The Joe Rogan Experience - #467 - Peter Giuliano

Episode Date: March 10, 2014

Peter Giuliano is a student of coffee, barista, director of the Specialty Coffee Symposium.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! I love when people are really, really, really into shit. And you, sir, are really, really, really into coffee. That's true. And what's important about people like you is that people like me who really do love coffee,

but I know nothing about it and I'm not gonna do all that research it's just not gonna happen man this is too just too much work I need someone like you out there that's obsessed with coffee that can bring me some coffee that smells like lemons I'm here for you what is this stuff that you brought you brought the Ethiopian blend that was warm when we got it. Yeah. Okay. So I brought you Ethiopian coffee because, okay, at some point, so I'm a coffee guy, right? I've been working in coffee for years, 25 years or more. And when you're a coffee guy, everybody asks you their coffee questions. And the number one question that people start asking you is what's your favorite coffee? You

know, everybody wants to know that. So now most coffee people, when they're asked that question, lie a little bit. The way I lied was I would say that's like asking a parent who their favorite child is. You know what I mean? You're not allowed. That's ridiculous. That's when you know you've got a coffee problem. Right, right. You're not allowed to do that, right?

You're not allowed to do that. You're not allowed to play favorites, et cetera. But putting that lie aside, most coffee people are affectionate about coffee from Ethiopia because that's where coffee's from. It originates in Ethiopia. It originates in Ethiopia. Pour some of that beautiful shit out. Yeah. It smells so good, by the way.

What is the name of this particular blend that you made? It's called Yirgacheffe. And Yirgacheffe is the name of a town in southern Ethiopia. And Yirgacheffe is the name of a town in southern Ethiopia. And it is in coffee. To coffee people, Yirgacheffe is like Mecca. That's the spot. It smells unbelievable.

And that's why it's so famous. The coffee smells sort of like flowers. And then like lemons, like lemon oil or something. And that's really unique. If you taste coffee that smells and tastes like this, it's almost certain that it comes from Ethiopia because of the variety they grow there, because of the way that they process it, et cetera. It makes it really special.

So this was roasted by a company in San Francisco called Wrecking Ball Coffee. This was roasted by a company in San Francisco called Wrecking Ball Coffee. And the coffee is called Ethiopia Classic Yergeshev. Classic meaning- How do you spell Yergeshev again? Y-I-G-R-G-A-C-H-E-F-F-E. Isn't it a weird thing where you have to write it down to look at it to make sure it's right? Well, the other weird thing, too, is that that's one way to spell it.

There's like, if you're in Yergeshev and you look at signs, they're all spelled a different way. Because it's actually an Amharic. It's a different language. And they just translate it to English in various ways. So you can spell it. I've been involved in internet. Okay, here's another coffee geek admission. I've been involved in these internet conversations

about how you should spell Yirgacheffe and also how you should pronounce it. In Ethiopian, they pronounce it differently in a way that I can't actually pronounce it. How do they say it? Give it a shot. Yirgacheffe. Yirgacheffe.

Yeah, exactly. That last thing is like a breathing out. But you just did it. How come you didn't do that? You feel pretentious? There was an Ethiopian guy next to me, yeah. That last thing is like a breathing out. But you just did it. How come you didn't do that? You feel pretentious? There was an Ethiopian guy next to me, yeah. Exactly. You feel like, you know, it's like saying I've just been to Roma or something.

Yeah, that is a weird thing. I have my friend Amber Lyon who's coming on the podcast soon. She was talking about Bahrain. Yeah, exactly. And instead of Bahrain, which is almost, she was saying Bahrain. Right. But then she let it go and she said Bahrain. I'm like like wait a minute

it's gotta be one or the other well it's like here in Southern California when a newscaster suddenly just goes into the perfect Spanish pronunciation oh yes yes

you know Brito yeah exactly that's very important if you want to maintain the Latin audience you gotta roll your R's bitch but anyway I don't try for that with coffee names

because it's a little too wild well you're taking a chance on being like already like kind of labeled as a crazy coffee person. But if you could pronounce all the words, then the pretentiousness level gets very risky. Well, that's a thing with

being a coffee person. People are afraid that you're going to be kind of a douchebag about your coffee. Because it's a weird conundrum. Because on the one hand, people like that you take it seriously and because you're trying to make, you know, embrace something that's super delicious.

Right. And you want it to be more delicious and better tasting and stuff like that. And so that causes you to learn stuff about the geography of where coffee comes from and all this weird trivia, you know. And you start to learn about that stuff and it's good. But at the same time, it's very easy when you get really into something to start to alienate people. Yeah. And that goes for anything. That goes for wine or food or, you know, any sort of hobby, you know, when people can't talk about anything else.

And then they start to get kind of snobby about stuff. And so it's a struggle for coffee people all the time, you know, because what I know, and I've learned in my many years of doing this thing, is that especially in the morning, you know, people just want their coffee. Right. They don't want to fuck around with, you know, all this stuff like that. And we learned that in, you know, so I started as a barista. I worked for many, many years as a barista behind the bar making people their coffee in the morning.

So do you really appreciate when someone's a connoisseur, like the difference between a guy who's like, I just want a cup of coffee and a guy who's like, what's your blends today? Yeah, yeah. A guy like who's really into it. Well, lots of times it's the same person. Like, a person that later in the day will be all into what kind of coffee it is and really particular. Everybody, just their first cup of coffee, they just want a freaking cup of coffee. Even coffee pros like me, you know, we dispense with all that stuff. That time when you, you know, you've been there. You wake up in the morning, you don't know what's going on.

All you want is a cup of coffee and people to be nice to you for the first couple of hours of your day usually. Most of the time when I don't have any time and I just want some sort of caffeine product, I have one of those little espresso things. You put those little capsules in there and you crunch it down. You press the button and a shot of espresso comes out yeah yeah um are those bad well it doesn't taste as good yeah exactly that's the thing they're convenient you know and and whether they're there there's a lot of disadvantages to a to a thing like that on the hand, I've tasted delicious coffee out of those. Really?

If the coffee going in is good, if the machine is working right, I mean, there's all sorts of different kinds of machines. What is the... I don't expect you to know this because you don't manufacture these things,

but what is the... They're plastic, right? Is that what it is? Like a metal or a plastic foil? There are some that are made out of aluminum, others that are made out of plastic, yeah. Yeah, I think the ones I have

are aluminum. So is that stuff okay for the flavor when you're heating that up? Yeah. If you're made out of aluminum, others that are made out of plastic, yeah. Yeah, I think the ones I have are aluminum. So is that stuff okay for the flavor when you're heating that up? Yeah. If you're heating up the aluminum, it doesn't mess it up? Yeah, that's not the problem. The problem, that's, aluminum's pretty, you know, resistant to stuff like that, and they make that metal work. You know, it's like a soda pop can. So they've engineered it to work well.

So it's not an issue with flavor. It's just an issue of what's in it. Well, right. And also how the machine works. So if like you guys made coffee here today and you did it in a great way by boiling the water in a kettle and then you have a French press and you use it. Now, the great thing about that is that you're boiling the water. The water is getting to 212. That's where it boils.

And then by the time you pour it in the French press, it's cooled off. Maybe it's 207, 205. Is that where you should have it at? 195 to 205 degrees is where you should be brewing coffee. Oh, my gosh. You're fucking crazy. I know. You got so intense.

You're like, 195 to 205 degrees. I know. This is the honey spot. It is. It's the honey spot. That's where we get, you know, guys like me get fired up over stuff like this. Well, we bought, today's the first day of using it here, what I have at home, which is, I think it's called Breville, B-R-E-V-I-L-L-E. And it'll show you, like, you could have one button for Oolong tea, the other button for French press.

And so this is the French press button. So I assume they get it right. Then that's even better. Then what it did, and this Breville, they make some wonderful, incredible coffee equipment. Yeah, they do. And so the French press button will, I'm sure, get it to 205 degrees. We should put a thermometer in that bitch and find out whether or not. Yeah, I bet it does.

We should find out. We need a thermometer, Jimmy. It's very important. Well, that's the thing. Guys like me, need a thermometer, Jamie. And it's very important. Well, that's the thing. Guys like me, we have thermometers at home because it makes a difference. Wow.

No, but check this out. I believe you, What I was going to say is the machines, whether it's a pod machine or a capsule machine, like you're talking about, or a Mr. Coffee type machine,

Black & Decker, whatever, all those kinds of coffee machines. One of the big challenges with those things is if they don't get hot enough. If they're brewing coffee at 180 degrees, it's going to taste like crap. Oh, okay. So you're cooking it while you're brewing it. Yeah, exactly.

So the water is hot, you know, some amount of hot. And if it's the right amount of hot, in between 195 and 205, right about about 200 degrees then it makes the coffee taste better so it actually literally changes the flavor that's coming out of the beans when it's hot enough to activate it right so and too hot is bad too hot it's bad and so here's here's the deal with coffee it's like if you looked at it under a microscope took a slice of it and then looked at that under a microscope you'd see all the cellular structure of the coffee. And it's like a sponge. And inside the sponge is all the oils and sugars and fats and stuff that make really complicated. It's, you know, thousands of little different chemicals in there that you need to get out of the sponge. You need to essentially rinse it out of the coffee

to get it into your cup. And that's what brewing is all about. Now, if you don't do that well enough, you leave all the good tasting stuff in the coffee, that sponge, the coffee cell walls, you know, and it doesn't get in your cup and your coffee doesn't taste very good. And plus, you've wasted all the good stuff. You wind up throwing it in the trash. If the opposite thing happens, if you extract too much out of the coffee, if you squeeze that sponge till it's perfectly dry, then the last stuff to get extracted tastes kind of bitter and like tannic. It doesn't taste good. It has a characteristic that we call over-extracted. And so that bitter tannin comes from a prolonged exposure to hot water?

Either the water being too hot or you brewing it for too long. Or like, for example, if you boiled coffee like they used to do in the cowboy days, they used to, like, boil coffee over the campfire. That will make the coffee taste bitter and acrid and awful. And it's because it's over-extracted. And that over-extraction is what creates tannins? Right. Well, not tannins specifically, but that tannic sort of flavor. It makes a stringency flavor taste in your mouth.

And that bitterness is from the heat itself? Well, it's from over-extracting. It's extracting bad-tasting stuff out of the coffee. So it extracts all the good-tasting stuff, but then there's an additional extraction. Exactly, of bad-tasting stuff, too. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. So you want to get the stuff that's, like, loose.

There's, like, this— Like a ripe fruit, almost. Right. It's, like, right in the middle. It's this sweet spot. And so this organization that I work for called the Specialty Coffee Association, we, in the 1950s, they started to do some science about this and how to brew coffee properly and get the coffee to where it tasted best to the most people. And they had thousands of people tasting different coffees, you know, and they determined what the perfect extraction of a cup of coffee was to most people in the world. And then they designed amount of extraction.

So I'm going to get technical on you again. So I already told you 195 to 205 is the right temperature. The extraction that you want to get is between 18 and 22% extraction. Now this is coffee geek stuff that nobody wants to hear, but this is the kind of stuff that we talk to each other about. Wow. And, and so, uh, and so like good, if you have a favorite coffee place where the baristas are like really good and they make the coffee taste really good, chances are they know about that extraction window. And they're trying to get the coffee within that extraction window so it tastes great. If you exceed 22% and something closer to 30% of

the coffee is actually extractable, you could get 30% of the material out of the coffee if you wanted, if you totally squeezed the sponge dry, but 18 to 22% is where it tastes good. Wow, that's crazy. It is. Now, you jumped at the chance to pour this coffee and to brew this coffee yourself. You didn't want us fucking it up. Well, yeah. Well, it's true. With good reason.

Jamie nor I know what the fuck we're doing. He seems like he knows what he's talking about. I doubt it. Trust me. He learned everything from me. We know a little bit, you know. But when it comes to these sort of things like times of extraction and temperature, does it vary depending on what kind of coffee you have?

Like this is the Ethiopian coffee. Would you have a different if it was a Jamaican? Yep. It absolutely does and and so when um when coffee pros sort of start to work with a coffee we'll experiment with different temperatures different kinds of extraction different coarseness of grind to try to to try to get it right find the sweet spot yeah we call it dialing it in. So if you're with a group of coffee people and there's a new coffee, you'll ask somebody, did you dial it in? And that means, did you get it tasting the way it should be tasting?

Wow. And so what are the variables? Like how much is the spectrum? The variance between, say, what's like an extreme? Give me an extreme on each end. Of what? Of like brew times and temperatures, what's like an extreme, give me an extreme on each end. Of what? Of like brew times and temperatures and what's the difference? Okay.

So every, there's a, first of all, there's a lot of different ways. Can I have some more of that too? Yeah, yeah. Stuff's delicious. Thank you. There's a lot of different, I'm going to have one more too. It does smell really unique. Yeah, it's really beautiful. Clean, clean really unique. Yeah. It's really beautiful.

Clean, clean floral coffee. Yeah. It's so different. We usually have this Hawaiian stuff lately. Yeah. Hawaii roasters. I'm drinking that. It's really delicious.

Yeah. This is probably like the polar opposite of that actually. It's very different. It smells amazing. Yeah. That's the thing about this coffee is it's super fragrant. Yeah. In a very unusual way. Like it doesn't smell like coffee. It's super fragrant. Yeah, in a very unusual way.

It doesn't smell like coffee. It's almost like a tea. It's almost like tea. Exactly right. I would describe this coffee as being tea-like. Yeah, it's really beautiful. So anyway, there's all these different ways to brew coffee. So you've got a French press here.

There's a pour-over coffee, a drip coffee that uses a paper filter. What do you think of those little vacuum things? What are those little vacuum things called? Vacuum things. You might be talking about an AeroPress. Yeah. Are those good? Yeah.

