July 12, 2019 • 25 mins
Think you’re addicted to coffee? Your habit probably pales in comparison to Teddy Roosevelt's — he supposedly drank a gallon a day. In this episode Marc meets up with La Colombe co-founder Todd Carmichael, a thrill-seeker who travels the world in search of rare coffee beans. He's also joined by Illy’s Master Barista Giorgio Milos to learn about the complex harvesting process and pick up some tips on how to brew the perfect cup at home.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Food through sixty with Mark Murphy is a production of
I Heart Radio. Coffee is very complex like wine, even
more complex coffee is and experience. Coffee is not just
taste and flavor and caffeine. I think being on the
ground is the number one ingredient to make sure that
there's no tears in your coffee. You have to be
(00:24):
you know, if you can get people to certify blah blah, okay,
that's great, but being part of the communities, that's how
you do it. Welcome to Food three sixty, the podcast
that serves up some serious of food for thought. I'm
your host, Mark Murphy. Some of you may know me
as a chef and a New York restaurateur. In today's
episode is bold. It's all about coffee. As we say
(00:45):
in Rome Noma, Bion Caffe. Let's get started. Many of
us on the go like a joke that we're running
on coffee, but there's a good chance that that statement
could actually be true. For Georgio Milos and Todd Carmichael,
my guest today who you heard of the start of
the show, I sat down first with Georgio Milos. He's
the master barista for INDI, the Italian coffee roasting company
(01:08):
that specializes in espresso. His mother worked at Elie for
thirty five years as a quality control specialist, and when
she retired in he took over her job. He won
the Italian Barista Championship in two thousand and eight and
currently travels the country training and sharing his extensive coffee
knowledge with some of Elie's biggest corporate clients. Georgio, thank
(01:30):
you very much for joining me today. Let's talk about
what a baristas with the difference between a master barista,
a regular barista and maybe I don't know, just a
guy who makes coffee. What's the difference between all these people?
But there are many difference between these figures. For example,
massa baristas I am. It's a person who knows the
agricultural production, who knows how to taste the coffee, who
(01:50):
knows all the technical aspect of roasting, grinding, transformation. And
also a masta barrista is somebody that can share and
teach a great barista as you have, first of all, passion,
passion is key. Then knowledge coffee is a very big topic.
So there is a lot of things you know about
(02:12):
the beans, about the roast, thing about the transformation and
so on, but also after the right skill. Coffee is
very complex like wine, even more complex than wine because
when you buy coffee, you do not buy the final
product unless you buy you know, ready to drink and
other things. And the barista is the wine maker of coffee.
(02:34):
So a barista or a home user can make a
very great cup of coffee or a very bad cup
of coffee with the same good coffee saying good coffee.
Because there are so many variables involved, it's really important
to follow instructions and also swollow your feelings sometimes. So
if you wake up in the morning and you make
your cup of coffee and you forgot to have passion
(02:55):
while you're making it, it might not be good. Yeah.
Of course, coffee is an experience. Coffee is not us
taste and flavor and coffee and the environment. Probably where
you're in the environment. Of course, you know, you're having
a cup of coffee at the local dump, it probably
doesn't taste as good. In that case, you probably drink
the coffee, you don't taste the coffee. How do you
judge a cup of coffee? Well, first of all, the
approach is the site is the look, you know, you
(03:17):
take a look of the color. If I have to
judge brew coffee or a pool over coffee that is
not espressed, So I like to having in a glass
cup so I can look through it. I can look
the red reflexes, the color of the coffee if there
is some residual solids in the cup. And then what
I do first is I close my eyes and smell it,
(03:41):
because the smell is the most important sense we use
when we taste coffee. The sensation of smell gets into
your brain right away immediately, so in that way you
can start drinking your coffee. Then you have to prepare
the other sense to taste. I take a little sip
and I keep the coffee in my mouth for know y,
so I can just prepare all the test but for
(04:03):
the tasting. Then I take the second sip. That is
usually the sip you can start perceiving the balance of taste.
There is no saltaness in coffee, but there is sweetness,
there is bitterness, and there is acidity. Then from the
third sip to the end of the cup, you start
perceiving different flavors, different aromatics, because the coffee in your
(04:23):
mouth start releasing this volatized aramas that move into your
nose by the retro nasal activity, and then you start
perceiving the flavor that there is nothing else than a
combination of taste and smell. Wow, So that you just
start with your eye, you can see that, and then
you're gonna go dive into the cups. Really the flavor.
Don't use any what I like to call contaminants in
(04:46):
my coffee. So I take the spoon and I start
talking about talking about sugar and syrups and cream. Yeah,
that's just a coffee, and I'm good with that. It's
not I think, of course. But if the coffee is
really good, high quality coffee, well prepared, you don't need
any sugar tot. So to the listeners here, what is
(05:08):
the one thing you could tell somebody to improve their
coffee making at home? What would it be? Well, First
of all, use the right water. The right water. Ninety
seven to ninety nine of your cup of coffee is water,
So the water you use for your coffee is extremely important.
My suggestion is never used tough water. Even if you're
in New York here and the water is quite good, right,
(05:30):
that's still there is some like off taste that can
really change the aromatics in the espresso. So my suggestion
is used spring bottle water. And I was gonna ask
you what the biggest mistake is. I guess using bad
water is the biggest and boiling water. Coffee does not
require boiling water, so especially they adicate coffees. Uh, you
(05:53):
know you drink tea, right, so you know that you
need different temperature of water for green tea and black tea, right,
So it's a kind of same thing when coffee. So
some coffee require a little lower temperature. We're always talking
about one ninety two hundred, no lower than one ninety.
But if you use boiling water to ten to twelve,
(06:13):
you burn the coffee and you attract the bitters that
you don't want. So I want to clear this up
because everybody calls them coffee beans, but they're actually not beans.
