The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: The Coffee Must Flow

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

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Welcome back to the Matterfax podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at MOFpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host Phil Ravley, Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. So welcome back to Matter of Facts Podcast. This is the least professional podcast in all of podcasting. I completely bonered up, setting up this show and did not apparently set it up for Rumble properly because it failed as soon as I hit the button.

So if you usually watch this on Rumble, that's totally on me, my bad. And if you normally watch this on YouTube or Facebook, you just really wish I'd shut up and get to the topic. And if you listen to this on audio, all this stream and video crap you don't care about anyway. So, you know, there's all that. But in my defense, I was literally telling Nick right before we went live about the absolutely freaking insane week I've had at work, it's been a corker. Yeah. Turns out, government shutdown messed up your schedule. Who'd have thought?

Yeah, government shutdown has had second and third order effects that are causing things that. I normally would be doing two weeks ago that are predicated on somebody else doing something, and I'm pretty sure that office is mostly furloughed. So the thing that should have got done two weeks ago so I can do my job, didn't happen until yesterday morning. So ever since then, it's been kind of like, you know, grab your button, hold on, hurry up, get all this done two weeks ago. But on the upside, I am finding ways left, right, and center,

because, you know, necessity is the mother of invention to get things done that used to take days done in hours. And I was already, I already had a reputation for being able to get things done in hours that take days. And now I'm just coming down even more and more and more like how fast can really all of this get done. Turns out you don't need half of the government. I mean, I don't want to say that out loud. I did. And I will continue to. I'm just going to say that when you have someone who is both inventive and properly incentivized, they can find ways to get things done very, very, very quickly, although I will also say in the same breath that I find that my greatest frustration with my day job is usually just beating my head against the wall of like 25-year-old technology that should have been updated while I was still in high school.

But here we are still using it. Hey man, if it works, the government is not going to replace it. And if it doesn't work, they'll replace it with something worse. I will say that as frustrating as it has been trying to learn software and applications, everything that were written and coded when I was not old enough to buy beer. Not commented, not coded, not documented. Oh, well, it doesn't matter. I mean, I, so the short version is. Um, they stopped teaching the language that these applications are coded in in colleges and computer science degrees 15 years ago.

It's cobalt. Nobody, nobody knows it anymore. It's cobalt. Cobalt. Dude. Okay. Way to pick a loser. I am, I am not a developer.

It's not my decision. It's not my, not no, not no, no. The craziest stuff I do is like writing mainframe reports, which that's been, that's been interesting to learn. Well, you know, at least you got the brain power to fight through it. Well, I am, I am leaning pretty heavily on my experience, like with Visual Basic and, you know, writing macros and writing logical statements in Excel, which some of that skill set transfers over, but it's still, um, the thought process transfers over. The language might not exactly, and the syntax definitely doesn't. The language and syntax absolutely don't. Yeah.

If you understand the way to think through the code, I mean, it gives you a leg up. It's better than starting from nothing. Well, before we get to topic, you'll get a kick out of this. So in the name of full disclosure, because I'm learning about an application, I'm learning about a reporting application that was written when I was still in high school. So it's ancient. It works fairly well, from what I can tell, but it's ancient, and there's not a great user base on it. And I found documentation at a public college in California's website, because apparently their payroll personnel system is based on a very similar mainframe and uses the same application.

So that's where I was able to find product documentation. Nice. But I started teaching myself how to modify these reports that are already been. built in there and how to write new ones and, you know, kind of the mother of invention as necessity, we had a need for these things and these reports were not built. And the people who built all this stuff retired 10, 15 years ago. Right. Nobody else around except for a handful of people in the agency that really understand how this stuff works. So like, I take it upon myself to learn because I want to, I want to know how to make the tool work for me. But in the

process of building this report yesterday, I was trying to call down an absolutely incredible amount of information because I needed all this different, all these different fields in order to use mail merge. Well, the problem is, I put all the stuff in there, the report exploded, like just immediately air it out. I was like, okay, usually when this happens, I've done something dumb. So I went through and checked like everything I put in, all of the print statements and everything print this field, this field, this field, yada, yada.

figured I misspelled something, dropped a character. Yeah, the typical errors. That fingered one of the mainframe addresses, which is just a string of numbers and letters. But everything looked good. And then the guy I was working with was like, okay, well, let's just comment everything out but one,

and let's run that one field. And we'll just, you know, turn them all on one at a time individually. And we'll figure out. Yeah. Well, when we did that, every single one of them worked. Too much data for the program to handle?

Don't beat me to the punchline. so every one of them works and we're like okay what the hell so we turn on like two or three of them it blows up we turn on two of them and finally three like process of elimination i figured out two of the fields we were trying to call down were address one and address two and they've got to be like 20 characters long and literally what was happening was when you put address one address to uh social security number and i forget one other thing in there you reach the the horizontal character limit of the mainframe program

it has the horizontal character limit that's reachable yes when was this installed I think this version went out of date in the mid 90s early 90s okay never mind that explains why there was

a horizontal character limit yes so what I had to do to make this insanity work and by the way this is insanity is I literally rewrote the whole thing to put address one address two on one line by itself and I put everything else on another line and then I made it to where you comment

in one set of information, comment the other one out and then flip them and you run the report twice and then you take those two reports and bridge it together in Excel using Social Security number as a unique identifier to say A goes with A

because the socials match. Right. Merged it all together in Excel did all the data validation it it was a it was a several hour long process you know this is why my grandfather's always said you don't put your hardest worker on your most tedious task you put the laziest guy because he's going to find a way to do it as easy as humanly possible and is automated as humanly possible yeah see my problem is is that i i am i am extremely hard working but I absolutely detest tedious repetitive processes. Exactly.

It's why you're perfect for these things. Because I hate doing tedious repetitive processes, I will find the least tedious, annoying way to do something purely for my own sanity. So Jeff brings up a good point, though. Can you use AI to code in one syntax and have it translated into another. So here's the thing.

There are multiple sectors specifically in the private, in the public sector, and some in the private sector, by the way, that are extremely averse to using AI, mostly because of the sensitivity of information being handled. For instance, I cannot use AI or a lot of cloud-based, cad cam software because occasionally we work on ITAR things yep

and let's just say there are multiple public agencies that very commonly have at their fingertips tens or hundreds of thousands of employee records don't worry fill with those are all been lost already

I know I know they've all been leaked to the Chinese twice I know I know I know I understand I get it I'm saying, man, it's all already been leaked. I mean, come on now. I know. But in any case. Didn't Blue Cross Blue Shield have a database breach recently that got like a third of all

American social security numbers online? Blue Cross Blue Shield has office personal mail management has DoD has. If you have ever in your life been enlisted or worked in the public sector, somebody in China has your social security number tattooed on his forehead. It is just. Probably. the way it is. Unfortunately.

But in any case, but that's digital security. It's awful hard to be right every time. That's really, that's the standard you have to be held. You're held to. Yeah, Raggle Fraggle is saying, get ready for the cold front this Sunday. Yep, we are, we have to do admin work. We have to add in the 20s for me. Okay, 11 minutes of rambling and bull crapping about work and we have to do admin work.

Really, really quick. If you're not a patron, you should. should be patrons keep the show going and support my insanity there's merch available at the southern gal support a small business and support the podcast cypress survivalist is going camping and i never remember what day it is but i can tell you it is a week from tomorrow the 14th yes the 14th we the before board members and my daughter are going out to boguchita state park i talked to ragel he said he might drop in but i found out about something recently he might not be able to too, so I wouldn't hold against him, we can't make it.

But, you know, if anybody would like to come out and hang out, get to meet us, hang out for the weekend, it's going to be one of those rum at your brung, make your own arrangements, sleep wherever you want to sleep. You are on your own, you're on your own recognizance, but if you bring me a gift of booze, cigars, or coffee, you will be welcome to the campsite. Good, good. Bribery is encouraged. It's not bribery. It's called paying your dues. And it's within bounds. And in honor of the, the main topic, I did not silence my phone.

This is the absolute, this is the absolute least professional. It could be worse. This podcast. It could be worse. We could have already had the show go down because of the intro video again. But if you guys didn't notice. the show title we're talking coffee today yes we're going to let

we're going to let Phil nerd out on coffee yes but first you're going to talk and tell me everything you know about coffee while I look something up really quick so what I know about coffee is extremely limited typically it comes pre-ground

in either a bag or a can you put it into the pot with some water and you hit a button in it starts. Now, I'm very familiar with terrible coffee, all my blue collar brothers out there, fire an EMS, police, you guys know bad coffee. It's usually burnt. It's been sitting in the coffee pot for four to six hours with the hot plate still turned on. When you pour it in your mug, you get to it about an hour later. So it's a nice tepid to slightly above room temperature coffee. Oh, that's work coffee for you. I mean, my coffee at home is better, but it definitely still

goes through the machine pre-ground. You poor, you poor, unfortunate. I've heard some people throw ingredients into it. The correct way to drink coffee is black. I will respectfully disagree. I drink, okay, so in the name, it's closer. Like, I drink coffee with milk, with sugar, black. I drink coffee.

