Coffee Over Corona Map Captures Coffee’s Precious Moments

Among all of life’s essentials, few are more purely joyous than coffee. From the invigorating aroma of fresh grounds, through the meditative preparation process, to the last drop of the sweet elixir, we could wax poetic for days about coffee’s inimitable pleasures. 

But coffee is also social, and that element has been lost among countless people stuck at home, fulfilling a social contract to reduce the transmission of COVID-19.

Helping to recapture some of that social magic is a new user-populated map called Coffee Over Corona Diaries, showing photos with captions of home-bound people enjoying their daily coffee.

The map was created independently by Alaine Johnson, who also works in marketing and communications with Singapore-based coffee training academy Bettr Barista, part of the Bettr Group.

“The project has surprised me in many ways. I initially started this project when I noticed myself gravitating towards my coffee ritual to separate myself from my multiple screens — and the rabbit holes of news I would be dragged down,” Johnson told Daily Coffee News. “I thought perhaps others are experiencing the same thing, with coffee as a moment to center oneself. That rang true for quite a few, but for many others the themes were different. For some, it’s the only respite between working from home and a break; it’s a motivation to get up before dawn during Ramadan; it’s simply something else to distract from boredom; or it’s a hobby turning to obsession due to discovering the world of home brewing.”

As of this writing, the map had received submissions from individuals in more than 40 countries from every continent other than Antarctica. When taken collectively, these individual snapshots of people, most of whom are thousands of miles apart, do indeed warm the heart’s cockles. Most are unpretentious explanations of home coffee setups, all are refreshingly apolitical, and some are even deeply personal.

“I even got a submission about using the lockdown as an attempt to detox from coffee,” said Johnson. “There was another about how the coffee beans on top of the fridge are a sore reminder of their ex who took the coffee grinder away during a break up just prior to lockdown.”

The map is hosted on Medium and can be embedded on any site. You can also submit your coffee moment here.

The Coffee Over Corona Diaries Map