They're actually berries. Correct. Their seeds seed And then how
does it go from being a seed to a cup
of coffee. Well, everything started with a seed in the ground.
The seeds sprouted in like three four weeks. This is
(06:35):
usually happening in a nursery, okay, and then they wait
one year in order to transfer the little plant to
the plantation. Then they transferred the plant. Three years later,
the coffee plants start producing a good amount of coffee cherries.
From there, the coffee plant can grow up to thirty
forty feet so, but they provene on top in order
(06:56):
to facilitate the harvesting exactly all. Every time there is
a very important rainfall following by a dry period, the
coffee plant produced a blossom that in a couple of
days become a beautiful white flower with just mink notes
it's beautiful. Three days later, the flowers get dry and
(07:17):
fall down, leaving the space for the cherry. Nine months later,
the cherry is ripe. Yes, So it takes nine months
for cherry to get at the right stage of maturation,
and then that's the moment of harvesting. In some places
where there are different rain seasons, you can have over ripe,
(07:38):
under ripe, ripe flowers, buds, any stage or moturation on
the same plant. So it's very important to use what
they call the picking harvesting. So there are pickers people
that pick just the right ripe cherries that could be
red usually or yellow, depends on the variety. After that,
the coffee has to be processed right away like grapes.
(07:58):
There are different processes methods. The most used is the
wash process methods. So the skin of the coffee beans
being removed by a machine and then the coffee beans
are sucking water for fifteen to thirty six hours, depends
on temperature and altitude and other things. And then there
is the last part of the process is drying. It
(08:19):
could be under the sun or could be in a
mechanical dryer. The oldest method is called the natural process.
The cherry are just spread out in big patios or
in raised beds, and the sun does the job for
fifteen days and it takes off the skin and the outside,
the whole thing. Now, yes, then they clean everything and
then they put it in a bag, and then the
coffee is ready to be roasted. And then there's also
(08:40):
this other thing now that's called cold brew there, which
I've never saw in Italy growing up. But evenly it's
a little bit different coffee market than any other countries.
You know, in Italy. As Italians, we are very conservative,
let's say, to our traditions. I lived in Italy, I
was born in Milan, I lived in Rome. I've traveled
a lot in Italy, and I always find interesting in Naples,
(09:00):
and I was just there recently. They're so obsessed about
their coffee cups being hot. For the first time saw
an espresso machine sitting there and next to it cups
upside down and boiling water, and they handed me that cup.
That cup was a thousand degrees. Basically, it was an
amazing espresso. They liked it a lot. Also a technical
(09:22):
explanation for the super hot cup because in south of Italy,
especially in aple Innopoly, the volume in cup is very short.
We're talking about not even alpha ounce of liquid, so
they've extract less in the north. It's about announcing down
south it's yes, let's say about the amount of liquid
is so small that if you don't use a very
(09:43):
super supernova temperature cup, right, the cup absorbed the temperature
from the coffee itself, from the espress itself, changing the
taste profile. The essays in coffee when the temperature drops
breaks down in simple assets, so the coffee become more
acidic when it cools. Okay, that happening in any kind
of preparation. Well, this was all very very informative. I
(10:05):
want to thank you very much. Georgio for being here
today was a very pleasure, And as I said, I
could keep going for a couple of weeks if you want. Yeah, no,
the podcast is in that long. But I'm gonna tell
you what I really want now is the nicest. Thank
you so much for We'll be right back after a
quick break. Welcome back to Food three sixty. To get
(10:29):
a larger understanding of the coffee industry, I spoke with
someone who actually flies around the world in search of
the perfect coffee bean. Todd Carmichael is the CEO and
co founder of le Alom, one of the best specialty
roasters in our current third wave of coffee. In two
thousand and eleven, he was named Esquire's American of the
Year in part for his philanthropic work reviving the coffee
economy in Haiti. He's traveled far and wide to explore
(10:51):
the different coffee cultures in the world, and he's documented
his explorations for two Travel Channel shows, Dangerous Grounds and
Uncommon Grounds. So thank you so much for joining me.
It's a pleasure. So when you got into coffee, you
wanted to get coffee from Haiti, but you couldn't find
it anywhere in America. And from what I understand, when
you can't find what you want, you just pack a
suitcase and you go there. Yeah, backpack. Yeah. I was
(11:14):
making a blend for the South for Sean Brock, right,
and you know, Sean is a He's a beast when
it comes to finding the right ingredients and you don't
mess around with that. I want to get something authentic,
and it has to include Haitian coffee because that was
the coffee of the South for hundreds of years, right,
But there was none left in the States, so I said,
all right, backpack it up, let's go in. This was
(11:34):
right after the earthquake, so you can imagine things were
upside down. And this was kind of lighting a fire
under me too, because I know that you know as
a farm kid, that selling your produce, your products to
the market, is what helps you survive. Without that, you
lose the farm. And so what I saw when I
saw the earthquake was there's gonna be some coffee farmers
who are gonna lose their farms. So let's get on
(11:55):
the road this go. It was quite an adventure, you know.
What I found was both promising way but also devastating,
just heartbreaking. So the remedy would be more than just
buying a container of coffee. It meant getting involved in
the communities. Well, that's what I understand is that you
know a lot of these countries where these beans are
grown are very poor countries. They have just been taking
(12:15):
advantage of used and abused over the years. That is
definitely the case. It's less and less, but it's always
still a problem, you know. I think being on the
ground is the number one ingredient to make sure that
there's no tears in your coffee. You have to be
you know, if you can get people to certify and
blah blah, okay, that's great, but being part of the communities,
that's how you do it, and that makes you feel
(12:37):
like when you get up in the morning, you're doing
something right as well. My job is to make people
happy with coffee, and that means the people who make it.
