Amalie Gagné-Acoulon

She appears at coffee competitions, stays on farms, teaches languages, and somehow knows people everywhere. But when we asked what she actually does, the answer turned out to be less important than the question.

There are people in coffee whose work is easy to explain. They roast beans, run cafés, grow coffee, or compete onstage. Then there are people like Amalie Gagné-Acoulon. We first met Ama in Thailand, and ever since, she has seemed to appear in a different corner of the coffee world every time we hear from her. One month she is volunteering at a championship in Europe; another she is visiting producers in Latin America. When we spoke, she was in Kazakhstan, helping a barista prepare for a competition after spending time hiking in Kyrgyzstan. She knows organizers, competitors, café owners, and farmers, yet she does not seem particularly interested in becoming a coffee celebrity.

So we asked the obvious question: “Ama, what exactly do you do?” She laughed and began explaining, but the answer only grew more complicated. She teaches languages online, volunteers at events, supports competitors, visits farms, and tries to introduce producers to roasters. Sometimes she offers help; other times she is the one asking questions. Her life does not fit neatly into a job title. The longer we talked, the clearer it became that what mattered to Ama was not defining her position in coffee. It was finding out where she could be useful.

When Ama arrives at a coffee farm, she does not want to be the visitor who immediately tells producers how to improve their work. She has met too many people, and seen too many different farms, to believe there is one answer that works everywhere. Soil, varieties, resources, markets, and ambitions all differ. A technique that sounds exciting at an international coffee event may be impractical for a family without the money to build new equipment. The producer may already know exactly how they want to process their coffee. What they lack might be a buyer, better communication, or a way to move their harvest to market.

“I’m not there to teach you something. I’m there to learn about what is your project,”

Ama often tells farmers. She is uncomfortable with the idea of arriving as someone’s savior, carrying ready-made solutions. Instead, she begins by asking what the people on the farm are working toward. Sometimes she can contribute. Sometimes she cannot. Either way, she wants to understand the place and remember the people she met there.

For an upcoming visit to Costa Rica, she described a simple exchange: the people on the farm wanted to improve their English, and Ama could help with that while learning about their daily work. It is not the sort of contribution that appears in an impressive coffee résumé. But for producers hoping to communicate with international visitors or buyers, language can matter. Ama has also been exploring connections between producers in Thailand and roasters in Taiwan. She knows that introducing people is only a beginning; shipping coffee across borders involves regulations, costs, logistics, and patience. She has not solved all those problems, and she does not pretend otherwise. She is trying to learn enough to help a promising conversation become something practical.

Ama’s curiosity about coffee began to take shape while she was studying international relations. She had worked some café shifts in Canada before, but specialty coffee was still new to her. In Brazil, people opened their doors and introduced her to farms, cooperatives, varieties, cupping, and the lives behind the beans. She traveled through coffee-growing regions and learned much of her early specialty coffee vocabulary in Portuguese. Instead of encountering coffee only as a finished drink, she began seeing the people and decisions behind it.

One afternoon in Rio de Janeiro, while trying to study in a café, she asked the barista to make whichever coffee he liked. He brought her a filter brew called Jasmine. The flavor startled her.

“It really tastes like jasmine… Like, it cannot be coffee.”

It was one of those small experiences that quietly rearranges a person’s understanding. She later looked for the beans again, wanting to hold on to the surprise of that cup.

Returning to Canada did not mean she suddenly had a clear coffee career planned. She had student loans to repay and was unsure about further studies, so she took a full-time job at a growing specialty coffee business. She worked behind the bar, managed a café, trained colleagues, and spent time around the roasting and quality-control side of the operation. A Brazilian colleague helped her move beyond following brewing procedures toward understanding why they worked. Coffee became not just a job, but a field full of questions she wanted to keep asking.

Through volunteering at a Canadian national competition and attending a major coffee event in Boston, Ama found something else she loved: the community. She met baristas and producers from places she had visited, watched people share ideas, and saw how a huge international industry could also feel surprisingly small. She did not leave those events dreaming only of a trophy. She wanted to keep meeting the people who made them possible.

 

Then COVID interrupted the life she had built. Coffee work became uncertain, and Ama began questioning whether she wanted to return to long shifts behind the bar. She enrolled in a specialized master’s program in translation and continued teaching French online. With French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish in her life, languages gave her a way to work while moving between places. During the pandemic, a short trip with her sister to a remote part of Canada turned into several months. Later she traveled around the country, reconnecting with friends from coffee communities she had known before everything closed.

She never entirely left coffee. She occasionally helped friends in cafés and tried competitions herself. At a Canadian Cup Tasters event, she competed despite having burned her tongue shortly beforehand, relying more than usual on texture because her sense of taste was affected. That weekend, a friend qualified for a world championship in Milan and invited her to come along. Ama said yes. Soon she was in Italy with a backpack and no especially detailed plan for what would happen after the event.

When her friend went home, she stayed in Europe. For a time, she worked picking grapes at a vineyard in France. Then she began noticing coffee competitions happening in different countries and asking organizers whether they needed volunteers. She traveled to events not because she expected to win anything, but because each one offered a chance to understand another local coffee community. What started as a series of invitations became a way of living.