Creamer goes bad in the work fridge before people remember to throw it away. So black coffee is the way to go. Well, I mean, I drink black coffee at work. first of all, to control my sugar intake, and second of all, because I put literally nothing in the work fridge at all. But anyway, okay, let's start with where does coffee come from? And the answer is not the store. The answer is a red tin can that you will later use to hold random nails and screws. They don't use tin cans anymore, Nick.

They're all plastic. Then how does it hold your nails and screws? cruise forever. I mean I've, dude, I've got like 20 plastic cans of folders that are all over my reloading shelves. Works just fine.

Interesting. I would think the bottom would bust out with all the lead. They haven't. I don't know. I've got a tin fulgers can full of random miscast 9-mill. So anyway, coffee comes from

a narrow belt that runs around the globe that is between two specific longitudes that I cannot recall which they are but if you think about where coffee typically comes from Colombia, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Mexico if you draw a band like a belt around the earth where all those countries are, that is the region on earth where all coffee comes from.

I found it. 25 degrees north and 30 degrees south. of the equator. Now, the reason for that is somewhat interesting if you're a nerd, which I am. So coffee grows primarily, it can grow outside of that region, but not well, and not enough to make a decent yield. But it grows very well in that area because you need a couple of things for coffee plants to really, really work well. You need, first of all, a fairly specific climate and some kind of altitude. Coffee does not grow well at sea level. Coffee does not grow where it gets cold and you have frost. But what you you need to make coffee plants really work is you need a place that has a pretty much a tropical climate, but you need elevation because think about what happens at elevation. When you're up at a high enough elevation and it gets nighttime, it gets very cold, but then as soon as you get back in daylight, it warms right back up, right? Yeah. And you need that temperature swing, not a frost, not like a winter, but you need that temperature swing from day to night. And I forget

exactly the biochemical reasoning for that, but it's something to do with, it makes the coffee plants fruit, but it slows down the maturity to have that temperature drop at night. Interesting. So that is why coffee, that's why all coffee comes from this very specific region on the globe all the way around the globe. Like from Columbia to Indonesia, all the way around the globe, that belt is where all coffee comes from. So by definition, if you don't live in that area, coffee is a 110% an import, period. It's not like most, it's not like most products where like it's cheaper to harvest it or cheaper to grow it or it's cheaper to process it. And then we import it in the name of convenience of globalism to have it at a lower cost to a higher cost of

living place. We literally, you cannot grow coffee in our climate without a greenhouse. And even then, there's been attempts to greenhouse grow coffee. Like, I know there was an attempt in United Kingdom and the yield for the coffee was like 30% lower than it would have been in its native climate and that was in her that was in that was in a greenhouse that was temperature control and as close as possible to mimic the natural climate but the best it got was a 70% of the yield so could it be grown at our out at our climate yes but it's not well yeah and and I guess the question there is is it is it economically viable because a lot of those areas are lower income countries. So it would be far more economically viable to just

import it. Yeah. I mean, to be able to greenhouse grow it up here that the input is so high for the output, it just makes no sense. Like the, the, the experiment with it was done in the United Kingdom was literally just, it was basically an intent. Now, first of all, the, the person who did it, like he sold the coffee to local, local UK roasters. And it was kind of kind of up front said, like, look, we're going to charge more than what you would, you would, if you got this from overseas, you could sell it as a specialty or as a curio, because, like, there is no United, there is no England grown coffee except for this. Well, there used to be, but they gave up all those pesky colonies.

Yes. Well, none in, none with none on the island, put it that way. True. So, like said, it's, it's kind of an interesting situation right there where coffee is by definition and import, but where the coffee actually comes from, like, you've probably seen Whole Being coffee, right? Yeah, yeah, well, roasted and unroasted because of the disaster ads. Yeah.

So start at... It's like a berry with like a nut inside of it, isn't it? Yes. Well, it's a cherry, coffee cherry, technically, but yes, it's berry. But like, let's start at the place most people are familiar with coffee being like ground coffee you put into a machine. Sure. To go one step back from that is Whole Bean.

And that literally, it looks like a little, it looks almost like a little brown peanut. Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that. To get there, you have to roast it and you start with a little green peanut of which there's like 30 or 40 pounds sitting on that shelf back there because I stock the stuff all the time. But, and to get from, to get there, you, it usually arrives here in the U.S. in a burlum sack. It's been on a ship. It got bust in from another country.

but in its home country, the coffee cherries are harvested from the trees, the beans are extracted. They are then sometime, now here's where you get a couple of decision points, depending on the way that plantation does things. They have dry processing and wet processing. You can either wash them or you can just leave them out and basically let them dry out on their own. There's different ways to do it. It does impact the flavor some, and each plantation kind of likes to do things. their own way. I mean, is this why having combinations of different sources of beans for different flavors of coffee is important? Not important. It's a decision. When you, when you get to the

point of blending coffee, there are two things you could be doing. One is you just, you don't care about the, you don't care about the flavor, the little nuances of flavor. You just want coffee. So if you buy like the last 200, the last hundred bags from this shipment, the last 50 bags from that shipment, you just put it all together in a pile and then you roast in and grind and make coffee. That's one possible. I mean, not to begrudge Folgers or any mainstream large scale coffee manufacturing. That's what they do. But that's what they do. I mean, there's a Folgers plant like right down here in New Orleans.

And it's literally a refinery. I mean, they roast at scale. scale. So probably tons at a time, I would imagine, or a continuous process. Yeah. So what they're looking at down there is they don't care. They're not, they're not interested in, well, we want 47 of these beans and 26 of these and we put them together and it makes the perfect flavor. That's not what they're into. They're controlling output via roast, maybe to a degree, like, because they do have some Colombians and um coffees and everything but I would be I would venture to guess

that even looking at like the Colombian coffees they're not like a single origin from a single lot from a single plantation it's just Columbia you know I'm saying you know the the interesting thing about that though is I I grew up drinking Folgers coffee because the machine shop I started working at at 13 they had Folders coffee we have Folgers coffee at work now It tastes exactly how I remember it, which is just mediocre. You know what I mean? It's not anything exceptionally flavorful.

It's caffeinated, and that's really what I'm looking for out of a cup of Folgers coffee. And it's relatively brown liquid. I mean, there's definitely a coffee flavor there, but I wouldn't say it has a distinct flavor profile at all. Yeah. Maybe that's why. I mean, it's kind of like what does chicken? can taste like it tastes like everything sure and again i'm not begrudging folders i've drank

this stuff for years i kind of elevated my taste but you know hold on a second we have comments are we going to talk bean brew types yes i know nothing about this i i put the pre-ground in the coffee okay i'm going to star that because that comment is going to come back up in just a second And yes, ragel, the three, okay, the two beans and the adulterant, and that's specific word I'm using, that you listed, those are the ones. Matter of fact, is chicory, not coffee? No, no, no, no. Because I got, I got the scary guy here says, chickery is not coffee. Nope.

So let's go ahead and throw this up here. Let's unpack it. All right. The two primary types of beans. are arabica and sumana or no wait it's uh arabica and rebusta sumatra is actually a um it's not a type of bean i think it's an origin of i recall correctly sumatra was a country yeah wasn't it and that that's what i'm saying it's an origin in the way that like you get you have mexican coffee which is coffee just from mexico but arabica and rebukes columbia uh not bavarian nicaraguan indonesia and so on so forth But Arabica and Robooster are your two primary types of coffee. So there for a long time, if I recall correctly, Arabica was, I'm drawing a blank now.

One or the other was in very common usage for a very long time because of the flavor profiles. And that's just what the market preferred. The other came into common usage more recently. And that's been more a result of the specialty coffee market. But those are both coffee. Chickory is not coffee. But here's the thing. So here's where chickery comes in.