That means the people who work it, and that means
people who drink it. So everyone's going to be happy
with this coffee, right, and it's not about me, which
is not now. If it were man, people would come back.
I think, what the freak, you know, because I may
(12:57):
have found the coffee that tastes vaguely of Q cumber,
and I don't know why. So we're going to drink
that for a week. You know. It's like people like
somewhere else nuts. Yeah, but it's just looking out and
making sure you're happy. I mean that's the idea. Well,
you had a travel show at one point, and I
heard certain things happen to you got shot at, you
got stabbed. I mean that was all in the name
of finding good coffee. Yeah, coffee has grown in the
(13:20):
isolated parts of isolated countries. So I mean even in
the countries that you're going, you'll saying I'm going there
for them. That's extraordinarily isolated, way up in the mountains
along the equator, right, and it's also a place where
there's a lot of conflict, right, So you're gonna have
opium or you know, poppy growth. This is where you're
gonna get most of your militia groups might be hiding
in there, or particularly right after some kind of political
(13:43):
unrest or in fighting within the country. That's where things
are going to stay hot. But that's where your farmers are,
so you want to get in, take care of them,
and get out of dodge. I just bleep myself. That
was very good. So this is a dangerous job being
a coffee person. It can be because you know, each
country is built a little differently, right, So right now
(14:03):
there's some beautiful being coming out of Dr Congo on
the Rwandan side, like Kivu. Right they're about fourteen different
factions that are shooting each other in the face right now,
but there's coffee there. So the question is do you
go in or don't you? It's like, I want to
go in and buy their coffee and support their growers,
but then of course you also don't want to get killed. Right,
there's an equation. There's an equation. You have to sort
of figure that out. So the flavor comes from the
(14:25):
plant obviously, how it's grown and where it's grown, like wine,
like you know some people like peanut and wire and
some people like cabernet, Like what's the difference in between
those plants? And also, I guess the second part of
that question is does the roasting have a lot to
do with what your final product is? So coffee is
exactly the opposite of wine because in wine, you take
the juice from the fruit and you throw away the
(14:48):
seeds and the rest where in coffee we keep the
seeds and we throw a ray of fruit it's a cherry.
Now that seed, it's base flavor. It's going to be
contingent on the plant that's growing in because there's many
different varieties of coffee plants. The altitude is super key
because the higher the altitude, the more dense that seed
becomes as it goes lower, and the more porous it becomes.
(15:11):
That's the density that gives it its flavor. You have
how it's processed, from the moment it's picked, whether it's
washed or natural or dry, the age of it. So
let's say you get all of that done, you bring
down this super high out coffee, let's say a Geisha
from Panama. It's treated and processed well like, it's bagged,
it's cry o BacT it hits your station and then
(15:31):
you burn it. Yeah, it's good taste like. But in
that coffee right there, twelve years ago have sold for
at the farm. It was me and two other companies
were bidding for it for four d and seventy nine
dollars a pound. That's how good that coffee was. And
it's still coming out of that region and you can
get coffees, they're so outrageous to hurt you, but in
two minutes on a roaster, just screwed it. It's like
(15:54):
taking blue fish tuna and having it cooked by my grandmother.
You know. It's like yeah, yeah, oh wow. And so
is it just because of the altitude that the pit
is more dense. Yeah, everybody's probably thinking what I'm thinking,
what do you do with the fruit? You just throw
it out? Is because fertilizer? Well no, see, now in region,
there's a couple of things. One you tell it back
into the soil like a responsible husband of the land.
(16:16):
But for consumption in origin, people make tea from it,
and it's outrageously good. In fact, if you make it
like a graph of antioxidents and you go like, well,
here's the blueberry, and you have a line, and you
have whatever, essay, here's a line, and then you put
like cascara is what it's called. That line goes for
like nineteen pages. It is outrageous and antioxidants and why
are you not selling this at your stores? Every coffee
(16:37):
guy and girl on the planet tries to do it,
but the word cascara does not translate over to people
because of the word being had we used the word
seed instead of being. Maybe, I mean, I think people
do think it's a being that you pull out of
a pod or something. And so when you say coffee fruit,
when you're at that point where you're making a decision
in the store, you go, oh, my god, I don't
understand what that is. But people are starting to understand
(16:59):
coffee much better than they used to write. Yeah, I
think that, you know, the proliferation of information has been helpful.
I think that the third wave movement and you know,
this whole kind of naval gazing taste. You know, we
did for a while we didn't wine. Now we did
in coffee. So now everyone's kind of verse. And I'll
tell you the big one. It was like in two
thousand and eight. It was going back to Ethiopia and
I decided I was going to do a cold brew
(17:21):
in my house and I pour it into a bottle,
right because I was only getting about three hours sleep
and I didn't want to brew coffee use the grinder,
wake of kids, that kind of thing. Right, got in
the car I was driving, and I just made a
really good one and I drank it and I thought,
you know what, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna make
cold brew tanks. I'm gonna get a little ball in.
(17:41):
I'm gonna sell people with this product I'm eating right now.
It's great, This is wonderful. And there was no word
called cold brew. I call it cold press, you know,
because I used a press to do it. Then two now,
at luck a home cafes, of what we sell is
cold zero percent n zero percent. Where it is today
(18:01):
is so incredibly huge. I can't begin to explain it
to you. So one day you get up in the morning,
you make this stuff, and you're driving along. You go, wait,
I got an idea. We're gonna make millions of dollars
with this coffee. That's not we don't have to heat
it up. It's never really that. I always just think
this is something I like. It must mean that other
people should like it too, and let's make more of it. Right.
