7g Roaster

Normality is subjective. What we perceive as ‘normal’ often comes down to where and how we were raised. In Portugal, where the cafe culture is a way of life, a heavily sweetened espresso is considered the normal way to drink coffee. Reasonably priced at around 70 cents a cup, it’s not unusual for people to enjoy two to three cups a day at a cafe.

In Portugal, coffee is a quick-to-make, quick-to-drink beverage. It’s not something you sit back and savor. It’s a drink to be downed, not tasted. And cafes are generally seen more as somewhere to enjoy the company of friends, rather than for enjoying a cup of coffee. 

It’s no wonder then that, despite being around since 2014, specialty coffee is still something out of the ordinary in Portugal. Fátima Santos is trying to change this. Head roaster at 7g in Porto, the country’s second biggest city, Fátima is challenging the old-fashioned conceptions of how coffee should be.

But how did she go from studying to be a psychologist, to studying the art of coffee roasting? Fátima shares how one cup of coffee changed her life and set her on a whole new career path.

Driving change through dialogue

When we’re only presented with the familiar, we may miss out on discovering something new. That’s where the Coffee Experience at 7g comes in. A coffee flight of four coffee types – filter, cappuccino, espresso and coffee lemonade (their take on a Portuguese drink called “Mazagran”) – it introduces customers to the diverse world of coffee, and encourages them to try options they might not have been aware existed. 

“Portuguese coffee customers are very conservative when it comes to coffee. Quality is not something they are concerned with. Sometimes they don’t understand why we charge 1.20 euros, almost double the average price. So we have to explain to them how the coffee is made, and about the work that is behind each cup.  

But it’s not easy. At the end of the day, if you speak with 30 people, you’ll get maybe one or two who’ll go away and try to understand more. So it doesn’t happen all at once. It happens over several visits. When the customer visits the shop again and again, and they want to know more, then we’re finally making a start. If you want to bring about change, you need to keep at it.

Still, a lot has changed in just the last five years. We have young people that want to become baristas. We have coffee enthusiasts who own their own coffee blogs and online coffee groups. They come to us and say, ‘Thank you for showing me different ways to drink and enjoy coffee. I used to drink tea but now I have my own V60.’ Which is so cool! 

Back in 2011, I went into Prufrock Coffee in London, and had a cup of coffee that blew my mind. I was like, ‘Okay, what is this? This is not coffee. This is something different.’ I want people to have the same kind of experience, this mind-blowing discovery with coffee. That’s what drives me.” 

Forging your own path to creativity

Fátima has helped out at her father’s cafe since she was a child, but she never had any intention of going into coffee. After graduating with a degree in Psychology, Fátima went on to graduate school and worked as a therapist while studying for her Master’s degree. As a therapist, Fátima helped patients managing schizophrenia, bipolar disease, and other severe diseases, to live independent lives through counseling sessions and facilitating communication between the patient and the psychiatrist.

But Fátima had begun to feel trapped and constrained by the formality of the job, and the lack of creativity. Being young and inexperienced probably contributed to her sense of frustration. Yet, while she was no longer sure this was the job for her, changing her path was not an option. Once you choose a direction, you stick to the course. That was what Fátima had always believed.

Then, something changed her mind. She was nearing the end of her Master’s studies, when she confided in her friend. ‘If you’re not happy, why not let go of everything? Move somewhere else, try something new?’ was the friend’s advice. 

The idea was so far out there, it took a couple of days to process. To give everything up after coming so far? It was stupid to even think about it. And yet, Fátima did think about it. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. She began to wonder, what if? What if she did go somewhere else and try something new. The more she considered it, the more she could see the potential and imagine all the possibilities.

After a few days, Fátima came to a decision. She was still young, only 22, what had she to lose? It was time to start a new challenge, a new era in her life. This was the first time Fátima strayed from the well-trodden path she’d walked since high school. Now she was forging her own trail.

She moved to London and began training to be a barista at a bakery cafe. During her free time, she’d visit coffee shops in and around London. Soon coffee became a huge part of her life.

Then one day, she had a cup of coffee that changed her life. Raised on super-sweet espresso, this one cup introduced her to a completely different concept of coffee. She fell in love with specialty coffee, wanting to know more and more about it, buying books to learn as much as she could. It was an obsession.

Fatima now had two passions to choose between: coffee and psychology. By the time she headed back to Portugal in the second year of her Master’s, she’d made the decision. Fatima chose coffee.

But in 2012, the specialty coffee scene in Portugal was non-existent. Forced to find a compromise between this reality and her ideal, Fátima took a job at Starbucks where she worked for two years. In 2015, she finally got her chance to enter the world of specialty coffee when she landed a job at Fábrica Coffee Roasters, Lisbon’s one of the earliest specialty coffee shops.