Coffee people love them. And each one of those has a different deal. So like in this French press, coffee will steep for a while, sort of like tea, and then you press it down and whatever. And how long do you usually steep it? Well, four to six minutes is kind of a window. Really? Yeah. Now, how does something like a clover work then?

Because the clover, that crazy computerized coffee machine, that cooked it very quickly, Very quickly, right. So the way that that works is it's designed to be able to have finer coffee, you know, so... Which changes the... Which changes the extraction. Oh, okay. Because it's a surface area, right? Which changes the profile? Which changes the extraction. Oh, okay. It makes it easier?

Surface area, right? If you grind it really fine, then it can brew, it can extract really quickly. So that's why, like, in an espresso machine, it's ground, like, to a powder. Pull that video up of the clover machine just so you can see what we're talking about. For folks who don't know, some genius guys who are coffee nerds, sorry. Yeah. Xander Nosler. I guess I'm a coffee nerd, too.

I'm just an educator. Yeah, you are. But from Stanford University? Right, yeah. And they figured out this machine, which costs some upwards of $10,000. $10,000. Yeah, like $11,000. And I fucking never thought about buying one until I watched someone do it and use it.

And I was like, oh, this might be the fucking coolest thing ever, like for a real coffee dork. And then I found out that Starbucks bought them all. They bought them, yeah. Those sons of bitches. Yeah. And I don't even see them. I never see them in a Starbucks.

Oh, yeah. They have them, but they're not that- Why don't they sell them? Well, I- Starbucks should fucking sell them. I'd buy one of these for the office. They might sell one to you. If they would, I would be totally willing to buy one of those and just put it in this

office so we could try it. I'll see if I can make that happen dude it's gonna happen the yeah but i mean i used to have one in my office this so this is incredibly variable yeah this thing if you've never seen it is this really beautifully constructed it looks like a giant piston like a car engine piston and uh you pour coffee in it and the water in it, and you stir it with like a little whisk, and then dial in the coffee based on the known recipes for that coffee. Right. Exactly.

And it was made really fancy. Here it is. Yeah. It could communicate with other machines, and you could send the recipe from one machine to another. Whoa, that's creepy. They're going to take over. Yeah.

Coffee machine's going to take over. And at the end, one machine to another. Whoa, that's creepy. They're going to take over. Yeah. Coffee machine's going to take over. And at the end, it's really unusual. It leaves this hockey puck of grinds at the top of the machine, and then you have this squeegee, which is kind of an elegant way to deal with that little problem of, what do you do with the coffee grinds? And they come off that piston. But it comes up like a cheeseburger.

It's so weird looking. It's like a burger. That's what we call it, coffee burger. Coffee burger, is that what you call it? And then you slide it in with this little gas station windshield washer squeegee thing. Yep. It's fucking badass. Yeah.

And so the reason that that can happen so quickly is because you can use fine coffee. Because it's got that hydraulic piston that sort of pushes it up. Right. That's incredibly strong. It's got this metal filter that the coffee grounds kind of sit on top of. And so it's a quasi-pressurized situation. Somewhere in the same realm as the AeroPress you're talking about. Something similar.

And by the way, the AeroPress is essentially a home $50 version of that. And it's just as good? Yeah. All right, fuck the Clover then. Yeah. Jesus Christ. We just saved ourselves 11 grand or whatever it is. Yeah.

11 grand is what it is? That was really designed for a coffee service environment. Seems so badass though, man. It is. I'm a big fan of that kind of technology. I want to support them. The fact that they were willing to go out and invest the money to make something like that and service environment. Seems so badass, though, man. I'm a big fan of that kind of technology. I want to support them. The fact that they were willing to go out and invest the money to make something like that

and design it. Have you seen the Steampunk yet? Okay, there's all these great coffee machines out there. There's one called the Steampunk. Pull it up. And this is a recently designed machine. And it's like these glass tubes and bubbles and you know

all this crazy shit. You're gonna love it. And what is the benefit of that machine? It's just another it actually works on a very similar principle to all these things but all coffee machines are designed to make it easier to do what I said before.

Yeah, that's it. That's the steampunk. So each of those chambers brew coffee. Whoa. Now, interestingly, you might... It's got a computer screen on it? Yeah, and that computer screen is to dial in all these variables. Wow.

You know? So recently- What's better, that or the Clover? Too much pressure? Yeah, I can't answer your question. That's like asking me what my favorite child is. Oh, okay. I'm sorry.

I apologize. I can't play favorites. But it's right up there with the Clover? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. How much is that band? That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. I would guess in the same sort of range. And all of these things, now I'm going to tell you something else, which is these machines, all they do is make it easier to brew coffee like this. So you've got some pretty sophisticated equipment in your kitchen. And this is all what he's doing right here?

This is the right stuff? Wow, this is wild, man. This makes me feel like a scientist, though. I'd like to have that. It's kind of laboratory stuff. Yeah, he's a very mad scientist. And so the water's boiling in one of them, and then the coffee's in the other one.

Is that what's going on here? Right, well, the one in the middle is kind of getting ready. He's going to dump some coffee in there. And the one on the right, it's already extracting the coffee. And these little pistons are there to sort of be the filters of the coffee. It's a complicated machine. Yeah, I would say so.

A couple of weeks ago here in Los Angeles, there was a battle between a guy called Nick Cho. Nick Cho is the guy who, he's one of the owners of this coffee company who roasted this coffee we're drinking. And then the inventor of that machine, the steampunk, went head to head and had like a man versus machine kind of thing. And Nick was just using very simple little brewer that he poured the water on, just totally manual. And then the other guy was manning the steampunk. And they were like having this head-to-head where they each had to brew six different coffees for these three judges and they couldn't see what they were drinking, all this stuff.

And so the result was that the steampunk machine won by a hair. It was essentially a tie. And the point is that you can make coffee delicious by being really good at mastering the variables, knowing what grind looks right, knowing how hot the water is, et cetera. Or you can entrust that stuff to a machine. And that's what machines do. They just get the water right every time. They get what we call the turbulence, like how much it gets stirred right every time.

And if you can replicate something very precisely again and again and again, the coffee is going to be really good. I get a sense, though, that you're a purist and that you prefer to use manual equipment, almost like if you drove a car, you would want a manual gearbox. Are you that guy? I am that guy. Well, I told somebody, somebody was interviewing me for something a while ago, and I told them I don't own a coffee machine in my house, and I don't, that I have essentially the same setup that you have. A water boiler that boils the water for me, a good grinder. I noticed you have a good grinder in there. And some home style

pouring, you know, I use basically very cheap $30 pour over thing. French press? Do you have a French press? Yeah, I have a French press. I usually use paper filter, though, just because I prefer the flavor. Do you really? Yeah. Okay, that's an interesting thing to bring up, because one of the things that I like about French press is when you get that sort of bubbly surface,

and then when you pour it into a mug, you get kind of like a little foam on it. The oil slick, yeah. I like that. Now, do you still get that when you go through a paper filter? No, that's exactly what it takes out. But that seems like that's a good thing to keep in there. It's a good thing to you, there. It's a good thing to you and that's great.

So you know what you like. Oh, so you don't like it flavor-wise. You know this, okay, so we're tasting it now. Can you taste in your mouth how you feel like there is, you can still taste the coffee?

A little bit, yeah. And it's coating your mouth sort of like as if you just drank a glass of milk or something? Mm-hmm. Okay, so that's called body or aftertaste

and aftertaste. Those are technical coffee tasting terms. And so body is the feeling, the texture of the coffee in your mouth. And aftertaste is the flavor of the coffee that remains in your mouth once you're gone, once it's gone. And aftertaste especially is really important because you drink coffee in the morning, you're driving to work, you still have that flavor of coffee in your mouth. If that's good, then that's great. Then you get an extra 20 minutes out of your cup of coffee. It's a bonus.

If it's bad, if it's a bad flavor and you feel like you need a mint, then that's like a bad aftertaste. And so you're used to drinking good coffee. You like that feeling in your mouth. You like that flavor in your mouth. You like aftertaste. That's good. You're brewing coffee the right way. For me, I just tend to want to move on to the next flavor, whatever it is, whether it's more coffee. Oh, you're such a coffee geek. You want to geek out with a bunch of different flavors in your mouth all day. Wow, you're taking it to a new level. You went with a paper filter

just to remove aftertaste so you could move on to the next flavor. Couldn't you rinse it out with some seltzer water or something like that? People do that, yeah. Maybe eat some ginger like you do with sushi? Yeah. Would that work? Yeah, it would. Pallet cleanser?

It would. You could do pallet cleansers. Do you have to brush your tongue or anything like that in between? People do. There are people that scrape their tongues, man. I don't do any of that mess. That's the dark end of the pool. That's people where you can't see the bottom. Yeah. You're coffee geeking out in the most hardcore way ever.

Yeah. So this is a very delicious coffee. And one of the things that I noticed is that you serve it completely black. Yeah. You don't fuck around with coffee fillers or sugars. I don't. But, I mean, generally, we coffee people don't judge people that do that.

Everybody's always apologizing to me. I appreciate that. That's very sweet. Do you put stuff in your coffee? Yeah, usually. This is what I wanted you to try this. This is coffee mixed with grass-fed butter and MCT oil. We found about this from...

Can I get it from here? Yeah, yeah. This is Hawaii hawaii roasters right is this hawaii roasters rusty's hawaiian it might be i think it's that rusty rusty's rusty's hawaiian and so um this uh i found out about this from this dude dave asprey he calls it bulletproof coffee and apparently a guy named rob wolf uh he was the first guy to figure it out and what it is is coffee mixed with grass-fed butter and mT oil, and then it's blended. And the idea being that blending it all up like that has – you get all the healthy fats mixed in with the caffeine. What is MCT oil? Medium chain triglyceride oil.

It's like palm oils and mostly coconut oils. They spin it in a centrifuge and extract it. I don't know the exact process, but it's essentially healthy fats. And then it's all mixed with this. And the benefit of it is that because it's all connected to the fats, you get sort of a slow burn, a slow release. I get the impression from you, though,

that you're fucking hopped up on coffee all day in a bunch of different kinds. You don't need no slow release. You're just riding that boat right into the rocks. It's interesting. There was something you said earlier, like as we were getting started, you were talking about, oh, you were talking about the bars at the top of the rocks. It's interesting. There was something you said earlier, like as we were getting started, you were talking about,

oh, you were talking about the bars at the top of the show. The meat bar or something like that? Yeah, yeah, the warrior bar. Right, okay. The buffalo and cranberry bar. So there's a story in coffee

and we don't know if it's true or not, but this is the legend, is that in ancient Ethiopia, that Ethiopian warriors would take the fruits of the coffee. So coffee grows like a fruit. It's got, you may have seen pictures, it looks like a cherry. Yeah, I have. And the two beans are like flat up against each other, like the pits of the cherry.

But around that is like a fruit layer, like a sweet fruit layer. The fruit tastes sort of like, it's kind of slimy, but it tastes like a mix of watermelon and jasmine. And then there's a kind of a tough leathery skin outside. And the legend says that the Ethiopians would take that fruit and make a ball with animal fat. And some stories say butter, and other stories say like cow fat. And they would make balls out of them and put them in their packs. And then just before a battle, these warriors would eat this power bar thing.

And it was like fat from the animal fat to give you energy and then the sugar from the coffee fruit to give that blast of energy and then the caffeine together. Now, some people say that this is like an invented story. Other people say that, yeah, no, this is what the ancient Ethiopians actually did before fighting a battle. What is known is that the ancient Ethiopians were known as especially intense warriors. How come nobody has recreated this? We need an on it coffee ball. We need to make that right away. That seems like something we

need to try. Well, when you said coffee and butter, that's what I thought of is that kind of thing, these coffee balls with butter. Maybe that's what they're trying to kind of recreate here. I don't know. Well, this is apparently the original. People have been putting ghee. You know what ghee is? They've been putting that in coffee for a long time. Yak tea that the Himalayans used, the Tibetans used, that was mixed with this yak butter and tea to make this creamy sort of a concoction.

What I like about mixing it with the butter and the MCT oil is that it gives you a long-lasting effect of the caffeine. Your body has to break down all those fats and sort of blend it in, connect it with the caffeine. You don't get it as a big burst. I drank this stuff. I haven't drank black coffee in, connected with the caffeine. You don't get it as a big burst. Like, I drank this stuff. I haven't drank in black coffee in quite a while. And with nothing attached to it, it's just like, woo! It just goes right into your system, and you can feel yourself, like, pepping up. How do you avoid heart attacks?

It's interesting. I don't. You don't worry about it? Just keep drinking the coffee? I'm just kidding, obviously. But you do get a rush from this. This is some strong caffeine coffee. This is some strong stuff. Yeah.

I mean, I guess I don't really. In a good way. I'm not criticizing it. No, no, no. I know. And it's really uniquely delicious. Yeah. I'm kind of shocked.

My favorite coffee lately is this stuff called Rusty's Hawaiian. I've been drinking this a lot lately. I know Rusty's, yeah. Ooh. God, it's so good. Yeah. God, that stuff is good. There's something I really love about coffee from the Big Island.

And I don't know what it is, but I had first tried Hawaiian. Was it Hawaiian Roasters is the red bag? Somebody told me about it. Like, dude, you got to try Hawaiian coffee. And so I got a hold of this stuff a while back. And it's my all-time favorite coffee. It just has this, like, really sort of a dark, rich taste to it. Very, very different from this stuff, this Ethiopian stuff.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's a different deal. If coffee started there, it started in Ethiopia? In Ethiopia. Now, did people take the plants and plant them in other places? Is that what happened? Yeah. So what happened was, so the Ethiopians were the first ones to sort of discover coffee.

This is what we have here, which we usually drink. That's my favorite, the one in the red bag. Yeah, Rusty's. What is it called? It has a name though. It's like-

It says, here it says mocha peaberry from Maui. Yeah. That's like a 94 on there. Grated coffee? Yeah. Okay. So good, man.

