Stuff You Should Know - Coffee: The World's Drug of Choice

Episode Date: December 29, 2011

There's a 98 percent chance you're drinking coffee right now. Maybe not, sure, but coffee is ubiquitous - about 80 percent of Americans consume coffee and Brazil alone has 3 billion coffee plants. Learn all about the great black brew in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We've been drinking coffee. I am actually, Josh. I told you, what did I tell you 10 minutes ago? That you are drinking coffee and you showed me even that you are. And it's my first cup since

when? Like last February or so? Yeah, which is weird, man, because you were on coffee for a while. You talked really fast. You were like, I feel weird. And it was fun to watch. And then I guess I hadn't noticed, but yeah, it just stopped. Why? I'm just not, you know, I'm not a regular coffee drinker. I drink it when I'm in the mood or when it's cold. Yeah, but a year in between cups is beyond not a regular coffee. Well, it hasn't been cold since February. It's like avoidance. Maybe I've had some since then. Really? Yeah. Actually, I had one of those gingerbread lattes yesterday. Those are good. They're real good. Eggnog's good, too.

It's almost like not coffee, though, to me, because you and I drink it black. It's a dessert treat. Generally. Yeah. Which I'm not, you know, not saying that's the way you should drink it. Right. But I just really enjoy the taste of black coffee about eight times a year. I'm with you. I've cut my intake down tremendously since then, since last February. Down to a dozen cups a day? Down to like a third of that. No, a quarter of that. Three or four cups? Three, about three. That's not bad. And it's all decaf, too. It's almost all decaf.

Yeah. But I still get wired and buzzed. It's weird. Yeah. What do they call that? The old psychosomatic reactions? Junkie. Yeah. So, Chuck. Yes. You asked me a question. I was like, this is the absolute truth, dear listener. Chuck asked me a question because I said I didn't have any, any intro to this. And he said, well, do you know the origin of cup of Joe? And I said, yes, I do. So here's the intro. Spontaneity. Back during World War II, right? The U.S. worked closely with the British and the British already had something called a cuppa,

C-U-P-P-A. Okay. Hey to our British friends over there. You guys can go to sleep for a minute because you know this. Yeah. But a cuppa is just a cup of tea. But tea is so ubiquitous that just saying C-U-P-P-A means a cup of tea, a cuppa. So if you're going to have a cuppa, that means you're having some tea. Exactly. Okay. But coffee is so thoroughly ingrained in the American culture. I believe, Chuck, there's a stat you furnished me with that 80% of Americans consume coffee, and it's been this way for a long time, right? And that's consume, not necessarily regularly, but consume. Consume. Take in. Like I'm part of the 80%. Right. Okay. This is already well established

by World War II. So when American GIs were hanging out with British soldiers, they drank coffee like all the time. It was part of the rations, dried coffee. There was even matches included, not just to let your cigarettes, but to light a fire for a kettle if you needed to. Sure. Coffee was just as ubiquitous among American servicemen as tea was with GIs. Okay. Well, American servicemen slang is G.I. Joe. Uh-huh. Ah. You put cuppa before Joe, and you have a cup of Joe. And that is why coffee is called Joe. Really? Yeah. All right. That, mystery solved. That was a good intro, Chuck. Well done. That was teamwork. So this, I'm pretty excited about this one, actually. It was a good article. It was a

really good article. Written by the esteemed and unknown Deborah Beller. Have you heard of Deborah Beller? Never. No. Must be a free answer. All right. So let's get to the history first, because that's what we like to do here, on the podcast program. There is an ancient, not ancient, but it's a legend and perhaps a myth, no one knows for sure, about Caldy, the Ethiopian goat herder. Well, he has a name, so you know it's for real. And supposedly what happened is, he saw his goats mowing down on these weird green fruits. Red. I'm sorry, red at first. Geez, I already messed that up. And he noticed they were, you know, they called them dancing goats. They started to get a little frisky and not sleep at night, like they're supposed to.

And he said, oh, what is this stuff? I gotta get ahold of this. Right. There's two versions from here. He took it to a local monastery and either the abbot there made a drink from it that kept him and the rest of his monks awake. So they said, this is awesome. Or he said, no, this is bad. And he threw it in the fire, which produced that nice aroma. And then he said, hey, maybe it's not so bad. Right. So either way, it's probably legend, but it's a nice story. Yeah. And there's a, there's a coffee company here in Atlanta. I don't know where they're based originally, but it could be Atlanta called Dancing Goats. And that is why. Oh yeah. I never thought about that. Yeah. There's a lot of Caldy coffees around the country.

Oh yeah. I never thought of that. Yeah. Well, okay. Dancing goats. Never knew. Yeah. Dancing goats. They're like, they're crazy for the coffee. Have you ever seen a goat dance? Oh yeah. I have not. I used to dance with my goat. I've seen a fainting goat, but not a dancing goat. So. So that's the legend history. Right. We know that ancient African tribes, by ancient, I mean like prehistoric, meaning pre-writing. How about that? Okay. Especially along the eastern coast of Africa had this, basically they made little power bars. That's awesome. They would take animal fat and then they would take the coffee berries and either smush them and then put them in animal fat or else they just put the whole coffee berries in animal fat and then eat them.