(18:22):
The big challenge then was that I realized, Okay, this
whole culprit thing is doing really well, and now I'm
entering this new space called CpG or grocery, right, so
tons of new things to learn, which I like, excuse
and slotting feet and blah blah blah, and all this craziness,
and I said, but it's so unfinished. What we need
to do is we need to figure out a way
(18:42):
to put the single most important beverage of brick and
mortar cafes in a can or bottle, and that would
be a latte. But the problem was a lot has
three ingredients. You know, it's concentrated coffee, which is wrestle
like you drink this milk, and the third ingredient is vapor. Definitionally,
it's incorrect. So the nerd in me gets upset that
it's like we're not delivering on the promise. So I
(19:06):
went to work on my lab on how to salt that.
Can you walk us through that? Well, first I had
to go borrow something from my wife or no, it's
something in a shower, right, and I noticed that she
takes her shaving cream cans and turns them upside down. Right,
you don't know that they do this. They do this
because they don't want to have rust rims on that. Yeah,
they do this, and someone nodding over there, dudes don't
(19:26):
know that we know that because then you know, they
don't want to leave a little rust rims on the marble.
So they turn it upside down, and when it was
turned upside down, I saw there was a valve on it,
and I thought to myself, Oh, that's how they put
gas in there to compress the jail. So will come
from I can that's pretty smart. But I left my consciousness.
Two weeks later, I'm standing in the refrigerator my kids
(19:47):
for he's got this huge, wicked, giant curly head of hair,
and he's standing right in front of me, and I'm
teaching him how to eat out a refrigerator without anyone knowing, right,
And this is totally life lessons, right. You start with
this stuff. They don't count like pickles, right, you know.
But there is the no man's land area, like don't
touch the cupcakes. They noticed that, right, But there's the
(20:08):
whip cream can. Now, if you don't take too much,
you're good, right, Right, So I take a little whip crane,
I bend his head back and I squirted into his
mouth and everyone it's vaporman. There's texturized milk. That's what
I'm looking for. Nitrous sock side valve upstairs I saw
on the man and so I went down on my
lab and two hours later I had the first draft
(20:28):
a lot. Then it worked. Wow. I took a can,
droll a hole in it, put a volleyball valve in it,
put the ingredients inside, seemed to shut turned it nitrosock
side tank with the pin that you would normally fill
a basketball needle. Put it in there, agitated it, put
it up the thirty five pounds, pulled it, let it
sit for two minutes, opened it pop. Damn thing, It's
just foamed in the cup. So I rised, well, that's it.
(20:51):
The latte in the cappuccino are now mobile. Now they're mobile. Wow.
How do you compete with your competition? It doesn't sound
like you're the type of guy that says I'm competing.
You just do what you do, and you do it well,
and you figured that's going to go forward. You know.
I do compete mentally with Okay, you know, I'm the
guy that walked across Aunt dark. Yeah, you're the first
person to walk across Antarctica. Yeah, solo, unsupported, And so
(21:11):
you get dropped two months on your own. Who you're
competing with there is the guy from yesterday, you know,
And I got that in my mind. It's always to
try to beat yesterday. Todd and if you stay there,
you don't get bored, you don't fall apart. You've always
got someone there to compete against. So you create this
thing in your head and a lot of ways I
apply that to myself. Now I want to beat this.
(21:34):
My next thing is I gotta beat the draft latte.
Sounds crazy, huh, But I want to do better than that.
I don't know how, and then I want to improve
it at the same time, like, what can I do
this more incredible than that? You get up every morning.
You're competing with yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's how it
works because I was kind of the first modern kind
of roaster on the East coast and right, and then
(21:56):
there are others that come on, but they've all sold
their companies. And now you're looking around, going if I
were competing against them, but what I do now buy
a bigger car. Well yeah, but when you're competing against people,
you're putting a lot of responsibility on them, Like you've
got to stick around, man, and you better keep competing
ast me. What is next for lack alone? What's in
the horizon? I'm gonna come out with a brand new
(22:17):
idea here probably the end of the year the beginning
of next year, we're looking at sharing what we do
with more countries, so getting back into more of the
giving back. Yeah. But also i'd like to export and
I'd like to build factories in other countries too. I mean,
in other words, you know, coffee consuming countries I'd like
to get involved in. And then yeah, I'd like to
just continue to grow a monster company that one day
(22:39):
I can take on the big boys. I want to
pull down either coke or pepsi and choke them. Okay,
that's what I'd like to do, Like get him on
the map. I'm gonna kill them, just like make them
tap out, right, Yeah, alright, one last thing. I have
a little game for us to play. I'm gonna ask
you a question something about coffee, and you're gonna tell
(23:00):
if it's true or false. Seattle is the coffee shop
capital of America. True or false? False? Yes, New York
has the highest concentration of coffee shops. Teddy Roosevelt love
coffee so much he drank a gallon a day. True
or false with all the cigars. I'm gonna go with Yes, Yeah,
that's true. That's true. Finland is the world's most caffeinated country.
(23:20):
True or false. True. Yeah, the average adult there goes
through twenty seven point five pounds a year. Americans drink
only about eleven pounds a year. You should see how
they brew it. That's the thing. They use a lot
of coffee per ounce. Then it's not really that efficient,
it's just their process. An average American spends about five
dollars on coffee a year. True or false. I would
(23:41):
think more. Yeah, that's false. They spent an average with
a thousand dollars a year. Irish coffee was invented to
warm up cold American plane passengers who were flying from
Ireland to New York. True or false. Sounds plausible. It
is true, as chef puts some whiskey in the coffee
to warm them up. This was back in Huh. Well,
this was fantastic. I feel like I've gotten quite an
(24:02):
education today. Thank you so much for coming in here
and educating us. That was amazing. I learned so much
about coffee today. I want to thank my guests, Georgio
Milos and Todd Carmichael. See you next week. Food through
six is a production of I Heart Radio and I'm
your host, Mark Murphy. A very special thanks to Emily Carpet,
(24:25):
My director of Communications, and producers Nikki Etre and Christina Everett.