She also learned something about her own place in that world.

“I don’t like to be myself on this stage… I’m way too stressed for that. But I really like the background scene.”

She enjoyed the preparations, the volunteers, the conversations, and the competitors trying to make sense of an unfamiliar environment. Through friendships and repeated volunteering, she became involved with the broader team supporting the World AeroPress Championship. Her favorite part is working with competitors and understanding what support they might need. The audience sees the person brewing; Ama is interested in everyone helping that person get there.

That instinct follows her even when she is supposed to be taking time off. Ama and her partner live with different work schedules and do not always have much time to travel together. They arranged a rare shared vacation to explore Kyrgyzstan and its mountains. But Ama had coffee friends nearby, and soon she was also giving café workshops and helping with quality control. In Kazakhstan, she began supporting a local barista preparing for a championship. Her friend had helped her with accommodation and other practical difficulties, and she wanted to return the kindness in a way that mattered.

We laughed when she explained it. Wasn’t this meant to be a holiday? She laughed too. Yet there is a difference between constantly working because you feel you must prove something and choosing to help someone because a relationship matters to you. Ama seems drawn to the second, even if she has not always figured out how to protect her own time. The traveling itself is not endlessly glamorous, either. During that trip, an electrical fire filled the hallway outside her accommodation with smoke, forcing her and Henry to leave and find somewhere else to stay. Freedom, in her version of it, includes a fair amount of uncertainty.

One of the most revealing moments in her career came from Colombia. Ama had been staying on a farm with a friend who was working with producers while preparing for a competition. Eventually, he needed to return to his roastery and other responsibilities. Ama stayed a few more days. She spent time with the family, learned about local traditions and the grandmother’s role in the household, and attended a small local coffee competition that most international audiences would never hear about.

That extra time matters. At major events, the coffee industry often gathers around recognizable names: champions, celebrated producers, and successful businesses. Ama enjoys those events, but she keeps wondering about the people who never make it onto the posters. What about the farmer growing coffee that will never command an auction price? What about the barista who enters a small regional competition and does not reach the final? What about the family members whose work supports a farm without attracting any attention? Their stories are no less real because they are harder to market.

Ama always wants to learn about lesser-known coffee varieties, what farmers can grow under changing climatic conditions, and what is possible without expensive infrastructure. She spoke about women whose contributions to farming and coffee education are easily overlooked. At one brewing workshop in Indonesia, only two of roughly twenty-four participants were women. Rather than treating that as a simple statistic, she wondered who could not attend and why. Were some looking after children? Did they have the same opportunities to spend time learning? She could not know each person’s circumstances, but the questions stayed with her.

She also spoke admiringly of Gloria Hernandez in Mexico, whose study of farm ecology and microorganisms broadened Ama’s thinking about processing. What impressed her was not the pursuit of a fashionable flavor, but an interest in what was already living on the land and how it might benefit the farm. Other women-led projects inspired her for similar reasons: they paid attention to practical needs, which might include water, transport, or children’s education rather than another piece of coffee equipment. Ama’s question remained the same: what would actually help this person, in this place?

As we talked, we realized how closely her curiosity connects with the purpose of I’M NOT A BARISTA. We want to share the stories of people behind coffee, especially those who rarely receive international attention. Ama has already met many of them. We asked whether she might record conversations with producers during her travels so their voices could reach a wider community. She welcomed the idea. Nothing had been formally planned, but the possibility felt natural: another way to connect people, without pretending that a story alone can solve every problem they face.

For all the places Ama has visited, she does not claim to know where she will be in five years. She would like to work more fully in coffee, but she has not found a role that fits the traveling, teaching, relationships, and curiosity that now shape her life. She wants more stability without giving up the chance to discover new communities. That tension is familiar to anyone who has tried to build a meaningful life without following a conventional career path. Sometimes the things that make us feel most alive are difficult to put into a business plan.

When we asked about her dream, she did not describe a championship title, a famous company, or a grand project that would change coffee forever. She talked about leaving something positive in the communities that welcome her.

“My dream is to help…”

She knows that good intentions are not enough. An introduction might lead nowhere; a project may take years; and sometimes she has nothing useful to offer beyond attention and friendship. But she would like the people she meets to be better off, even in a small way, because their paths crossed.

Near the end of our conversation, Ama returned to the question of knowledge. She wants it to be open to people who seek it, rather than imposed by whoever has the most influence or the latest award.

“Don’t deliver dreams that are for a day, deliver dreams that are forever, or like for ten years on.”

It is an ambitious hope from someone who is still working out her own future, but perhaps that is why it feels sincere. She is not presenting a finished philosophy from a stage. She is testing it, one relationship at a time.

We began by asking Ama what she does. After listening to her, we are less concerned with finding a tidy answer. Perhaps the next time we meet her in another country, we should ask who she has met, what she has learned, and whose story we ought to hear next. Not everyone who matters in coffee will have a title we recognize. Some people simply arrive, listen, offer what they can, and keep the door open for the next person.

Humanity runs on coffee.