Order of the Baristas
- For the canon entities, see The Baristas.
COMMUNITY REPORTSThe remainder of this article contains lore created collaboratively by the Blaseball community.
The Baristas are an ancient organization bound by a shared passion and devotion to the brewing and consuming of coffee and coffee-based drinks. While they insist that the study of Great Coffee in the Immaterial Plane can be traced back to the days of King Tom Hurtin and not at all before that, the organization itself was formed in the aftermath of the Coffee Wars by the scattered barista factions that survived the conflict.
Organizations of the Baristas
The Baristas operate on a decentralized structure of clubs centered around aspects of the coffee trade. The largest and most well-known organizations of the Baristas are the Machinists, the Beanistas, and the Ordersitter's Club, but the very structure of the Baristas allows for several other smaller organizations, including the Milk Knights and the Organization of Temperatures.
The Machinists
The Machinists seeks to brew great coffee through the conception of intricate coffee-making devices, believing that one can understand coffee through the understanding of the mechanical process of making it. To show their commitment, Baristas of the organization often take upon the outfitting of mechanical limbs, a process that makes them a fully functional coffee machine.
The Beanista's
The Beanista's are an organization dedicated to the growing and seeking of coffee beans. Often working with various local producers, the Beanista's dedicate themselves to studying all the different factors that effect the taste of the bean, both the mystical and the mundane. They are also charged with the roasting and the blending of the beans, including great ceremonies in which it is said that coffee can acquire new and strange properties.
The Ordersitters' Club
Shrouded in incredible secrecy, the Ordersitters' Club uses all manners of subterfuge in order to protect the flavor of coffee. Occasionally known as 'the Hipsters' by both Baristas and non Baristas, the Ordersitters often plant themselves in coffee shops and cafes in order to encourage others to order drinks that showcase the bean instead of the dreaded Pink Drink.
History of the Baristas
The Court of King Tom Hurtin and the First Schism
The coffee trade in the Immaterial Plane (or, perhaps more accurately, the part known as "the United States of America and Canada" according to more trusted historians) was centered around the court of King Tom Hurtin, of Canada. Looking for his perfect cup of coffee to start the day, Tom Hurtin sought advice from the local barista organizations, who had engineered the first of the Great Machines, the Québécois Press (later known as the "French-Canadian Press", eventually shortened to the "French Press"). Seeking to bolster Canada's coffee industry, he invited the baristas to his court as advisors, forming the Royal Coffee Society of Canada/Société Royale du Café Canadien (RCSC/SRCC).
Under King Tom Hurtin, the RCSC was free to innovate and dedicate themselves to studying many of the fundamental techniques and rituals that are used in coffee-making. However, as its numbers grew, controversies began to erupt, as political factions began jockeying for power and royal favors. These tensions culminated with the invention of the Ontarian Press (later renamed "the Italian Press" following a series of highly unfortunate typos and mishearings). Unable to reach a consensus on the perfect way of making coffee, much of the senior leadership of the RCSC decided to leave the court in search of better prospects.
The Dunkies Corporation
Sitting on the world's largest deposit of raw donut ore, the Dunkies corporation was rapidly expanding and gaining power over the city of Boston. A minor incident at a Gloucester glazing mine led to the discovery of a naturally occurring pocket of drinkable coffee, leading Dunkies executives to expand their operations into coffee drilling, and calling on the expertise of baristas to build the coffee refineries of Quincy, Braintree, and Weymouth. Seeing the potential in Boston to become the new Great City of Coffee, many of the RCSC baristas took jobs with Dunkies, hoping to spread the word of good coffee in Boston.
Despite their pivotal role in the incredible success of Dunkies' Refined Coffee, baristas were systematically kept out of decision-making power at the Dunkies corporation, with some blaming the uptick in coffee demand for the Great Jelly Flood, and the 18-month stoppage in service required to repair the damage it caused. As part of a wider move to remove human workers from the resource extraction process, the Dunkies corporation began working with Clambridge University on alternative means of producing coffee and donuts, including the Super Donut particle accelerator.
The Coffee Wars
Following the discovery of an illegal coffee experiment laboratory in Brockton, and amid mounting frustrations with the Dunkies corporate structure and board, the baristas of Boston chose to band together and leave the corporation, grinding all coffee operations in the city to a halt. Eager to take control of the city's coffee industry, Tom Hurtin mounted an army and began descending on the greater Boston area, setting up camp in the nearby city of Medford with all the Tombits and playing cards they would need. Fearing the prospect of having to hold off an invasion without a morning coffee, the Dunkies board chose to activate the Super Donut, in hopes of having enough coffee from alternate dimensions to fulfill demand. The rushed activation, in addition to flaws in the design of the particle accelerator, led to the time-space shattering explosion known as the Big Dunk.
Thinking the city defenseless in the immediate aftermath of the blast, Tom Hurtin's troops played through the time-scattered streets of Boston, only to be met with resistance from multiple eras of the city's resistance cells. Fighting to a sometimes-literal standstill. The merging and un-merging of parallel realities that took place during the first Battle of Boston caused the coffee beans in the kitchen of dissident barista Ulysses D. Donut to get turned into tea leaves, which, once brewed, could be turned into a hot drink of comparable power to coffee.
Rallying the various pockets of resistance across Boston through the power of tea, Donut led a small force to the Battle of Bastings. Over the course of a 12 days game of "Go Flish", he kept Tom Hurtin's troops to a stalemate, until issues with currency conversion and a lack of sevens in Donut's hands forced Tom Hurtin's to file for bankruptcy and withdraw all troops from the city. Shortly thereafter, Boston's first congress passed two laws: one instituting the current electoral system, in charge of electing a mayor following the ILB post-season, and another banning the possession and sale of coffee throughout the city.
The Founding
Effectively forced out of the city of Boston, and having witnessed firsthand the dangers of centralizing power, the surviving Baristas on both sides of the Coffee War chose to re-center themselves on the pursuit of coffee. The organizations would be free to pursue the Great Deeds of Coffee through any way they wish, and they would organize in whatever way they saw fit in order to accomplish their task. The event was described in Barista legends as "our first victory, the first step on the journey to the pure light of the Perfect Cup".
