Savor Spills the Beans on Coffee

Globally, we humans consume around 2.25 billion cups of coffee every day. Anney and Lauren explore the turbulent history of coffee, plus what it takes to bring each bean from a farm to your cup, with special guest Shawn Steiman – aka Dr. Coffee.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Oh god. And I haven't had a good cup of
coffee since I've been here. I've been like stuck in
the holiday and express Why didn't you talk to me
right away? Hello, and welcome to save your protiction of
I heart radio and stuff media. I'm Anna Reese and
I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And today we're talking about coffee, Yes,
the big one. Yeah. We've been honestly putting this off

(00:30):
because it's so big and so much Yes, and there
are so many avenues we could have gone down, oh gosh,
coffee brewing methods, different types of coffee drinks like lat
Day's cappuccinos. But really, for our sanity, for your sanity,
for respecting those topics, they should be their own episodes. Absolutely,
And we will glance through another few things on here,

(00:52):
like a like an instant coffee stuff like that that
deserves its own time and space. Um. Because yeah, like
we could on as we do an entire season just
on like coffee beans and coffee culture. Um. But yeah, yeah,
we're gonna see, We're gonna see what we get through
here today. Uh huh. Because while we were on oah Who,

(01:12):
we were fortunate to interview a fellow who sometimes goes
by the name Doctor Coffee Um or Sean Steamond PhD Um. Yeah,
and he's the he's the guy that you heard at
the top there. And yes, I wish that we had
gone to him immediately. Um. He had so many recommendations.
He's literally written the book on coffee three actually just

(01:33):
held up four few days. I wasn't in a comment,
but yep uh. And he has a background in um
in horticulture and chemistry. So he is a coffee consultant
and a partner in Daylight Mind Coffee Company, which is
a restaurant in Rostary with two locations on the island
of Hawaii. But yeah, he's based in Oahu, which is
where we met up with him. Um in a room

(01:54):
in a coffee house with a sort of menacing taxidermy peacock. Yeah.
This was another instance in which our lift driver, overhearing
our meeting place, was a little concerned inquisitive about what
we were doing, because Sean texted and was like, well,
I'm in the room with the peacock, and we were like,
what on earth does that mean? What are we walking into?

(02:17):
Is this alive peacock? Yes, it wasn't it was not,
but we had many questions, and the lift driver therefore
had many questions. He was even like, uh, should you Yeah,
do you want to exchange numbers? It could tell me
everything's okay, Like I think it's gonna be okay. I
think dr coffee is not going to murderers or sick
of peacock on us. And he did not. He was great.

(02:38):
He he was lovely. He really was. And if it
isn't obvious from past episodes, Lauren and I and generally
the office we work in, we're big coffee people. Any
day where the coffee machine isn't working in our office
is what I described as pure panic, pure panic, yam.
I always compare it to the true in the Dungeon

(03:01):
scene from Harry Potter where Jacob Malfoy like throws down
his sweets and they all run out of the hall. Yeah,
that's what it's like. It's not dissimilar, and honestly, it's
not even very good coffee. Um. I discovered the coffee
can have like flavors other than bitter or frappuccino only
about ten years ago. I would say, um, but I

(03:24):
am pretty into it these days. Yeah, it's the first
thing I consume every morning. I know that's terrible. I
should hydrate. Um. And I'm fairly sensitive to caffeine as well,
so um, so I have a hard limit of three
cups a day. Mine is two cups a day. I'm
proud of you, but that's pretty recent. I I and
stated that only after I figured out that I was

(03:44):
addicted to caffeine. Oh yeah, because um, A couple of
years ago, I think five or so, UM, I was
waiting in line to see some famous celebrity at dragon
Con and I had a massive headache and I just
assumed hangover territory dragon Con. Yeah. I hadn't had my
morning coffee though, and so while I was waiting in
the line, my friends held my space and I went

(04:06):
to go get coffee. The headache went away in what
seems like minutes, just amazing, all gone. Um. And then
a couple of years ago, I gave up coffee for
a week or maybe two, and the headaches I experienced
during those week or so time period brutal. Oh yeah,

(04:27):
so bad? Yeah No, I yes, I am also addicted
to caffeine in a similar way. I mean, it's it's
it's a drug. Back when I was a copy editor
for how Stuff works dot com. I got to edit
a few articles about how caffeine and coffee work and um,
and it's fascinating it is. But that brings us to
our question coffee. What is it? Well? The beverage that

(04:56):
we call coffee is a water infusion of the roasted
seeds of plants in the genus Coffea. And there are
a lot of species in that genus uh at least
a hundred, but the two most commonly grown are sea
Arabica and c. Caniphora m a k a. Arabica coffee
and Robusta coffee, respectively. Mostly Arabica is grown the robust

(05:18):
It tends to taste a little flatter, um, but it
is more caffeinated. Oh hm um. These plants are large
shrubs or smallish trees like. Left alone, they can reach
about thirty feet that's around ten meters in height, but
four harvesting purposes, they're pruned shorter, and these plants produce
huge clusters of these small, fragrant flowers, which, when pollinated,

(05:40):
develop into clusters of berries sometimes called cherries, that start
out green and then turn red as they ripen. Each
berry has a thick bitter skin with a with a
sweet kind of like grape textured flesh inside, and contains
two bluish green half oval seeds or sometimes one full
oval seed, which is called a peaberry. Separate issue. So
these plants evolved to produce caffeine because caffeine is toxic

(06:04):
to some animals, and that caffeine is concentrated in the
plants seeds to discourage those animals from chewing on and
thus destroying the seeds. But yet again, suckers humans decided
that we like that stuff, so we make coffee. Um,
we asked Sean what it takes to get one of
those seeds often called beans into a cup of coffee. Yeah.

(06:25):
It Actually we have to go back farther than that
because it is a seed of a plant, which means,
like most seeds, it's surrounded by fruit. So we have
this tree bush thing that grows in the field. Eventually
there are these fruit that ripen on it, and we
need to get those fruit off the tree and then
get the seed out and dry it down. And there's
lots of ways you can do that, and the way
you choose to do that has an influence on the flavor,

(06:48):
and you might do it because the flavor, but you
might do it based on your resources at hand. So
you get the seed, how you dry it down, you
get all those layers off, there are many of them,
and then it says green dried seed, which kind of
looks like a coffee seed but doesn't really have any
other familiarity to it. And that's the seed of commerce.
That's what's going to move around the world, or if
you're in Hawaii, is going to move down the street. Um, alright,

(07:12):
so we this green bean has to go to a roaster,
and the roaster in its simplest form, adds heat to
the seed and through the course of their efforts, and
that can beginning aware from really committee awhere from five
to twenty minutes. Most people who really care about coffee
flavor game for eight to twelve minutes, and that process

(07:35):
turns it from that green hard seed to a brown
see that we all know and love in our everyday experience.
Then someone home user a cafe a restaurant grinds up
on little pieces and runs water through it and fall out.
We have the beverage that we call coffee. And of course, um,
that's the basic process. The whole thing is an art

(07:57):
as much as it is a science, and peep will
have opinions about what makes a coffee good. The part
of that that we often hear about is the roasting process,
in which the green seeds are heated in big rotating
drums um at around four hundred degrees fahrenheit that's about
two oh five celsius, the beans will pop and double
in size and um and begin to brown as sugars

(08:18):
in them caramelize, and that's called the first crack. Oils
from inside the seeds will start to emerge and go
through chemical changes called pyrolysis. From the heat, the seeds
will will darken to a medium brown and and some
of the coffee plants bitter compounds will start to degrade,
which is great. Um. Then at around of four d
and thirty seven fahrenheight that's about celsius, the seeds go