Yeah. And then they would like, they would have a lot more energy after that. Pretty cool. Right. This originated probably in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is the biggest. Because it grows naturally there. Yes. A certain type does. Sure. Years later, so we leave Africa now. Africa, they're eating their power bars. We go to the Arabian Peninsula and the same kind of coffee grows there on the Arabian Peninsula as does, as thrives well in the Ethiopian Highlands. Should we go ahead and call it what it is? Arabica. Okay. Okay. And that is like the Primo coffee as far as coffee drinkers are concerned. The wine of Arabi. Right. On the Arabian Peninsula, somewhere around 1000 AD, somebody figured out that you could roast the stuff and make it into a concoction, a brew, if you will, and start drinking

it. Yeah. Hot drink. By, I think, the 13th century, a couple hundred years later, the Muslims, which had conquered the Arabian Peninsula by then, knew that they had something really special with the coffee. Yeah. So they would export coffee beans, but you would be beheaded if you tried to get a plant or a seed out. Right. They want to keep it. Yeah. Because they knew, like, we can basically control the world with this. Yeah. And I found that there's something called the Kabe Kane, which was the public coffee houses in the Arabian Peninsula, and they were hugely popular. Still are. Still are, I'm sure. And they, it's at that time, and this is, what do you say, 1000 AD? Well, they had a lockdown on coffee by the 13th century. Okay. Long time ago, though, but early

on, coffee already started to have a link between drinking this stuff and sitting around with people and talking about smart things. Yeah. It wasn't like going to a bar where you get sloshed and talk about, you know, the good old days. And end up weeping. Exactly. So they called these Kabe Kanes, Schools of the Wise, and then later in England, there were more than 300 of these in London by the 1600s. And they were called penny universities, because a cup of coffee was a penny, and you would sit around and like learn stuff in the US. No, in London. Okay, nice. So there was always a link. I just found it interesting from the very beginning between drinking coffee and talking smarts, like we're doing. Right. Go ahead, Chuck. Okay. No, that's all ahead. Okay. So

we were saying that the Muslims had a lockdown on coffee, but there was supposedly a legend, there's a couple of legends of people getting it out of the Arab Peninsula and into the rest of the world. Yes. And one of them is an Indian smuggler named Baba Bhudan. Baba Bhui? Baba Bhudan. Okay. And he left Mecca supposedly with some seedstrap to his chest and made it out and started growing coffee in India. Yeah. Well, the fact that it was Mecca was, it may not have spread the same because Mecca was obviously a destination, still is, for pilgrimages. So it may not have picked up if it hadn't been for the fact that it was in Mecca. Right. Supposedly, I don't know how it got out to Europe, but the first coffee plantation,

first European controlled coffee plantation was established in Java by the Dutch in 1616. And then it made its way across to the Atlantic. And you can kind of see like little by little, there's like histories and legends about how coffee spread, which is pretty cool. So it made its way into India, thanks to Baba Bhudan. It made its way to Brazil, thanks to a spy named Lieutenant Colonel Paletta. Yeah. Who was sent by the emperor of Brazil at the time in 1727 to get coffee from, yeah, from French Guiana. He said, go find the ambassador's wife or the emperor of French Guiana, the ambassador. Yeah. Go find his wife and seduce her and get some coffee seedlings. And he did. Yeah. Apparently,

he was a looker and she was a sucker for a handsome mug. And so when he left, she gave him a bouquet of flowers and he hid them inside the flowers. So there you have it. So coffee spreads to Brazil. And now Brazil is like the world's leading grower, I believe, of coffee. That's true. I think in Brazil alone, there are 5 million people who are employed to cultivate and harvest 3 billion coffee plants. That's just in Brazil alone. Wow. So you mentioned Europe though, coffee in Europe. It would have not taken hold in Europe nearly as aggressively if it hadn't been for Pope Clement VIII. Did you hear about this guy? No. It was originally coffee was very controversial, obviously, early on because it's a drug and a stimulant. And a lot of Europeans cautioned

against the bitter invention of Satan. They took it to Pope Clement and said, hey, dude, you've got to rule on this evil stuff. And he went, well, let me give it a try first. He noticed everyone has a Brooklyn accent now. And he gave it a try and said, wow, this stuff's pretty awesome, actually. I'm going to give it the stamp of approval. So Pope Clement gave it the papal stamp, and that's why it became so popular in Europe. Well, yeah, it was vindicated papally. And if it hadn't been, who knows? So, okay, we'll talk about Europe first. You were talking about how the Penny Academies. Penny Universities. Penny Universities. So there's also, Chuck, been a lot of companies that are still around today. A lot, just a lot of huge events have

taken place or begun or find their roots in coffee houses. Lloyds of London. Very true. Lloyds of London, the huge insurance company, I think the world's largest insurer, began in a coffee house that was owned by a guy named Edward Lloyd. And I guess to make a little extra money on the side, or to keep his patrons happy, he kept a list of all the ships that were insured by some of his patrons, who I guess at the time, you could get somebody to cover your ship as an investment. And Edward Lloyds started keeping track of it. Hence Lloyds of London. And now you have your tonsils insured because of that very day. Man, that cost me arm and a leg, but it's going to be worth it just in case. Also,

do you remember how I said that coffee is just so ingrained in American culture? Do you know why? That answer is totally obvious. Boston Tea Party. But it's so obvious. Yes. It's so obvious you just walk right past it. Yeah. And you don't hear a lot of, not press, but you just don't read about that a lot unless you go looking. And it wasn't just the Boston Tea Party that did it. It was, that was part of it, but it was all of the taxes on tea that really made it prohibitive for people to drink tea. So they started switching to coffee and then it became something of a point of national pride. And, and the Boston Tea Party itself was planned in a coffee house called the Green Dragon.