Yeah. But this is part of the story. I can tell you, you were asking about coffee coming from Ethiopia, et cetera? Mm-hmm. Okay. So good, man. Yeah. But this is part of the story. I can tell you. You were asking about coffee coming from Ethiopia, et cetera? Mm-hmm. Okay. So, yeah. Okay.

This is cool. They're really tiny. Really tiny. Yeah. And so what happened was it's from the forests of Ethiopia. On either side of what's called the Rift Valley, it's where the human species evolved. It's where we evolved over there.

And coffee evolved in the same place, which is crazy to begin with. Yeah. And the Ethiopians consumed it somehow. But then somehow, probably by the people on the other side of the Red Sea in what's now Yemen, which was then called Arabia Felix, this is like in about 1100. They said, wait a second. Some of the Ethiopian slaves brought some coffee seeds over there and they started planting coffee in what's now Yemen. And they started growing it and it turned into a big deal.

And they were the first ones that actually exported it out of the area. So, and the biggest, the port, the main port at that time in Yemen was called Mocha. So you've heard of a cafe mocha. This coffee is called Mocha. Mocha Java. Yeah, Mocha Java, all that stuff. That's all a reference to this one port in Yemen. Wow. And it's still there.

It's called Al Mucca. Wow. I thought mocha had something to do with chocolate. Chocolate, yeah. Now in Europe and the States. Yeah, we kind of, well, it's that people started adding chocolate to coffee that wasn't from there to try to make it taste like it was from there. Really? Yeah.

So it had a natural chocolatey taste to it. Can you still get coffee from there? It's very hard because it's Yemen, you know. It's creepy. And so, yeah, it's a difficult place to do business with. We need to make friends with Prince Nassim Hamed. Do you remember that guy? No. He was a boxer from Yemen. so, yeah, it's a difficult place to do business with. We need to make friends with Prince Nassim Hamed. Do you remember that guy? No.

He was a boxer from Yemen. Oh, yeah. He was a badass dude who did a lot of wild shit, came in on a magic carpet. Oh, crazy. He used to dance around the ring. Yemen's an amazing place. I mean, I've never been there, but I've seen lots of pictures. I've known lots of Yemeni people.

But it's just politically a little dangerous, volatile spot. That's unfortunate. That sounds like it's some unique coffee out of there. But so anyway, so when they brought coffee from Ethiopia to Yemen, they brought only a few plants. And then they used those to be the parents of all the coffee in Yemen. And they were the ones that exported it anyway. But then, this is in history, they were growing coffee, they were exporting it.

Other people said, wait a second, we want in on this coffee deal because you're making money selling coffee. But they had a penalty of death if you took seeds out of Yemen at that time. If you got caught exporting fertile coffee seeds, you could be put to death. It was that valuable? That valuable. That's incredible. And this is at a time when the English and the Dutch were fighting over the Dutch East Indies as the Spice Islands. Everybody was trying to get some colonies going to export these cash crops.

And they saw coffee as a potential cash crop. Some Dutch spies successfully got some coffee out of Yemen, and they planted it on, and they had just won the war with the English over the Dutch East Indies, and they planted the coffee that they stole from Yemen in what's now Indonesia on the island of Java. Wow. And they did great.

They planted all these farms. They were producing coffee. And that's why we still call coffee Java. Wow. Yeah. And Mocha Java. Mocha Java. And 150 years ago, those were the two places that made most of the coffee in the world.

The port of Mocha in Yemen and the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies. Wow. And Ethiopia back then, if that's where it all started from... They weren't exporting anything then. They were just letting it grow? They were just drinking it themselves. Wow.

Yeah. And they didn't build an export market. Wow. So then it gets weirder. You ready? Yeah. So at one point, the Dutch and the French signed a treaty, like some sort of treaty. And as a gift, the Dutch gave one coffee tree to the French.

One coffee tree. And the French, in France, they built a hothouse, like a greenhouse, just to hold this plant. And it was the first greenhouse in Europe. What? The first greenhouse in Europe was for a coffee plant. Right. And they planted other stuff there too, but this coffee plant was like really special. And they used cuttings from that plant to plant.

They wanted to plant some stuff in the West Indies, in the Caribbean. They wanted to plant some coffee. The French did for their colonies. And so this one guy named Gabriel de Clou, he was responsible for bringing the coffee from France to Martinique. But so he brought this one plant and he had it in a glass box. But they ran out of wind on the journey, so they were stuck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Gabriel de Clu was sharing his water ration with this plant to keep it alive.

Oh, my God. He managed to keep it alive, planted it, and that one plant was the parent of most of the coffee in Central America, South America, et cetera. Holy shit. Yeah. So now there's a scientific impact to this because all the genetic diversity that was in Ethiopia, all the thousands of different coffee varieties that were in Ethiopia, imagine how that got narrowed down from getting brought from Ethiopia to Yemen

in the first place. from getting brought from Ethiopia to Yemen in the first place. Then whatever plants those Dutch spies stole to put the coffee in Java, then that one plant that went to the New World, that went to France first and then to the New World, they call it a genetic bottleneck. So all the coffee outside of Ethiopia is kind of siblings to one another. That's incredible.

And that's a problem for us because if there's a disease that that one genetic variety of coffee is susceptible to, it can wipe out the whole coffee deal. It's so incredible that one particular area of the world was the only place where this stuff was growing. And now it's considered to be a completely worldwide beverage. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And the Ethiopians are kind of pissed off about that. Seriously. If you go and you talk to them, and they're like, because everybody says they've identified coffee with Colombia.

Right. Juan Valdez. Right. Fucking Juan, man. And they hate Juan Valdez in Ethiopia. They're like, that's our thing. Wow. That's our thing that the world is getting rich on. But that's right.

I mean, that's true. If you go to Ethiopia, the different kinds of flavors that you can get in coffee from Ethiopia is crazy compared to anywhere else. Really? I was saying before. So it's a genetic diversity issue. Genetic diversity thing. Each village in Ethiopia has their own variety of coffee that they grow traditionally. Wow.

And how many different varieties are there? Well, that's a good question. We don't know completely. There's scientists that are out in Ethiopia right now trying to count all the different coffee varieties. And the estimation is that there are somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 different varieties of coffee growing wild in Ethiopia. And outside of Ethiopia, there's like 30.

Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's crazy. That's nuts. So every legit coffee connoisseur is like a big fan of Ethiopia. Do you have like an Ethiopia t-shirt that you wear yeah oh that's the spot it's like brazilian jiu-jitsu brazil is the spot right so

right it's the origin center of origin right if you want to get into taekwondo you go to korea right yeah wow that's amazing man so um this particular blend that we had um is from ethiopia and um what are the variables in in Ethiopian coffees like what's this is sorry say the name again how you say the year Gachef Gachef and this your Gachef is a fruity sort of floral one right but I would assume that with thousands of different varieties right you get a broad spectrum of different flavors right so, uh, just north of, of Yergeshev is a kind of a larger area. And actually Yergeshev is within an area called, um, Sadama is the name of the region. And we call coffees from there Sadamos. So Sadamos are similar to Yergeshev, but they're not as floral. They tend

to be sweeter. They taste sort of like honey to me. Really? So, yeah, they have a honey-like characteristic. Like what's a good name for one if someone wants to try one of those? Sodamo. Any Sodamo? Any spell that? S-I-D-A-M-O. So any Sodamo.

No particular name is necessary? Yeah, check out a Sodamo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's different ones. The names that you get besides Sodamo will often be, or even Yergeshev, will often be the specific name of a washing station

where they wash the coffee itself. And so you can get geeky about that. But Sodamo is- In what way? Well, people develop favorite washing stations. Yeah, yeah. And what's the variables in the washing process changes the way the flavor is?

Yeah. So, yeah. And then I noticed, I listened to a podcast you did recently that had a nutritionist and you were talking about washing, washed coffee being important. Yes. And I thought I could explain that process to you if you want me to. Yes, please. Okay. So it's all about how the, I told you that coffee beans are like two seeds inside of a cherry. Right. And you got to get that fruit off because if you don't get the fruit off, it can mold

and spoil and taste yucky. So the whole challenge with coffee is to do something with that fruit layer before it spoils. Okay. Because like any fruit. So it's for any kind of fruit, you pick it and then... You either do... So what the ancient Ethiopians did is they just picked it

and they set it on the ground or on a mat to dry. And the coffee would sort of shrivel up, turn into a raisin. And once it was totally dry, they'd pound it in a mortar and pestle and the seeds would separate from the dried-up husk, and then you could roast the seeds and drink the coffee. So that was the original method of doing coffee. But when they moved coffee from Ethiopia, which is very warm and dry, and they could grow it in Indonesia and in Central America. And it would grow fine, but when they tried to dry it, it was tougher because there's more rain there. It's more humid, and the coffee would mold and get musty and taste crappy.

So in Costa Rica, they invented a different thing. And what they did was they ran it through a machine that would strip off the leathery skin. Husk. Yeah. Well, the leathery skin. But it would leave this slimy fruit, you know? And it's sort of like, you know, if you eat a peach and some of the... Right. It sticks to the seed.

And that's exactly what happens to coffee. The sticky, fruity stuff is sticking to the seed. And you got to get it off. So what they did was they let it ferment for about a day. And if you let that stuff ferment in a bucket or whatever, a tub, for about a day, then it loosens itself through magic. It's like amazing. Bacterial action and yeasts and stuff act on that stuff to dissolve it. And then you can wash it away with water.

It just rinses right off. That's wet processing. That's wet processing. And then once that sticky, slimy, sugary stuff is rinsed away, then it's very easy to dry the coffee in the sun. It dries in a few days. And then you can husk it and send it for roasting. So there's a difference between drying it out and then roasting it. It must be dried out first, and then it must be roasted later.

Right. So there's, right. So, and those two processes, those two major processes, we call them either dry processing and wet processing, or the natural method and the washed method. So washed and wet processing are the same thing, and dried and natural is the same thing. So in a certain way, changing climates and moving coffee plants to other geographic locations presented a lot of pretty unique challenges.

Absolutely. For coffee. Which they were doing in the 19th century. Seems so different than anything else, which is also a fruit that you would grow. I mean, you would just take it when it's ripe and you eat it when it's ripe. Yeah. But this seems like a really complicated thing that they had to figure out. Well, it's because we're eating the seeds, too.

I mean, unlike most fruits, most fruits aren't cultivated for their seeds. Is there, outside of the seed, isn't the extract, the outside, doesn't have some sort of nutritional benefit? Sure. Well, it's, I mean, it's, it's a fruit. It's got sugar and it's got- What does it taste like? It tastes like, um, uh, I always say it's like a mixture of, of watermelon and, uh,

jasmine. Really? Yeah, it's beautiful. It sounds delicious. Oh, it's delicious. It's totally delicious. How come you can't just buy a coffee fruit? Well, you can.

The problem is that if they, coffee doesn't really grow around here. Right. So by the time they got it to you, it would be spoiled. Yeah. What do they do? Here's a few things for you, and I should have brought some for you. Some places, they keep the fruit that they husk off, and they dry that too. And you can make sort of like a beverage out of that by soaking that beverage in water,

treating it like tea. And they do that in Ethiopia and in Yemen. They call it hashara in Yemen. They call it kishir in, I mean, hashara in Ethiopia, kishir in Yemen. And so it's another beverage that comes from coffee and it's sweet. It's got plenty of caffeine.

Really? Yeah. Why isn't that more popular? It seems like that'd be more popular. Yeah. It's interesting. You would think that that would be, maybe that's a new thing. It's kind of, yeah. How do you say it? What do you call it again? Well, a lot of places that sell it here call it cascada, C-A-S-C-A-R-A. That's the Spanish word for it. Cascada. Cascada. Now, is that something that Starbucks could start selling? They could, yeah. Why don't they do that? That's a good question. What the fuck's wrong with you, Starbucks?

Get on the ball. Don't you bitches like money? But there's other coffee companies sell it. Do they? Yeah. It's not satisfying in the same way that coffee is. It's kind of an oddity. You'll try it.

Yeah, I certainly will. Yeah, you tell me what you think. That sounds interesting. Cascada. Okay, I got to remember that. Now, the actual bean itself, is there more caffeine in the fruity outer layer or is there more caffeine in the bean itself? I don't know the answer to that. Okay.

But – It varies. There's – yeah. And there's coffee – that's true. It varies. And there's caffeine in all parts of the coffee plant. Oh, so the leaves, everything. Yeah, it's there and – What does coffee plant even look like? I don't even know what it looks like. It's about, well, it depends on the variety of coffee, but generally they're about six

or eight feet tall. It's a bush, yeah. All I know about that is now that I'm realizing it, it's fucking Juan Valdez, man. Yeah. Juan Valdez, the only reason why I know. They did a great job. They did. They really got you attached to that burrow and him with his coffee beans.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, how odd. Now, is there a variation in the caffeine content of beans from one part of the world to the other? Because I've seen something called Kicking Horse. Is that what it's called? Kicking Horse Coffee, which claims to have an excessive amount of caffeine in it? Yeah, well, I don't know that brand. But what they might be talking about is there's another species of coffee.

So the species that we've been talking about from Ethiopia and all that stuff is called Caffea arabica is the name of that species. Ah, okay. So there's another species that comes from the western part of Africa. And it's called Caffeic Canephra, but we call it Robusta. Have you ever heard of Robusta? Yes. So Robusta comes from West Africa. It doesn't taste as good, generally.

In my experience, it tastes sort of like burnt popcorn. You know cheap diner coffee has that burnt popcorn kind of taste to it? Yes. That's from the Robusta in it. Oh. Burnt popcorn kind of taste to it. Yes. That's from the Robusta in it. Oh. And they've used- Burnt popcorn. Yeah, or rubber. Yeah.