Mixing and music by Anna Stump and recording help from
Julian Weller and Jacopo Benzo. Thank you to Bethan Macaluso
and Kara Weissenstein for handling research. Food through Sixty is
executive produced by manguest at Ticketer. For more podcasts for
My Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
(24:49):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Two
Food through sixty with Mark Murphy is a production of
I Heart Radio. Coffee is very complex like wine, even
more complex coffee is and experience. Coffee is not just
taste and flavor and caffeine. I think being on the
ground is the number one ingredient to make sure that
there's no tears in your coffee. You have to be
(00:24):
you know, if you can get people to certify blah blah, okay,
that's great, but being part of the communities, that's how
you do it. Welcome to Food three sixty, the podcast
that serves up some serious of food for thought. I'm
your host, Mark Murphy. Some of you may know me
as a chef and a New York restaurateur. In today's
episode is bold. It's all about coffee. As we say
(00:45):
in Rome Noma, Bion Caffe. Let's get started. Many of
us on the go like a joke that we're running
on coffee, but there's a good chance that that statement
could actually be true. For Georgio Milos and Todd Carmichael,
my guest today who you heard of the start of
the show, I sat down first with Georgio Milos. He's
the master barista for INDI, the Italian coffee roasting company
(01:08):
that specializes in espresso. His mother worked at Elie for
thirty five years as a quality control specialist, and when
she retired in he took over her job. He won
the Italian Barista Championship in two thousand and eight and
currently travels the country training and sharing his extensive coffee
knowledge with some of Elie's biggest corporate clients. Georgio, thank
(01:30):
you very much for joining me today. Let's talk about
what a baristas with the difference between a master barista,
a regular barista and maybe I don't know, just a
guy who makes coffee. What's the difference between all these people?
But there are many difference between these figures. For example,
massa baristas I am. It's a person who knows the
agricultural production, who knows how to taste the coffee, who
(01:50):
knows all the technical aspect of roasting, grinding, transformation. And
also a masta barrista is somebody that can share and
teach a great barista as you have, first of all, passion,
passion is key. Then knowledge coffee is a very big topic.
So there is a lot of things you know about
(02:12):
the beans, about the roast, thing about the transformation and
so on, but also after the right skill. Coffee is
very complex like wine, even more complex than wine because
when you buy coffee, you do not buy the final
product unless you buy you know, ready to drink and
other things. And the barista is the wine maker of coffee.
(02:34):
So a barista or a home user can make a
very great cup of coffee or a very bad cup
of coffee with the same good coffee saying good coffee.
Because there are so many variables involved, it's really important
to follow instructions and also swollow your feelings sometimes. So
if you wake up in the morning and you make
your cup of coffee and you forgot to have passion
(02:55):
while you're making it, it might not be good. Yeah.
Of course, coffee is an experience. Coffee is not us
taste and flavor and coffee and the environment. Probably where
you're in the environment. Of course, you know, you're having
a cup of coffee at the local dump, it probably
doesn't taste as good. In that case, you probably drink
the coffee, you don't taste the coffee. How do you
judge a cup of coffee? Well, first of all, the
approach is the site is the look, you know, you
(03:17):
take a look of the color. If I have to
judge brew coffee or a pool over coffee that is
not espressed, So I like to having in a glass
cup so I can look through it. I can look
the red reflexes, the color of the coffee if there
is some residual solids in the cup. And then what
I do first is I close my eyes and smell it,
(03:41):
because the smell is the most important sense we use
when we taste coffee. The sensation of smell gets into
your brain right away immediately, so in that way you
can start drinking your coffee. Then you have to prepare
the other sense to taste. I take a little sip
and I keep the coffee in my mouth for know y,
so I can just prepare all the test but for
(04:03):
the tasting. Then I take the second sip. That is
usually the sip you can start perceiving the balance of taste.
There is no saltaness in coffee, but there is sweetness,
there is bitterness, and there is acidity. Then from the
third sip to the end of the cup, you start
perceiving different flavors, different aromatics, because the coffee in your
(04:23):
mouth start releasing this volatized aramas that move into your
nose by the retro nasal activity, and then you start
perceiving the flavor that there is nothing else than a
combination of taste and smell. Wow, So that you just
start with your eye, you can see that, and then
you're gonna go dive into the cups. Really the flavor.
Don't use any what I like to call contaminants in
(04:46):
my coffee. So I take the spoon and I start
talking about talking about sugar and syrups and cream. Yeah,
that's just a coffee, and I'm good with that. It's
not I think, of course. But if the coffee is
really good, high quality coffee, well prepared, you don't need
any sugar tot. So to the listeners here, what is
(05:08):
the one thing you could tell somebody to improve their
coffee making at home? What would it be? Well, First
of all, use the right water. The right water. Ninety
seven to ninety nine of your cup of coffee is water,
So the water you use for your coffee is extremely important.
My suggestion is never used tough water. Even if you're
in New York here and the water is quite good, right,
(05:30):
that's still there is some like off taste that can
really change the aromatics in the espresso. So my suggestion
is used spring bottle water. And I was gonna ask
you what the biggest mistake is. I guess using bad
water is the biggest and boiling water. Coffee does not
require boiling water, so especially they adicate coffees. Uh, you
(05:53):
know you drink tea, right, so you know that you
need different temperature of water for green tea and black tea, right,
So it's a kind of same thing when coffee. So
some coffee require a little lower temperature. We're always talking
about one ninety two hundred, no lower than one ninety.
But if you use boiling water to ten to twelve,
(06:13):
you burn the coffee and you attract the bitters that
you don't want. So I want to clear this up
because everybody calls them coffee beans, but they're actually not beans.
They're actually berries. Correct. Their seeds seed And then how
does it go from being a seed to a cup
of coffee. Well, everything started with a seed in the ground.