That is very true. So coffee is very much just from the, from the get-go, from the, the, the reason why everybody's so jacked up for the American Revolution. Well, it's just, it's interesting. All these stories come together to make coffee, like the fact that it was in Mecca, the fact that the Pope gave it the stamp of approval. The Boston Tea Party, the ties with smart talk and coffee houses. It's, all those things came together to form the perfect storm of what is now the second leading import or export, or just commodity, aside from oil. Second leading commodity, as far as I understand, as far, it ranks second to petroleum in terms

of dollars traded worldwide. Crazy. And it's the most popular drink on the planet, aside from water. And I imagine that's on the, the normal market. I don't know if anything tops coffee on the black market. Chuck, it's, I think, you know, there's plenty of reasons to love coffee, but probably the most, the most common reason to love coffee is the trimethyl accent theme. C8H10N402, for those in the know. That's caffeine, which has the same but a milder effect on the brain as cocaine or opium, meth. I'm starting to feel this already. I felt the first one this morning. Yeah. And caffeine occurs naturally in a number of plants. It's not just coffee, but it's in like whammo amounts in coffee. An average cup of coffee has

about 100 milligrams of caffeine, where if you have like a can of Coke, 12 ounce can of Coke, there's 50 milligrams of caffeine. Yeah. So I mean, it's twice as much. And you can tell, I drank decaffeinated coffee just now, and I'm a little more just decaf. Yeah. And decaf will explain how it comes about later on, but there is one plant out there that naturally is decaffeinated. One naturally decaffeinated bean, right? Yeah, the Madagascar coffee. Crazy. Species Mascarcofia viniei. I wonder if that was naturally, happened naturally if it was bred to be so. I don't know. Or not bred, but you know what I mean. So we're talking about the United States and as big a junkies for coffee as we are, there's only one state in the union

where coffee can grow. And that is Hawaii. And that's because Hawaii exists in the bean belt. That's right. And they grow their very famous and delicious Kona coffee in the volcanic mountains in the bean belt. That's on the big island. On the big island. You're a Hawaii guy now, you know that. The bean belt, as you mentioned, is bounded by the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. Yes. It's in Remilia running right through the middle. That's right. And the soil, climate, and altitude are awesome for coffee. It means that you're going to get a continually producing tree, which is really cool. One coffee tree can have beans ready to pick, beans and bloom, flowers blooming all at the same time. Do you remember we saw them in Guatemala?

Oh yeah. I think it's their second or third largest export is coffee. Says they're number eight in the world. I believe it. Yeah. So the coffee is grown on a tree. It's a woody evergreen tree that can grow up to 30 feet high. But if you're into coffee cultivation, you keep your coffee shrub level so you can harvest it easier. Yeah, you don't want to be bringing ladders in there. No. And most harvesting is done by hand. Like you said, it's constantly productive. So you've got a little bit over here that's mature, you've got a little bit that's ready. And there's flowers. Did you know the coffee tree has flowers? I did. That smell like jasmine, some say. And on the spot where those flowers bloomed,

about a year later, you're going to have fully mature red coffee cherries is what they're called right for the picking. And they look just like cherries. They do, except grouped in bunches. They taste different. Yes. And then one tree in a single season, I thought this was, this is kind of staggering. Just one tree produces one to one and a half pounds, which is less than, it's about a half a kilogram. Yeah, that's not this. One tree. Yeah. That's all that takes a lot of trees to produce all the coffee that the world's consuming. Think about that. Yeah. Yeah. Luckily, we have Babu Badan, who got coffee out of Saudi Arabia. That's right. Varieties of coffee, Josh, we already mentioned Arabica. There are two, Arabica and Robusta.

If you're talking Arabica, those are the original Ethiopian coffee trees or descendants of. They grow well. I'm sorry, they are mild and aromatic. Eventually, that's what you're going to get when you drink a cup of it. About 70% of the world's coffee is Arabica. Grow in higher altitudes between two and 6,000 feet above sea level. The Ethiopian highlands is a great place for it. Sure. Mild temperatures are required between 60 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit. 16 to 24 degrees Celsius. And they need about 60 inches of rain per year. That's 152 centimeters. And frost is no good. No. Not at all. No, because if you look at the bean belt, if Florida's not even in it, the keys aren't even in the bean belt.

So it's probably rare to get a frost, if not impossible in the bean belt. The Robusta is, you're going to have a bean smaller and rounder. Overall, the tree is much hardier because it can grow into temperatures up to 85 degrees Fahrenheit and lower altitudes. And it packs a lot more punch. About 50% more caffeine and it's more bitter. And I read somewhere that Robusta is like, has long been considered an inferior type of coffee. Oh, yeah. Like it's the hearty, like redheaded cousin of Arabica. That's only 30%. And that we here in America consume, we consume a lot of it. And the reason why is because the Pan American Coffee Council, I believe, which created something called the coffee break. Have you heard of that, Chuck?