Star Diner in White Plains, New York. Yeah, totally. I used to eat at this fucking place. Their coffee was just always like burnt popcorn. I never even thought of that. Right. But it tasted like shit. Yeah.

So that's the Robusta in it. Now, Robusta has a lot more caffeine than Arabica does. No kidding. But it also has a bunch of other than Arabica does. No kidding. But it also has a bunch of other chemicals that don't taste very good. Ah, so that's why it's got such a jolt to it. Right. It tastes like shit.

So some people, I've seen people talk about high caffeine coffee, and they're just using Robusta in it to sort of amp up the caffeine level. What is that thing floating around? That's the scoop. The scoop. I didn't take it out. Oh, how dare you, Jamie. We're drinking plastic soup here. But, you know, I mean, obviously caffeine is an important part of the whole coffee deal.

Without it, let's be honest, this is a drug. Without it, the ride wouldn't be nearly as – the line wouldn't be nearly as long. It's true. But after that, once you've satisfied the caffeine part, you start drinking coffee for what it tastes like. And so people that are focused on coffee flavor tend to de-emphasize the jolt part and emphasize the flavor part. What is the origin? Why does the plant produce caffeine in the first place? Do we know that? Yeah. It's called an alkaloid, is the class of chemical that caffeine is. uh and there's in general plants seem to to produce alkaloids to drive away um predation yeah like insects and stuff like that okay so the insects eat the coffee they'll have

a fucking heart attack yeah fall out of the sky it's toxic to to insects at a micro level so and and animals a lot of animals as well right yeah what I understand, that's the reason why dogs don't like chocolate. You shouldn't feed your dog chocolate. It's another alkaloid called theobromine. Ah. So theobromine chocolate has, and it's very similar to caffeine, it'll make your heart, you know, and I talked to a veterinarian about this once, and the problem with dogs is they eat a bunch of chocolate and their heart pounds so fast they have a heart

attack. Yeah. From the from the from the theobromine. And it's like caffeine. And, you know, people say that that the chocolate has caffeine, that the active thing is actually theobromine, which is this. So it's an alkaloid. It's very similar. It's a stimulant that works on dogs in a different way than it works on humans? Yeah. Yeah. Dogs are more susceptible to it. That's fascinating because in humans, it actually has some weird representation of love, right?

It gives you a very similar. That's what they say, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which kind of makes sense, right? They give chocolate to people you love? Yeah. That's what they say.

Yeah. I mean, I myself, if I drink, if I eat too much chocolate, my heart pounds. I can feel it much more than that. Well, you're a hairy dude. You're probably much more animal-like. There was a recent article that I was reading today online about chocolate, that chocolate is going to be extremely rare in the future because of our overconsumption of chocolate. We consume so much chocolate, they can't keep up with the production. The demand can't keep up with the production.

And they've got a similar problem that coffee does. A genetic problem. A genetic problem. And the same – okay, so chocolate is indigenous to South America. Like coffee is indigenous to Africa. Cacao is from Latin America. But then it's been spread all over the world, has a narrow genetic base. I mean all these tropical crops have these problems.

The other problem is climate change. You know, as the climate gets warmer, the suitable kind of environment for these very climate, very temperature intolerant plants narrows. Diseases spread more easily, et cetera, et cetera. It's a problem. That is very interesting. So you said that coffee can't be grown in the United States?

Well, it can. Mainly, Hawaii is in the United States. So in Hawaii, there is also one farm here in California. Really? Up in Santa Barbara. It's not far. You could drive here. In Santa Barbara?

Yeah. How's their coffee? Delicious. Really? Yeah, but he only planted this farm a few years ago. No shit. Yeah, it's called Goodland Organics. So he's the only guy in America that's growing coffee in the lower 48?

Yep. And it's because he's in a very unique kind of microclimate there. If you go to his farm, it can be warmer at night on this farm than it is during the day because of the weird way that the weather works around there. Santa Barbara's paradise. It is. It's beautiful. It's an amazing spot. In this place, you should go to this farm. I will during the day because of the weird way that the weather works around there. Santa Barbara's paradise. It is. It's beautiful. It's an amazing spot. In this place, you should go to this farm.

I will. You should. He also grows amazing fruits like these crazy Australian limes called finger limes that look like caviar inside. Cherimoyas. Have you ever heard of cherimoyas? They're a very rare tropical fruit. No, never heard of that.

He grows all these insane fruits. Wow. What's the name of his place? Good Land Organics. That's pretty cool that he's the guy that figures out how to grow coffee in California. He has avocados there. There's a lot of avocados in Santa Barbara, right? So he got this avocado.

He's a guy from here. I think he came from here in L.A. He got into agriculture and he bought this farm that was an avocado farm. Then he started planting dragon fruit, these finger limes, cherimoyas, all this stuff. He grows coffee there. He's just a really good fruit grower. He grew this coffee., and he, uh, uh,

he was telling me recently, he's, I mean, this coffee that he grew, he's planted the right varieties of coffee, including this one, um, the mocha variety that has these little tiny beans. Um,

he's got that growing there, et cetera. And it's just now coming into fruit. You know, one of the interesting things about coffee is you plant a coffee seed. You don't start to harvest coffee from between three and seven years after you plant it. Wow. So he's just now starting to reap the rewards of all these years and years of taking care

of these plants. That is fascinating. Yeah. Dude, you should grow coffee. You love it so much. I love it. Why are you not involved in growing it? Well, yeah.

You need to get yourself a spot in Santa Barbara, a small patch of land in Santa Barbara, and let the party begin. I would love it. I've always traveled too much to be at a farm. So, I mean, I've spent the last 15 or so years just traveling to coffee farms all over the world, working with coffee farmers to get their quality better and kind of learn about all this stuff. Because that's kind of a new phenomenon too, is coffee roasting companies that are interacting more directly with farmers and getting the quality thing really worked out, understanding what makes coffee great, et cetera. So most farmers that are growing coffee,

are they doing it just for a profit? Are there places where you go and they're real artisans? Is there a broad variation? It's mostly the first thing. Mostly artisans? No, no, no. Mostly businesses. Yeah, it's mostly small farmers struggling to get by.

So going back to the history, so the Dutch, you know, they planted their thing in Java, and they basically enslaved the local population to work on their coffee farms. This is in the, you know, in the 18th century. Everybody was, all the European powers were trying to get colonies everywhere. So, you know, colonies, the Spanish doing their colonies in Central America, the French doing their colonies in West Africa, the English were trying to colonize Kenya, the Dutch were colonized East India, and they kind of enslaved the local population to grow coffee. And so that was sort of a dark period in world history. And unfortunately, coffee was part of that. But since then, so then, you know, the Enlightenment

happened, democracies started to spread around the world. But still, many of these countries that were former colonies had poverty problems, like Central America and stuff like that. The place that I first started working with coffee farmers was in Nicaragua. And in Nicaragua was formerly a colony, you know, and had that problem. But then they had the revolution. They dissolved a lot of these big farms and gave little parcels of land to a lot of people that used to work on the farm. So here you have all these people that used to work on a farm that now have their little tiny farm of their own. And that's cool because then they've got their own business, their farm. The problem is it's pretty tough in any country,

whether it's the United States or Nicaragua or anywhere, to make a small farm profitable. And so in many, many parts of the world, you've got small farmers that are just trying to get by and put food on their plates. And so one of the great things that coffee, that special coffee companies can do is get engaged with those farmers and try to get the, celebrate the product, get people to pay more for it because it tastes really delicious. And it becomes a better livelihood for farmers all across the world. So your friend in Santa Barbara, what was his name again that owns this place? Jay Ruski is his name. And what's the name of the place again? Goodland Organics. And so he's just a guy who loves coffee and decides I'm going to try to grow some stuff in Santa Barbara. He loves growing, he loves agriculture is what it is. And he thought it was a challenge to grow coffee, I think. I think

he loves coffee too, but I think really he loved the fact that it was a challenge to, he likes these unusual fruits. So it kind of takes a person with sort of a deep commitment to make something like this take place. Otherwise, it's a pretty significant investment in time and effort before you reap any rewards. And there are those people too in coffee. I mean, even in El Salvador,

in Guatemala, in Panama, in Brazil. I know of amazing farmers in all these places who are focused on making the best imaginable coffee. So now when you work with these people, say if somebody contacts you and say, Peter, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Come down here and help me grow some bitching coffee. Yeah.

What is your process? Let's say a guy from Hawaii calls you up and says, I want to grow some coffee. I don't know what I'm doing. Yeah, well, coffee is kind of an unusual, I mean, Hawaii is kind of an unusual situation because the University of Hawaii is involved and they can actually call up the University of Hawaii and get some advice from them. So they wouldn't need you? They wouldn't need me in Hawaii.

Okay, so where would they need you? South America? Yeah. Okay. I'm a dude in Peru. Right. I'm tired of getting busted for cocaine. Yeah, in Peru.

I've done a lot of work in Peru and Bolivia. And not just me. I mean, there's lots of people out there. And in fact, the U.S. government through USAID is out there trying to give good support to these guys. The first thing you do is you teach them to taste coffee. And amazingly, and some of your listeners may have had this experience. I've had this experience. You go to wherever, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Peru, or whatever, a place that's famous for its coffee. And you go into the hotel and they've got Nescafe and the instant coffee in the

restaurant or whatever. And it's because in a lot of these places, people don't drink the coffee. They grow the coffee, but they don't drink it. And it's crazy. That's so weird. Totally weird. How's that happen? Because it's more valuable to export.

Ah, so they don't drink it just because it's not worth it. And it's like not part of the culture. That's interesting. You know? It's not part of the culture yet it is. It it's like not part of the culture. That's interesting. You know? It's not part of the culture, yet it is. It is. It's part of the agricultural culture, but it's not part of the consumption culture. Wow.

It's weird. Okay. Ethiopia is the only place, and Brazil to some extent, where they drink coffee as much as they export it. And Brazil has the same issue as the rest of South America where they have a very limited genetics. Is that the same thing? Yeah, it's slightly different because Brazil is so much bigger.

So they have more than one variety from Brazil? Yeah, in general. And all these countries, by the way, are aware of this problem and they're trying to diversify their genetics. So do they contact you through the coffee website? Is that how they go to Specialty Coffee Association of America? So in the, yeah, so in the, about starting in 2000 or so, we in our group that we're

affiliated with called the Coffee Quality Institute, had this program called Coffee Corps. It's sort of like the Peace Corps for coffee people. And guys like me would sign up and volunteer for two weeks to serve in a coffee farming community. And if we had a skill, we might have marketing skill or accounting or tasting. My skill was tasting. So I would go down and I would teach a coffee cooperative in El Salvador. Do you speak Spanish? Yes. Oh, okay. How to taste their own coffee and taste it like we do.

Look for things like sweetness and flavor and aroma and stuff like that. And just that is extremely powerful because if you're running a coffee farm and you know how to taste it like your buyer is going to taste it, then you can say, all right, this tastes better. I'm going to do this. I'm going to grow it this way. I'm going to dry it this way. I'm going to ferment it this way, et cetera. Now, when you say grow it this way, what are the variables involved in changing the flavor of coffee? Is it just climate or is it the soil content or is it something you add to the soil, the way you water them? What do you do?

Well, the biggest thing is the climate. And a lot of that is determined by altitude. So remember Mrs. Owen on Folgers? What was the lady? I don't know. Anyway, on the commercial, she used to say mountain-grown Folgers. Oh, that's right. Yeah, and that's because coffee likes to be at high altitudes.

So in general, the higher the altitude the farm is, the better the coffee. But a farmer has no control over the altitude of their farm. But what they control is how much shade the coffee gets. So they plant trees next to the coffee to actually provide some shade for it really so they have coffee and they're like oak trees or some shit Yeah, yeah, usually it's a different. They're different. They're like Latin American indigenous something that large leaves shady Yeah, and and and sometimes it's a fruit tree so they can get fruit as well from the yeah Avocados Jay uses avocados in in uh in santa barbara for this purpose wow okay so he grows his avocado trees and then sandwiches them

in between yeah exactly so so the deal is um the coffee now a shaded coffee so coffee evolved under other trees it's called an understory shr shrub. It naturally likes to be protected by other trees. However, if you take it out and put it in the full sun, it'll be more productive. It'll produce a lot more coffee, but in general, that coffee won't be as good. So a farmer has to figure out the benefit. If he puts it in a shade, the coffee will taste better, but it won't be as productive. So he has to sort of balance. And that's what happens in coffee.

All the time, you know, it's like the better you make it taste, the less there is of it kind of thing. And so a farmer is always trying to make that balancing act between having his farm be more productive versus having the quality be higher. What is the ultimate taste expression? What is the move to forget about no money involved, no financial reward? You're only trying to achieve the greatest taste ever. What's the way to do that? Start with a variety of coffee that's known for being really good tasting. So there's these different varieties of coffee that we talked about.

Some of them taste really good. Some of them maybe are more disease resistant and don't taste as good because of that. So you choose a good variety to start with. The disease resistant coffees don't taste as good? That's interesting. And what diseases specifically are they getting? There's a disease,

and you may have heard about it in the news. It's actually a big deal right now. It's called coffee rust, and it's a fungal disease. It makes the coffee leaves get this powder on them that looks exactly like rust. Makes all the leaves fall off in the coffee plant. So is it similar to what's going on, like, what is that disease that was hitting? Oh, no, that's the bark beetle. I was thinking of a bug.

But it's like that in that these crops can be susceptible, particularly if there's a narrow genetic, like we were talking about. I see. And where's this coffee rust? Is it all over the world? Yeah, it's all over the world. Except it doesn't occur really in Ethiopia. So there's some sort of natural control happening in Ethiopia. That seems to be the motherland.