The seeds sprouted in like three four weeks. This is
(06:35):
usually happening in a nursery, okay, and then they wait
one year in order to transfer the little plant to
the plantation. Then they transferred the plant. Three years later,
the coffee plants start producing a good amount of coffee cherries.
From there, the coffee plant can grow up to thirty
forty feet so, but they provene on top in order
(06:56):
to facilitate the harvesting exactly all. Every time there is
a very important rainfall following by a dry period, the
coffee plant produced a blossom that in a couple of
days become a beautiful white flower with just mink notes
it's beautiful. Three days later, the flowers get dry and
(07:17):
fall down, leaving the space for the cherry. Nine months later,
the cherry is ripe. Yes, So it takes nine months
for cherry to get at the right stage of maturation,
and then that's the moment of harvesting. In some places
where there are different rain seasons, you can have over ripe,
(07:38):
under ripe, ripe flowers, buds, any stage or moturation on
the same plant. So it's very important to use what
they call the picking harvesting. So there are pickers people
that pick just the right ripe cherries that could be
red usually or yellow, depends on the variety. After that,
the coffee has to be processed right away like grapes.
(07:58):
There are different processes methods. The most used is the
wash process methods. So the skin of the coffee beans
being removed by a machine and then the coffee beans
are sucking water for fifteen to thirty six hours, depends
on temperature and altitude and other things. And then there
is the last part of the process is drying. It
(08:19):
could be under the sun or could be in a
mechanical dryer. The oldest method is called the natural process.
The cherry are just spread out in big patios or
in raised beds, and the sun does the job for
fifteen days and it takes off the skin and the outside,
the whole thing. Now, yes, then they clean everything and
then they put it in a bag, and then the
coffee is ready to be roasted. And then there's also
(08:40):
this other thing now that's called cold brew there, which
I've never saw in Italy growing up. But evenly it's
a little bit different coffee market than any other countries.
You know, in Italy. As Italians, we are very conservative,
let's say, to our traditions. I lived in Italy, I
was born in Milan, I lived in Rome. I've traveled
a lot in Italy, and I always find interesting in Naples,
(09:00):
and I was just there recently. They're so obsessed about
their coffee cups being hot. For the first time saw
an espresso machine sitting there and next to it cups
upside down and boiling water, and they handed me that cup.
That cup was a thousand degrees. Basically, it was an
amazing espresso. They liked it a lot. Also a technical
(09:22):
explanation for the super hot cup because in south of Italy,
especially in aple Innopoly, the volume in cup is very short.
We're talking about not even alpha ounce of liquid, so
they've extract less in the north. It's about announcing down
south it's yes, let's say about the amount of liquid
is so small that if you don't use a very
(09:43):
super supernova temperature cup, right, the cup absorbed the temperature
from the coffee itself, from the espress itself, changing the
taste profile. The essays in coffee when the temperature drops
breaks down in simple assets, so the coffee become more
acidic when it cools. Okay, that happening in any kind
of preparation. Well, this was all very very informative. I
(10:05):
want to thank you very much. Georgio for being here
today was a very pleasure, And as I said, I
could keep going for a couple of weeks if you want. Yeah, no,
the podcast is in that long. But I'm gonna tell
you what I really want now is the nicest. Thank
you so much for We'll be right back after a
quick break. Welcome back to Food three sixty. To get
(10:29):
a larger understanding of the coffee industry, I spoke with
someone who actually flies around the world in search of
the perfect coffee bean. Todd Carmichael is the CEO and
co founder of le Alom, one of the best specialty
roasters in our current third wave of coffee. In two
thousand and eleven, he was named Esquire's American of the
Year in part for his philanthropic work reviving the coffee
economy in Haiti. He's traveled far and wide to explore
(10:51):
the different coffee cultures in the world, and he's documented
his explorations for two Travel Channel shows, Dangerous Grounds and
Uncommon Grounds. So thank you so much for joining me.
It's a pleasure. So when you got into coffee, you
wanted to get coffee from Haiti, but you couldn't find
it anywhere in America. And from what I understand, when
you can't find what you want, you just pack a
suitcase and you go there. Yeah, backpack. Yeah. I was
(11:14):
making a blend for the South for Sean Brock, right,
and you know, Sean is a He's a beast when
it comes to finding the right ingredients and you don't
mess around with that. I want to get something authentic,
and it has to include Haitian coffee because that was
the coffee of the South for hundreds of years, right,
But there was none left in the States, so I said,
all right, backpack it up, let's go in. This was
(11:34):
right after the earthquake, so you can imagine things were
upside down. And this was kind of lighting a fire
under me too, because I know that you know as
a farm kid, that selling your produce, your products to
the market, is what helps you survive. Without that, you
lose the farm. And so what I saw when I
saw the earthquake was there's gonna be some coffee farmers
who are gonna lose their farms. So let's get on
(11:55):
the road this go. It was quite an adventure, you know.
What I found was both promising way but also devastating,
just heartbreaking. So the remedy would be more than just
buying a container of coffee. It meant getting involved in
the communities. Well, that's what I understand is that you
know a lot of these countries where these beans are
grown are very poor countries. They have just been taking
(12:15):
advantage of used and abused over the years. That is
definitely the case. It's less and less, but it's always
still a problem, you know. I think being on the
ground is the number one ingredient to make sure that
there's no tears in your coffee. You have to be
you know, if you can get people to certify and
blah blah, okay, that's great, but being part of the communities,
that's how you do it, and that makes you feel
(12:37):
like when you get up in the morning, you're doing
something right as well. My job is to make people
happy with coffee, and that means the people who make it.
That means the people who work it, and that means
people who drink it. So everyone's going to be happy
with this coffee, right, and it's not about me, which
is not now. If it were man, people would come back.
