Back in 2011 when I began Birds of Unusual Vitality (and back much earlier when it was merely a wild idea), I was in a very different place. At the time I was working at Brother Baba Budan, my first specialty coffee job in Melbourne. I’d completed my Bachelor of Photography about five years prior, and had subsequently started and deferred both a Masters in Writing, as well as a Masters of Advertising,

I was desperate for an opportunity to combine my passion for coffee alongside my urge to continue to pursue writing and photography, and - lacking confidence in my ability to pursue paid work in the field - decided to create my own project.

Over five years ago now, it was a different time in the specialty coffee industry - there were folks like Sprudge doing good things, but I found most of the writing about coffee to be either sponsored pieces masquerading as unbiased content in trade magazines, or ill-informed journalism espousing bullshit about how specialty coffee was ripping coffee-drinkers off with high coffee prices (spoiler: not actually true).

Thus, Birds of Unusual Vitality was born. The goal of the project was multi-faceted: to talk to coffee professionals as a way of illuminating the complexities of the specialty coffee world, to utilise my beloved Hasselblad medium format film camera, to get to talk to people that I looked up to within the industry, and to get a different dialogue out into the public about specialty coffee. For me personally it was a way of connecting, of getting out of my comfort zone, and staying in touch with my photography roots.

Over the years, Birds gave me the opportunity to speak to a huge range of people that I found incredibly inspiring, in relation to both the coffee trade and also as people generally. Getting to sit down and talk with Peter Giuliano while in Long Beach for Coffee Common at TED 2012 was a huge moment, as was chatting over coffee to Tim Wendelboe, talking with WBrC champ Erin Mccarthy shortly after his win, having the lovely Jason Scheltus make the time for a project (that at that time didn’t even exist yet), and being able to showcase lovely friends like Talor, Angus, Mark, M'Lissa, Dan, Emily, Bowen, Sam, and Simran. Also, the time and energy that Nico Alary Jr put into the logo and website development, and also the huge help from Aaron Maxwell & Joe Miranda in putting the two publications together and getting them out into the world.

All of this, all the time that people have given to this project, and the amount of care that these people give to the specialty coffee chain, has meant so much more to me than I can even really convey.

There came a turning point, however, when after three years of fervently working on Birds on top of working full-time and other projects, I could feel the urgency waning. I was in London in 2014, after photographing the World Barista Championship in Rimini for Sprudge, when I finally got the opportunity to sit down with the inimitable James Hoffman for a proper interview.

I was exhausted and coffee-d out, and as James and I sat down at Bulldog Edition at the bottom of the Ace Hotel, I couldn’t find the energy to pose any hard-hitting questions. Feeling this, and sensing that he too was potentially somewhat coffee-fatigued after the previous few weeks, I asked if we could instead just have a coffee and a casual chat. While it inevitably led back to coffee at some points, I felt a huge sense of relief just being able to connect and chat, without having to stay switched on and in interview mode.

Since that point, over the last few years, it feels like a project like Birds of Unusual Vitality is less needed. More of the great coffee professionals are out there communicating great ideas themselves (Scott Rao, James Hoffman, Peter Giuliano, Talor Browne), and my own focus has moved away from those in consuming countries, and much more wholly to those in producing countries.

In the six years since Birds started, I’ve worked at Brother Baba Budan, Market Lane, Lune Croissant, Assembly Coffee & Tea, Patricia, and now Small Batch (with a brief year-long interlude in Adelaide making natural wine in the hills while studying viticulture). I’ve started and ended relationships, raised two dogs, written numerous articles for Sprudge, seen more countries than I could have ever dreamt of, made two books, moved house countless times, and have grown and changed considerably - inside and out.

With all this in mind (and having not posted a new interview in over three years now), it feels like it’s time to put the current version of Birds of Unusual Vitality to rest. That’s not to say that this is the very end - rather, it’s the end of this particular chapter.

In my role at Small Batch I’ve been able to travel to Kenya & Ethiopia to source coffee, and on future trips I hope to be able to tell some of the stories of those places through stories and words - which I will eventually post here, time and energy permitting.

When I started Birds of Unusual Vitality, getting to origin to those stories in an un-biased way was always the goal - working full-time as well as occasionally working for Sprudge makes this a more challenging task in reality - but I intend to make good on the promise that I made myself all those years ago.

So, stay tuned, there’s more to come, and hopefully it won’t take me three years this time round.



P.S. If you'd like to get in touch, just shoot me an email at eileen.p.kenny[at]gmail.com, or say hi on instagram.

P.P.S. In my most recent house move I unearthed a number of copies of Birds of UV Vol.2 - they're available here.