Yes. That's a made up thing from the 1950s. Coffee was coming down from up on high where only the wealthy could afford it to being a lot more predominant. And one of the ways that it was it was introduced to wider culture is by mixing the inferior Robusta beans with the Arabica beans. And so now it was like, sure, it doesn't taste as good, but it gets you going through your your horrible life. So have a have a coffee break and get back in there. We drink more of the Robusta here. At least in the 20th century. Yeah, we started consuming a lot more of it. All right. Yeah. Yeah. There are more than 800 flavor characteristics in a coffee bean, which is double that of wine. So when you hear people talk about wine and all the, you know, it's smoky,

oaky and woody, like double that. And he talks like that. You know, wine people. Gotcha. I'm a wine person, but I'm not. I know you're making fun of yourself. I'm making fun of my people. But wine, I'm sorry, double that. And you've got the what you got going on with coffee, even though you think you're like, Hey, there's like the morning blend, little Colombian, little Brazilian. Yeah, not so. Remember our friend Brandon was having a fight with our friend Mark over because he keeps buying flavored coffee, like blueberry, blueberry coffee should not exist. No. Mark, we're just going to go ahead and tell you that right now. Yeah. And not only should it not exist, but if you make some

in your coffee maker, you might as well throw it away. Yeah, because you can taste it for the next 50 pots of coffee. That's right. Let's talk about the actual coffee bean itself, Chuckers. The coffee cherry, Josh. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that in on the prime example. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off.

The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil asset for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Who do we become when we travel? I have never flown without wearing a suit in time. I refuse to do it. Who are we allowed to be? Those blue American passports as powerful as they are. It doesn't work the same for everyone. And where is everybody going? I do love to sit near the ocean and drink. Join me, Brendan Francis Nunum, for Not Lost

Chat, a new season of the travel podcast that the New York Times, the Economist, and the Atlantic named Best of the Year. In each episode of the new season, I'll share an audio postcard from where I've been, talk to a travel writer about their work, and invite a famous frequent flyer to come by and answer your travel questions. If I'm sitting in the seat and the person beside me is acting irate, I'm going to call a flight attendant before I stick my size 13 foot up their tiny ass. Ah, the joys of air travel. Listen to Not Lost on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, what you got is a bright red, like we said, skin. When it's ready to pick and ripe, it's green if it's not. And apparently coffee

pickers, they don't want to have more than two green for every 100 picked. Otherwise, they're going to get their hands slapped by coffee plantation owner. Oh, yeah. Yeah, like when they're hand picking them, they, I mean, they're picking them fast. Right. So you're going to have some green ones, but that's their goal. Right. Is what I hear. Okay. The skin of the the cherry is called the exocarp, very thick and bitter. You got a fruit beneath that called the mesocarp. And it's kind of like the inside of a grape. Like if you peel the skin off a grape, yeah, that's what I take the mesocarp. Yeah, it's gushy and sweet. Right. Then you have the parenchyma, which is slimy and it's a honey like layer protects the bean. There's going to be two

beans generally in every, you know, if all goes well in every cherry and they are covered by a parchment like envelope called the endocarp. They're kind of bluish green at the time. And then there's the silver skin on top of the bean and it's all protecting that little nugget that looks sort of like a shelled peanut. Right. And the silver skin is also called the spermiderm. I prefer silver skin. I think everybody prefers silver skin. So if you can get rid of all these layers that protect the bean, basically what you're going down to is like the pit of a cherry, the seed. Yeah, a nut. That's where the gold is. Right. And when you harvest them, you said that people, they just want the bright red ones, but people are harvesting between 100 and 200 pounds

a day by hand. Yeah. Most coffee harvesting takes place by hand. And it depends on where you are, where it's going to be harvested or when it's going to be harvested. If you are north of the equator, you're going to harvest between September and March. If you're south of the equator, you're going to harvest between April and May, which is not spring. Right. So the summertime is basically the only time they're not harvesting. Right. Correct. Yeah. And when you, when you've got them harvested, you've got them picked, you have your 100 to 200 pounds for the day. Depending on the type of coffee plantation, you're going to dry them by one of two methods. There's basically just two methods of drying, which is pretty cool considering that there are huge,

huge concerns that like produce coffee. Yeah. And there's still like two kind of primitive means of drying them. Before we get into the cool method, I want to point out that all of this is speed is key because the freshness of coffee is the secret to good coffee. So if you pick beans that morning, they're being processed that afternoon. They don't sit around in barrels for a few days at all. Right. Unless they're being dried, then they sit around for seven to 10 days. That's part of the processing. So basically, if you're using the dry method of drying, you are basically, you're laying the coffee beans out in the sun or the coffee cherries. I'm sorry. Yeah. Big concrete slab. You're laying them out in the sun and you're letting them dry. And after about seven to 10 days,

and you're raking them periodically, just kind of turn them over and get some air underneath them, the cherries will have dried enough so that there's only about 11% moisture in the whole coffee cherry. Yeah. And you can tell that it's ready because the beans rattle inside. So it makes it a good children's toy as well. I couldn't find who dries dry. Like I'm sure you can find out like whatever coffee, if you really want to research what kind of coffee you want to drink. Yeah, I'm sure you can tell. Like who does the dry method because it's, I mean, I get the feeling that dry methods probably superior because anything that usually takes a little longer is probably worth it. Sure. And also it doesn't use enzymes like the wet method. I get the impression