I think, what the freak, you know, because I may
(12:57):
have found the coffee that tastes vaguely of Q cumber,
and I don't know why. So we're going to drink
that for a week. You know. It's like people like
somewhere else nuts. Yeah, but it's just looking out and
making sure you're happy. I mean that's the idea. Well,
you had a travel show at one point, and I
heard certain things happen to you got shot at, you
got stabbed. I mean that was all in the name
of finding good coffee. Yeah, coffee has grown in the
(13:20):
isolated parts of isolated countries. So I mean even in
the countries that you're going, you'll saying I'm going there
for them. That's extraordinarily isolated, way up in the mountains
along the equator, right, and it's also a place where
there's a lot of conflict, right, So you're gonna have
opium or you know, poppy growth. This is where you're
gonna get most of your militia groups might be hiding
in there, or particularly right after some kind of political
(13:43):
unrest or in fighting within the country. That's where things
are going to stay hot. But that's where your farmers are,
so you want to get in, take care of them,
and get out of dodge. I just bleep myself. That
was very good. So this is a dangerous job being
a coffee person. It can be because you know, each
country is built a little differently, right, So right now
(14:03):
there's some beautiful being coming out of Dr Congo on
the Rwandan side, like Kivu. Right they're about fourteen different
factions that are shooting each other in the face right now,
but there's coffee there. So the question is do you
go in or don't you? It's like, I want to
go in and buy their coffee and support their growers,
but then of course you also don't want to get killed. Right,
there's an equation. There's an equation. You have to sort
of figure that out. So the flavor comes from the
(14:25):
plant obviously, how it's grown and where it's grown, like wine,
like you know some people like peanut and wire and
some people like cabernet, Like what's the difference in between
those plants? And also, I guess the second part of
that question is does the roasting have a lot to
do with what your final product is? So coffee is
exactly the opposite of wine because in wine, you take
the juice from the fruit and you throw away the
(14:48):
seeds and the rest where in coffee we keep the
seeds and we throw a ray of fruit it's a cherry.
Now that seed, it's base flavor. It's going to be
contingent on the plant that's growing in because there's many
different varieties of coffee plants. The altitude is super key
because the higher the altitude, the more dense that seed
becomes as it goes lower, and the more porous it becomes.
(15:11):
That's the density that gives it its flavor. You have
how it's processed, from the moment it's picked, whether it's
washed or natural or dry, the age of it. So
let's say you get all of that done, you bring
down this super high out coffee, let's say a Geisha
from Panama. It's treated and processed well like, it's bagged,
it's cry o BacT it hits your station and then
(15:31):
you burn it. Yeah, it's good taste like. But in
that coffee right there, twelve years ago have sold for
at the farm. It was me and two other companies
were bidding for it for four d and seventy nine
dollars a pound. That's how good that coffee was. And
it's still coming out of that region and you can
get coffees, they're so outrageous to hurt you, but in
two minutes on a roaster, just screwed it. It's like
(15:54):
taking blue fish tuna and having it cooked by my grandmother.
You know. It's like yeah, yeah, oh wow. And so
is it just because of the altitude that the pit
is more dense. Yeah, everybody's probably thinking what I'm thinking,
what do you do with the fruit? You just throw
it out? Is because fertilizer? Well no, see, now in region,
there's a couple of things. One you tell it back
into the soil like a responsible husband of the land.
(16:16):
But for consumption in origin, people make tea from it,
and it's outrageously good. In fact, if you make it
like a graph of antioxidents and you go like, well,
here's the blueberry, and you have a line, and you
have whatever, essay, here's a line, and then you put
like cascara is what it's called. That line goes for
like nineteen pages. It is outrageous and antioxidants and why
are you not selling this at your stores? Every coffee
(16:37):
guy and girl on the planet tries to do it,
but the word cascara does not translate over to people
because of the word being had we used the word
seed instead of being. Maybe, I mean, I think people
do think it's a being that you pull out of
a pod or something. And so when you say coffee fruit,
when you're at that point where you're making a decision
in the store, you go, oh, my god, I don't
understand what that is. But people are starting to understand
(16:59):
coffee much better than they used to write. Yeah, I
think that, you know, the proliferation of information has been helpful.
I think that the third wave movement and you know,
this whole kind of naval gazing taste. You know, we
did for a while we didn't wine. Now we did
in coffee. So now everyone's kind of verse. And I'll
tell you the big one. It was like in two
thousand and eight. It was going back to Ethiopia and
I decided I was going to do a cold brew
(17:21):
in my house and I pour it into a bottle,
right because I was only getting about three hours sleep
and I didn't want to brew coffee use the grinder,
wake of kids, that kind of thing. Right, got in
the car I was driving, and I just made a
really good one and I drank it and I thought,
you know what, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna make
cold brew tanks. I'm gonna get a little ball in.
(17:41):
I'm gonna sell people with this product I'm eating right now.
It's great, This is wonderful. And there was no word
called cold brew. I call it cold press, you know,
because I used a press to do it. Then two now,
at luck a home cafes, of what we sell is
cold zero percent n zero percent. Where it is today
(18:01):
is so incredibly huge. I can't begin to explain it
to you. So one day you get up in the morning,
you make this stuff, and you're driving along. You go, wait,
I got an idea. We're gonna make millions of dollars
with this coffee. That's not we don't have to heat
it up. It's never really that. I always just think
this is something I like. It must mean that other
people should like it too, and let's make more of it. Right.
(18:22):
The big challenge then was that I realized, Okay, this
whole culprit thing is doing really well, and now I'm
entering this new space called CpG or grocery, right, so
tons of new things to learn, which I like, excuse
and slotting feet and blah blah blah, and all this craziness,
and I said, but it's so unfinished. What we need
to do is we need to figure out a way
(18:42):
to put the single most important beverage of brick and
mortar cafes in a can or bottle, and that would
be a latte. But the problem was a lot has
three ingredients. You know, it's concentrated coffee, which is wrestle
like you drink this milk, and the third ingredient is vapor. Definitionally,
it's incorrect. So the nerd in me gets upset that
it's like we're not delivering on the promise. So I
(19:06):
went to work on my lab on how to salt that.