So if you're a real coffee dork, you're going all due respect. I mean that in a good way. I get it. If you're a real coffee connoisseur, Ethiopia is the spot. That's where you want to get your coffee. For the strongest flavors, the widest variety of flavor, and because it's the OG. I think so. But then, not to qualify that too much, I mean, there's amazing coffees from Central America.

Columbia is some of the most incredible coffees. Very different. It's crazy diversity. And Hawaii. Like I said, I really enjoy coffee from Hawaii. It just seems to me to have a very different taste. It does. Well, what causes that?

Is it the volcanic ground? It can be. And then coffees within Hawaii, too, can taste very different. Right. There's a... This is a Maui coffee. Yeah. I usually like the Kona coffees.

Yeah. Kona is the most well-known area on the, it's on the big Island, you know? Um, and then it's got altitude. You can, once you go up that mountain,

that's the biggest challenge in, uh, in Hawaii. I used to know some people that managed a coffee farm in Molokai, which is a smaller Island, not as much altitude. The coffee wasn't as good. So,

um, that's interesting. Yeah. There's a place in, in Hawaii and on the, on the big Island called mountain thunder. Have you ever heard of this thing's interesting. Yeah. There's a place in Hawaii on the Big Island called Mountain Thunder. Have you ever heard of this thing? No. Great, great coffee from-

Mountain Thunder from the Big Island. Mountain Thunder from the Big Island. Really delicious. I'll get in there. Yeah. But anyway, but in general, coffees from islands like Hawaii, Jamaica, places like this, they've got kind of a unique characteristic. You might like coffee from Indonesia or from Papua New Guinea.

Damn, this stuff has four stars. Yeah. Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. You know, I really enjoy coffee, but until this conversation, I was a fool. Yeah, well, you know. I was an ignorant fool. I knew nothing. I relied on too many unscrupulous people to fill my head with useless information.

This is what we do. Coffee people, this is what we do. We get dialed in to what people like and show them other options if they want. So to continue what I was asking you before, say if someone contacted you from, let's say, somewhere in South America, and they wanted you to go over there and, hey, we need to fix our flavor profile. What would you do besides planting trees? So step one is start tasting the coffee themselves.

Okay. And how can you change that taste? Well, okay, so you can either shade the coffee or not. Okay. One easy way that a farmer can change the quality of their coffee is how ripe it gets. So as coffee gets riper, it gets sweeter, obviously, but you don't want it to be too sweet or else it'll get like overly sweet. And also it'll get this kind of rotten character. So figuring out, dialing in, there was a farmer I worked with in El Salvador,

And there was a farmer I worked with in El Salvador who, like, got super focused on how ripe she was going to pick her coffee. And she wound up figuring out, this is geeky and amazing, is that if she let the coffee get, half of the coffee get ripe to where it was the color of blood, or I'm sorry, of wine, right? Like burgundy kind of color. And then half of the coffee cherries get to where they were the color of blood, like bright red like this. And blended those together, it was the perfect flavor. Wow, what a dork.

And she dialed in. But she's famous. Like they did a, her name's Aida Batye. They did a piece on her in the New Yorker a couple years ago because she's become the rock star of in the coffee world. That's so fascinating to me. Like I said, when you sat down, I love people that are really into shit. When someone gets really into something as you are in a coffee, it's very infectious.

Like, you know, I want to like start trying all these different flavors now. But I don't want to be hopped up out of my fucking mind on caffeine all day. Well, you don't have to like start trying all these different flavors now but I don't want to be hopped up out of my fucking mind on caffeine all day well you don't have to drink that much either I mean it's like

you know I've already drank five cups of this shit yeah yeah yeah you can space it out a little bit but it's really good but if you go to a

coffee shop all the time they can blow your mind with a different flavor like all the time now how do you feel about a place like a chain like a big chain

we don't even have to mention any names. But one of those big chains that sells sort of generic coffee. You're talking about Starbucks? I am talking about Starbucks. Does that make you sad when you see that these fucking things are popping up all over the place? Well, let me tell you a story. So I started in coffee in San Diego.

I was running a coffee shop. I started in 87, right? So I was a barista in the early 90s and stuff. And in 1994, we're running this coffee shop in San Diego, and we got word that Starbucks was going to start opening stores in San Diego. And everybody freaked out, like, oh my God, we're done. We might as well, you know, they're going to, they're going to drive us into the ground. The year that Starbucks showed up was the busiest year that we had. And every year after that, it got busier. So the great thing that Starbucks has done, and Starbucks is, you know, they started in the 70s in Seattle, a bunch of guys that really liked coffee, and they just figured out how to grow this business they taught in many ways they taught the world how to drink coffee

they taught the world to drink coffee in many ways when I was a kid we used to drink coffee in the morning like before I would go to work or you know like guys would go to Dunkin Donuts and like I was working on construction job sites guys would go to Dunkin Donuts and bring back coffees for everybody but there was no like going to a coffee shop

and buying a coffee in the middle of the day. That sort of Starbucks shifted people's... Mentality, absolutely. Well, it shifted their behavior, too. Like Brian, the guy who was here earlier, he's always got a fucking venti coffee in his hand. No matter where he goes, he's got a Starbucks in his hand. That's right.

And that's right. And so, and that's important, you know. So, they've grown and gotten very ubiquitous and stuff. They've got shops all over the place. But it's not that delicious. It's not the best stuff. It's, well, I mean... I know you're trying to be nice.

I don't want to accuse anybody of anything, but okay, let me put it this way in a very nice way. Instead of saying something negative about them, which I use all the time, by the way. I'm not a Starbucks hater. I buy Starbucks all the time. I have no problem with it. And if you were going to look for a very specific, very gourmet type of coffee, that's not where you would go. Not a bad cup of coffee.

Right. Not a bad cup of coffee, but if you want to go really, you want to have some of this stuff and have it this way. Right. I wouldn't go to a Starbucks store because that's not what they're doing.

They're bringing coffee to the people. Yes. They're bringing like a Pike's Peak and maybe a dark roast and that's it. And I will say though that I've tasted, I've been to Starbucks

where they're, you know, where they're, they've got access to awesome coffees. And they do have that. They do do that. It's not in every store. Right, right, right.

Well, they have the Clovers now. Yeah, they've got the Clovers. I've never seen one at a Starbucks. Yeah, they've got them in special stores. And that's another thing that they're doing. They're starting to, you may have seen it in the news, they're designing different stores that do different things. And they're a specialty coffee company that's doing their thing. And they do have a wide variety when you buy the bags.

They've got limited small lot stuff that they do. How should you store coffee? We put it in the freezer. Is that bad? It depends. It can be freezer. Is that bad? It depends. It can be bad. Can be bad? It can be bad

if your freezer stinks and you don't, you know, you don't seal the bag up well enough. No, we don't have stinky freezers. Then you're good.

We don't ever put anything in there but coffee. Yeah. And the other problem is, like right now, we took the coffee out and it got up to room temperature

and if you take a coffee mug that's in the freezer out and you put it on your thing, it gets all wet on the outside. Right. Then you've got that problem, you know. Uh-huh. In general, we don't tell people. We generally encourage people not to put it in the freezer and just drink it fast. Okay. But I will say that if I was in Alaska or something, you know, and I could only get a shipment of coffee once every six months, I would freeze it.

Ah, okay. But I don't. It's not ideal. I don't. Okay. Yeah, it's not ideal. So you should essentially, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you should essentially do it almost like you buy vegetables. Yeah, exactly.

I always say like you buy bread. So you should get it and between the time that it's dried and between the time that it's roasted and then you drink it, how much time should take place? Between the time it's roasted and the time you drink it? So the drying, it's essentially, it's good for how long? Once it's dried. Once it's dried in Nicaragua or whatever, then it's usually good for about a year. A year. Yeah.

Okay. And that's good because it's about once a year, you know, coffee. Coffee harvest happens once in a year. They dry it all. They get it together. They stabilize it by drying, and then they ship it to roasters in the U.S. Okay, so assuming you're in the correct window, then once you get it to a roaster, how long after it's roasted should you drink it and does it matter,

or should you brew it, and does it matter how it's stored then? Usually the window after roasting is about two weeks. Two weeks only? Yeah. That's it? Yeah, like bread. Wow. You know?

That's crazy. So you really should roast to order. Yeah. And so that's why a good coffee roasting company will- So we have some old coffee. We should just throw it away. Yeah, there's no point. Just get some new coffee.

But like this one, it says when it was roasted right there. Can I see that? Yeah. So that's a good sign when a roaster cares enough to put the roasting date on there. This shit was roasted just a couple of days ago. Yeah. That's how you do it, huh?

And this is from Wrecking Ball? Wrecking Ball. And where's this company at? In San Francisco. San Francisco's awesome. Of course they would have something like this there. Yeah, and it's kind of a cool company, too. It's a couple owns this company. She's like kind of a legendary

roaster. She's been roasting coffee for a long time. And he is like a pretty famous barista guy, and they got together, and they've got kind of the they're kind of a power couple and he is like a pretty famous barista guy and they got together and they're kind of a power couple in coffee. That sounds amazing.

Yeah, they're cool. Wrecking ball coffee. All right, I'm going to buy some of this. You can buy it online? You can buy it online. And so when you buy it online, do they roast it when you order it? Yeah.

A good coffee company will do that. They'll sort of collect the orders and then do a roasting day and send it all out. Lots of times you get it the day after it was roasted. My friend has a coffee company called Caveman Coffee, and when you order it from cavemancoffee.com or whatever the fuck it is, they roast it as you order it.

That's cool. That's the only way to do it, right? That's very cool. And they should probably start including roasted on dates, huh? They don't have roasted on dates, but that shit sounds like it's important. Sure. Or light it on the bag or something. I was making a decision about what coffee to bring you today.

That made a difference. Dude, you knocked it out of the park because this is a unique flavor. It's different. It's unique in a weird, unexpected way. I really, really like it. I love the smell of it, too, man. What does the bean smell like? Do they have a unique smell, too?

Yeah, you should get a little bit of a whiff of that... Whoa, that's amazing. ...of that lemony jasmine kind of thing. Dude, why don't they make incense out of this shit? I know, right? It smells so good. You know, I used to... One time I had to work with an airline to try to get their coffee tasting better.

How dare they? How did you do that? Well, I didn't. It wasn't that successful. In this particular case, it wasn't that successful. But what all the flight attendants were doing is they were taking the coffee bags and they were putting it in the bathroom to make it smell a little bit better in there. That was the best thing that they could do with this.

Oh, so they just used it as coffee potpourri? Yeah, exactly. That's interesting. Well, that's kind of a good move because when you smell, even if it's crap coffee, when you smell the grinds, it smells good. You could open up a Folgers and get it. Not that Folgers is crap, but you get that smell of non-roasted coffee. It's delicious.

So people, human beings, like the smell of brown things. Have you noticed that? Not all brown things sound, you know that? Not all brown things smell. Not all brown things smell. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. Flush it. But like toast.

Yes. One of the greatest smells ever. Meat. A steak. Yeah, yeah. That's true. Good point. Bread baking.

All these things. Yeah, yeah. Chocolate. We love things that are cooked a little bit, right? Yeah. This brown, they call them browning reactions in science. Right. And when heat turns this brown, they call them browning reactions in science, you know? Right. And when heat turns food brown, it tastes good. It certainly does. It's a fascinating thing.

Like try eating a piece of raw steak. Yeah. It really doesn't have the best flavor to it, but goddamn, when it's got that crust on the outside of it and you cut through it and you... Delicious. Yeah, I am a fan of tastes and flavors and I think it's sort of an unsung art form that people have figured out how to cultivate different tastes and flavors in all sorts of foods. In cooking, I became a big fan of cooking. I don't really cook very well, but I became a big fan of the art form of cooking very well

when I started watching Anthony Bourdain's No Reservation show. And then in becoming friends with him and getting to know him and talking to him about chefs and going to a restaurant with him, which was one of the coolest fucking experiences of all time. That's amazing. That's like playing basketball with Michael Jordan or something. You're hanging out at a restaurant with Anthony Bourdain. Yeah, totally. But I developed a respect for the art form from him, from watching his show, the art form of cooking.

And then I started considering it in a different light. Instead of thinking like, oh, it's nice when people cook good food. Oh, that tastes good. I want to eat there. Instead, I started thinking of it as art, as artwork. Right. No different than a song, no different than a stand-up comedy sketch or a cup of coffee.

The art in the creative, literally creative, because you're creating. I mean, you're growing and you're influencing the actual finished product. It's sort of an overlooked aspect of creativity, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. It totally is. It's nice to hear you talking like that because guys in coffee, if we start to talk about how we think of coffee as an art form, a lot of times people are like, ah, come on. People are always looking to call bullshit, man. People call bullshit too much. It's true.

It's a good thing to call bullshit because there's a lot of bullshit out there. But it's not a good thing to call bullshit about people's passions. I think it's more interesting to observe those passions and try to find out what it is. And if I looked at it on a surface level and I wasn't really into flavors and I didn't have that sort of transition in the way I thought about flavors because of cooking, I probably

wouldn't think about it that much either. But when I sit down and talk to a guy like you, who obviously has dedicated an incredible amount of time to this passion, then that's when it becomes infectious and you kind of understand it. Yeah, it's true. So, and that's the way I, you know, I and a lot of my colleagues think about it is,

is like, how can we make the flavor just kind of stop people in their tracks? How can we use coffee? And like, so like for me, I kind of mentioned this before, when you're, when you're a coffee person, when you're a barista, you're interacting with people at like this really delicate point in their day. You know, they don't know what's going on. They're coming to your coffee bar. They, you're usually the first person they've seen other than their wife or whatever. And, and they're, they're not sure what kind of day they're having. And then if you give them something that sort of tastes really good and makes them feel good, it's like a great thing. And if you do that for people a lot,

you feel like you're doing something positive for the world. So I always get really focused on these things. Sure. I mean, you certainly do. I think that any time you can inspire someone, too, you can inspire someone with your passion for something. I'm constantly inspired by things that I don't want to have anything to do with. There's people that inspire me. I watched that movie, Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

I don't want to make sushi. But you want to eat at Jiro's place. Yes, I certainly do. I was thinking, literally thinking about flying to Japan and booking a reservation. I was going to try to see

if I could call David Lee Roth who lives in Japan and ask him to book. David Lee Roth lives in Japan? Fuck yeah, he does. Wow. David Lee Roth lives in Japan

and practices sword fighting all day. Fuck. David Lee Roth's one of the greatest bad motherfuckers to ever walk the face of the planet. Guy walks around

in overhauls, gives zero fucks. He's in his 60s and is just still doing new things and challenging himself. He lives in fucking Japan, in Tokyo, with his dog. Wow. He has an apartment. He's fucking David Lee Roth, man. He's David Lee Roth and he's got an apartment like a normal person with a dog in Tokyo. He's fucking David Lee Roth, man. He's David Lee Roth, and he's got an apartment like a normal person with a dog in Tokyo. He's incredible.