(08:41):
through what's called the second crack. Um they pop again,
and we'll start to look shiny as as more oils emerge.
And if you keep going, the seeds will turn black
as those sugars in them caramelize and burn. And that's
an espresso roast. But yeah, the the length and heat
of your roast is a is a balance between holding
onto those raw sugars for their sweetness and letting those

(09:03):
caramel flavors develop and getting those bitter compounds to go away.
It's tricky. Yeah, you know what this reminds me of,
do you know, uh Jordan's Slansky from the Conan Show. Uh? Yeah, yeah,
he has so many opinions Oh yeah about espresso and coffee,

(09:24):
and I, like many people are unsure if this is
a character. Promises it's not a character, but I have
a hard time believing it. But yeah, there's a I
think a remote as they call them, where um Jordan's
kind of gets in an argument with a professional barista

(09:45):
about how coffee should be made. Because people have strong opinions.
As you say they do, they do. But anyway, getting
those seeds in the first place can be quite complicated,
especially at scale, and it sometimes involves one of our
favorite things, fermentation. So I mentioned there's several ways you

(10:09):
can get the seed out of the fruit and dry down,
and the one that most people are familiar with is
referred to as fermentation. And there is actual fermentation, so
it's legitimate from a microbiological standpoint. So we take this
fruit and inside is the seed and you can just
put a little pressure on it. In the squeeze, the

(10:30):
seed pops out. The surrounding that seed then are two
important layers. One is the outermost layer, which is this
really sweet sticky muselage, which is quite tasty because it's
all sugar, and beneath that is a very heavy papery
layer we call parchment because it's very parchment. You can

(10:50):
dry down the seed with that sticky muselage on, but
it's risky because lots of things like sugar and water.
So if you dry it down poorly, then things grow,
and that growth tends to impart a flavor on the sea,
which we don't like. So if you can improve your
chances of success by drying that down, you're going to.
So when we do that is to remove all the
sticky muselage that when you dry the sugar is not

(11:11):
hanging around causing trom So how do you do that? Well, Historically,
you don't have many options except letting nature do its work.
So you can throw all the pile with the muselage,
all the seeds in a pile with the muselage on,
and just let it magically disappear. It's not magic. Of course,
it's native, naturally occurring microorganisms doing the work of degrading it.

(11:34):
No one quite doesn't like that. Often they tend to
cover it with some water to even out the heat distribution,
to make it a little more likely to succeed well.
But the same idea happens. You just cover slightly in
water and micro organisms slowly eat away at the muselage.
They actually fermented. We know that because there's CEO two
bubbles and alcohol that appeared. And then after some period

(11:57):
of time, depending on the ambient temperature, all that sticky
muselage is degraded, and you can just wash off the
seeds and drive them down, and then, of course you
have to later remove the parchment. There's another step after that,
but that's what fermentation is. But you can skip that step.
You can use a machine to scrape it off. You
can dry the coffee down in the fruit. You don't
even have to do any of that hard work. And
that sort of makes the most sense if you have

(12:18):
limited resources, because you don't need the water to soak it.
You don't have to clean the dirty water afterwards, you
just dry it down. Of course, you need the right
machine to move all the layers. You can leave the
muselage on, it's just risky. You can leave the fruit
on also risky, and i'll risky from the sense of
things going wrong with potential And Okay, y'all know that

(12:38):
we ask follow up questions about this because you know, yeah,
um so, so I asked what that fermentation contributes to
coffee other than you know, just getting the fruit off
of the seed. Fermentation and can cow is absolutely necessary
because the seeds themselves need to change to become what
we want them to become coffee. The step is totally

(12:59):
not necessary. Are it's not good or bad. The argument
to be made for fermentation process and coffee is that
you get you can sort of define that as a
baseline flavor of the coffee, the soul of the experience.
Other processing methods tend to add on a flavor experience
which is consistent with the process. So if you dry
the coffee and the entire fruit, you tend to get

(13:21):
a very consistent end flavor, which is jammy, fruity berry
kind of flavor. If you leave the mu sledge on,
it gets a little bit sweeter. A little complexity about
the increased sweetness is pretty common, but without any of that.
If you can just ferment it and dry it with
the seed, you just get whatever. The coffee is not
good or bad, right, And that's a really important distinction

(13:41):
when we talked about anything, not just coffee, that there's
no right answer. We do things, we create flavors some
people like when some people don't. Just because an expert
says this is great, you should love this doesn't mean
it's good or bad. It just means they like it
a lot. It doesn't make it better or good, or
doesn't necessarily mean it should be more money or it
should be more exclusive. It just means the experts, who

(14:05):
are very different from normal consumers really liking And yes,
there are a lot of coffee experts out there, it's
a whole system, But there are also a lot of
normal consumers. Oh yeah. Coffee has often dubbed the world's
most popular drink after oil. It is the world's most

(14:25):
traded commodity, valued at over one hundred billion dollars. Yeah,
oh my gosh, yes, And because of that, we have
so many numbers for you. Yea of American adults have
at least one cup of coffee every day, which, honestly,
I find a little low um when that comes out
to four cups of coffee sold per second in this country.

(14:48):
New York City is thought to drink seven times more
coffee than any other city in the US, the city
that Never sleeps. Indeed, the daily average is three point
one cups a day, and the average size of a
cup here being nine ounces. Sixty people drink coffee for
breakfast in the US. That comes out to an annual
forty billion dollars spent on coffee. The industry employs one million,

(15:13):
six seven hundred and ten people in America. In the
decade between two thousand and coffee exports grew by eighty
five up to fifteen point eight three billion. Global coffee
consumption is thought to be around at two point to
five billion cups of coffee every day. Uh yeah, wow,

(15:36):
that's sinking. I don't know how much that is. That's
too many, that's that's it's a big it's just big
brain trouble processing my brain at least. Oh yeah, I
honestly cut off after like a thousand. I'm like, that's
about yea, as as high as it goes. I'm like,
anything else is just more. I guess, yeah, it's more

(15:57):
than one thousand. We can say that for sure um
in the US, drip coffee is the most popular um
or it's the way most coffee is consumed. And as
of single cup brewers took the second spot. Specialty coffee
sales are going up a year and independent coffee shops

(16:17):
make about twelve billion dollars a year. As Brazil produces
the most coffee beans at two point seven to billion
kilos um. Vietnam comes in second with one point six
five billion, then Colombia, Indonesia and Ethiopia, And if I
may bring up Zilla, film per section may always spring up,

(16:39):
thank you, thank you. There's a joke in there because
there's like these French spies that are pretending to be
American and they have a joke where the guys like
he SIPs on some coffee brood and uh and Mr
Coffee or something and he spits it out and he goes,
you call this coffee. Another guy goes, I call this America.
So we don't have a good a great reputation for coffee.

