But also, if a roaster wants to be more than a forklift driver, you know…

Or, it's always messed me up that baristas don't do any blending. Nowadays it doesn’t happen, but in the third wave heyday I might walk into a shop that’s a multi roaster and the barista might tell me, “I’m not feeling the espresso today”. And you have [all this coffee] right there. A chef wouldn't be standing in a walk-in full of ingredients and be like, “Oh, the soup is kind of boring”. You got some garlic right there, dude—fix it!

Blending is the easiest, lowest hanging fruit. [but] it's like this third rail where people are afraid to mess with the sanctity of their single origin coffee. I don't know, if you can make it taste better, and you've got the tools right there, do it. I just don't understand why those things wouldn't be just barista basics for a shop that had any sort of culinary pretence behind it.

Can you talk some more about this concept of thinking about coffee as ingredients?

If you're willing to just sort of take the gloves off and say, this is an ingredient, how do I make this taste as good as it possibly can? Invariably, you are going to do some blending. So that was kind of our original manifesto going into it.

And obviously there are other expediencies around inventory management and things that, on a pragmatic level, it gives you some affordances. But I found that those affordances, from a culinary perspective, are also very useful. It’s like, if I have this Peru that I've sat on for too long, and it's not that sweet and it's not that interesting. But guess what? At 10% in a blend, as like a stretcher coffee, it helps open things up.

What I’m drinking now is a countertop blend that’s 80% Rwanda, 20% Colombia, mixed up this morning as I was brewing. I've been playing around with this combination, and this is a different Colombia than the last time I did it. It's still mostly Rwanda, and it's everything I love about this particular Rwanda lot, but taking that sort of clean, open, crisp brightness that comes from the Colombia—it's like drops of water in whisky, it just opens up and now the finish has a little more lift.

How does green buying work when you’re constantly changing your blend?

I think over time, my idea of what works and how it works in blending has expanded. So at this point, if I like a coffee on the cupping table as a sample I'll commit to buying it. Just because, even if it's not going to work in a blend, it's going to be a nice single origin release.

Part of the whole point of doing the model the way we do it is so that from a green buying perspective, if it's good, let's just say yes and we'll worry about what to do with it when it lands. It's sort of allowing for that promiscuity on the green side. Part of the joy of why I built this coffee company was to scratch my own itch, right? Just like, if I love a coffee, I want to buy it.

And it happens to be that I really like clean washed coffees. Like, I love Central America or Latin American coffees, so from a blending perspective, those are really your chocolate chip cookie, glazed doughnut crowd pleasers. And then there’s coffees where I’m a little more cautious, where they require more finesse. Colombias tend to lean kind of bright and citric-like, or blending with Kenyas—I’ve done it a couple of times, and it’s just hard. I have to play to its strengths and say, what can I do to give it an extra dimension?

Do you have any overarching goals or long-term aims with Yes Plz?

It's a very mediocre manifesto. We can take it 10 steps back and say: it's cooking. We [the coffee industry] are chefs. We're creating a culinary experience that we want people to enjoy and blow their minds with it. Okay, how do you do that? You have all the toys, all the tools, all this access to green coffee. What are you going to do?

I just wish that, when I went into other shops, I [more often] had an experience that was a solid B+ base hit. I look at an offering list and it's like, I don't need the watermelon co-ferment, I don't need this anaerobic process. You've got a washed Honduras on the menu: I'm interested. That coffee could be really good, but it's also the coffee that your baristas care about the least, because it's the least interesting to them, the least charismatic. And yet it's the one that should have the most potential to win somebody over, like, “Oh, my God. I didn't know coffee could taste this good”, right?

And I think, on a day to day basis, what Yes Plz is doing with The Mix is saying, Look, we have access to all this stuff, it's gratuitously good. You take a bunch of 85-88 point coffees and just start fucking with them, you can give people the most buttery, obscenely good grilled cheese sandwich, or the most fresh out of the oven glazed doughnut, over and over and over again.

I feel like, as a baseline, that's the sort of experience that every coffee roastery, every shop, should be trying to give people.