Chickory is actually something that grows native down here in southeast Louisiana. And you and other people have probably heard of coffee with chicory, right? I have not. Okay. If you ever come... I have not. If you and your wife ever come to New Orleans, you would probably... You might have to go to New Orleans, French Quarter, Café Dumont,

but you will find coffee with chicory. Chickory is a very, very acquired taste. But chicory is almost more attuned to, like it's almost more like I want to compare it to like a tea but it's not like tea leaves are we blaming the French for this being that it's really only in that quarter

this is not actually a French thing this it grows native to Southeast it sounds like a French problem though here well okay here's the problem here's the thing so chickery was actually not originally used in tandem with coffee or drank standalone what happened was American Revolution

Battle of New Orleans. The English blockaded the Port New Orleans, right? As you do. One of the first things that they couldn't get into Port anymore was coffee. And that is a bit of a problem for we French folks down here. We like our coffee. So to stretch out the available coffee store, it was very common in this area to adulterate or use an adulterate,

basically to mix some chicory with coffee to kind of spread it out. out a little bit. Think of it like if you have really good stuff from your local non-authorized pharmaceutical dealer and he mix in a little bit of flour or something to like spread it out a little bit. That's what was going on with the coffee and chicory. And then over time when the coffee completely late war bread was sawdust. Yeah. And then when the coffee completely ran out, people just brewed up chicory. Now it's it's an acquired taste. I couldn't say, I mean, I've drank it before and it's not my favorite, but I wouldn't turn it down. It does tend to make the, coffee very spicy not necessarily in a good way like you've had like really strong black coffee

right yes okay this is not like three times brood through three different sets of grounds yeah this is not that though this is not like ooh this is like a really strong cup of coffee it's like there is something in this coffee that is not coffee like putting cloves in something not the same flavor but similar like when you if you ever smoke like a clove cigarette yes okay so there is no debating that there's cloves in this oh yeah oh yeah you know there's something there yeah same thing with chickery and coffee it's interesting it doesn't it doesn't have like a minty flavor i don't know how to describe it's just chicory but it's if you ever tasted you will never in life ever get that taste out of your head and i'm going to agree

Dr. Scary guy, like, Cafe Dumont is highly overrated. Like, it is, it is the ultimate. I just came to New Orleans as a, as a tourist. I am the most basic bitch. I have to have all the basic bitch French quarter experiences. I'm going to go to Cafe Dumont and get a Benet and a cup of coffee. I get it. Do it.

Enjoy it. Have fun. But for, for really good coffee, Cafe Dumont is just, I've had just as good, if not better. I mean, but down here, we're. spoiled for choices. I mean, Folgers, even though it's I don't think it's great coffee, it's freaking close, so it's reasonably fresh,

but you've also got like community coffee, PJ's coffee, which is local, so is community. I mean, we are really spoiled for good coffee, good coffee brands down here in Louisiana. That's fair. But anyway.

So yeah, that's the whole, that's my whole rant on what chickery is. If you get the I almost want to try it now just because I know it's different. Probably your best bet would be to order

Cafe Dumas, I know is going to have it, but Cafe Dumas, coffee with chicory. You can probably order and have it shipped to you. Probably. I mean, you cannot have chickery in the disaster coffee store. That's not going to happen. I wasn't

going to request you do that. I was going to insist you keep coffee on that store whatever you think is good coffee because apparently i don't know good coffee oh look i i i i've gone down the coffee nerd rabbit hole i accept it at this point man you know what honestly i coffee for me has always been about a caffeine delivery system that was not just metric ass loads of sugar i mean that's fair i mean i went from i went from coffee to monsters back to coffee and I really do think that was trading up

yes going off the monsters because man I'm raggle I don't know the top of me have chickery has caffeine in it don't know or no that wasn't ragel shit I'm sorry that's your wife oh that was

Rachel it was that's good question she has there's Rachel right underneath raggle fraggle and their names are similar enough that at a glance good God, yeah, they are So it's not just me, same length, both start with R.A. They are, but I would imagine she's prettier, so.

I haven't met Raggle, you never know. I have, your wife's prettier than he is. He won't, he won't be upset about that either. I don't think she will be either. But in any case, so, like, let's, that's where coffee comes from. It has to be grown overseas. It does come up, it does come into us.

in the bowels of ships in frigging 55 get in um 50 pound burlap sacks it is ostensibly a dried grain at that point like as long as there's not in long as it doesn't get moist and as long as rats don't start chewing on it i mean this is this is like been the reason why disaster coffee start off with bunker beans and green coffee beans as a long-term store because it's no different than store and rice at that point now i have heard there are some extremely expensive and very ritsy coffees that require them to be chewed on and digested by critters. I will never, ever, ever. Eat the poo coffee? I will never drink the copy luak or luac or whatever it's called. Now, is that because it's insanely expensive, which I have heard it is, or is that because it is poo coffee? both and both are perfectly valid answers both both are perfectly valid answers also the uh the market for that is actually extraordinarily exploitive of those animals because like so okay so before

the movie um bucket list came out and it kind of like came into vogue at that point it was still expensive then but it wasn't near as expensive as it was and it wasn't as much sought after it's kind of a specialty market so what has happened is that right because how many people are going to be willing to be like yes a cat has pooped this coffee yeah please drink it so so what has happened is now they literally have farms where they have these animals in cages and they feed them nothing but coffee cherries which is awful for the animals and awful for their health by the way they're incredibly malnourish and it's not a good thing that i i like nothing about it and the problem is So don't drink poo coffee.

It's bad for the environment and animals. Yes, and I like animals better than most people, which... Also, it's made of poo. It's not made of poo. It's just been partially digested in poo. Look, so has corn, but we're not making that corn into cornbread either. That's a different show. That I'm just saying, man, you shouldn't make poo into food or drinks.

True, true. So anyway, that's where coffee comes from. Um, let's talk about roasting, even though Raggle specifically said he wanted to know about, what was it? I have to start it. Otherwise, I'll forget. He had a big question. He wanted to talk about brew types. So we'll get to that in just a minute.

So I know you've talked before about your, your home brewing setups. You've, you've gone through a bit of an evolution in your home brewing setups. haven't you? I mean, I think you started off with like a popcorn maker. So like a campfire popcorn maker for your first kit. It wasn't actually that, but let me get through the whole thing. So sure, most people buy your coffee pre-roasted. There's lots of good reasons for that. It's convenient. Most of your roasters have very, very precise equipment. So the thing, my whole spiel on roasting coffee is that to roast a single batch of coffee to an excellent end result is art. You're, you're listening to the coffee, you're smelling it, your, your senses are fully engaged in what the coffee is doing. It's like baking and waiting for that perfect moment to pull, pull the pie or whatever it is out of the oven. So it's not over. It's not a delicious perfect.

That is not science. That is art. That is art to have that intuition and know that the product is ready to come out. to be fully engaged in the coffee and to like to use your intuition to like there's a certain amount of measuring temperatures and watching times but at this point in me roasting coffee most of my senses are engaged in what the coffee is telling me it's the most fruity like overgrown nonsense i i can express to anybody but i'm listening to and smelling and watching the coffee more than i am watching a stop watch well i think part of part of it has got to

be the scale you're doing it at, right? Because if you have an inconsistency in like, say, your one pound bag of beans, you're going to notice that more roasting however many ounces at the time you're doing. Whereas if you have 10,000 pounds of beans, those little inconsistencies are going to average out, aren't they? Not so much that. So here's the thing. Roasting one badge of coffee is art. Roasting 10,000 batch is exactly the same. That is science. That is a where professional roasters will have a small scale roaster that only roast a small amount at a time. And this thing is filled with temperature probes.

So they are watching, they are not just watching the temperature, but they're feeding all this into a computer program that graphs over time, what the temperature is, what the rate of agitation or erration is, depending on whether you use in a fluid bed or a drum type. Like, they're graphing all this to build out a profile so that when we want to roast this coffee again. We put this profile into a computer hooked up to a gigantic machine and it reproduces this profile again perfectly. It runs that, it runs that, it preheats the roaster to exactly this temperature and then it drops the beans in and then it, it agitates them at exactly this rate, this many RPM if it's a drum roaster, for example. It's going to raise the temperature at exactly

this rate over time to closely match this curve. It's going to do all those things in a very controlled repeatable fashion. That is the science of roasting is to be able to do it exactly the same time, exactly the same way over and over and over so that your can of red folders taste like the other 50 cans that are on the shelf. I can never match that level of consistency because I'm roasting one batch at a time. What I can do is I can roast a little bit lighter, a little bit darker, I can play with it, I can come up to temperature faster. I can I can do things like When I get down towards the bottom of one of my propane tanks, I know I need to preheat a little bit more. I need to come upon the temperature more aggressively.