(17:02):
Semi recently, I think that's changed. Okay, that's that's fair, right, Yeah, anyway,
that's what I always think of the five largest coffee chains,
which are Starbucks, Duncan, Coast of Coffee, Timmy Horton's, and
Cafe excuse me, McDonald's Coffee have thirty four thousand, three

(17:23):
hundred stores. Yeah, and coffee has become something of a
cultural phenomenon. I think those first coffee or don't talk
to me until I've had my coffee shirts. Sean spoke
a bit to coffee's popularity. One of the really maybe
the best thing that coffee has going for it is
that's not alcoholic. And when you were in high school

(17:45):
and you want to have freedom and spread your wings,
you can't go to a bar, but you can go
to a coffee shop and you can spend money on
something that is affordable. The worst, most expensive cup of
coffee often going to find in a geeky coffee shops.
I mean, really gonna do what like six dollars at
the worst. You can definitely find the occasional other, but
four to six dollars is totally accessible, especially if you

(18:06):
have a part time job. Right it's legal and there's
a status now associated with coffee, so there's a lot
of it's easy to get young people in the coffee
I think, and some of them are never gonna leave
the milky flavored whatever, because it's part status and it's
part candy, and it's just what they're always gonna do,
and it's always got that underlying magic called caffeine. M

(18:29):
The word coffee may have derived from a Romantic word
for wine in Yemen. From there we got the Turkish
word for coffee, covey, and then we got the Dutch coffa,
and then the English coffee. The nickname Java originated in
the eighteen hundreds, when coffee was gaining popularity and a
decent amount of coffee came from the island of Java.

(18:50):
As for the nickname Joe, that's a bit murky. One
theory goes the nickname was a byproduct of a nineteen
fourteen band on alcohol on U. S. Navy ships and
acted by Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Joe Daniels. This
meant that the stiffest drink sailors could get was a
cup of black coffee. Historians don't really buy this story, though,

(19:11):
arguing that the phrase cup of Joe didn't enter our
language until the nineteen thirties, derived from another nick game
for coffee from that time, jamoke or maybe jamoica a
combination of java and mocha, or potentially it simply is
used the same way that we use when the same
connotation when we say something like average Joe. It was

(19:32):
a drink for everybody, every man, which brings us to nutrition. Yes,
m uh, caffeineate responsibly. Yeah, well, okay, so coffee and
it's like plain hot bean juice state has um just
a few calories like two to five from the oils
in the seeds. Uh. Coffee drinks prepared with a creamers

(19:53):
and sweeteners can be wildly caloric. Um. That's a whole
different episode. But yeah, there's a lot of research to
the biochemical properties of coffee because it's such a globally
popular beverage. Um. Okay, very briefly, caffeine aside, Yeah, okay,
so um. Caffeine is a chemical stimulant that works because
because your brain creates this chemical called adnazine, and when

(20:16):
that adnazine binds to the receptors in your brain that
that are shaped to to to lock it in, adnascine
will slow your nerve cell activity down and uh and
dilate your brains blood vessels like it prepares you for sleep,
you feel drowsy and there's there's extra oxygen floating around
up there for your brain to work with while you're sleeping. Um.
Caffeine can bind to those same receptors, but it has

(20:40):
the opposite effect. It speeds up your nerve cell activity
and can constrict your brains blood vessels. Um. Which is
why some headache medicines contain caffeine and maybe part of
how it helped out with your headache that one day. Yeah, um,
and also caffeine and so so like okay. All that
increased neuron activity that caffeine produce is can trick your

(21:00):
pituitary gland into thinking that there is some kind of emergency,
and so your body produces adrenaline to help you deal
with it, you know, like your heart beats faster, your
your blood vessels redirect blood away from the skin and
towards the muscles. Your your liver gives you a kick
of sugar to the bloodstream and and uh, Caffeine slows

(21:20):
down the rate at which the feel good neurotransmitter dopamine
is reabsorbed in your brain, meaning that you'll have more
dopamine floating around, meaning you feel real nice. Uh. It's
an extremely mild version of what would happen if you
were to take heroin. UM, and it's why both of
these drugs are addictive. Wow, and that's just one compounding coffee. Yeah,

(21:44):
coffee is a fascinating cocktail. Um. There are over eight
thousand different compounds in your average cup, and all that
processing stuff we talked about, UM does subtly affect which
ones happen and in what amounts. These things add to
coffee's flavor and to the potential health effects, from lowering

(22:05):
your risks of cardiovascular disease and diabetes and cirrhosis, to
protecting the brain from diseases like Parkinson's two, blocking cancer
cells movements in the body, to anti inflammatory and antibacterial
properties um, but also potentially negative effects, especially if you
drink more than like three to five cups a day,
which can just jack up your stomach and your blood
pressure and your sleep cycles. Jack Up is definitely the

(22:27):
science term. Oh absolutely yeah, UM. And yes, caffeine can
be toxic. Two we humans in very large amounts, like
think like thirty cups of coffee just like shotgun style. UM,
don't do that, um, but but just like really make
sure that your house bets don't get into coffee because
their threshold, like cats and dogs, is a lot lower.

(22:48):
Also bad news. Um, there's no erudite answer to the question,
why does coffee make me want to poop? What if
you're not one of the humans for whom this happens,
It does happen for a lot of us, supposedly women
more often than men. Yeah, but anyway, Yeah, researchers think

(23:12):
that it's likely a number of compounds that are interacting
with your stomach lining or get into your bloodstream and
then work together to create a neural and hormonal gastro
calonic response, meaning that you feel the need to defecate. Yeah. Um,
but yes, there are science about this. Are Compatriot Christian
Sager once wrote the Weirdest brain Stuff video script about it.

(23:36):
It had me and Christen Conger like sort of arguing
and then talking about giving coffee enemas to rats, and
we're ben bolen um. It has never seen the light
of day for I don't know if that's the correct word,
tragedy for somebody, for you perhaps particularly uh, but I digress.

(24:01):
We were we were talking about coffee. We were we
were Hawaii is the only US state where coffee is produced,
though it's also grown on Puerto Rico. A lot of
you have probably heard of ConA Coffee, Hawaii signature coffee product.
In two thousand and seven, there was an estimated seven thousand,
eight hundred acres of coffee being grown in the state.

(24:24):
While shopping for souvenirs for our friends back on the mainland, yeah,
I looked at a lot of coffees around Oahu and
was surprised to find that most were blends of like
a little bit of Hawaiian coffee maybe with um along
with something produced elsewhere. Um. But I've given those numbers.
It makes sense. Uh, Hawaiian coffee bags did exist, but
they were expensive. Um. And of course there are reasons

(24:48):
for that. UM. We asked Sean, perhaps naively, UM, what
Hawaiian coffee is like. So in Hawaii right now there's
about a thousand coffee farms, and around the rest of
the world and every country there's obviously many more. Hawaii
is nothing on the world market, right We're less than
point zero three percent of coffee production. We just we

(25:09):
got followed by the next hurricane or a flood. It
would nobody would really care. The market certainly wouldn't care.
And if you seen we have a thousand that there
are places that have tens of thousands of farms, and
mostly farms around the wild. They're tiny right there, like
an acre. So in a perfect world, every farmer has
access to all the knowledge of resources they could possibly want.
They make a very active decision to how they're going

(25:31):
to produce their coffee and what it's gonna end up
like and which market you should go to. An ideal will,
but that's not how it works, right, I do a
world you have natural variation, and we can map natural
variation of anything on a curve. Right, you just plot
what the XX is whatever it is that you want
to measure, in this case our conversations, quality of coffee,

(25:52):
and the other y access is a number of occurrences.
When you do this through most natural things on the planet,
you tend to get a Bell curve. So if we
took all the coffee in Hawaii and we mapped it
on a curve, it would be a Bell curve and
you'd have a big hump, which is you know, average, ordinary,
acceptably engaging coffees. You have one tail that is really disgusting, horrible, stuff,

(26:16):
and you have one tail that's really amazing and esoteric
and extraordinary to explore. So when you start to say, oh,
what are Hawaiian coffees tastes? Like? Why are they special?
First you're talking about the tail. Really is what the
question is. And that tail, by statistical measures is you know,
you can make it five percent, but really we're talking

(26:36):
which is two of a thousand is uh twenty, So
not much we're talking about here, all right, So that
is just part of the conversation. The other part of
the conversation is this bit about there are a sense
of taste of a place, and lots of farmers. Every
farmer in the world wants their place to be really important. Right.