Well, if you do that, if you go to Japan to eat some- There he is. There's Dave and us. Eat some- He's such a cool guy. We allowed him to wear sunglasses indoors. I didn't shit on him while we were taking that photo. That's an old school thing.

That's awesome. Those old school rock stars, they still wear sunglasses indoors and we let them get away with it. But if you do that, if you go visit Jiro, let me know and I'll send you some coffee places that are sort of the equivalent of that. Ah, in Japan? In Japan. Really? So these coffee guys,

so in many ways, Japan, there's a concept in Japanese called Kodowari and that is like practice, practice, practice until you're the best in the world. And keep practicing and keep getting it wrong, but you're going to get better all the time. You know, and it's evident in martial arts. It's evident in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, right? So he's like focused.

Was that what they were calling each other? Was that the phrase? This phrase, kodowari, yeah. Yeah. And this exists for coffee too. This idea of getting it perfect. There's this one coffee place I went to last time

I was in Japan that would blow your mind. It's this guy that's like super he has this coffee equipment. I walked in. My wife she actually found out about this place from a Japanese friend of hers. We walk into this place and he's got all this crazy equipment, like you'd like it. It's like weirdly excessive

coffee equipment. I'm saying, what is going on? And also in this place, this guy has stereo equipment, these giant speakers playing like perfectly, and this incredible turntable and all this stuff, playing like perfect classical music. And he's serving, his goal is to serve you the perfect coffee while you're listening to the perfect music. And it's like a crazy library. And this guy takes five minutes to make you a cup of coffee. Whoa.

Why so long? Well, he's just like practice he's getting it right you know he's he's nailing it he'll throw stuff away if it's not perfect and how will he know if it's perfect well it's like Jiro man it's like he's just trying to to get to the ultimate coffee experience there's another guy named Katsu he's got a place called bear pond espresso and he learned about coffee in New York. And so he's trying to bring the New York City coffee experience to Central Tokyo. And he's got this little place. This guy, he shows up to his shop like an hour and a half before they open. He spends that hour and a half making his coffee taste right. And he'll taste it, throw it away, adjust, taste it again.

And if it's not right, he doesn't open. There he is. Yeah, that's Katsu, man. God damn. That place is awesome. And that's in Tokyo? That guy is a badass. He sounds like a badass.

He is a coffee badass. I want to meet that dude. And him and his wife, that's all. It's a tiny little place. You go in there. If it's not open, it's because he's trying to get the coffee right. And you just wait. And then you go in there, and he makes you awesome coffee.

Did you go there? Oh, yeah. Did you fly there just to drink coffee? No, but I was there for it. But I definitely make a trip. Every time I'm in Tokyo, I go to visit Katsu. He's the man. So he rides around in a motorcycle and makes coffee?

I've never seen that before. That's his spot. Oh, yeah, that's his place. He just jumped off a motorcycle. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. He's the man. So he rides around on a motorcycle and makes coffee? I've never seen that before. Oh, yeah. That's his place. He just jumped off a motorcycle. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah, he's a badass. Now, are there places like that here in Los Angeles?

Where'd you find that, man? It's on Vimeo. There's a whole three-minute documentary about it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Say the name of the documentary so folks can watch it if they want to. I think it's just Bear Pond Espresso. Bear Pond Espresso. Yeah.

Are there spots like that in Los Angeles? Are there really exceptionally good coffee spots? Yeah. So the place I actually bought that for you here locally in a shop in Culver City called Cognoscenti, C-O-G-N-O-S-C-E-N-T-I. Cognoscenti. Cognoscenti, yeah. Yeah, Cognoscenti, which means those in the know.

There you go. Yeah. There's a queue that'soscenti. Cognoscenti, yeah. Yeah, Cognoscenti, which means those in the know. There you go. Yeah. There's a cue that's a pool cue. I play pool. Oh, okay. And there's a pool cue called a Cognoscenti by my friend Joe Gold. There it is. He designed this.

Joe Gold, I know that name. Well, it's a very common name. Yeah, okay. That's true. But he lives in Chicago. Okay. One of the best pool cue manufacturers, or artists, I should say, in the world. Cool.

Yeah. It's called a Cognoscenti. Yeah, and he had them designed based on, he hired these engineers to figure out what was the exact perfect taper and the right combinations of woods. Like, mostly he uses ebony. He used, like, all kinds of different woods, but most of the time he uses ebony with a maple shaft and, you know, certain dried, aged wood dried aged wood because the wood has to be dry. There can't be any water in the wood or it'll move as it dries and changes.

So they have to cut the wood down. It starts out in a big block and you slowly cut it down over long periods of time until it becomes a dowel that you can make a cue with. Because you have to allow for the wood to move as it dries out. It's like a guitar maker. Very, very similar. And there's a big difference amongst pool players in woods and how they perform on a table. They have a different, like a maple forearm of the cue.

There's a joint in most cues. And then the shaft is almost always maple. But the maple forearm will be very different than a cocobolo forearm. Like a springiness thing? Yes. Yes. Maple is a little bit more gentle and forgiving, and a cocoa bowl is a little more dense,

and then ebony is denser still. Wow. Ebony also is heavier, so it has like a more forward balance to it. The middle of the cue will hold a lot of weight. So sometimes people who prefer a maple cue will go with a steel joint, so the steel in the middle sort of acts as like a pendulum because the weight is forward on the cue. That's crazy.

The balance of the cue is very important, but it's also an artisan thing. It's like, it's just like this coffee thing in a lot of ways. The people that are really into it are really into it. And they, you know, the guys who make pool cues, like there's, they're artists, man. And they're doing a lot of, especially guys like Joe Gold, do it on a very high end level.

They're making a functional piece of art. It's very beautiful to look at as well. Yeah, this is Joe's work here. These are really super fancy ones where you're seeing the inlays in the bottom. And these, I don't know whether he's going to have a wrap on these or what. Sometimes they make some with no wrap, meaning no leather around the handle.

And some people prefer leather around the handle. There's a whole art to that too. That's crazy. Yeah, I'm unbelievably fascinated by that as well but like i said i'm into anything like guitar makers i don't play guitar but i watch a documentary on how a guy makes a guitar i think it's i watched a whole documentary on a mongolian bow maker last night i was making traditional mongolian bows yeah like uh recurve bows yeah guys doing it out of all these different woods and using animal horns and sinew

and glue that they make from fish. Really incredible. I'd so much rather pay my money for something that is like handmade

and like somebody put their soul into it. Yeah. It does. It means something. It turns a normal artifact into something really special.

Yeah. It's functional and you also get a feeling from using that thing, whether it is like a handmade knife that you're chopping up food with in your kitchen. You know that somewhere in Brooklyn, a guy works in a shop and cuts that metal and polishes it down and sharpens it up

and then sends it to you, and you're receiving a labor of love. That's true. Yeah, you're receiving the fruits of someone's creativity there's something about yeah handmade stuff like that well something about us human beings that we really appreciate other people's effort and work that's why you want to have someone's artwork on your wall you know what's why you you want to like a piece of furniture that someone made it's like there's something uniquely satisfying instead of like something at Ikea that's just like some form block thing that's made in a factory and spit out.

But if you could buy a couch that some guy actually carved the wood and, you know, and planted the, or put the cushions in place and, you know, embroidered it all and, oh my God, that couch would be amazing. You're excited about it when you sit in it. You're sitting in someone's work. Totally. So anyway, Yikai's place is Kognoseni. Yikai, he's a guy who's an architect but got turned on to coffee.

And this is in Culver City, is that what you said? In Culver City, yeah. So Kognoseni Coffee. Yeah, there you go. Okay, there you go. And then another great place in L.A. that I like a lot is called G&B Coffee. These guys Charles Babinski and Kyle Glanville got together

and they're the G&B and they put together a coffee program amazing. Downtown LA their shop is and Charles is the current reigning do you know we have champions like barista champions? Charles is the current reigning okay

do you know we have champions like barista champions baristas have champions? what do they do like crossfit? no it's like a coffee contest has anybody ever baristaed until they died? what's that? like John Henry just like dropped from

yeah well like you know they have contests like to see if people can do things for 24 hours a day. Oh, yeah, yeah, like an endurance thing? Yeah, if they ever have a barista until you drop. Not that I know of. No, they shouldn't do that. No. Because people will wind up dying.

They would die. People are crazy. We need to limit the amount of competition that people are actually allowed to involve in. That's true. So this is the coffee competitions that we do. And there's a barista thing where they're making espresso. There's a barista thing where they're making espresso, there's a brewer's thing where they're brewing coffee, there's a

taster's thing where they're competing on how well they can taste coffee and discern the differences between coffee and stuff like that. So there is a coffee version of the sommelier. Yeah, absolutely. So if you drank this, you would know this is from Ethiopia. If you didn't drink this, if you drank this and you called yourself a coffee pro

and you weren't able to identify it as Yirgachev, that would be a major... You'd be a faker. Well, kind of. Yeah. I mean, this is one of the classic origins of coffee that you need to be able to identify. What could you get confused by? Like if you were really worried, like if you had to bet your mortgage on whether or not you could nail one, what would be a tricky

one? The differences between what coffees? Well, in Central America, they get really new, because, I mean, think about that Central American isthmus there, you know, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, they're all right next to each other. And as you said, it's almost like the same country. Very similar genetics.

Very similar, right. So those coffees taste very similar. But like a coffee from, another great coffee growing area is right in the middle of Kenya. And Kenya is right just south of Ethiopia, but the coffee tastes completely different. Huh. And so there's a city called,

okay, just as Yergeshef is special in, in, uh, in Ethiopia, a place called Nyeri, N-Y-E-R-I in Kenya is really special. And, uh, it, it, the coffee there tastes like, uh, blackberries, you know, like this is like lemons there. It tastes like blackberries or blackcurrants. Really beautiful and savory like meat. Now, what would happen if you took that stuff, though, like you took some plants from that area and then moved them to Hawaii?

That's a great question. You should get into the coffee business. You're asking the right questions. In general, we don't have very many examples of that because only recently have people started to move coffee around. But I tasted once a coffee from a farm in El Salvador that had Kenyan coffees from this place in Neri planted on it. And at the time, I didn't know anything, but I was tasting this coffee and I accused the guy that was working in my lab with me of making a mistake. It tastes like Kenyan coffee. So it's the varieties that have grown to these places that are in many ways determine these flavors. There's also a farm in Panama that was kind of accidentally planted with some coffees from Ethiopia.

And the coffee tastes like Ethiopian coffee. Really? Yeah. So is there a similarity in the climate? Yeah. If the climate's the same and the coffee variety is the same, because remember all these thousands of varieties that exist in the world.

You know, in Yirgacheffe, they grow three different varieties there. If you go to Yirgacheffe and ask a farmer what varieties of coffee he's growing, he's got a choice of three. And they're different from anywhere else in the world. They look different. You can see that they're different. Right, like those little tiny ones that we have. Yeah, exactly.

Is it called Peaberry? Is that what it's called? Mocha. Yeah, mocha is the variety. So M-O-K-K-A, this came from Yemen somehow and made it to Hawaii, and they plant it in Hawaii. And that's Rusty's Hawaiian, by the way. And it's really delicious and really tiny. They're like little seeds almost.

Yeah, like BBs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good way to describe it, BBs. Yeah. So how often do you travel around the world helping people define the flavors of their coffees? Well, now I have a kid, so I don't do it as much anymore. But there was a decade there where I would travel one year, 200 days in a year. Just buzz out of your mind doing coffee?

Yeah. Yeah, tasting it more than – a lot of times, by the way, when we're tasting coffee, we'll spit it out. So you don't get too fucked up? Yeah, just taste it and spit it. That's interesting. Do you feel bad about spitting it out? Sometimes. Sometimes you don't. If it's too delicious and you don't want to, you just drink it. But yeah, but there's a lot of, I mean, it's not just me. There's lots of people out there right now. In fact, I was chatting with a guy in Kenya this morning.

Now, what can be done about the soil itself? Is there composting that improves the health of the plant? Great question. Yeah. One of the issues with coffee is you take all this coffee out from a farm in wherever, Kenya, and you bring the coffee here. But you've got to be bringing stuff back to the soil all the time.

Uh-huh. And otherwise, the soil will be depleted. So getting nutrients back in the soil is really important. Composting is a big deal. It's good to have access to manure, if you can, from cattle or chickens or whatever they put it. It's a lot of work. Is there a preferred type of manure that you use

It depends on the soil because I know people are really into chicken shit. Yeah chicken shit's great because we have chickens Uh-huh, and people are asking us for our shit. Yeah, it's like it's like Dynamite that stuff. It's weird people asking for shit So what about like rotten vegetables? Yeah, they build, any good coffee farm will have a gigantic compost heap. Okay. That they have the coffee pulp and stuff like that from when they process the coffee, plus manure, chicken manure, all sorts of stuff. And this is all sort of leavened and like piled up and then it's evenly distributed over the farm. Exactly. And then they have to carry it. So farmers will put it in a bag on their back and walk up these mountains.