I need to open the burner up hotter. I can do all those. I can make all those decisions in real time because I'm looking at this one batch at a time. But the place I started out roasting coffee was actually with a very small, a wire, like a popcorn popper. But it's not exactly a popcorn popper. So the popcorn poppers you're thinking of are usually about the size of like a pie pan, right? uh yeah i was thinking more of like the campfire ones you have there they're usually a rectangle you know maybe four or five by six to eight all right something like that so the inches square

so the one i started with is maybe about five to six inches in diameter it's okay it is barely big enough to fill my french press twice so it's not a very large coffee maker actually no i can fill my french so you're basically make it yeah so So you're basically making a pot of coffee there when you're roasting that. Yes, for all intents and purposes. Now, for that, that's very simple. Just put your beans in, wave it over a fire. You know, closer to the fire, it's hotter, further away is cooler.

And you have some basic principles you want to apply to roasting. Like, you do want to come up to your roasting temperature as quick as is feasible without burning the beans. If you go too fast, you'll wind up with the beans explode. And then when you look in the final product, you'll find lots and lots of beans that are not like together. They've literally like broken into thirds and force because they just popped. Not to mention, usually you'll light them on fire if you try to get too aggressive with it. But that, depending on the bean origin, it can take a lot of temperature really fast to get to that point. If you don't come up on temperature fast enough, they'll never, they'll never crack or make this popping noise that is kind of intrinsic to roasting coffee.

so you'll kind of dry them out almost like almost dehydrate them so they're already fairly dry what you're doing what what that cracking noise is is actually the it is a little current is a little bit of carbon dioxide that's trapped inside the beans and when you heat that up enough it breaches out of the coffee bean but if you heat the beans up too slowly it leaches out instead of popping so you're not expanding the gas fast enough Yeah. And now the problem with that is you can still roast the bean, but if you roast too slowly, often you'll overdevelop the outside of the bean, but the inside of the bean is not roasted properly. So when you go to grind it, you'll have a, it might, all your beans on the outside might look the same, but when you start grinding it, the inside of all those beans is a little bit too green, a little bit too light. And you'll start to notice that in the taste. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense.

Raggle-fraggle. Small brewer, so a small brewer, and I don't own one, because I don't make anything that small, would be like single cup. Think like an aeropress or something like a V-60, like if you're ever seen the little funnels

you put on top of a copy cup hub and then you pour your water over the top to make one cup at a time, I don't do any of that nonsense, because I like my coffee. I make that I make that sounds like an extraordinary waste of time. I mean, yeah, I use French presses and pour. I use French presses and percolators and all kinds of stuff when I'm out camping.

And they make eight to ten cups at a whack because like four of those are going in my cup. And usually the other four going in Gillian's cup. So we're not making eight cups at a time. We're just not making coffee. But that's what I started off using. What I progressed to is what's on that. shelf back there behind me above my head, which is a fairly large stainless steel popcorn popping pot.

If you've ever seen the ones where like you'll have a crank handle on the side of it, you'll have the old whirly pops. Okay, so I have a whirly pop behind that one. That is actually a, I think it's a VK popper, which I actually like a lot better. They work better than the whirly pops in my experience. The worthy pops, the gears tend to bind. And, you know, it's, you know, I've been. I've been, I've been fully intending on replacing my whirlipop for the last five years,

but it still works. And I just like for the, the couple times a month, we might use it when we're doing a lot of movie nights. It just works, man. I don't know what to say. It does, but coffee beans are heavier than popcorn curles.

Oh, yeah. Sure, that makes sense. They're a larger, they're a larger nut. Yeah. Well, beans.

So that, that's the issue I have with Worley Pop specifically is that, that greater weight tends to make the tends to make things bind up and bog down a little bit more the VK Popper actually has a almost like a braided bike cable that goes between the handle and the agitator oh instead of like a spur gear yep so if you if you like bind it up too too much you'll break the cable but it's much smoother it doesn't bind near as much it's just I like the system a lot better but I always thought that if they went back to cast cast like zinc cast gears instead of plastic gears and it really pops you to eliminate that binding issue because I think a lot of the binding issue is the flex.

I've got the metal gears and that's not the problem. Honestly, what I think the problem is actually the, I want to call it the handle, but it's not a handle, but the top piece that you have the top C-shaped piece of metal

that kind of locates all the gears. Yeah. That has so much flex to it that I've, it's just like some what, like 16 or 20 gauge stamping. But I have noticed that about

every four or five times I use it. I've got to like bend that. I've got to tweak that to get the gears back in a proper mesh. I've not had that problem. Well, perhaps it's because I'm only using it for corn and not coffee. You're using yours for popcorn. I'm using mine for coffee. And that's another thing is that if you're going to use a popcorn popper or anything to roast coffee,

don't use it for anything else. Well, okay. So as you roast coffee, the coffee oils leach out of the beans. and that stuff cakes the inside of my pod. So you're saying we could have coffee-flavored popcorn? I don't know if you'd end up with a coffee-flavored popcorn or just, I don't know, but I wouldn't. I personally wouldn't. Because I don't think you're going to have coffee-flavored popcorn.

I think you're going to wind up with death-flavored popcorn. Oh, well, that's disappointing. I mean, it's like rancid, burnt-on oil. Oh, and it's very disappointing. Yes. So like I said, I was hoping for it all. Now, those are, that's how I've roasted coffee. James Walton, one of the other owners of disaster coffee, his favorite method is just cast iron skillet and a wooden spoon.

I have heard of guys doing that or like old in the bottom of the actual coffee pot over a campfire and a wooden spoon. Yeah. he's also turned me on to like I believe it was him if not it was him of somebody else um sometimes they'll just put a put a single layer of coffee beans onto a pan like a cookie sheet into the oven at uh I think they set it for like I want to say they set it for like 450 because hmm of course and the only the only rotten part of that is you're not getting any bean agitation. So you're going to tend to like, you know, not scorch,

but you're going to tend to heat of the beans more on one side of the other. But, I mean, there are different ways to do this. You could go spend hundreds of dollars on a commercial roaster and I think you'll get a good product, but I don't know that your product's going to be dramatically better than what you can get

with a much more humble roasting method. But at the end of the day, your principles are all throwing flaming money at a problem is usually the solution. I mean, somebody once asked me like, okay, how much does it cost to get into roasting coffee? And I'm like, well, I've got a $60 pot that I'm using on the side burner of a barbecue pit. And I check my pot preheat with a $15 hour thermometer off Amazon.

So, like, pretty reasonably affordable. Pretty reasonable. I use the collater out of the, out of the kitchen to, like, you know, knock the chaff out and a coffee sheet to, or a cooking cookie sheet to, lay it all out on to let it cool after it's been you know roasted so pretty reasonable but then again you can spend 600 hours on a genie cafe you can spend well over a thousand on or two one to two thousand dollars on coffee roasters and these are still small batch roasters you want to get into the stuff where you're going to like commercially roast the stuff at scale you're talking about a five to ten thousand dollar piece of equipment i mean

Oh, yeah. Well, it's just, it's just like jumping from this little lathe behind, little lathe behind me to a production CNC lathe. I mean, you're talking about at least a 10x multiplier in price minimum. Yeah. But if you want to start roasting at home, like, it's not hideously expensive. I actually have a, I have an article on MOFpodcast.com that, uh, that kind of details out that whole process and, has in it

some of the things I've personally used for roasting that I tend to recommend based on my own experience. It's a fun thing to get into if you're a coffee dork you will get the freshest cup of coffee you've ever had because you can literally like roast it grinded and

drink it within an hour. Sure. That makes sense. And if you're one of those ten-full hat-wearing survivalist types then frankly if you have coffee just already ground already roasted sitting on a shelf it's going to start to lose flavor within a matter of weeks i've got 40 pounds sitting on the shelf i am going to be drinking coffee after the rest of

the neighborhood has gone to mad max so then i suppose this is a good place to toss in shelf life talk here so obviously ground and ready to ready to brew is the shortest shelf life what about is that shelf life do you know so opinions do vary on this because it's taste based and That's subjective to a degree. But I mean, obviously, even if it's, even if it no longer has a quality taste to it, it's caffeine. It's still caffeine, but it's going to taste, it's going to start to taste like crap. Although it is worth pointing out that eventually the caffeine content will start to flash off eventually. Yeah, of course.