that if you get from a small plantation, you're probably using the dry method. The wet method uses enzymes and fermentation. And basically you take the cherries and throw them into a vat of water after, I'm sorry, you get the pulp and skin peeled away. Then you throw it into a vat to ferment for a couple of days. And the natural enzymes apparently eat away the little envelope in the silver skin and then you have the beans left over. That's right. And you still need to dry for about four days in the sun, just like the dry method. And you let it rest at night. Sometimes if you don't want to do, if you want to speed it up even more, you don't do the sun dry method. You put it in these big rotating drums that pump in hot air and that'll dry it out. And it's

fermenting, but if it smells too much like vinegar, that means it's fermenting too much. Is that right? Yeah, that's what I hear. Okay. So let's say you have a bunch of dried coffee. What you have is a commodity, like we said, second only to oil and total dollars traded. And it's called green coffee because coffee producers don't roast. Coffee roasters roast the coffee and they buy their green coffee from coffee producers. Yeah. So you've got, if you bought a bunch of green coffee, what you would have is traditionally a big jute or a Cecil bag filled with coffee, still in this day. Yeah. And it's going to be transported to the tune of about 7 million tons of green coffee shipped worldwide every year. Now it's already hulled

too at this point, right? Right. It's just the beans. Right. Yeah. So the the hulling process, you know, it's a machine that does that. And then they sort them according to class, like grade A beans, grade B beans, grade C. I forgot about that part. Yes. But eventually you're going to get a nice bean. Right. And they grade them first by size and then by density. Yeah. And you want the bigger, heavier ones are superior to the smaller ones. Yeah. And either they're graded by hand, like along like a conveyor belt, or there's a conveyor belt and puffs of air that will puff off the lighter, smaller ones. Yeah. Or they have little machines like the sorters that sort it according to size. There's all different kinds of machines now.

Yes. They also have ones that look exactly like giant spiders that are terrifying, but they get the job done. All right. Now to the roasting, which is that's the good stuff. Yeah. That's where coffee really gets its aroma and its flavor, eventual flavor. And here's an interesting fact. Roasting reduces caffeine. Is that right? That's right. So, even though an espresso roast takes 14 minutes compared to a seven minute light American roast, an espresso bean has a lot less caffeine than just a regular thing, a regular bean. Huh. So, you may say, why do you get so jacked up? It's because the grind and the concentrated brew. Yeah. I never knew that. I thought the espresso bean was like loaded with extra caffeine. I guess

I would have, I would have imagined something because you equate like taste with caffeine content too. Yeah. True. So, like the blacker it is, the thicker and richer the taste is, you just like, this must be loaded with caffeine. Not so. No. Very interesting, Chuckers. So, we're roasting now. Yeah. So, you've got a roasting drum that's capable of achieving temperatures of 550 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 288 degrees Celsius. And the key is not just the heat, but the rotation of the drums. You can roast coffee at that heat as long as it's moving so it won't burn. Yeah. Don't want to burn. It's hot, but it's not going to burn. Espresso beans are burned a little bit. Right. So, there's, there's a couple of, if you are a coffee

roaster, you're, you're looking for a couple of things. The first thing is that the beans should start to turn yellow, smell a little bit like popcorn. Yeah. Like you said, they shouldn't smell like vinegar at all. You want to throw that out. No. And then you're going to hear something called the pop and the coffee bean is just popped and it's hit about 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah. And it doubles in size at that point. Yeah. And that's really the beginning of the real roasting process. After that happens, you really want to be Johnny on the spot, pay attention to this because things move pretty fast after that through a process called pyrolysis. The heat extracts the oil and they turn the coffee from green or yellow to a nice rich brown.

Yeah. And now it's really being roasted. And eventually almost a black. Yeah. It depends. Like, like you said, if you are going to make espresso roast, you're going to heat it for 14 minutes and basically you're toasting these things, you're burning them and the sugars inside are caramelizing, right? And by the way, God help you if you say expresso. Yeah, really? Or even worse, if you sell espresso and you have a sign that says expresso, come on. And then Chuck, there's the second pop and the second pop is like, I'm done. Take me out. Yeah. You talked about the roasters, these roast masters, and they are called roast masters because it is a very specialized job. What they do a lot of times

is because you don't want to roast, you know, 10,000 beans and have a bad batch. So what they'll do is they have a side room where they roast a little tiny batch. And this is where the roast master does their taste testing. They'll brew up four cups of coffee from different parts of the batch just to make sure they've covered it all. They push aside the foam and when they don't put it in a coffee maker, they put the grounds in a cup with hot water and let it steep, you know, like old school. Yeah, that's how I make coffee. Or what I like to call camping style. Do you do that at home? Yeah. You just boil it with the French press? Oh, French press. Sure. I have several ways. I also have this coffee maker that Yumi got me to boat them and it uses a vacuum.