Whoa. And like put, you know, two or three kilograms of manure on each coffee plant. Now one coffee plant will produce about a pound of coffee in a year. So this gives you an idea how much work it is. That's insane. It's crazy. One coffee plant produces a full bag of coffee in a year. So this gives you an idea how much work it is. That's insane. It's crazy. One coffee plant produces a full bag of coffee? In one year.

In a year? Yeah. So why isn't coffee a million dollars? That's a great question. What would happen if coffee could be grown in the United States? It is. It probably would cost a million dollars. And that's why straight, this was probably pretty expensive.

This straight Hawaiian coffee is probably. Oh, yeah. It was not cheap at all. Yeah. It's very expensive. I think it's like, well, I forget. I shouldn't say. Yeah.

But anyway, it's a lot of money. And that's why. It's because it's incredibly labor intensive. Yeah, that's amazing. Now, the issue that they're having with a lot of farms is the depletion of the soil, correct? Absolutely. Minerally deficient soils have been, that's been an issue depletion of the soil, correct? Absolutely. Minerally deficient soils have been, that's been an issue with farmers since the 1920s, right? Absolutely.

When they first started realizing it. Yeah. And this is a big challenge for all agriculture, but coffee is no different. How to maintain fertility in your soil without, because it takes a lot of work, like a lot of labor to get stuff back. So chemical fertilizer is another option for farmers that they use. But that's a problem too because it takes energy to make, you know, they burn gas basically to make NPK fertilizer, which is chemical fertilizer. Right. So organic farms don't use that kind of fertilizer.

They make their own with compost. But it's so much effort. It's just a hugely expensive undertaking to do. So it's a challenge. It's one of the things that we face and we talk about a lot in coffee. Is there a variation in the flavor of a plant that's been fertilized with a chemical fertilizer or a synthetic or whatever you call it as opposed to compost? No. As long as the plant is healthy, it's possible to make it healthy in both those ways.

So if the plant's healthy, it's going to make good coffee. But it seems like a huge difference in the chemical process itself, right? Yeah. I mean, you obviously have to burn things in order to make... Yeah, it's like a... Yeah. And then there's a lot of middle ground too.

I mean, I would say most good farmers or many good farmers use a little bit of synthetic fertilizer and a little bit of compost as well. And they kind of try to find the middle ground. Sort of like multivitamins with a good diet. That's exactly what it's like. Using chemical fertilizer is the same as using vitamin supplements. Have you ever heard of a guy named Dr. Joel Wallach? No. supplements. Have you ever heard of a guy named Dr. Joel Wallach? No. He's a doctor who wrote a book called Dead Doctors Don't Lie. And it's all about minerally insufficient soils and about a

real epidemic we have with minerally deficient diets. Now, I don't know how much of what he said is fuckery. I need to really probably talk to someone. I'll talk to Dr. Rhonda Patrick about it. She's one of the guests that we have on the podcast. Okay. She's an actual scientist. Yeah, she really understands what she's talking about. But this guy was talking about areas in the world where people lived to be much longer or lived to be much older and were healthier and had darker hair longer. And that it was because they were getting something called glacial milk, which is the runoff like water from glaciers that actually had like a milky quality to it because it was so minerally rich.

Now, is there areas like that where they grow coffee? It's minerally rich coffee. A lot of people like the legend. There's a lot of legends in coffee. Well, yeah. I mean, about special areas that make special coffee. Right. And you mentioned earlier volcanic soil. Yes. And you mentioned earlier volcanic soils.

Yes. Places that have volcanic soils. The farmers, if their coffee is great, they will attribute it to all of these things. But so far, there's not a lot of actual evidence to support any of that. All it is is we know, and we're discovering these things all the time.

It's like, what is the magic sort of mixture of the right variety, the right climate, the right kind of soil composition, the right kind of husbandry. It's this. It's so many factors together. I don't think it makes sense to isolate one thing. You know, another thing that people always ask me is like if they're growing pine trees on the farm where they're growing coffee, can you taste the pine trees in the coffee itself? And I'm pretty sure that there's no way that that, I mean, I've never experienced that. But people, these legends kind of come up when around coffee. And you do taste amazing things in coffee that are inexplicable.

Like, I mean, that coffee that we just drank, it definitely smells like lemons, right? Yeah. Well, it smells like a tea. Yeah, like lemon tea, right? And it tastes good even when it cools off. Oh, yeah. It tastes better. I noticed that, too.

Why is that? It's just, it's, I don't know why. Because that's not the case with a lot of coffee. No, no, no. That's right. Why is that? Well, coffee will continue to extract over time. So while it's been sitting in this thing, it's continuing to extract.

It's going from maybe – it was maybe 18% when I plunged it in terms of percentage of extraction. And it keeps on going up as it sits. And so it will evolve in terms of flavor. The other thing that changes is you. And so it'll evolve in terms of flavor. The other thing that changes is you. So there's this thing called habituation in tasting things. And I wasn't completely hip to this until a taste scientist, he did this demonstration for me.

And he did it with wine. He gave me a glass of this white wine from New Zealand. And he had me taste it. And he said, you taste that green bell pepper note in this, you know? And that's a thing that they say about wines from this area. And I said, yeah, I can taste it. And he says, okay. And then he gave me a little bit of actual green bell pepper. And he said, eat that.

And I did. And then he said, okay, now taste the wine again. And I tasted the wine again and it tasted like a completely different wine. And I said, what happened? He said, okay, so that, that wine had this chemical in it and he named the chemical. I don't remember what it was, but it was the green bell pepper chemical. And then he, and then when he gave me the green bell pepper, it overwhelmed my senses with that same smell. And so you know how if you use Windex in your house, you smell it for a while and you're overwhelmed by it. And then in a few minutes, you can't smell it anymore. It's not that it's gone away. It's just that your brain has sort of screened it out. Well, olfactory senses depend on change in the smells. Right, exactly. And so

once you get used to something, you can't smell it anymore. Yes. And so the same thing happens with coffee. If you're drinking coffee and there's an overwhelming element, then your olfactory will screen it out and then you start tasting different things. So things change over time. So smell certainly does enhance taste or change taste. Yeah, in coffee especially, it's at least half of the thing. It does in wine as well. Yeah. Like, I find that, like, you know, a good wine, like, I like red wine.

When I smell a good red wine, like, the smell of it actually makes it seem somewhat more delicious. Yeah, well, flavor, the definition of flavor is the combination of aromatic and taste together. So if you eliminate, if you have a cold or something and you eliminate your aromatics, suddenly food doesn't taste right.

Nothing is right because you're only tasting sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory, which is what you can experience on your tongue. But your nose is able to get thousands of things. So there's this phenomenon that happens when you're tasting things. And it's called retronasal. So when you swallow, this is weird, but you swallow something

and then it coats your throat and the aromatics kind of go backwards up through your nose from your throat. And that's called retronasal from the back of your nose from your throat. Whoa. And that's called retronasal, from the back of your nose. And so you're actually smelling things at the same time that you're swallowing them. That is fascinating. Is there any restaurant in the Los Angeles area that gets the whole thing right? Like, great food, great wine, and great coffee.

That's a great question. Why doesn't someone nail that? Somebody should. Somebody should have coffee like this. Yeah. Like the perfect cup of coffee, roasted March 4th. Right. So it was roasted a week ago.

What's today's date? What's the official date right now? It's the 17th? What is it? 10th? The 10th? Yeah. So 6th, 6th, 17th.

I don't even know what day it is. Yeah. How about that? Fucking seven days off. Yeah. I knew it was one of those Mondays. So 6 days ago. It's really recently roasted. That would be an amazing thing for someone to pull off in a restaurant.

Have like really delicious wines that go with really delicious food and have the same effort put into the coffees. Yeah. A few restaurants are starting to really work on it and try to get it right. Really? Yeah. And what do they do? None that I know of in LA. None? How the coffees. Yeah. A few restaurants are starting to really work on it and try to get it right. And what do they do? None that I know of in LA. None?

How dare you, LA? Yeah. I'm sure there might be. I just haven't been there yet. San Francisco must. San Francisco has a couple. There was one in Baltimore, of all places. Really?

That did an amazing job. Is it still open? Woodbury Kitchen, yeah. It's still a great coffee service. Amazing coffee service. Amazing coffee service and amazing food as well? And amazing. I mean, this guy named Spike does this.

I mean, he is amazing, this dude. Well, I'm going to get that number from you because I'm going there in a couple of weeks. In Baltimore? Oh, you have to eat at Woodbury Kitchen. It's great. All right, I'm going. Yeah. Done.

How about that? Yeah, yeah. Wow. Awesome. What else can we talk about when it comes to coffee? Is there anything that we missed? No, I mean, no, I don't know. I mean, some of the things that people always want to know is about decaf. Yes, that was another thing. I'm glad you brought that up. I forgot.

Well, I mean, it's the thing. You see, when you work in coffee, you go to cocktail parties or something, people always ask you these questions. They ask you, what's your favorite coffee and why? Because they want to know. They also want to know what the deal with decaf is. What is the deal? And then you have to get it out. So the first way that they got it out is they used the solvent. Paint thinner? Yeah, kind of. More like dry cleaning solvent. Oh, God. This is 100 years ago.

And they noticed that it was able to take the caffeine out. And that was the original. But who wants to use that in there? Right. So over the years, they've developed better ways of doing it, using carbon dioxide or charcoal filters to get the caffeine out. And how much do you actually get out? Because I had heard that Starbucks has a particularly high caffeine content of their regular coffee,

and that there might be a little bit left to that when you have decaf. Is that the case? That doesn't sound right to me. No? No. I don't see any reason why Starbucks would have a higher caffeine content than anybody else. Of their coffee? Yeah.

So it's just an urban legend sort of thing? Sounds like an urban legend to me, yeah. What about the decaf? Does it have any caffeine in it at all or is it less? Trace amounts. Trace. Just trace. Trace amounts.

And so people that are allergic sensitive to it shouldn't drink decaffeinated coffee. But people that are – and each of these methods is slightly different. But trace amounts of caffeine in decaffeinated coffee. That's interesting. And the good methods, the Swiss water process, for example, you may have heard of, is one. There's a number of these methods that are really good at getting the caffeine out and not destroying the flavor of the coffee. So what is it? It says Starbucks tall decaf, a tall, which is a small, has 9.5 milligrams of caffeine in it. Okay. What is a normal cup of coffee have in it? Like, like, uh, 150, 200.

So that's the trace. So it's got a little bit, a little bit, but it's not caffeine free. It's just low caffeine. Yeah. But that's pretty low. I mean, you know, sure. But unless you're super sensitive to it, but if you have a 20 ounce decaf, you're getting what about 18, maybe is it a double? What is that? A 16 ounce, 16 ounces double, right? Because that's an eight. Is it tall in eight ounce? I don't know. This is the, a 16-ounce? 16-ounce is double, right? Because that's an 8. Is it tall an 8-ounce? I don't know. I think it's an 8. This is the Starbucks bar language that I don't know.

Right. Well, they get all goofy with grande. Call it middle. I know venti is 20 ounces. I know that. Yeah, that's silly. Call it medium, stupid. Don't call it tall either.

That shit ain't tall. In what world, Gulliver travels, in what world is that tall? That's ridiculous. Yeah. So if someone is really sensitive to caffeine, though, they can also still probably get a little bit of a caffeine kick from a decaf.

Yeah, that's true, if they're super sensitive to it. So it's not caffeine-free. Yeah, I guess that's right. It's called decaf, but it's not decaffeinated. It's only mostly decaffeinated. But the only mostly decaffeinated. But the flavor. Right.

So now the flavors, okay, great. I've done this. I've tasted a great coffee that becomes decaffeinated and certainly the flavor is impacted by the removal of caffeine, by the process

it goes through, but it's still delicious coffee. Okay, like give us an example of a delicious decaffeinated coffee that we should look for. That you can go out, well, any of these, any coffee company that's like putting extraordinary care

into their regular coffee, it's very likely that they will be putting extraordinary care into their decaf too. But you should ask them about it. Right. You know, I mean,

you know, if you engage with them and they're proud of their decaf, then chances are that they are putting a lot of care into it. And I know that, okay, I used to run a coffee company, a coffee program for a coffee company back East called Counterculture Coffee. And I put extra effort into my decaffeinated coffee because i knew that the people that were drinking that were drinking it only for the flavor they weren't drinking it for the drug effect right they just they cared enough about coffee that they wanted to drink it just because of the way that it tasted and i felt like that was a responsibility you know that's a very interesting point because you're not dealing with any people just looking for a drug. Right, right.

And so – but I mean the problem with decaf, I think, is that consumers who drink decaffeinated coffee, they don't necessarily expect to pay more. They feel like it should be the same price. And I get that. But it does cost money to Put it through the process of decaffeinating. Well, don't they feel like that most coffees overpriced in the first place? I don't think people really truly realize the amount of effort when you broke it down by one pound is one tree for a fucking year It's totally like what is that? Is that an eight ounce bag of coffee? What is that? How many with was that? This is bringing that row Hawaiian roasters. What does that say that say this is probably 16 ounces that's a fucking year 14 ounces so it's essentially a year

of one plant yeah that's unbelievable man yeah no it's crazy and you know you can get that for like 20 bucks right whatever the hell it is so we have this ideal of the you know the in the depression a nickel cup of coffee yeah and and uh know, that's when my grandparents had access to a nickel cup of coffee. Starbucks? You're paying $4 for a cup of coffee? They think it's stupid. Meanwhile, grow your own coffee, dummy. Yeah.