7 and 10 days, maybe as much as 14 for like ground roasted coffee. Now, let's stop and think about how long you think that coffee was sitting on the shelf. before you got your hands on it. Well, I usually get a five-pound bag every three months. Sub-optimal, Nick, sub-optimal. I mean, I think it tastes pretty good, but I'm not trying any fresher than that. So what would I know? Whole bean coffee that has been roasted but not ground yet is more in the realm of like

four to six weeks. Because you remember how we were talking about during the roasting process, there's carbon dioxide trapped inside the bean. So there's still some trapped inside the bean after roasting. It hasn't all been completely pushed out of the bean yet. And because there's carbon dioxide trapped inside the bean, it resists oxygen being able to penetrate into the bean. Makes sense.

And if you don't have oxygen, sunlight, or moisture, you have nothing that encourages spoilage. So that is why my wife has diamonded me out. she says there is a change in how our coffee tastes i i've never noticed maybe maybe that's just me and i am an unsophisticated heathen i mean to be fair i polluted my taste buds with quite a lot of like army coffee over the year so yeah i don't know man it uh i think it's pretty good fresh bag to nearly empty bag but no no it's really not three months Jesus Christ.

Yeah, round about. I can't talk too much smack because I used to, I used to drink reds every 90 days. I used to drink like red cans of Folger and I always have one on the shelf and one on the counter. So like I've also been in that position where I drank coffee that was like well past the point it should have been tossed out. I am fairly certain that at work we go through one of those big red cans of Folgers about every two months. Because a lot of us have really cut back on how much coffee we drink. and I'm fairly certain the lady that stocks it buys six cans at a time from Sam's Club.

So Raggle brings an interesting point up here. There is a kind of this old, I want to call it a wife's tale that freezing your coffee makes it last longer. It actually does, but not much. So freezing the coffee does slow down the rate of which that, it does slow down the rate of oxidation in the same way that freezing anything helps prolong it. But it doesn't help it much. So, like, if you're looking to improve the freshness of the coffee going from already ground whole bean and grinding it on demand or grinding a couple of days out, that is, that's going to improve your situation dramatically. But to get to the point, I'm at where I roast coffee typically every weekend, and then sometimes I'll roast an extra badge in the middle of the week, just depending on consumption. I roast 330 grams at a time.

You'll have to forgive me for using the metric system. And we do use it for things other than bullets on this podcast, but it's rare. But the problem is that everything... Bullets, narcotics. Well, but everything around... Now, in the nameful it holds closure, I also drink espresso, and everything around espresso brewing is done in metric. Sure.

That makes sense because it's small volume. Yeah. Well, that and the fact that, like, when I'm working to perfect like a roasting recipe, I'm looking at things like the before and after. weight and the difference in that weight can tell you what gross level you're at. Well, there's a lot more granularity of data when you're talking about 330 grams versus 10.1 ounces. You know what you should use. You should use your reloading scale.

Do it by grains, 3,000 grains to a pound. I mean, I could, but I also have a 10th grain scale. I also have a very, very, very precise coffee scale. very precise enough in i do have to disagree with ragel here you can't get every liquor by the gallon that's for shit if you know the right people you can get every liquor by the gallon make friends with your local distillery and you can get cases at a time so that's my spiel on home roasting if you're interesting if you already know that your optimum time to drink is going to be constrained by whether it's ground or it's you know how how old

that coffee is that being able to go from a steady state which is green beans and roasting it on demand and then grinding it that's going to be a fresher cup no matter what and it's not a huge time investment i mean i want to say like my time my personal time spent roasting coffee might be 20 minutes a week takes okay that's actually a pretty minimal investment i would have thought it have been longer than that. It takes about 10 minutes a batch. 15. If I, if I, if I, if you include the time it takes for the beans to like come down from temperature until I can handle them with my bare hands. But that makes sense. Well, yeah, because there's always, so if you said a half hour a week,

that's a safe bet. Yeah. I mean, even if you call it an hour a week, it's, I waste more time doing things that are less fun than that, to be perfectly honest. We probably all do. So, let's talk brew methods you're familiar with the age old drip machine and i use it oh yes it works it makes the brown water i especially like the fact that it has an automated timer on it so i can have coffee waiting for me when i wake up in the morning to quote my brother it's the magic brown bean water yeah so like there's there's a group people out there that think very little of drip machines i actually like. I like drip coffee and some of it might just be like an ode to my childhood because that's what I grew up drinking with, you know, mostly more milk than coffee, but still.

Sure. That's what I started with. I mean, the first cup of coffee I ever had was burnt black coffee. And that, that is what I had this afternoon. So, burnt black coffee. Oh, yeah. You know, the stuff that's in the work coffee pot that's been there since six o'clock in the morning, last time somebody brewed a pot it's like two in the afternoon that might as well top her off and away we go uh ragel i'm gonna put him on word rations if he doesn't slow down he's doing the good though yes he is so there there is drip pour over is what we were talking about earlier where you have a you have the little fixture that sits on top of your coffee cup i've never used one because it only makes one cup at a time and that's that's dumbed me that is dumb and ragel actually did miss

one even on the next chat that he just put in he missed one he did he still missed one there's one there's one not here we got we got percolator what are we missing let me don't beat me to the punch line nick don't beat me to the punch line um french press french press and a percolator the two that i have in my camping stuff and i have both because sometimes i have to make a lot of coffee and um that makes sense actually over there on the floor you see the big silver container Yeah, that was a purchase for Cypress survivalist. It is a, uh, it is an 80 cup coffee maker. That sounds a great way to get a heart condition.

Um, it, it, it takes one 12 ounce bag of coffee to run at full blast, like wonderful. One one bag of disaster coffee, ripped the top off, poured in, fill it up the water and press the button. So you're telling me you can, you can consume 12 ounces of coffee in a day is what is where you're at, 12, 12 ounces of yeah you're going to drink the entire 12 ounce bag no no no of coffee yourself that comes out when we have not even guessed that come that that that is a cypress survivalist type of thing where we have like you know 20 people that show up and we're going to be drinking coffee and three of them want coffee i get it um no we actually drank two thirds of that thing oh wow that's actually significant amounts yes well southeast louisiana we like our coffee

Um, but yeah, percolator and French press are what I keep in my, uh, my camping coffee coffee box over here. Sometimes we run a both, sometimes one or the other is the, I do like percolator for camp coffee. So the primary difference between the two and it, okay, so a bit of coffee nerd nerd crap here. Mm-hmm. There is a relationship between how fine you grind the coffee and your brewing method. So if you think, there's a, there's a thing in coffee. brewing called contact time. That is literally the number of seconds and minutes that the water is in contact with the grounds. Think about your two extremes, cold brew and espresso. Espresso is really,

really fast, really short contact time. Like your shot is usually like 35 seconds. You push the water through the bed of coffee. The coffee has to be ground extremely fine to get extraction out because the coffee, the water passes through it so fast. Follow me? Yeah, yeah, I guess that makes sense. Now, it'd be like a Portland cement versus a concrete. Now, in the opposite extreme, it's cold brew where you, or is where you literally, you, you put your coffee in the water and you put it in the fridge and it's cold so it doesn't extract very well, very well, and it sits in there overnight. So the coffee. Is that how you're supposed to do cold brew?

I mean, yeah, if you do it at the old-fashioned way. Huh. My wife has got a cold brew. machine that does I think it hot brews the coffee and then puts it on ice. Okay, so that's kind of cold brew, but I'm talking about like the really slow

old school way. But when you do Well, we could try that. But when you do that, you grind the coffee actually fairly coarse, coars or even than you do with a drip machine because the water's to sit there all night. Because the water's in contact with the coffee for so long. So a percolator and a

French press are going to technically have different optimal grind settings because with a French press, you put the coffee in the hot water, you let it sit there for five minutes or so, and then you press it through. When a percolator, the coffee is constantly flowing over the coffee bed. It's all a little bit different. Now, there is kind of a Goldilocks setting for your grinder where you could just grind at that and it works okay-ish in everything.

Sure. Except espresso. Espresso is kind of special. All right. But the one coffee brewing method ragel didn't say, because I don't like this coffee brew method, is curic machines. Is not that very similar to an espresso type grind? Because it's a very short contact time. No, don't ever impugn my fine product of espresso.

Well, I wasn't trying to impugn. I was more asking, because it is a very short contact time. It is a very short contact time. The primary difference is espresso is done underpresent. pressure and Kyrig is still ostensibly a gravity drip machine. It's just a really,

really fast gravity drip machine. So finer, but not that fine? In my experience, it's about two steps finer than drip coffee. Okay. But on, now, on my

power grinder, I use setting 12, which these settings mean nothing to anybody else. It's just, for comparison's sake. It's the volume goes up to 11 joke. I use setting 12 for my drip coffee. I use setting 10 for my curate cups and I make my own. I use setting two for espresso.