It uses a vacuum to suck water up into this top bulb and it just sits there and percolates and then it drips back down. Really? But just the coffee does the ground stay up above and then you take the top part off and you've got like a little pot of coffee. It's awesome. It's fun to watch. I find that a press pot is a little chalky for my taste. Oh yeah, it totally is. But I guess it's just, you know, if you like that, you like it. But you have to grind it just right. Yeah. Which we'll talk about in a second. It's all about the grind, Josh. But what they do is, like I said, they get the small batch, they broke the four cups, they steep it and then they push aside the foam on the surface to release the aroma and that's called breaking the cup. They sniff it, then they

skim the grounds from the surface and do a little sip and spit for each cup and then they say, hey, it's ready. Go ahead and brew the big batch. And then when no one's looking, they snort the grounds. That's right. And another interesting thing is that once they roast it, it actually gets packaged still hot. It goes into the bag hot and they pump in nitrogen to replace the oxygen and because you don't want oxygen. And then, you know, the vacuum seals it. Yeah, oxygen degrades the freshness of coffee faster than anything else. So yeah, that's why everything's vacuum sealed. Well, let's go. We're there. Okay, freshness. So, well, there's four keys to making really good coffee, right? You've got your roasted coffee. It's been roasted masterfully. And now it's your

turn. You have a bag of beans that's vacuum sealed, very fresh. You can still tell it's warm even, Chuck. And so you have four things you want to take into consideration. Freshness, the type of the grind, the ratio of water to coffee, and then water purity and the purity of your coffee maker. And by the way, don't either A, buy ground coffee or B, buy coffee and grind it in the store. You're not doing yourselves any favors. Or you can and tell everybody to just leave you alone while you enjoy your coffee. Do whatever you want, people. But if you're a coffee connoisseur. Yeah, you're not doing that. You're grinding. You have a home grinder. You're buying beans. You have a home grinder and you're grinding just enough to make a couple of cups of coffee.

Well, and not only do you have a home grinder, but you should have a nice grinder. I went to research Emily drinks a latte every morning of her life. Yeah. And she had a crappy little grinder and a crappy espresso machine. So I invested in like the good stuff. Nice. And the difference between the $15 grinder and the $100 grinder is massive. I would imagine so. Yeah. It's really all. Is it a burr grinder? I've heard burr grinders are like the best ones. It's a burr grinder. And it's, you know, I don't know enough about coffee to know the difference, but I started reading up on it and it said the grind is the key. Yeah. So as you say, the grind is the key. You've got your freshness. You don't want coffee that's older than like

two weeks. You don't want to grind it ahead of time. And if you do end up somehow with some ground coffee, you want to keep it in the fridge and it will stay up to two weeks. Don't try to get Chuck Bryant to drink any of it though. No, I'm not like that. I'll drink any of it. I'm just teasing it. But the grind, like you say, is what releases all of the flavors and aromas and every little great little nugget of goodness in coffee. It's the way you grind it. And anybody who's ever ground coffee, especially at like Trader Joe's or something, you can adjust the dial. Yeah. And it will say French press espresso automatic drip. Right. And espressos are really fine grind. Very. And Turkish is actually even finer than that. But the grind is related to

the amount of time it takes to make the coffee. Right. So espresso is very fine. Yeah. Almost powdery. And that takes about 25 seconds to make espresso with steam. It takes about 10 minutes to make a pot of regular drip coffee. So for that, you have a coarser grind is what it's called. Yeah. And then also, Chuck, I want to mention there's cowboy coffee. You're talking about how the roast master just masses up some. Yeah. Camping coffee. Is that called cowboy coffee? Cowboy coffee. Yeah. And apparently it used to be very difficult for cookie to get anybody to grind coffee because that gets sold very, very often. So I believe in the 19th century, there was a coffee company called our buckles coffee and they put a peppermint stick in every

bag of coffee so that cookie could be like, hey, whoever grinds this gets a peppermint stick. And yeah, apparently cookie had no trouble after that. That's a great story. I love it. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

Who do we become when we travel? I have never flown without wearing a suit until I refuse to do it. Who are we allowed to be? Those blue American passports as powerful as they are, it doesn't work the same for everyone. And where is everybody going? I do love to sit near the ocean and drink. Join me, Brendan Francis Nunnam for Not Lost Chap, a new season of the travel podcast that the New York Times, the Economist and the Atlantic named Best of the Year. In each episode of the new season, I'll share an audio postcard from where I've been, talked to a travel writer about their work, and invite a famous frequent flyer to come by and answer your travel questions. If I'm sitting in the seat and the person beside me

is acting irate, I'm going to call a flight attendant before I stick my size 13 foot up their tiny ass. Ah, the joys of air travel. Listen to Not Lost on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you talked about proportion of water to coffee. Everyone has their slight variation. Some people like it a little stronger, some people like a little weaker. Yeah, I found this ratio to be wanting. Oh, really? Yeah. Because what we have here in this article is two tablespoons of ground coffee for six ounces of water. They say that makes a strong cup, but you say more. I like a little more coffee than that. A little more? Yeah. Which is like a heaping kitchen spoon? No,

kitchen spoon is about one tablespoon. Oh, okay. No, I mean two of those. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah. Yes, heaping, for sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You don't level it off. You're like, if it doesn't fall off on the way into the basket or the French press, it's fine. Okay. And they also say that cold water, fresh cold water is what you really want to start with, and eventually you want to end up with 200 degrees Fahrenheit, 93 Celsius, if you want to really get all the flavor out of the beans and keep your maker clean. You've got to clean that thing out. Well, there's the irony. If your coffee smells like vinegar, you've got bad coffee, but you want to use a vinegar solution to clean out your coffee pot.

Crazy. Yeah. Every once in a while, rinse it out. I don't know what the proportion is. Make it up. I think if, yeah, there, I mean, there's got to be a certain amount of weeks or amount of coffee pots you've brewed, but if you start to taste bitter coffee, then it's time. Or if you taste blueberry coffee and you want to do the vinegar thing too. Or throw it out. And then we talked about the Madagascar coffee species that naturally produces decaf, but most people don't drink this. Instead, they're drinking stuff that has been removed somehow. Crazy. The caffeine's been removed from the beans either by using a chemical solvent gross, which extracts the caffeine and then the solvents washed away. Wow. And then the other method is to steam the beans. Nice.