(26:59):
My potatoes come from from Idaho, they should be really
tasty like Idaho. My wine comes from Burdau, it should
taste like Bordeaux. My chocolate comes from Ecuador, it tastes
like whatever that little valley in Ecuador is. And our
coffee comes from Colona should taste like ConA coffee. And
that's a beautiful romantic idea. It's not well explored in science,

(27:21):
partially because doing these sorts of tests are really difficult
because you can't have two identical places next to each
other that all the variables are controlled. So doing that
test is really tricky. Hawai is your example, because we
had such a small place growing coffee for a while
that we have this great case studdy so um in Hawaii.

(27:44):
The only place growing significant amount of commercial coffee from
about nine to about two thousand, it's ConA. So for
about a hundred years I had the games themselves. And
ConA is not that big a stretch, right, It's about
you up and down the mountain. It's about three some
feet maybe a mile or two lengthwise across the ocean

(28:04):
coast if you will go that way. It's it's not
that big. And the idea of ConA really is just
a political designation they know true sense of it. But
there is a section on the big island we call ConA,
and that's where coffee has been grown. Right, do you
go back fifty years ago? People who are growing coffee

(28:25):
and ConA were not growing coffee to sell as a
bag of roast of product. They were growing a fruit
and they sold the fruit to someone else and they
were done with it. So this guy who was buying
all the fruit was buying lots of fruit from all
these farmers and then doing all the processing to make
green coffee and then selling it in a container to
wherever there were maybe three or four these people or
these mills that were buying on us. You can imagine

(28:47):
that all these little variations that might be happening based
on farmer skill and climate, which is important to coffee
and any micro ter war issues, are now being homogenized
into one terror, right you. So all of a sudden,
Hawaii does have a sense of place, a taste of place,
because all the stuff's being blended together and chipped down,

(29:08):
and there was I think a ConA coffee profile, flavory
profile people still talk about and we still sort of
celebrate some of our competitions. But now that it doesn't
work that way anymore. You can have one farmer selling
roasted product of his own or her own. Most of
the steps they might do themselves, and maybe they'll contract
out various bits. They have a lot of room to
create unique experiences, right that two percent of the bell curve,

(29:33):
now it's that flavor continuum is is highly diverse and variable.
So there's no really such thing as sense of place
here because of the freedom to do different processes, different varieties,
different roasts. Hawaii has some amazing coffees. I don't think
they taste particularly like Hawaii. I bet if you looked

(29:54):
hard enough around the world, you'd find other similar experiences.
But you have to look and find them and capture
all those thing And the more we allow for diversity
of yeas and fermentation and how long you how you
dry it, how you do whatever you're gonna do, like,
we're gonna get more variations. I'm just not gonna be
no one's to be able to say, oh, this is

(30:14):
what it tastes like. And our biggest challenges that we're
in Hawaii and our coffees cost way more than almost
anywhere else on the planet, even the bad stuff, because
we're Hawaii. And there's a whole list of reasons why
our coffees are more expensive, and I think they're quite legitimate,
And if you dig deep enough, I think you might
be convinced that it's not that our coffees are so

(30:35):
expensive that everybody else's coffees are way underpriced and unfortunate,
dark evil way. We'll come back to that dark evil
way in a moment. Yeah, it's time for some deeper history. Um.
But first it's time for a quick break for a
word from our sponsor, and we're back. Thank you sponsor, Yes,

(31:05):
thank you. Okay, this was a tough one to wrankle. Yeah.
As it turns out, because of the popularity of coffee,
it kind of had a hand in building like the
world as we know it, um, And a lot of
the history about it is real muddled because a lot
of people have had a hand in writing it. Yes,

(31:27):
absolutely so, yeah, we did our best. We did our best. So.
Coffee most likely originated in Ethiopia or possibly Yemen, but
people seem to thank Ethiopia UM, where it was probably
cultivated by ninth century CE in a region called Kafa,

(31:49):
though it was also probably chewed as a stimulant for
hundreds of years prior to this. Enslaved people's from Sudan
are believed to have chewed on the beans to survive
their treacherous and dangerous journeys on trade routes. There's a
popular Ethiopian legend that coffee was discovered by a goat
herder named Caldy after he witnessed the energy level of

(32:11):
his goats shoot up after they ate the coffee shrubs
red fruit. The goat started dancing dancing goats. Yes, a
lot of articles that had this story in them had
the gift of those goats dis bouncing around to to illustrate.
So he intrigued called he gave the barrier try and

(32:32):
experienced a similar energy boost. Excited to share his findings
and in some versions, convinced by his wife, he brought
some of the beans to a local monastery, where they
quickly were dismissed as suspect for their stimulating properties. The
monks burned the beans, but the resulting aroma of roasted

(32:55):
coffee beans and tied them enough to give the crop
another go. However, this story didn't appear in the records
until around sixteen seventy one C, and it dates quality
to around so yeah, grain of salt, matures of history
as always, and also Yemen has it a very similar legend,

(33:16):
and even in their legend. Uh, sometimes the coffee being
came from Ethiopia first, sometimes it came from human first. Anyway, Yeah,
I think the general historical agreement is that the plant
probably Ethiopia, the drink probably Yemen. Modern day versions of
those yeah um at any rate, early preparations of the

(33:40):
coffee fruit included a mixing, mixing it with animal fat
to make an early version of a protein bar um,
eating it in a sort of porridge, and fermenting the
pulp to make something similar to wine. It was viewed
by many as like a medicinal kind of thing. One
of the first written records of coffee, dating to eight
hundred fifty Ish CE, was pinned by rocky's are Ras,

(34:00):
a physician and philosopher, who wrote of coffee's medicinal properties, quote,
it is a drink that is good for those with
hot nature, but it decreases libido. He was actually kind of,
from what I understand, famous for these good thing bad
things about stuff that that's that's good. You're you're covering
all the bases. I like it. Yeah. Roasting coffee beans

(34:22):
to make the drink were more familiar with today. Didn't
become a thing until at least one thousand to twelve
hundred C on the Arabian Peninsula again modern day Yemen,
where it was highly regarded for the energy it provided
and was particularly popular among the Muslim community. According to
mental Floss, coffee or perhaps coffee leaf tea was sometimes
passed around at funerals or other events to stay awake

(34:45):
and alert during long prayer sessions. Folks are growing coffee
in modern day Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Persia by the
sixteenth century, and public coffee houses sprung up in cities
in these areas, becoming spaces for all sorts of scial
interactions of music and games, conversation, news. This earned them
the nickname schools of the Wise, and the first documented

(35:08):
coffee house opened in what's now Istanbul in fifteen fifty four,
though they probably existed around various places before then. As
the Ottoman Empire conquered and spread, and with them Um
Muslim prohibitions against alcohol, so did a taste for have Um,
literally the wine of Arabia a k a. Coffee. The

(35:31):
Yemeni port city of Mocha was a major trading hub
for coffee from the fifteen to seventeen centuries. Mocha was
known for moca beans, highly sought after for their strong
sort of chocolate flavor, although separate from the chocolate e
drinks we conflated with these days. Yeah, that was a
European thing exactly. It does have like a chocolate e

(35:52):
kind of flavor profile, but it's not what we think
of it when we hear it, perhaps in our Western parlance.
The story goes that the Bean Peninsula controlled the coffee
bean market through the end of the fifteen hundreds by
parching and boiling the beans to make them infertile, and
as a result, not one coffee plant grew outside of
Africa or Arabia. That changed shortly after the turn of