Oh, okay. So it's more of like almost a flour consistency powder. Maybe slightly. You want it between flour and wet sand. For espresso. We'll get into espresso in just a second. And espresso, we could do a whole other show about just espresso, but none of you nerds care. Oh, I bet you could.

But yeah, I say it's different, ragel, because from a, from a perspective of how you prepare the coffee and how it makes the coffee, it is to me fundamentally different. And I'll be the first day, like, I make my own K cups for work because it's all we have at work is curing machines. I don't like curing machines. I think they make a lot of compromises in the name of making coffee. The contact time is way too short. There's not pressure like you have with espresso. you can get proper extraction. I've never had a curig make as good of a cup of coffee as I could make with a drip machine,

except for the fact that a curate will be done in a minute, and a drip machine will take substantially longer to make a pot. Well, I think the whole selling point behind the curig is Karen can have her tea, so and Susie can have her hot chocolate, you can have your cup of coffee all out of the same machine in a corporate setting. I think I think that was the point of the machine was user friendly, quick, and variability. So what happened? It was never supposed to be a good cup of coffee. It was just supposed to be decent enough at all the things.

Yes. And what happens when something is good enough at everything? It winds up being great and generally crap. Yeah. Yeah, it's just generally crap. It's good enough for the office. Yeah. So.

We're going to end this at espresso. So espresso is this subject that gets even people that are in a coffee really wound up because you do have that camp out there that sees espresso is like something, something that isn't coffee. But they don't, they've never felt the need to try it. Or they associate espresso with like these god awful drinks at Starbucks makes that are more sugar and crap than. I've never understood the liking of Starbucks now I Phil have you had just their coffee without all the extra shit in it tastes like ass it does now I'm a man that loves a nice overly burnt too hot and or too cold cup of coffee I will drink them all but my God I mean I will take four hour six hour old on a hot plate shitty work coffee over Starbucks is freshly made and yet somehow still even more burnt to shit coffee. It is worth now to back up just a step or two

to that whole conversation about roasting. Roasting your coffee really light tends to bring out different flavors than roasting it really dark. Roasting coffee really light tends to bring out the origin flavors of coffee more than the roasting flavor if you follow me. If you roast a bunch of different coffees very light from different parts of the world,

they will taste notably different. If you roast all those coffees dark, they all taste like dark fucking roast. Yeah, you burn them enough, they all taste like carbon. This is why Starbucks dark roasts, this is why the running joke in the coffee community is that if you see like beans that are just burnt to have burnt to charcoal,

it's like, oh, it's Starbucks light roast. Because Starbucks just dark roast the hell out of everything because they buy really low quality beans from importers and roasts. the shinola out of them so that it all tastes the same when they're done.

Also, do you ever notice that if you walk into a Starbucks, you can't just order a large cup of coffee? You can't just ask them for their biggest cup of just coffee. It's always a fucking fight. I wouldn't know. I haven't stepped foot in a Starbucks

in a very long time. I got a sister that likes Starbucks and I've had a couple of friends that liked Starbucks. And every time I ended up in one of those places, it was like pulling teeth to just get a cup with coffee and nothing else. So I think

the thing is that like when Starbucks first really came to market, I think it was a departure from, it was the first kind of really fancy coffee that was nationwide. And unfortunately, what has happened is that lots of other businesses.

First and best dressed. And what's happened is that a lot of other companies going back to like, we're spoiled for good coffee companies down here, Louisiana, but you can get, like, there's a PJs on most, most corners, and PJs also has lots of really sugary bullcrap drink. Sure. But PJs legitimately makes a pretty decent cup of coffee. Community makes really good coffee.

CDM or Cavie Dumont is, I think, very overplayed, but, you know, it's okay. But I'm not a Starbucks person. But anyway, so getting back to the whole thing about espresso. The thing about espresso is the origin of espresso goes actually dates back to to Italy and the weird part of this is that there was a time period in Italy where like coffee was and still to a degree is considered medicinal and there's there's studies to there there's actually I saw a study recently that said that if you consume at least one eight ounce cup of coffee a day you're all caused mortality rate drops by like 23% which I show because you're less likely to

start a fist fight with your coworkers. Well, I showed my wife that said, I'm going to be immortal. Diminishing returns, bud. Diminishing returns. Actually, I think I said her that. And then I sent her the meme of Connor McLeod with the lightning course of the room. That's great. Oh, yes, it was awesome.

But anyway, that's what I need to do. I need to make a meme for our Instagram of me drinking a cup of coffee and Queen, Masters of the Universe playing in the background. Yes, that would be perfect. That's great. But anyway, so in this time period, coffee was considered medicinal. And as a result, there were taxes in Italy on coffee, but they exempted coffee if you drank and standing up.

So if you went into a coffee bar, there'd be tables for you to sit down. But if you were just like coming in to get your medicinal coffee, you would stand at the coffee bar. And if you stood up to drink your coffee, it was tax exempt. So this was the genesis of this question the Italians had of like, hey, how can we make this coffee faster so our customers don't have to like stand here at the coffee bar and wait for it? Because all they're doing is they're coming in to get their cup of coffee and they're, you know, they're going to drink down real fast. They're going to hit the road to go to work for the day. Right. So initially, espresso was an answer to that question of how do we make coffee faster? We grind it finer.

because finer gives us more extraction with less time to get the water through the bed of coffee and when it's ground that fine, because when it's ground that fine, the spaces between the coffee are really, really small. Water doesn't flow through it very well. We need pressure. The early coffee, the early espresso makers, which weren't even called espresso at that time, I want to say brood at something like one and a half, maybe two bar of pressure, which sounds like a lot, but really not. modern espresso is brewed anywhere from 6 to 9 bar So considerably more pressure

It's also brewed with Anywhere from like 80 to 90 Celsius water Which again, hot pressure You get more extraction faster But this was the whole genesis of how do we make espresso So what espresso is in a nutshell And the reason I will defend to the death That it is coffee

is because it literally is coffee, but because it is ground up so much finer because it's extracted under such heat and pressure compared to drip coffee, you do get a very different flavor profile. You get more non-soluables. You get more coffee oil. It's not just stronger.

It's noticeably different because there are people who like drip coffee that don't like espresso and there's people who will only drink espresso because it is a very it is a different flavor legitimately i don't know that i've ever tried espresso so if you go to a specialty coffee a specialty coffee store like you got to get away from you got to get away from almost any place that's corporate um around we got we have a boutique single location coffee shop in our hometown that's pretty good that we go to now and then if they make a hell of a danish if they may if they offer espresso you could try just a regular old

straight espresso shot for the average person that is so strong it's not that like if you don't enjoy a strong coffee you won't enjoy it but it might overpower your taste bus to the degree that you don't taste anything other than really really strong coffee which you can do is you can have that you is you can have an americano mate which is literally an espresso shot or a double espresso shot poured into hot water so that it waters it down to roughly black coffee strength like drip coffee strength okay that way we we made the mistake one time of ordering an espresso blend to throw in our drip pot didn't really work out i mean it tasted like crap i thought but that was probably because we used it incorrectly um so i would have to ask that i'd have to ask the question

when you got this espresso blend because that's a that's a that's a loaded statement in in It was, I did not know it was an espresso coffee. It was really finely ground. Okay. That's what I was looking for was if. I do believe it was actually meant to be espresso and I threw it through my drip machine and it, it was caffeinated. Yeah, your, your contact, you over extracted the holy hell out of it. Probably.

It was strong and it was black. So the problem is, you will hear things refer to as espresso beans or a, espresso blend, and that is usually just dark roasted coffee, unless it is specifically ground for espresso. The reason I don't know that I would sign off on the idea of buying already ground coffee for use of espresso is that you remember we were having that whole conversation about the variable between contact time and how fine you grind your coffee, right? Right. So if, for example, you put two finely ground coffee in a drip machine, the drip machine might back up and actually, like, if you notice, just send a bunch of grounds down to the bottom of the pot.

Exactly. On the flip side of things, if you try to do that with an espresso machine, like a pressurized machine, you literally won't be able to drive the water through. And I've actually had that experience where I just, I got, I got a little too excited with how fine, I was grinding my coffee for my espresso. and I was literally like on the verge of bending the lever on the machine could not get the water to go through. The puck was a solid slab of concrete almost. Well, that would be a problem. Now, on the other side of things, if you grind, if you don't grind fine enough, you will not be able to make enough water pressure because as fast as you push, you pull the lever down, in my case, I have a manual lever machine. and as fast as you pull the lever down,

the water just goes zoop right through the coffee bed. Contact time goes down like five or six seconds. Coffee tastes like water. It's hollow. Hollow is the coffee nerd term. But it's a very under-extracted, weak, sad cup, a cup of a coffee or a shot of espresso.