Can you walk us through that? Well, first I had
to go borrow something from my wife or no, it's
something in a shower, right, and I noticed that she
takes her shaving cream cans and turns them upside down. Right,
you don't know that they do this. They do this
because they don't want to have rust rims on that. Yeah,
they do this, and someone nodding over there, dudes don't
(19:26):
know that we know that because then you know, they
don't want to leave a little rust rims on the marble.
So they turn it upside down, and when it was
turned upside down, I saw there was a valve on it,
and I thought to myself, Oh, that's how they put
gas in there to compress the jail. So will come
from I can that's pretty smart. But I left my consciousness.
Two weeks later, I'm standing in the refrigerator my kids
(19:47):
for he's got this huge, wicked, giant curly head of hair,
and he's standing right in front of me, and I'm
teaching him how to eat out a refrigerator without anyone knowing, right,
And this is totally life lessons, right. You start with
this stuff. They don't count like pickles, right, you know.
But there is the no man's land area, like don't
touch the cupcakes. They noticed that, right, But there's the
(20:08):
whip cream can. Now, if you don't take too much,
you're good, right, Right, So I take a little whip crane,
I bend his head back and I squirted into his
mouth and everyone it's vaporman. There's texturized milk. That's what
I'm looking for. Nitrous sock side valve upstairs I saw
on the man and so I went down on my
lab and two hours later I had the first draft
(20:28):
a lot. Then it worked. Wow. I took a can,
droll a hole in it, put a volleyball valve in it,
put the ingredients inside, seemed to shut turned it nitrosock
side tank with the pin that you would normally fill
a basketball needle. Put it in there, agitated it, put
it up the thirty five pounds, pulled it, let it
sit for two minutes, opened it pop. Damn thing, It's
just foamed in the cup. So I rised, well, that's it.
(20:51):
The latte in the cappuccino are now mobile. Now they're mobile. Wow.
How do you compete with your competition? It doesn't sound
like you're the type of guy that says I'm competing.
You just do what you do, and you do it well,
and you figured that's going to go forward. You know.
I do compete mentally with Okay, you know, I'm the
guy that walked across Aunt dark. Yeah, you're the first
person to walk across Antarctica. Yeah, solo, unsupported, And so
(21:11):
you get dropped two months on your own. Who you're
competing with there is the guy from yesterday, you know,
And I got that in my mind. It's always to
try to beat yesterday. Todd and if you stay there,
you don't get bored, you don't fall apart. You've always
got someone there to compete against. So you create this
thing in your head and a lot of ways I
apply that to myself. Now I want to beat this.
(21:34):
My next thing is I gotta beat the draft latte.
Sounds crazy, huh, But I want to do better than that.
I don't know how, and then I want to improve
it at the same time, like, what can I do
this more incredible than that? You get up every morning.
You're competing with yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's how it
works because I was kind of the first modern kind
of roaster on the East coast and right, and then
(21:56):
there are others that come on, but they've all sold
their companies. And now you're looking around, going if I
were competing against them, but what I do now buy
a bigger car. Well yeah, but when you're competing against people,
you're putting a lot of responsibility on them, Like you've
got to stick around, man, and you better keep competing
ast me. What is next for lack alone? What's in
the horizon? I'm gonna come out with a brand new
(22:17):
idea here probably the end of the year the beginning
of next year, we're looking at sharing what we do
with more countries, so getting back into more of the
giving back. Yeah. But also i'd like to export and
I'd like to build factories in other countries too. I mean,
in other words, you know, coffee consuming countries I'd like
to get involved in. And then yeah, I'd like to
just continue to grow a monster company that one day
(22:39):
I can take on the big boys. I want to
pull down either coke or pepsi and choke them. Okay,
that's what I'd like to do, Like get him on
the map. I'm gonna kill them, just like make them
tap out, right, Yeah, alright, one last thing. I have
a little game for us to play. I'm gonna ask
you a question something about coffee, and you're gonna tell
(23:00):
if it's true or false. Seattle is the coffee shop
capital of America. True or false? False? Yes, New York
has the highest concentration of coffee shops. Teddy Roosevelt love
coffee so much he drank a gallon a day. True
or false with all the cigars. I'm gonna go with Yes, Yeah,
that's true. That's true. Finland is the world's most caffeinated country.
(23:20):
True or false. True. Yeah, the average adult there goes
through twenty seven point five pounds a year. Americans drink
only about eleven pounds a year. You should see how
they brew it. That's the thing. They use a lot
of coffee per ounce. Then it's not really that efficient,
it's just their process. An average American spends about five
dollars on coffee a year. True or false. I would
(23:41):
think more. Yeah, that's false. They spent an average with
a thousand dollars a year. Irish coffee was invented to
warm up cold American plane passengers who were flying from
Ireland to New York. True or false. Sounds plausible. It
is true, as chef puts some whiskey in the coffee
to warm them up. This was back in Huh. Well,
this was fantastic. I feel like I've gotten quite an
(24:02):
education today. Thank you so much for coming in here
and educating us. That was amazing. I learned so much
about coffee today. I want to thank my guests, Georgio
Milos and Todd Carmichael. See you next week. Food through
six is a production of I Heart Radio and I'm
your host, Mark Murphy. A very special thanks to Emily Carpet,
(24:25):
My director of Communications, and producers Nikki Etre and Christina Everett.
Mixing and music by Anna Stump and recording help from
Julian Weller and Jacopo Benzo. Thank you to Bethan Macaluso
and Kara Weissenstein for handling research. Food through Sixty is
executive produced by manguest at Ticketer. For more podcasts for
My Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
(24:49):
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