And that gets some of the outer part of the bean, which apparently packs the most caffeine. Right. Worn away and you've got decaf. And then I think they scrape the rest of it away after that even. Yeah. So if you're, if you're into healthy, then get organic decaf if you want decaf. Nonchemical solvent. Yeah. You don't want to be drinking that. Yeah. So then coffee around the world, Chuck. America, thank you to our friends at Starbucks who founded their company in 1971, has kind of come out of its haze of not that great coffee. Yeah. And is starting to understand like, oh, there's really good coffee out there. Is it good coffee? Because up here, I've heard coffee people say, you know,

Starbucks really named good coffee because of X, Y and Z. I was trying to be polite here and I was thanking Starbucks of 1971, not Starbucks of 2011. Starbucks opened America up to the concept of good coffee, doesn't necessarily serve it good coffee. Or at least expensive coffee. Right. But for the most part, Americans still prefer the American roast, which is about a seven minute roast, like you said. Yeah. Which is just shameful if you ask me. So what do you think though? I mean, I'm not an aficionado. Are we talking about this?

Well, I don't know. I mean, I just hear coffee snobs say, you know, Starbucks isn't even good. But then I think those are people that are just fighting the big mass corporation that's on every corner. Well, I don't know, man. I tend to go with the coffee snobs in that one. Yeah. I think it used to be a lot about like, wait, there's way too many Starbucks out there. And now I think it's like they're just not, the coffee just doesn't taste that good. It's really cloying. But the thing is, is I wonder also if I'm missing something, because how does Starbucks not know that it's coffee tastes like this?

Right. Why wouldn't they change it? Yeah. What's the deal? I'm sure someone out there, we're going to get some good emails on this from people who really know how they drink their beans. From Ted Starbucks himself. It's going to be like, I'm suing you too. Teddy Starbucks. France, French roast, very dark, robust, cafe au lait. It's going to be half milk, half coffee. I don't know why you'd want to ruin your coffee with half milk.

I know it's good. Is it? Yeah. Viennese roast, I think Vienna was the first, I think the first coffee shop in Europe was in Vienna. I might be wrong. I can't remember. I think so. I think so. Possibly. We'll find out. At any rate, the Viennese roast is very popular. Dark roast, two thirds, dark roast beans, one third, regular roast.

And the European roast is the flip, the reverse of those. It's one third dark and two thirds light. Yes. And then of course you have espresso, which like you said, there's less caffeine, but you get the big jolt out of it by grinding it. So just pulverizing every hiding place where caffeine can hang. Have you ever seen Mulholland Drive, David Lynch? I have, yeah.

The espresso scene? I don't remember. It's one of those mysterious meetings in David Lynch movies where you're like, who are these people and why are they having this mysterious meeting? And they serve this one guy. He's like, you know, we searched the world over for this espresso and we know you're going to approve of this one. And they serve it to the guy and he drinks it and then spits it up in a napkin.

So good. I love that guy. Oh god, he's the best. Turkish roast, what's the proverb? That coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love. So what does that mean? They just put a lot of sugar in it. They like it sweet.

Oh, I think it's way, I think it's more than that. So they have Cardamom and Chickery and Coriander in their coffee. They also, have you ever had like Mexican coffee or Mexican chocolate coffee? No. With like cinnamon and like cayenne pepper in it and all? I don't know. It's very good. Nice.

And then yes, they also put some, some sugar in there, I believe. And it's very finely ground. Like I said, even more finely ground than espresso. Boy, that's powdery. Yeah, and thick. They make it real thick. Oh yeah. Yeah.

In Cuba, you're going to get the Cafe Cubano, which you do it like a shot, which is pretty cool. And it's like espresso, but you don't sip it with your Sambuca or your lemon twist or whatever. Right. Have you ever had a lemon twist with espresso? Yeah, sure. Oh, I never have. No.

Remember a bulky in Beverly Hills Cop? He said, can I interest you in an espresso with a lemon twist? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then in Thailand, I didn't realize this coffee is really strong there and it is chicory tinged, iced and sweetened with condensed milk. So I don't know if they don't drink hot coffee at all or I know it's in Japan. It's like coffee is huge.

I think it's always hot in Thailand and they're like it's too hot for hot coffee. Is that what it is? So apparently if you want to make it at home, you just take some coffee, a little sweetened condensed milk and some ice and there's your Thai coffee. Boom. So Chuck, I am heartened by some recent research that has come to light that basically says drink as much coffee as you like. Yeah.

They, I mean, they used to say like coffee is bad for you. Yeah. You don't want to have too much. Right. Bolic acid is bad for you. Too much caffeine will make you go shoot people. I mean, it's been crazy. There's good and bad.

Let's just say that. So let's talk about some, there's some sort of weird link between coffee consumption and diabetes. There's a negative correlation. Whereas the more coffee you drink, the lower your risk of diabetes, right? Two diabetes specifically. Yeah. They did nine studies about five years ago and four to six cups of coffee per day versus two or less reduced your risk by 30%, which is pretty significant.

Yeah. That's extremely significant. 35% if you drank more than six cups a day. All right. And whether you drink decaf or caffeinated, the results were the same. Yeah. So it's not the caffeine. No.