(36:15):
the century, and there are a few legends about how
that went. Some say that an Indian saint by the
name of Baba Buddan, who made the pilgrimage to Mecca,
fell in love with coffee and smuggled seven fertile coffee
beans out, either strapped to his chest or hidden in
his beard. I like that version, I do too. I
hope that's the true one. Peter van der Bruck was

(36:38):
able to sneak some coffee beans out of Mocha into
Amsterdam in sixteen sixteen. The first European owned coffee estate
got its start in Indonesia. In the late sixteen hundreds,
the Dutch opened up shop in Sri Lanka and Java.
The Mayor of Amsterdam gifted King Louis the fourteenth with
a coffee plant in seventeen fourteen, and the king proceeded

(36:59):
to planted in Paris's Royal Botanical gardens, and about a
decade later, a French naval officer, Oh, would you help
me with the name any Gabrielle? Thanks? Um, Yeah, that
guy um undertook this arduous journey, allegedly complete with a saboteur,
to Martinique with a seedling from this coffee plant. The

(37:21):
seedling flourished and spawned over eighteen million coffee plants over
the next fifty years on Martinique. The Spanish established coffee
in Central America soon after, and the Portuguese after that
with an estate in Brazil. Legend has it that the
Portuguese tasked one Francisco de Melo to go to French
Guiana in order to obtain a seedling and get in

(37:42):
on this whole coffee business. Um. The French declined to share,
but the French governor's wife was so smitten with Francisco
that she bestowed him as a going away present this
bouquet of flowers, within which they were hidden coffee sprouts.
Oh no love it um. From those Brazil went on

(38:04):
to become the biggest heavy hitter in the coffee world.
Um As trade became increasingly global, so did coffee, and unfortunately,
so so did the populations of enslaved peoples who were
the ones actually growing it. Meanwhile, the first European coffee
houses opened in Italy and sixty five and England in

(38:25):
sixteen fifty, and then in France and sixteen seventy two,
soon followed by most of the rest of Europe. Europeans
loved these coffee houses. According to legend French poet Voltaire,
who's you know up and around around six drank a
daily forty to fifty cups of coffee. That's dangerous. Voltaire

(38:48):
was living on the edge. These cups were very small.
I don't know, it could be anyway, We don't know. Uh.
These coffee houses to became hubs of intelligent discourse. England
even had what they called Penny Universe. These opinion, got
you a cup of coffee and all the intellectual discourse
you could ask for. Three hundred of these were up
and running in London. By the mid seventeenth century, coffee

(39:10):
began to edge out the previous go to breakfast drinks
beer and wine. Also, of notes, women generally weren't allowed
in these coffee houses because they might be exposed to
foul language or obscene conversation. Parl Clutch. Yes, you can
see r T episode or tea Time episode from more

(39:30):
on that. Yeah. Absolutely. Um. Not all Europeans welcomed coffee
with open arms, though one one review from the time
labeled it the bitter invention of Satan. Oh yeah, I
might be in through it though right, I'm like, let's
say about me, color me in at any rate. In

(39:54):
UH sixty five, the Venetian clergy condemned coffee, and the
ensuing uproar called for Pope Clement the Eighth to weigh in,
and after trying some of this you know, coffee beveraging question,
he deemed that it would not in fact send you
to hell, and that it was indeed delicious. Um. Purportedly,

(40:15):
he said, this devil's drink is so delicious, we should
cheat the devil by baptizing it. Jury is still out
on whether this was a literal or metaphorical baptism, or
if any baptism at all took place. Um. But throughout
history there have been a few attempts to bann the
drink Um. One of the first actually took place in

(40:35):
Mecca in fifteen eleven, due to the governor's fear at
that time that coffee would unite his dissenters who were
hanging out at coffee houses and talking about politics. Yeah,
and this band lasted mere weeks before being overturned. That's
actually a common theme throughout these these bands we're going
to discuss. In sixty three, after Sultan Murad the Fourth

(40:59):
took the Ottoman thrown, he banned public coffee consumption, particularly
in the coffee houses in Istanbul. Allegedly, he would wander
the streets in disguise to find rule breakers to punish.
Stories about how he punished them are so brutal, like
the stuff of legend. Hard to say what is facts
and what isn't. But according to some records, the first

(41:21):
offense called for a beating, while the second called for
a sewing of the offender into a bag and then
tossing them into the bosporus street. Oh, that's that's a
pretty big step. That is that's a pretty intense. It's
just coffee man. Gosh, just coffee man. Uh. Back in Europe,

(41:46):
when when coffee started getting popularity there in the six hundreds,
some winemakers struck back. They were like, oh no, you're
not taking away our breakfast wine. One wine maker in
Marseilles enlisted this universe the students to write a thesis
on why coffee was bad for your health and and
this this poor student wrote burnt particles, which coffee contains

(42:09):
in large quantities, have so violent energy that when they
enter the blood, they attract the lymph and dry the kidneys,
leading to general exhaustion, paralysis, and impotence. Not impotent, anything
but that. Yeah. Yeah, while it wasn't banned per SAE related,
London women in sixteen seventy four believe drinking coffee rendered

(42:31):
their husbands impotent and um. Some racist articles came out
against the beverage around the same time. The article that
these women wrote in London is uh often compared to
like the most sexual Mikey Blush Shakespeare passages. Yeah. I
read it and was like, I don't really get it.

(42:53):
I mean, I overall get it, but I feel like
a lot of your your little slight cereal funds are
going right over my head. Yeah it happens, It's okay. Yeah.
Paranoid Swedish King Gustav the Third Band coffee and coffee
paraphernalia in seventeen fifty six, They're coming for your coffee cups,

(43:13):
coffee dishes. Uh. So he went a step further. He
was trying to prove that coffee was bad for your health.
He's trying to use science to his benefit to get
rid of coffee. Um. So he found this pair of
twin convicts who were since to death, and he instead
gave them the option to live out a life sentence

(43:35):
so that they could be a part of a coffee experiment. Okay, okay. Basically,
one twin drank three pots of tea a day and
the other drank three pots of coffee a day, with
the hopes this whole thing proving coffee will kill you.
So doctors were taking notes of how many cups of
coffee it would take to kill this oh my god,

(43:58):
which turned out to be quite anti climactic, as the
chance reportedly outlived the doctors. And not only that, the
tea drinker died before the coffee drinker did so the
King's experiment failed. Also a note of this whole thing.
It was very similar in that he was afraid of
like political discourse and okay, yeah, that's what he was
paranoid about all of this. Yeah, and then in seventy

(44:24):
Prussia's Frederick the Great declared that beer was officially better
than coffee and that you should be drinking it instead
of coffee as part of your balanced breakfast again booze
breakfast upheaval right. Um, this was partially an attempt to
boost Prussia's beer making industry. From the book All About
Coffee by one William Harrison Hooker, h Frederick the Great said,

(44:49):
it is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity
of coffee used by my subjects, and the amount of
money that goes out of the country. In consequence, everybody
is using coffee. If possible, this must be prevented. My
people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer,
and so were his ancestors and his officers. Many battles

(45:10):
have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer,
And the King does not believe that coffee drinking soldiers
can be depended upon to endure hardship or to beat
his enemies in the case of the occurrence of another war. Wow. Also,
some of that money which straight to this guy by away, Well, well, um, yeah,

(45:35):
the restrictions were lifted after Frederick the Great death in yeah,
pretty shortly after. Uh. Coffee made its way to the
New World by the beginning of the eighteenth century, but
it really wasn't a thing here until seventeen seventy three
and the Boston Tea Party. Boston boasted the first coffee

(45:57):
house and what would become the US Circuit sixteen seventy six.
Out with the tea, In with the coffee. Drinking coffee
over tea was viewed as patriotic. There's even a famous
letter written by John Adams, I believe to his wife
or he was like, I must wean myself off. Tea
does a matter of patriotism, but it will be difficult.