Good luck. But, I mean, that was intentional. I mean, restaurants at that time, they were losing money on their five-cent cups of coffees, even in the 20s. Really? Because, but they did that. It was sort of a lost leader. They were trying to get people into the restaurants, you know?

Uh-huh. So, but it kind of stuck in people's mind that coffee should be cheap. And it shouldn't be. In my view, coffee should be the best you can possibly make it taste. And then, and if that costs money, whatever. Just drink less.

So let me ask you this. Say if you're traveling across America and you stop at a diner because you're hungry. Do you even fuck around? Do you even order a cup of coffee? Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. But you get sad when they bring you out that little stupid white cup. It is.

Taste it. I mean, I love diners. You know, I love to eat at diners. Right. I freaking love all that stuff. But you don't love to drink coffee there. And I love pancakes and hash browns and all that stuff. And I wish that the coffee, and a few times I've gone to places where the coffee was outrageously good.

And did they tell you it was really good coffee? Oh, yeah. Do you ask? Sometimes they're proud of their deal and they all make it good. So it's someone who takes as much effort into their omelets as they do into their coffee. And that's possible, right? It should be. It should be expected.

If it's financially feasible. And that's what comes down to people gotta be willing to pay for good stuff. What is a bag, like this delicious bag of Ethiopian Yirgachef Usually that'll be, I don't know, maybe $12 or $13. Dude, I'm going to sleep with this shit next to my pillow.

It's good. I just want the smell. Well, I hope you drink it. I'm going to drink the shit out of this. Don't worry about it. Sometimes, and this always happened to me, when I'd get a special coffee, I'd give it to my parents, and they'd throw it in the freezer,

and they'd save it for a special occasion because they're like, well, no, no, this is a special coffee. No, no, no, we're drinking this all day. There you go. I'm going to put that out in the freezer and they'd save it for a special occasion because they're like, well, no, no, this is special coffee, you know. No, no, no. We're drinking this all day. There you go. I'm going to put that out in the kitchen, too. I'm not going to put it in the freezer. I don't have to, right?

You don't have to. Just drink it. Drink it quickly. All right. So we're going to leave this out and we're going to report on this. And thank you for coming by. And thank you to Wrecking Ball Coffee for making this awesome Ethiopian. Yeah, it was a pleasure talking to you.

Is there anything else we can cover? Anything that people don't know about coffee that should know? Is there anything else? While we were gearing up, I was looking at the Twitter feed, and somebody mentioned something. Oh, okay, I've got a few things that people might be interested. You ready? Okay. Cat shit coffee.

Oh, I've had that. Kopi Luwak. Kopi Luwak. Yeah. Yeah. That's made by a civet. They eat the beans. Right, oh, you know the deal. Yeah, I've had that. Kopi Luwak. Kopi Luwak. That's made by a civet. They eat the beans. Yeah, I've had it. I've ordered it.

It's interesting. For folks who don't know, it really is shit out by this cat thing. It's in the cat family. I think it's more like a raccoon. Yeah, and it eats the beans and then shits them out and then they take it out of its poop. Right. And when it goes through its digestive tract,

it imparts a very mellow taste to the coffee. Right, and so it got in this movie, you know, The Bucket List. What movie's that? There's a movie called The Bucket List. Oh, okay. Jack Nicholson and... Missed it. You don't remember this movie?

No, I never heard of it. It was about some old guys, and they had a bucket list... Of things to do. Of things to do before they died, and one of the things was they'd drink the cat shit coffee. And so that, of course, it started a rash of people asking people like me about this

stuff. There's the animal. Look at that cute little thing. Oh, that's fake, man. He's not really talking. Oh, that's the beans that he pooped out. I first tried that with my friend Tate, who's one of the owners of Caveman Coffee. Tate's always been a crazy coffee connoisseur, but we were in Miami and we saw this thing.

Where's Caveman Coffee, by the way? He's out of New Mexico. Okay, cool. And this place in Miami was like some sort of a specialty coffee joint. It was a restaurant that had these really expensive coffees. And I forget how much, it was like 30 bucks a cup or something like that. Yeah, it's really expensive. Something really nutty because it came out of this cat's butt.

Yeah. And the problem is that it's really rare, and that's why it's expensive and everything. It's good, though. I've had it. It's delicious. I'm glad. Yeah, I'm glad.

Okay, there can be some pretty rotten of this stuff. Wait a minute. It comes out of a cat's and it's rotten? How weird. The other thing is, there are these places where they have the cats in cages and it's really sad. Oh, fuck. I didn't even think of that. You got me now. God damn it. I'm sorry. You blackfished my Kopi Luwak.

It was blackfished. Blackfish is that new documentary that's killing SeaWorld. Oh, right. Because people got a chance to see what it's really like. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Fucking SeaWorld. Oh, right. Because people got a chance to see what it's really like. Yeah, that's right. Fucking SeaWorld. It is terrible. It's terrible. They're slave colonies.

Yeah. They're enslaving intelligent beings that we can't understand. It's true. It is. It is 100% true. And, yeah, so I got a touch of that same sadness when I saw the... And I've been to the places where they do this.

Oh, I'd imagine. It just stands to reason if you have a product like this that's very expensive, then you're going to have these fucking animals. There's also a lot of fraud because it's so expensive. I would imagine. But the amount of pleasure that you can get from a coffee like the one I brought you

or some of these other ones that you've mentioned, it's not totally necessary to go to that extent. The other thing I noticed on the Twitter feed, somebody mentioned coffee going extinct. There was a news about a year ago, there was a news thing that was talking about coffee going extinct. It's because this is tied into this Ethiopia thing. The fact that 98, 99% of the total genetic diversity of coffee is in Ethiopia.

And not only in the country, but in one, there you go, you're fast on that. It's not even Ethiopia at all. It's the southwest part of Ethiopia where coffee is indigenous to. Pull an image of the beans itself like that. Get a blow up on one of those because most people don't even know what coffee beans look like. Yeah. So we call them coffee cherries for obvious reasons. Yeah. I mean, they look like a fruit. It's so interesting because we think of coffee as, you know, if you're crazy, you grind your own stuff.

Right, right. That's how most people think. But it's already cooked and roasted. Yeah, we think of it as food. Yeah. In coffee, you know. You know, one of the biggest things that we can do for people is. How pretty that is.

Yeah, it's beautiful. Looks like grapes. Get people to understand that coffee is the seed of a fruit. I need to get some of that coffee fruit. I want to eat some of that fruit. But you'd have to send me the dry stuff. Where can I go and actually buy the fruit and eat it?

Jay Reski in Santa Barbara, California. Oh, so that's right. 45 minutes away from here or something. Yeah, I fucking love Santa Barbara. I've actually thought about moving there. Oh, I'm there soon. When am I there? I think I'm there in April or something. Yeah, I fucking love Santa Barbara. I've actually thought about moving there. Oh, I'm there soon. When am I there? I think I'm there in April or something. You should go visit Jay. He's a great

guy. The fruit is delicious. You eat fruit, right? I love fruit. Yeah, then this is the guy. I'm there in Santa Barbara May 2nd. Friday, May 2nd, I'm at the Lobero Theater with Joey Diaz. Yeah, go check it out. So I will definitely go and check that out because I want to go just to support that

guy. I love when someone does something that cool. Yeah. You know, it takes a crazy project like that and spend seven years. He's a cool guy for sure. Well, listen, man, this is really fascinating stuff. Really interested. I really appreciate you coming on here and educating us and giving us all the lowdown on coffee.

I've been on a journey to kind of understand and learn the process of this over the last few months. Yeah. Just really kind of digging deep into the coffee flavor barrel. It's really been fascinating stuff and very intriguing and stimulating in a lot of ways. Just the ideas behind it. It's cool to uncover this whole sort of community of people trying to enhance flavors and taste them. I mean, I had no idea there was a Specialty Coffee Association of America until just a few days ago. Yeah.

It's a serious business. And you want to hear... SCAA.org. You want to hear a crazy thing? You're talking about intellectual connection and stuff like that. So coffee was invented in Ethiopia, as we said. And in Ethiopia, they do it like a coffee ceremony. It's a very ceremonial way to prepare it and drink it.

And when they do this coffee ceremony, it's like they gather people together from the village and they talk about things. They talk about the news of the village. They talk about things that are going on in the world. When coffee moved from Ethiopia to Yemen, totally different deal. Like in Ethiopia, it's always a woman that makes coffee, whereas in Yemen, it wasn't like that. But they still would talk about news and intellectual and stuff like that. Then coffee moved from Yemen to Europe, Italy and England and places like that. And the coffee house still remained a place for intellectual exchange and discourse and

stuff like that. They planned the American Revolution in coffee houses. You know? Because they were wired, right? They were like, fuck these English people. There's something about coffee that gets your mind going as well as stimulates you and wakes you up. Do you think that the Tea Party movement

had an effect on the way the United States took off just by simply the fact that they went from tea to coffee? That's what they... There are people that speculate that. That totally is valid, I think. Yeah.

That coffee consumption is a part of the American drive to ingenuity and imagination. We're on fucking speed. We're a country on speed. I wonder if they could show gross domestic product post-Starbucks whether or not Starbucks impacted people's productivity. But still, if you go to meet

somebody at a coffee shop, you're going to talk about something that's different than going to drink with somebody at a bar or have dinner with somebody or something like that. It's different. It's somehow more about exchanging information, more imagination. It's stimulating. The stimulant of caffeine in coffee is stimulating,

and then the flavor is enriching. You enjoy the flavor, and then you get fucking happy. And it's been that way since the origin of coffee. Well, coffee houses. A thousand years. Yeah, coffee houses are always thought of as places where people read poetry and, you know, yeah. Top politics, et cetera.

And as you said, planned revolutions. That's interesting to me. Yeah, it is interesting. And that's one of the reasons that I think that I like to work in coffee because I'm into that sort of thing anyway. Intellectual engagement, creativity, you know, music, poetry, politics. This has always been like that. It's like this in Asia, in Arabia, everywhere that coffee goes been like that it's like this in Asia in Arabia, everywhere

the coffee goes is like that do you feel like coffee doesn't get enough credit for the impact that it has had culturally? I do think sometimes it bums me out this idea of like cheap people want cheap abundant coffee

it's just it's only function is as a drug to get them to work in the morning you know and it's been cheapened by our culture um but but it's it's special and and it could go away you know really well yeah so that this whole extinction thing is about about how where 98 of this of the origin of coffee is because of climate change. This scientist who does this work has done the projections. And if the weather there, as predicted, increases by a few degrees, then the coffee won't be able to survive. And it could be 80% wiped out in these natural coffee forests in 50 years.

Whoa. And then we'll be up a creek because the mother load of genetic origin of coffee will be gone, essentially. That's intense. And then can there be steps done to safeguard that? Well, we're trying to do that in the industry. So we actually had a conference about a year ago on this very question, where we talked about preservation of the genetic diversity of coffee,

which means taking coffee out of Ethiopia, planting it elsewhere, to make sure that we've got other examples of the same, of the genetic diversity in other parts of the world. You know, preserving it. There's other ways to preserve coffee by freezing the seeds and putting them in storage. If we need them, we can go back to them. This has been an eye-opening podcast, man.

I learned more about coffee today than I had in 46 years of life on this planet. I'm glad. Thank you, Peter. I really, really appreciate you taking your time and educating us. I really appreciate your passion. The website is SCAA.org that is the

Specialty Coffee Association of America and follow Peter on Twitter it's Peter Giuliano G-I-U-L-A-N-O L-I-A-N-O L-I-A-N

okay G-I-U-L-I-A-N-O Giuliano Peter Giuliano Peter first P-E-T-E-R G-I-U G-I-U-L-I-A-N-O

That's a lot of work Thank you Joe Rogan That's so easy Giuliano but it has a lot more flow to it And againO-G-A-N. It's so easy. Joe Rogan's so easy. Giuliano, but it has a lot more flow to it. And again, S-E-A-A dot org. Thank you very much, man. All right. Really, really appreciate it.

Okay, peace. And thanks also to our sponsors. Thanks to NatureBox. NatureBox. Go to naturebox.com and use the... Wait, hold on a second. I lost my place. NatureBox.

Fuckers. You're awesome. Delicious shit. I lost my place. Naturebox. Fuckers. You're awesome, delicious shit. You confused the shit out of me. It's a code name, Rogan, I believe. Oh, we don't need to believe. We need to know. So give me a second here. Naturebox.

Yeah, here we go. Yes, it is. Naturebox.com slash Rogan. It's not a code word. So Naturebox.com slash Rogan. That's why we code word. So Naturebox.com slash Rogan. That's why we look it up. Otherwise, we confuse the fuck out of people. So go to Naturebox.com slash Rogan.

Try Naturebox and get 50% off your first box. That's Naturebox.com slash Rogan. Very delicious stuff. And as I said before, a lot of variables as far as what you can order. You can go super healthy. You can go medium healthy. You can go pretzels. But really good, yummy, delicious shit with a lot of positives on it.

No artificial sweeteners, no artificial flavors, no artificial colors, no partially hydrogenated oils. And like I said, the blueberry almonds are the bomb diggity, son. Go get yourself some of that. And we're also brought to you by LegalZoom.com. LegalZoom.com is an excellent sponsor as well and one that we really enjoy here on the podcast because we get a lot of positive feedback. In fact, 9 out of 10 people who've used LegalZoom

said they would use it again. Go to LegalZoom.com and use the code word ROGAN in the referral box at checkout for more savings. Thanks also to Onnit.com. Go to O-N-N-I-T, use the code name ROGAN, and save 10% off any and all supplements. Now, bitches, you know as much about coffee as you ever need to unless you become a freak like Peter Giuliano. All right. We'll see you guys tomorrow with a TriCast.

Dr. Christopher Ryan and Duncan Trussell return, and we're doing our threesome thing that we always do once a month. So much love. See you guys soon. And tomorrow night, Ice House almost sold out. Get on it. See you, bitches.