So since those are kind of, since I have a given amount of pressure I'm looking to make and still be able to flow water through this so that my, the time, the time between I start pushing the water through and the water's fully passed through the coffee, I'm aiming personally for about 30 to 35 seconds. That's my equipment.

That's my recipe. That's how I know it works. And this is a very personal how you figure out how your stuff works. But the way I tweak it so that I don't overpressure and I get that amount of time is by changing the grind setting. Okay. So I go finer to slow down. and I go coarser to speed it up until I get into that range where I'm making espresso. Once you're roughly into a range, you can tweak it up and down a little bit.

You can do things like play with what's called a pre-infusion where when I very, very first start pulling down on the lever, I will just like let my arm hang on it. So I'm making about one bar of pressure, not enough to push water through the puck, but enough to get water to kind of like start to soak the puck. and I'll hold that for about 10 seconds and then I will pull down and hold about 9 bar pressure for about 20 to 25 more seconds,

35 finished. And that gives me the shot of espresso I'm looking for. It gives you your desired result. Brewing espresso is a lot. It is equal parts art and science. It's a lot of art because you're going to be experimenting, you're going to be trying,

different things, you're going to be fooling around with it, but it's also a lot of science in that way. Like if you have the personality where you enjoy reloading your own ammo because it's very precise, it's taking measurements, it's doing this thing 10 different ways and recording your results until you find the perfect thing. That's espresso. Making your friends one MOA rifle shoot minute of other bullet. Yes. But literally to be able to get my espresso recipe to the point it's at now where I can reproduce it every single time because I know what I'm aiming for was a several week

you know like every night brew a shot of espresso or two shots of espresso try a little sip pour it down the sink because it was abominable like do that over and over and over I actually had a notebook I was taking notes okay

that makes sense because it makes a lot of sense yeah but here's the here's the kicker when you get everything dialed in I can make I would think coffee shop acceptable espresso here in the house for the cost of bunker beans

which are like 40 bucks for 5 pound bag right now and I mean whatever milk and you know all the rest of your stuff costs sure more importantly to me though is the fact that because I have like all those capabilities here at my fingertips

I can make drip coffee I can make espresso I can do all those things I can have 40 pounds sitting on the shelf at all times that's been my dissent you can make exactly what you want yeah by having the wrong ingredients but that's been my that's been my descent into coffee nerdism because i started out where you're at which was it's coffee it's black it caffeinates me it's all i care and then over it's over the course of years and really it started with disaster coffee even before i was a part owner

when i was a customer i i tried their coffee i liked i liked it i can immediately tell the difference between small roast specialty batch coffee that even i'll admit i couldn't afford to drink every day that was like week i called it weekend coffee during the week yeah i'd brew the folders in the red can because it was cheap and it got the job done yeah exactly but then on the weekend when i had time to like sit around in my pajamas with my wife hang out for a little bit have a cup enjoy that porch that's when i'd bust out the disaster coffee and now i'm at the point where because I'm roasting my own and grinding it and doing all the work myself, I can almost match that end result.

I can match that end result in terms of freshness. But I will happily admit that disaster coffees, coffee is definitely like their roaster has got a little bit of a finer touch than I do. He's just flat out better. They're flat out better ahead than I am. They have the technology to do better. The technology and the expertise. I'll be the first to admit.

I roast coffee every week. I can't hold a candle to the people that are running the roasters behind this brand. I can't. That makes sense. It's their job to get it right. Yeah. But I will say that I will, I'll punt that red can of folders down a hill in front of you. And you won't even be mad at me.

Probably not. I mean, you know, I'd have to try it to know the difference, I guess. Regula has a couple good questions for us here. So one of them I think you might be able to answer. better, Phil. It says, so disaster coffee, six bean espresso. If I buy the whole beans and grind them for my French press, is it a waste of time? So, I don't exactly know what he means by waste time, because if you get coffee, it's at least a good, good life decision. But, um, sure, I let me unpack that in a couple different ways. So first of all, the six bean bean espresso, I don't recall

what the name of that roast is you're referring to. Um, I want to say maybe he's, referring to pandemic, but I could be thrown off. But, um, buying the coffee

is it for espresso specifically. So, okay, good question. No. Again, like I was saying,

a lot of people will market, including us, will market a darker roast coffee and an espresso blend. And that's because a lot of people who

brew espresso prefer dark roasted coffee. I don't. I'm, I like a medium dark for my espresso. I've used really dark roast

and I just don't care for the flavor, but that's a personal thing. So if you see espresso blend and it's not specifically crown for espresso, you're really looking more at just a darker roast coffee. If you like dark coffee, go for it. It's not going to hurt you. Whole bean is always going to be more fresh

than buying it already ground. You will need to spend some time experimenting with your grinder to find the, right grind setting for your brew method. Best I can tell you is that if you grind it and you brew it and it tastes really, it tastes too weak, too hollow, then it's not ground fine enough.

And if what you end up with is like super, super bitter and sour and just the over extracted, go more course. And you can, you can kind of get a decent range. There's actually a resource on the internet that will tell you, if you're using this brew method, you want to agree to approximately this coarseness or refine this.

All right. That's good. The other half of Regal's question is why the upsurging coffee companies over the last 10 years? I think I can tell you why. Social media. So social media is one thing. A lot of these companies, in the name of full disclosure, disaster coffee, we are a, I mean, Drop Shipper has an ugly ring to it. we market the coffee and a subcontractor handles fulfillment based on our specs, our decisions.

Like, I'll be the first to admit, all the coffees I've personally had a hand and bring into market, it's because we taste test to them and said, this is what we want this coffee to taste like. So, we're definitely doing the work, but I don't have a $10,000 roaster here in my house, nor do I have a shipping department. So there is a company behind disaster coffee that handles the production of the fulfillment. You have a child. Child labor is within your reach. Yeah, the 13, they become slightly uncooperative, though.

But I think there's been a lot of coffee companies that have taken off as a result of that, just the ease of kind of starting a coffee company where a third party handles production. The technology's made, made it a lot simpler, for sure. I also think it's a lot because just the market has expanded. Like, 20 years ago, no one was talking about specialty coffee. And now it's just become more and more mainstream. There's a greater appreciation for it, bigger market, more customers. And I think that's a reason why there's been so many more coffee companies like startup and come out of the woodworks personally.

You know, I think that, yeah, the availability of the customer base, definitely. But if you can't market it, you can't maintain a business. So it didn't, it wouldn't have mattered if the demand was there. If you couldn't outreach the customers as easily as you can now, which is what you get with social media, the company's not going to succeed. Yeah. So that's my whole spiel on coffee. If you don't drink coffee, I'm not mad at you, but I'm a little concerned. I'm shocked that you're able to function on a daily basis.

I mean, about some supplemental caffeine. I'm shocked that I'm able to function with caffeine. So, you know, there's that. Caffeine in spite makes the world go around. Yeah. But like I said, I would encourage anybody who just, who's looked for more information, MOFpodcast.com has, I think off top of my head, two different articles I wrote on coffee stuff. One was talking more about like roasting and not specifics roasting, but more like the theory behind it.

And the other one was talking more about like my personal setup, the thing. the products that I'm using to make coffee here at my house and kind of details like that evolution of my espresso set up because I actually use a I use a Flair Neo for anybody that's around espresso or really anybody that pays attention stuff on social media you may have seen Flair FLAIR is a coffee company they make full manual espresso presses and it's exactly what it sounds like it's a it's a lever that you use to push a drive a piston through a chamber and there's water in the chamber and there's a puck coffee at the bottom deceivingly simple but i started with a flare well that would lower your that would lower your barrier to entry in both cost and

maintenance though the simpler you can make it i mean that's why drip coffee is probably i think the most prevalent just because of the simplicity and the maintenance of it yeah except that a flare neo at time I bought it started at 99 bucks. I've spent easily another hundred on top of that with upgrades to the machine and pressure gauge and two extra port of filters, port of filter baskets. A port of filter is the thing that holds the coffee puck. Sure. But

I've spent some money upgrading that to the point where I should have just bought a Flair Classic to begin with. But if you really want to spend money in Flair's ecosystem, they may the flare pro and then they make the flare 58 which by the time everything in the flare ecosystem is based around this idea of having like their own proprietary port of filter the brew chamber that fits on top it so on and so forth by the time you get to the flare 58 there you're using legitimate 58 millimeter porter filters like commercial stuff and they have preheat preheating elements and everything so you don't have to like heat up your brew chamber with scalding hot water like i do it you literally plug the sun of a bitch into the wall and press a button and it just heats itself up. That's also like a $500 lever machine. And by the way, when we start talking about espresso, let me just tell you, if you want to start playing with espresso, I highly recommend you follow my example.