(46:19):
I love it. Spit and taxes, spike and tag in taxes. Yeah,
Thomas Everysing called coffee quote the favorite drink of the
civilized world. It's kind of surprising, actually, because he was
such a big fan of wine. But all right, big
ideas were born in coffee asses again, at least in
parts such as the French and American Revolutions and conflicts

(46:40):
like the Civil War helped increase coffee's consumption, as it
gave soldiers a little bit of pep um. Although, as
we discussed in our Okra episode of all episodes, yeah,
the South was largely cut off from the coffee supply,
so Confederate soldiers had to resort to something else. And yes,
it is Okra related. It is. Check out that episode

(47:01):
if you're fuddled at how that could possibly be. Uh.
Teddy Roosevelt was rumored to be up there with Voltaire
in his coffee consumption, downing a gallon a day. One
story even goes that after he enjoyed some Maxwell House
coffee at Andrew Jackson's historical home, he came up with
the slogan good to the last drop. Huh yes, and

(47:25):
I think Maxwell House is the coffee of the American Army.
Oh yeah, or at least it was sure Yeah, Um,
I guess. Speaking of John Dring received a patent for
compound coffee in Britain in seventeen seventy one, um, what
we would now call instant coffee. However, it would be
a century later before it started to take off because

(47:47):
it was honestly kind of terrible. Um. The first commercial
instant coffee was thought for a long time to be
the product of this Japanese chemist by the name of
In but recently a patent for for soluble coffee powder
dating back to resurfaced from a New Zealander by the
name of David strang Yes. Spanish explorer Don Francisco to

(48:10):
Palomar and brought coffee to Hawaii in eighteen seventeen, but
his plantings failed. However, he inspired the Royal Governor of
Oahu Bokey, to bring coffee plants from Brazil, and he
successfully planted them and the Minoa Valley in eighteen five.
From their coffee planting spread throughout the islands in eight

(48:31):
and American missionary and reverend by the name of Samuel
Ruggles took some cuttings to Kona. The first commercial operation
was up and running in the mid eighteen thirties. While
coffee four shure took a backseat to sugar production on
the islands, it earned a reputation of being a superior
coffee product. In eighteen sixty six, Mark Twain told the

(48:53):
Sacramento Daily Union ConA coffee has a richer flavor than
any other. Be it grown where it may, and it
by what name you please, okay. A ConA coffee farmers
showcased some of his product at the eighteen seventy three
Vienna World's Fair, where it was recognized for its excellence. Meanwhile,

(49:14):
the first people to sell bags of roasted beans by
the pound may have been the Arbuckle Brothers out of
Pittsburgh in eighteen sixty four. That year they purchased some
self emptying coffee bean roasters, which was this new hot
invention on the market. They called their coffee ariyosa Um,
and cowboys in the American West were apparently big fans
bought a whole bunch of it um. By nineteen o six,

(49:35):
the Arbuckle Brothers were roasting twenty five million pounds of
coffee a month, and John Arbuckle was known as the
coffee King Um. Soon after that, James Folger took note
and began selling a similar product, specifically to the California Goldfiners,
and then Um the Hills Brothers and Maxwell House followed.
Soon after. Going back to y a new strain of

(49:58):
Guatemalan arabica was in reduced there in eighteen nine two.
This new varrietal went on to become the most commonly
grown coffee plant. Another change took place at the beginning
of the twentieth century, when many of the large coffee
plantations parceled out their land to tenant farmers, many of
whom were Japanese immigrants, about eight percent by nineteen ten. Yeah. Um.

(50:20):
It was also around this time that European inventors were
working on a way to speed up the coffee brain process.
And you know, just bless their hearts for trying, because
I respect that. UM. In turn, Italy, in eight four one,
Angelo Moriondo filed a patent for a new steam machinery
for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage. This

(50:44):
machine often gets credit for being um the first of
what would become our modern day methods of brewing espresso.
Other inventors improved upon it over the next century. Again
whole other episode. And as for the coffee maker, um,
that was most likely invented by Melita Bents in nineteen
o eight. She used a blotting paper as her filter,
resulting in a drip coffee that a lot of us

(51:05):
are familiar with today. Yes. When it was established in
nineteen eleven, the National Coffee Association, which was a group
of growers, roasters, importers, distributors, traders, and retailers became one
of America's first trade associations. Yeah, the demand for coffee
for soldiers during World War One led to innovations around
instant coffee just said water in the field. It's estimated

(51:28):
American soldiers polished off thousands of pounds of coffee per day.
This demand was a huge boost for ConA coffee as well.
Estimates suggest that around two point seven million pounds of
ConA coffee was produced in nineteen sixteen. Nest Cafe launched
in ninety eight, and to this day it is the
most consumed instant coffee in the world, with seventy four

(51:49):
percent of the market. UH freeze dried coffee came along
in nineteen sixty four, and around the same time interest
in specialty coffee started to take route here in the
United States. In the nineteen sixties or so, I'm leading
to the birth of a chain that you might have
heard of maybe in one Yep. We're talking about Starbucks.

(52:12):
Starbucks is critical and convincing coffee consumers that it's worth
spending more money on this thing from a place that's
different in worthwhile, and the idea of that is predate.
Starbucks are the especially coffee predates them, and it's just
an idea that this coffee tasted from this coffee, and
there's special attributes to and we should pay attention to that.

(52:33):
And how sort of the birth especially coffee, it really
spread well because of companies like Starbucks and Pizza and
Coffee Beat and te Leaf who just had great outreach.
And that's coincident with the small mom and pop shots
coming out of you know, beating Nick Kippy Age Starbucks.
Also a whole other episode. Oh gosh, yes, I'm telling you,

(52:57):
we could so many of these opened doors that I
wanted to go down. Yeah, we just like saw them
swing open and we were like sorry by as we
continued down the hallway. One day, Yeah, we have to
go to classroom one O, one B right now. Yeah.
The seventies is also when Mr Coffee, the first automatic

(53:17):
homebrewing drip machine, entered the market. And yeah, this interest
and specialty coffee and different ways of consuming it has
led to all kinds of coffee innovations, including this one
right here. But first let's set the scene a little bit. Okay, okay,
there a man by the name of John Sylvan rushed

(53:41):
to the hospital after experiencing heart attack. Oh yes, but
his diagnosis wasn't a heart attack or a brain injury.
So the doctors went through a list of lifestyle questions
found most of his answers pretty blanched, nothing suggestive. But
then when the doctors asked Sylvan how much coffee he
had had that morning, he answered thirty or forty cups? Okay,

(54:07):
cups up morning. Yes. So caffeine poison was the culprit
because for three years prior, Sylvan and his business partner
had been working on a new type of coffee machine.
So caffeine poisoning was a risk that came with a territory. Gosh,
you don't have to drink all of it, like spit

(54:30):
cups are a thing, a friend, you know. I in
some ways I appreciate the determination. But they called this
a new type of coffee machine here egg oh, which
they got out of a Dutch dictionary, I believe, and
it used pods of pre grand coffee to brew a
single cup. The original pods they used came from the