Which I thought was interesting. It's probably the Bolic acid. We're going to do a caffeine podcast, by the way. Okay. That's coming. Free radicals, which may or may not exist. Supposedly there's phytochemicals, about a thousand of them in coffee beans. And if free radicals do exist, these phytochemicals act as antioxidants,

preventing the aging process and all sorts of cellular damage. If free radicals exist. They say that coffee improves memory and cognition. They did plenty of studies on this. And coffee drinkers, people that drink coffee in the morning, especially perform better than non-drinkers when it comes to learning new information. Yeah. I was surprised by this.

Like I'm not surprised, but I wonder if they did a follow-up like four hours later. Like how are you doing now? Exactly. Yeah. The coffee crash, I get that. Which is, I think, why people, like my brother-in-law, drink coffee all day long. Yeah. There is no coffee crash when you drink two pots a day.

No, I know what you mean. But you also don't sleep. And like your calf muscles rupture through your skin. Are they doing a study on that? I can tell you. All right. What about the bad? Because, you know, not everything is all good.

Well, when you drink a lot of coffee, you pee calcium. And that means that you are losing bone density, e.g., coffee can increase osteoporosis. But they say, add a little milk to your coffee, balance it out. Oh, yeah. That's what it says here, at least. It definitely makes sense. Or yogurt. But who wants to eat yogurt?

So if you put two, I love yogurt. I'm just getting all like it all right. Two tablespoons of, but only the good stuff, like only Greek yogurt. Yeah. Two tablespoons of milk or yogurt per cup of coffee. I don't see putting yogurt in coffee, though. Like you'd have to be literally insane to do that. It seems like it would just coagulate and lump up.

Yeah. Gross. Like they would take you away and lock you up if somebody saw you putting yogurt in your coffee. Josh, I know you like your skin. I know you like to remain youthful and handsome and sexy. But it's just like an exercise in futility, I feel like. I disagree. Coffee has antioxidants.

If you drink too much of it, it will cause your skin to wrinkle probably quicker than your average dude who doesn't because of dehydration. That's what they say. I've heard that. I don't know about this weight gain thing. Basically, there's a change in blood sugar that the caffeine high can produce, which is strange because that would seem to contradict the diabetes study if there was less of a risk of diabetes. Yeah.

But apparently, because we love eating donuts with our coffee and that kind of thing, too, you can actually gain weight if you eat a lot of coffee because you're like, I would have another crawler. Why not? Because it goes so well. I've got some coffee. Do you dunk? I have dunked in the past.

Yeah. I'm not that big on it. I also will dunk in Oreo from time to time, but it's not like every time I eat Oreos, I have to have milk. I thought you meant Oreo and coffee. No. Okay. And then coffee is one of the most heavily sprayed crops on the planet with pesticides

and herbicides and chemicals. So if you're not into that, you should get organic coffee. Thank you, Norman Borlaug. And just a couple of more little facts here. I'm going to skip most of these, but I will say that fair trade, coffee, if you have a heart, you will seek out fair trade coffee because for every, I'm sorry, the pickers themselves earn as little as four cents per pound. And the farmer earns as little as 12 cents per pound sold.

So the fair trade movement tries to redistribute profits so that all these people earn decent wages. I believe the fair trade movement originated around coffee production. Like I think that was the first industry. I think that's where it's cradle lies. Oh yeah? Yeah. And finally, Josh, if you are one of those dudes or ladies who start your day off by going to

your local coffee shop to get a cup of coffee on your way to work, you're going to wait in line about 45 hours a year for that coffee. Wow. Not too bad. A couple of days. That's a lot though. So you're also going to drop about 165 bucks on coffee every year. Yeah, I don't know about that.

That seems, that to me looks like a stat if you buy and make your own coffee because I bought one of those gingerbread ones yesterday at Starbucks. It was like 525. Yeah. Let's even say four bucks and you drink coffee every day. Yeah. And you buy one a day. There's plenty of people out there who buy 365 cups of coffee.

That's more than $1,000 on coffee a year. Yeah, that's way love then. That's just a stupid statistic you came up with. I'm done with my coffee. We're done with the podcast. Well, no, we're not quite done yet. But you got some stuff. Chuck, let's forego listener mail.

And instead, we're not going to just let you go. Before we let everybody go, we want to wish everyone a very happy new year. Yeah. No matter where you are, no matter what time it is, we are wishing you a very, very happy, safe, bountiful, beautiful, wonderful 2012. Yeah. And that's what I love about New Year is it's everyone. We're not going to get a mail saying, well, you know, in my country, we don't do this or

down here, it's not that. Everyone gets a new year. So you must really love New Year's. I love it. Yeah. So, Merry, Merry New Year. And I want to also say, very, very special, happy birthday to a very, very special girl who has her birthday the two days before New Year's.

No way. My Yumi. I was assuming that. Well, happy birthday, Yumes. We love you. Happy birthday, Yumi. And happy New Year to everybody. And if you, I forgot almost, Chuck, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at

syskpodcastfacebook.com slash stuff you should know, and you can send us a good old fashioned, happy New Year email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today. On iTunes.

Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging?

They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer for that. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Here's today's Fortnite weather report. iHeartland has been hit by a major blizzard. The snow has turned iHeartland and Fortnite into a winter wonderland. With new festive games, including a winter themed escape room, a holiday obstacle course,

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