Start with Flair. The barrier to entry is fairly low. If you want, there are some commercial machines that you can get into for like the sub $500 range, talk about like Gaja or Breville or any of the. the bigger names. Cheaper than that, your quality falls to crap really, really fast. But understand that when you start looking at espresso machines, because it's a special to market,

and because the machines themselves have to be, like, so precisely made, it's not unheard of to see $1,000, $1,000, $3,000, $4,000, espresso machines. That's not unheard of it. That's a bit of a bar thing. entry. I mean, I've seen $1,500 what they call pro sumer models, which is like, it makes one cup at a time, but it's a really, really nice machine that's going to, you're going to like will to your grandkids. And then if you start looking at any of the multi-head machines that are meant for like, because again, this is a thing within the espresso culture. There are people who it's not enough to have the $1,500 pro sumer model on your kishel on your counter, they will. want something they came out of a coffee shop. So they will go shopping for like used

four, five, six thousand dollar machines that will make two and three cups of espresso at the same time. Huh. Yeah. Interesting. It can be a lot. I'm actually so my daughter has this thing where

she enjoys going thrifting and I go with her and I'm there strictly looking for old espresso machines because it would be worth it to me to get one. and see what I can do to put it back in service. Well, that would be a fun project, for sure. And if not.

At the very least, you learn something. Yeah, Ragul's saying try state sales, if, I mean, frankly. Dead people's stuff is always cheaper than living people's stuff. Especially some of that, some of espresso stuff, like, it's, I don't want to say it's so specialty, but like, there's just not a huge market for it, honestly. Yeah. But anyway. Yeah, I could believe that. So, Nick, have I told you more than you ever wanted to know about coffee, or do you have any burning questions I haven't discussed?

I have curiosity. I definitely should probably try slightly fresher coffee than what is probably three months old coffee on my counter. Bro. Hey, man, it's gotten me by so far. I'll probably try it. Maybe I'll get some of the whole bean coffee from disaster here shortly and try that out. I'll have to get a grinder. Because I'm pretty sure my grinder will not make coffee.

What grinder do you have? Grindr. No. No. It will powder the coffee. It will powder your bones. It'll powder everything. I'm pretty sure that bastard right there is like half horsepower.

It dims the lights in the other room when I turn it on. So my only question is, is like, When you talk about needing a grinder recommendation, and this is a good thing to unpack for the audience, if you're going to make that first initial step from ground coffee and a whole bean, you need a grinder. Yeah, absolutely. Is power grinder required or are you willing to use a hand grinder?

It's a fair question. Because the problem is, like, if you're going to fill a 12 cup drip machine, doing that with a hand grinder, you're going to be here for a long time. Probably an electric. Grinder, more than likely. Okay, so hand grinders, first of all, any grinder you get has to be a burr grinder. Point blank a period. Okay.

If you see a blade grinder? No, a blade grinder will give you absolutely zero consistency over the size of the ground, and it will, the coffee will come out tasting muddy and crappy out of the back end. All right. There's actually, James Hoffman did a YouTube channel. on the channel feature on this recently. And he was comparing the difference in taste between like coffee that was fresh ground, one day old, two day old, three day old, so on and so forth.

And then he compared a really, really crappy chopper to a burr grinder to a really high end grinder. And the chopped coffee that was one day old still didn't taste as good as the three day old coffee that came out of a burr grinder. interesting so and this this was like blind taste testing he just put them all in a row and then figured out what was what afterwards so like burr grinders are necessity um on the cheaper end of things to get your feet wet you're probably going to be looking at conical burr grinders if you can find one that has metal burrs instead of ceramic it'll cost a couple of bucks more but it'll last longer too um most of your entry level grinders like quees and

or any of those common brands. Think like your Target Walmart brands. Yeah. That will get you by. Okay. I will tell you now that the things you're going to not be happy with, which are kind of built into that price bracket, is the collection bins are going to be made of plastic.

There's going to be a lot of static build up. It's going to fling, like, if you grind your coffee, let it sit there for about half an hour before you take it out. Or better yet, grind your coffee at night, and then the next morning, it. Oh, okay. But if you don't do that and let that static dissipate, then when you pull the collection

bit out, the static's just going to eject coffee all over the counter every time. That's good to know. Yeah. It's annoying. I actually am currently playing with an Urbanic, I think a 74 series, which I had to have shipped in from South Korea because that's where they're made. That was a $250 garage. and it actually has an aluminum collection bin.

It doesn't make as much static. It doesn't make as much mess. It's a flat burr grinder to have conical burr, but it's three times the price of the Quesenard I started with. So it's one of those things of if you're going to get, if you're going to make that jump into whole bean coffee, I recommend you start at a cheaper grinder. Yeah, make sure you're,

the investment's worthwhile for you. And the thing of it is that especially if we're talking about, like, weekend coffee and your day-to-day is still going to be the red can that's already ground, then spending $3, $500 on a really good grinder just doesn't make sense for once a week coffee. If you end up like me and you go down the rabbit hole and you get really stupidly into coffee, you'll be able to justify a $3, $400 grinder to yourself really, really quickly. No, I completely understand that. For your hobby, quality tools do make a difference. Yeah. And then on the flip side of things is once you have a grinder, you are only two things away from being able to roast your own.

You need a roasting pot of some sort, and you would optimally need an iron thermometer so you can like check your pre-he temperature on the pot. I'm assuming you already have a cookie sheet and a colander. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's not a problem. So with roasting, I roast my coffee. When it's done, I dump it out on the coffee sheet, kind of like, you know, shake it back for it to spread it out. And then I put it under a fan, let the fan blow air over it.

And that starts to blow the chaff, which is the outside skin of the bean that flakes off during roasting, blows that out and cools the beans down. Because if you have the beans all mounted up, then the ones in the center are being insulated and heated by the ones on the outside, they're continuing to cook. Yeah. So you do that, and then after that, I drop the beans into a colander and, like, shake them up under the fan to get more of the chaff out. And then I drop them into a bucket and bring them in the house. Nice. But if you already have the grinder, then you're only really two small pieces of equipment away from being able to roast your own. And if you never get to that point, you have the grinder, you can buy whole bean coffee.

There you go. Nice. I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff. I told you I could talk about coffee for an hour. It's been an hour and a half, and I know there's more. Hey, we all like coffee. And those of us that don't, you're wrong. And it's okay to be wrong sometimes.

Yeah. Well, it is 9.m. over here. And I do have a bright and early day of fun and adventure to have it work. So probably going to sign this one off. Sounds fair, man. Uh, didn't talk sources. There are many. They are between the 25th North and 30 south latitudes.

I'll tell you what, Raggle. You remind me next week, and I'll get you taken care of. Sounds fair. All right. Matter of fact, it's going to go out the door. I'm going to get up in the morning, and I'm going to have coffee. Because that's about the only way I can mimic adult behavior. And if you also need coffee, then you, you'll also need coffee.

then you should check out Disastercoffee.com, the links in the show description, along with a promo code MOF that gets you a discount on your coffee. It's good for anything in the store, and I mean, try it. If you're looking for a coffee recommendation, like you look at all the blends, you have no earthly idea what you're into, reach out to me, and I'll ask you some basic questions, try to point you in the right direction. But the best I can tell you is, like, if you try a medium and a dark rose, And somewhere in between those two, you'll figure out what you like fairly quickly. But quite frankly, we have a lot of different roasts in Disaster Coffee Store. And I think they're all at least pretty good. Nice.

But I'll be the first to admit dark humor, even though it's our brand, is actually not my favorite. I'm a little ashamed to admit that. I like Bear Blend. Okay. So when we first started this relationship with Disaster Coffee before Andrew and I became part owners, we were both really really into dark roast and since then i've backed off i like medium dark now hey fair enough man taste of all uh jeff holding it down for stewart he didn't see stewart so start over we refuse as his tradition we refuse as his tradition one of these days steward is going

to ask us to and we will just end the stream and replay it from the start until that point that's a lot of work just to needle the old jerk I think it would be amusing we'll take it under consideration all right Matterfax podcast going out the door good night everybody have a cup of coffee in the morning think of us and we'll talk to you in the week

bye y'all good night We're going to be able to be. You know,