(54:52):
same company that made jello shot cups. I love it
today after numerous felt prototypes and rejection from venture capitalists,
and also still be in leaving with only about fifty dollars.
Curegg is worth billions of dollars. Of American workplaces use
a CUREG, and one out of every four homebrewing coffee

(55:16):
devices in in the US was Cureg. Yeah. Lately, they
have come under fire for the amount of waste that
their pods generate. In response, Cureg is pledged that their
pods will be on recyclable by Starbucks. Is version of
the cureg the very small uh debuted in boasting. I

(55:40):
believe recycable packaging mostly recyclable packaging. So that's also another
episode we could. Oh gosh, absolutely, I happened to have
seen the inside of a Kurrig office recently, M and
UH and their walls of coffee selection our sites to behold,

(56:02):
it is intense. I believe that there are so many flavors. Yeah,
and they had them. Was this in Boston? Maybe? Maybe not.
I like the vagueness. I won't follow up clarifications. You
can live your mystery life, Lauren any rate any rate? Uh. Yeah,

(56:25):
that about brings us to the present. We do have
some more for you about about this specialty coffee we
keep talking about and about the flavors of coffee. But
first we've got one more quick break for a word
from our sponsor, and we're back. Thank you sponsor, Yes,

(56:49):
thank you. So uh. One thing that Sean was really
passionate about sharing was the disconnect between coffee experts and consumers,
particularly when it comes to specialty coffee, which are coffees
that are batch produced instead of mass produced, with particular
care for the beans and and also for the people
along the supply chain. And all of that is great, amazing,

(57:13):
but it does raise the question how do we quantify
and scientifically measure good versus bad when it comes to taste.
There's no right answer. That's a truncated version. So who
gets to make all the rules and say things right?
That's pretty tricky. But there is a Specialty Coffee Association.
It is now a global thing, and they in some

(57:36):
sense do have a right to sort of lay down
some law, or to lay down some suggestions if you will.
It's kind of taken is law. When you're big enough
and seemed nice enough, that's what happens. And I'm a
member of the community and I participate greatly, and I'm
a big fan. But one of the things that I
really struggled with approaching this is from a scientific perspective?
Is this idea of what good and bad was? And

(57:57):
and how do we talk about what we're tasting? Who
eventually gets to the side what it's good a bad is? Right?
It sort of stemmed from this notion that you go
into a liquor store to buy a bottle of wine
and they got all these numbers on them, and the
presumption is that the higher the number, the better it is.
But then you get it and you might not be
that excited about it, or you might like the lower
number better, or it doesn't make any sense to you.

(58:17):
And but there's a there's a fallacy going on nobody
talks about. And if you dig deep enough, what's happening
is the the people who make these scales and the
scoring systems and these numberings, right that were the close
you get too hundred, the better it is. It's really subjective,
and there's nothing wrong with the subjective analysis of something

(58:40):
or a subjective conversation about something. It's important to say
I like this or not. But if you're trying to
say I like this a lot, I'm gonna get a
higher number and therefore everybody else should think it's better
and higher's been worthwhile. Well, what are you really saying.
You're not saying anything about the product. You're saying something
about the preference of the user. And the problem with

(59:01):
experts is that they don't like simple things anymore. Right
they drink They started with folders or Budweiser boxwine right
when it was cheap and affordable and got him the
kick they needed. They slowly found that was okay, and
they explored a little bit. Oh this coffee thing is
yell me, I like the flavor of coffee. After why
the flavor of coffee is boring? So you want more things,
So you keep increasing its complexity level to a point

(59:23):
where it doesn't really taste like coffee anymore. And then
the experts say, oh, this is their good stuff, and
then someone comes and drinks it and says, this doesn't
taste like coffee. I don't understand. And there is a
formal definition of especially coffee. There's a under point scale
and people use it, but I think it's terrible system
for communication because of this inherent problem with the subjectivity.

(59:46):
But it's easy to say, oh, this is an eight five,
and that can convey some information. It's really hard to say, well,
this tastes like walnuts and flowers and coffee and has
a lot of acidity, and it kind of tastes like
Jim socks. That just takes longer, and it's confusing for
people to think about those things because the reality is
we don't learn to talk about our experiences. This can

(01:00:09):
be a problem when your job involves taste testing and
describing coffee one thing that I'm notoriously bad hat. That's
why experts use a method called coffee cupping in order
to professionally evaluate coffee, although it can be done informally
um if for anyone who's interested. It's very similar to
wine tasting and similarly valuable when it comes to rating

(01:00:31):
something that is often so subjective. So the more we
cannot be human, the better off we are, because humans
are wonderful. We think, and we feel, and we interact
and we were laughing all morning. But we're really terrible
at being instruments because of those things, because we think,
can we feel. So if we can create situations that
are not typical of being a human, it helps us

(01:00:55):
be it's human. So we're all drinking coffee, right now
and we're drinking out of cups and it's fun and
we're thing, we're engaging conversation. And I had coffee this
morning with my daughter while she was eating her own
me on it breakfast. And every time we do something
as humans, we capture part of it in our minds
and it it maternalized, it becomes part of us, and
it's just is always there. So if I'm trying to

(01:01:16):
evaluate this cup of coffee, I'm going to bring a
little bit of all my past experiences of holding a
mug and drinking it with me. So wouldn't it be
better if I had a way of drinking coffee that
I only did when I was trying to be an instrument?
Sure enough, I never drink coffee for fun with a spoon.
I suspect most people don't. So cupping has this magical

(01:01:37):
ability to let us have this system of oh, I'm
only tasting and experiencing this as a taster. There's also
so lots of other things we should do, but right
there's scientific precision versus industry practicality. That's there's a statement
to make, another conversation to have. So that's the most
important thing cupping does and I want to tie in
this idea about good versus bad and a sports versus

(01:02:00):
normal drinker. Experts are people who want an intellectual and
emotional challenge from the product that they're consuming because they're
bored with the paradigm of that thing. So they don't
want coffee to taste like coffee. They want coffee taste
like something else because they're bored with coffee taste. But
as we've talked about, what happens is that experts are

(01:02:21):
the ones who have their own soapboxes and they say,
this is what good is, this is what we like,
this is the amazing stuff found appreciation of what people
actually want to drink. All right, more people buy folders
than buy slush to coffee. That says something about what
people want. So who is an expert to say what
good or badness? Right? That shouldn't be the role of
the expert. The expert's rule should be this is what

(01:02:41):
this is based on what you know about you, what
I know about you, this is probably what you like.
And you can conclude all those factors of accessibility and
price and effort to produce it in your home or
your restaurant or whatever. But the problem with our culture
is that, Oh, if there's an expert, and the expert
knows what's going on, and expert we trust, then I
should be somehow adhering to that. And that's ridiculous because

(01:03:06):
you are allowed to like what you like, and we're
all gonna like different things, and you should let somebody
else tell you what you should like. Now, with time
and patience, you might try a product and then move
into a different aspect of it, get a more complex
version to please you. But you may not. Just because
an expert says, drink your coffee black doesn't mean you
should ever try black and drink it black. Short our
hearts of coffee experts, we all want everybody to appreciate

(01:03:28):
the way we do. But that's selfish and ridiculous. And
even though I fall in that trap sometimes and I
complimented everybody here in this room about drinking their coffee black,
you know there's a there's a piece of us that
that that admires that. But experts are just people who
like what they like. Their understanding of something is greater,
maybe deeper, than non experts, but that doesn't make them