While working as a barista at Fábrica Coffee, Fátima gradually became interested in roasting and kept begging the owner for training. But despite her persistence, the owner – responsible for roasting at the café – was reluctant to give her a chance. Roasting defines the heart and soul of a café’s flavor. It’s not an easy task to hand over to someone else.

Fátima did get a chance to test her roasting skills, but the opportunity came quite unexpectedly. One summer, when the owner was off on vacation, the cafe ran out of coffee. Serving a full house of customers every day, something had to be done. There were greens in the storage, but no one to roast them. Fátima tried to get in touch with the owner but no luck. 

With no other options available, Fátima took matters into her own hands and decided to roast the beans herself.

And how did she do? “I think it went pretty well…I didn’t burn anything!” Fátima doesn’t remember much about that first roasting experience, but whatever the result, her move to action helped the cafe get through the emergency.

When the owner came back, he sampled Fátima’s roast. ‘Not bad for your first try,’ he said, and finally agreed to teach her roasting.

“What appeals to me most about coffee is the sensorial process. How we use our senses to understand the differences in the processes, in the beans, the regions, countries, and how that combination can result in different coffees. You need to manage all these factors, the heat, the time, the air, everything can result in different profiles. It’s kind of like cooking.”

Coffee as a catalyst for self-growth

Fátima has always loved adventure and was born with a curious nature. Her stubborn streak means that she’s unstoppable once she sets her mind to trying something new. Growing up in the 90s, when traditional gender roles were deeply ingrained, Fátima often found herself at odds with societal expectations. She wanted to work with tools, climb trees, play sports, and couldn’t understand why she was excluded from these activities just because she was a girl.

Fátima often clashed with her parents on these issues. From an early age, she learned that to live her life on her own terms, she would have to challenge conventional beliefs and values, and work to change the system. It’s possible that this is what drew her to specialty coffee, a niche that challenges the traditions of commercial coffee.

“What gives me the most pleasure is giving this new excitement to people used to the traditional espresso. When I’m making filtered coffee, customers around my grandmother’s age will say to me, ‘Oh, this is the way that I used to make coffee when I was a child.’ That would be before espresso machines came to be so common. It feels like connecting the future with the past. Connecting these people with new things.”

One event that remains etched in Fátima’s memory is the national barista championship of 2022, where all of the baristas in the top five were from specialty coffee cafes. Compared to traditional coffee shops and franchises, specialty cafes are typically smaller in scale and at a disadvantage when it comes to financial or technological resources. 　

It marked a significant shift in the Portuguese coffee industry. It was a turning point that signaled accelerated change for the future. Fátima had waited for a sign that things were improving, and this was it.

“That one cup of specialty coffee opened my mind to the possibility of other options, and made me want to discover something new. Craft beer is one of those. I want to understand why each beer tastes so different or so good. Interacting with all these different things gives you new answers, new tools, and new opportunities to experiment with.

I mean, life, it’s not black and white. There’s a lot of gray areas, and you have to deal with those gray areas all the time. You have to be flexible in your life. Especially when it comes to making decisions. You need to be balanced. A little bit creative, a little bit rational. Exploring, testing, having this natural curiosity. You have to keep developing your thinking and your mindset. 

In the end, my boss is the coffee. It’s the coffee that tells me, ‘Look, you’re not doing a good job. Try again. Try again. Try again.’ That’s the big lesson.”

Why choose coffee?

Back in high school, Fátima’s favorite school subject was Philosophy. Exploring the depths of the human psyche, thinking about the eternal and unanswerable questions is something that has always appealed to Fátima, and she misses her work as a therapist. Even now, she’ll open up her psychology books and browse the pages. It was a job that she loved, and though her career has changed, that feeling hasn’t.

“Whether it’s people in psychology, or coffee beans in specialty coffee, the more you explore, the more you know about them. You’ll learn about their nature, what is inside of them, and understand them better. The main rule is you have to listen. You have to wait to understand and see which tool will work. And there’s never one solution. You need several plans to understand the dynamic of people’s minds, or the dynamic of the coffee bean itself.” 

Fátima has not completely given up on psychology, but she doesn’t see returning to that world as a realistic option. If it was, then she wouldn’t have chosen coffee to begin with. And whenever she questions her decision, she still comes back to the same answer: Coffee.

“You have the best of both worlds with coffee. It has the science, which I love. But, there’s also the social part. The people part. When you’re tired of calculations and numbers, you have this other aspect. And of course, people are more complex. At least with coffee, you can make predictions. 

The only thing I can say for certain is that coffee gives me the drive to get up in the morning, every day. It gives me positive energy to get the job done well. And coffee gives me joy in learning something new every day. Which is just amazing. It’s a passion. And I think that’s what gives me the drive to continue.”

Photos：Ana Coutinho