(01:03:52):
their opinion about something's taste any better or worse than yours.
So there's no right answer, and there's no you have
to like. But people should be I mean a sense right,
be yourself. It's it's sort of the message there. I
think that's really important. I think the coffee industry would
do much better for itself if it gave a message
of inclusivity versus exclusivity. There's a really amazing coffee person

(01:04:17):
based on the named James Hoffman, and he's it's a
shame you can't interview him. He has so many wonderful
things about coffee all the time, just left him to pieces.
And he was giving your talk on about behaviors of
coffee shops. And you know, secretly all this coffee people
say drink your coffee black. We really want that, but
we don't promote that. What we do is we give

(01:04:39):
away milk and sugar in our cafes. Don't do this thing.
But here have this free thing that you're not supposed
to do. That's pretty insightful, and in fact, you actually
want to go more insightful. My own insite to try
and play at James's level. Um with black drip coffee, right,
it's frowned upon ed milk but with espresso based strings,

(01:05:01):
we have competitions that celebrate adding milk to coffee. Espresso
is just coffee. Why is it okay to add milk
there but not in my drip. It's a weird dynamic
that we're stuck in our in our rut and we
don't see a bigger picture and coffee. Of course, part
of that bigger picture isn't just including average consumers in

(01:05:24):
the conversation. It's also including the growers. Um we promised
we would come back to that dark side of coffee
that we mentioned earlier. It's a good time. It's a
it's a good time to have It's always been a
good time to have the common it's always been important
time to have a conversation. Now it's really a good
time and coffee industry. Coffee involved in Ethiopia where it

(01:05:45):
was consumed in various ways for a long time, and
left Ethiopia went to Yemen, and it through Yemen that
the world discovered coffee and Yemen had control it for
a while. Eventually the Western power has got ahold of it.
And I didn't want to have to pay what they
were paying from Africa and the Middle East to have

(01:06:05):
their coffee. And there are Western powers at the time
who had lots of guns and lots of colonies, so
coffee became a product that they took to their colonies
to have and to make lots of money off of
all of South America, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, anywhere coffee is
grown that's not Africa basically came from a Western power

(01:06:29):
who wanted to have coffee cheaply, like spices or anything else.
And this is all started a time when slavery was
perfectly okay, and whether the slaves or slave labor didn't matter.
So coffee became the backbone of many economies because of
powerful Western powers. Slowly, of course, all the that those

(01:06:51):
relationships shifted and all those places are now independent, that
doesn't mean that the the base of the system change
or improved. And part of the issue is that lots
and lots of places grow coffee. So there's some depending
on how you define it, right, there's some eighty odd
countries if you go look at the world figures that
produce coffee, and probably between fifty and sixty of them

(01:07:15):
that produce it to sell as a commodity. So fifty
or sixty countries is you know about a quarter of
the world's countries. Yeah, there's a range of coffees that
are girl, but on the global scale, that's a lot
of coffee being produced. A lot of drinkers, mind you,
but that's a lot of coffee being produced. And when
you have that much being produced, it's basically a commodity.

(01:07:38):
And it's not like the individual farmer who might not
be literate and lives in the middle of nowhere with
no running water and has no education, is going to
stand up for himself and say, no, my coffee is better.
It demands a higher price. Right. They have their hands
tied in many ways about how they can deal with that.
And so you've got this global competition. Your neighbor's coffee,

(01:07:59):
my neighbors, I mean one country next to another will
have somewhat different economic systems, but they're all gonna suffer
from this global commodity issue. And there is a global
commodity price for coffee, and it fluctuates, and it's not
just how much coffee is available to sell and who
gets denoted. There's the futures market, and there's investors, and

(01:08:21):
there's big companies planning ahead, and there's guessing what the
feel is going to be this year, next year, and
there's all the mess of commodities that coffee suffers through,
and there's no incentive by anyone who has the power
to make a difference to make a difference, because the
difference to make is to give more money to the fires.
But that's not how capitalism works, so that doesn't change

(01:08:48):
in any way. And what tends to happen is that
this global c price for coffee goes up and down
every time, and currently as we are speaking, it's incredibly low.
We're in crisis of crisis mode being it cost a
farmer more to produce their coffee and they can sell
it for and most companies because we have this third

(01:09:09):
party see market commodity, no one's really a fault for
thing like big people just say, oh, that's just the
way the system works, without saying a system is really
not helping the people who need help, Like I'm buying
this thing from people who are in crisis with their
lives and I don't really care because you know they're
far away, and this is very like you know, neat

(01:09:30):
package version. I'm giving you one of his proposed solutions,
pay more for coffee, that's a good start buying coffee
from sources that really seem to be buying more directly
from a farmer, that are really focusing on quality and stories,
so that if you're being drawn in by marketing, it's
probably a good coffee to buy. I sort of hate

(01:09:50):
to say that because I don't want to be about
the marketing, But if some roaster or companies is telling
you about this farmer they've met, or the picture that
they're showing this farmer or somehow this experience, well there's
a lot of marketing kuha around that there probably is
some better money going because you know, everybody has to
make more money for that to work. We're always a

(01:10:11):
proponent of knowing where the things we consume come from
and the people don't yeh um. And that about brings
us to the end of this episode. Oh man, so
many other topics to return to. Yes, yes, yes, yes,
I oh gosh, oh gosh. Indeed, we were just discussing

(01:10:31):
before we came in, how the cravings of this episode
we're not helpful in our overall goal to consume less
coffee because every time I finish a cup like I like,
I would just be like, oh more coffee research, and
they will be like coffee exactly. There's something so ritualistic
about it too, like comforting I'm starting off the day,

(01:10:54):
or like it's warm, it's kind of it's it's refreshing,
It gives you that hap, it gives you that dopamine.
That's like all everything it's going to be just okay. Yeah,
and uh yeah, yeah, I do find that. And I
know we've done an episode on this before, not specifically,
but os is in our massive company. Um, after I

(01:11:14):
have coffee, I frequently get really tired, like thirty minutes later,
And if I can write it out, I'm fine. But
I know several people in the office has said they
experienced the same thing where they get tired after having
so another thing to come back so much so much science. Yes,

(01:11:36):
and if there's any particular aspect of coffee science or
coffee machinery or coffee types or creus Turkish, all of
this coffee like ceremonies stuff like that, yes, please write
in if you want us to do any episodes around that,
or if you have any information you'd like to share
around that, and you can do that via our email.

(01:11:58):
It is Hello at Saber dot com. Or you can
find us on social media. We are on Twitter, Instagram,
and Facebook at Saver Pod. We do hope to hear
from you. Thanks as always to our superproducers Dylan Fagan
and Andrew Howard, and our executive producer Christopher Hassiotis and
Sean dr Coffee um uh. If you would like to

(01:12:19):
hear more from Sean, check out those books. His books
are The Hawaii Coffee Book, a gourmets Guide from Kona
to Kauai. Then also Coffee, A Comprehensive Guide to the being,
the beverage and the industry. And then also The Little
Coffee Know It All, a miscellany for growing, roasting and brewing,
uncompromising and unapologetic. Yeah yeah, check those out. Um. Thanks

(01:12:43):
also to Michelle McGowan, Rice of the Hawaii Food and
Wine Festival, Joy Goto and Maria Hartfield of the Hawaii
Visitors and Convention Bureau, and particularly in this case, Don
Sakamoto Piva of Put It on My Plate for putting
us in touch with Sean and all of our other guests.
Um Savor the production of I Heart Radio and Stuff Media.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you can visit

(01:13:03):
to the I heart Radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks to you for listening,
and we hope that lots more good things are coming
your way. They called their coffee Ario sa It's Ario
sa Ario sa