▷S3E7 Brian Gelletly, Barista Trainer, Spits Out His Favorite Drinks

Brian Gelletly is a barista trainer with a sensitivity to caffeine. Brian and Rose Thomas share the secrets of beverage professionals who spend their days spitting out their favorite drinks In Modo di Bere's first episode about coffee. They divulge specific spitting techniques, from spittoon styles to mustache technique, along with general advice for avoiding machismo and protecting your health as a student of liquids.

Brian and RT consider parallels between coffee and wine in terms of biodiversity, climate change and sense of place. Brian spills the beans (or the seeds, actually) on what a coffee cherry tastes like and his one piece of advice for improving the espresso you brew at home.

For local language, we're in Philadelphia. What's a "jawn," how to order a beer in Philly, and why do residents refer to the water as "Schuylkill punch"? Brian is an educator and he beautifully explains the answers to these burning questions, along with coffee basics such as the difference between "coffee" and "espresso," why Italian and American coffee taste so different, and how to evaluate a well-pulled shot.

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Come for the information and stay for the joy as Brian and RT talk about the wines and coffees that gave them shivers and inspired their devotion. 

• Expand for auto-generated transcript. (Please excuse errors.)

  kind of in a similar way that drew me to wine and coffee, just like the sort of visceral pleasure. This is like deep sense of like, this is amazing. Like this is something very special. Like when I would listen to certain pieces of music and be moved to having shivers, I just wanted to understand that better. Welcome to Modo di Bere, the podcast about local drinks and local sayings. I'm your host, Rae. Today, I'm very excited to share an interview with Brian Galletley, a music lover, wine enthusiast, and professional barista trainer who tastes many coffees every day despite a personal sensitivity to caffeine. Before we start the interview, I want to remind you that Modo di Bere is a listener -supported podcast. Please visit Patreon.com/MododiBere and become a supporter so that we can keep making the show. My guest, Brian Galletti, travels around every day, educating people on how to properly make coffee. Brian, when we met, we discussed the entertaining reality that the more you get into beverages, the more you end up spending the entire day spitting out your favorite liquid. Yes, it's a thing, people. It's really fun. Brian's going to talk to us about life as a coffee taster and teach us how to taste coffee like a professional. Brian, we're also a big fan of cocktails, beer and wine. But before we get into your journey as a student of liquids, I like to start the show by asking my guests for a local drink and a local saying, Brian, where are you from originally? Cool. So I grew up in Pennsylvania. My childhood mostly in South Central Pennsylvania, South Middle. But then I moved in when I was 18 to Philadelphia and spent 10 years of my life in Philly. So I feel like Philly has been a big impact, like who I am today. Yeah, then I moved to New York when I was 28. Oh man, Philly, I love Philly for like the local accent and everything. Do you remember any kind of Philadelphia sayings that you can share? You know, I'm really terrible about doing accents, but of course, there's always the like the term John, like for any sort of thing you wanted to refer to. talk about water, drinking water. - What's a John? What's John? - John just means like, you can use it as a word to describe any sort of noun. Like, you know, can you pass me that John over there? - Oh. - Potentially from the word joint, like, like. - Oh, funny. - Yeah. - Is it like, does it mean like thingy? - It means like thingy. Yeah. - Oh, I love that. - But you just can't. - I have heard that before, but I don't know if anyone's ever really explained it to me. - Yeah. The phrase I was thinking about sharing with you today is I've heard some people when I was living in Philly describe the tap water as "scookle punch" which might need a little bit of background to understand what they're saying there. But in Philly there's two main rivers that pass through the city. There's the Delaware River on the east side. And then there's the Scookle River that goes through more on the west side, a smaller river between the two. But the Scookle River does have some water inlets to like into the water, Philadelphia water system. And especially as like a person coming from the coffee background, like something I was exposed to a lot more as a barista was thinking about water quality and Philly is famously like not the best tasting water in the tap. Like it's very healthy, you know, you're not going to get sick if you drink the tap water. But it does have a flavor to it. Not quite mineral -y in the way that we refer to in nice wines, but there's definitely this sort of like, maybe chemical, maybe like rocky taste to it. So some locals lovingly refer to it as like "School Cool Punch," which I think is also kind of interesting because in the liquor world, sometimes we talk about like, like or like, compared to water, like OdaVee, whiskey, What else? Odeve meaning like water life. Water life. Or Aguardiente. That's right. Like angry water or spicy water. Yeah. But this kind of like is the opposite direction. Like thinking about water as a cocktail or as a some sort of alcoholic thing because maybe in a not so flattering way. Skookle. Skookle. Yeah. That's also going to, I definitely, before I myself relocated to the East Coast from the Western American, Western American Midwest. I think that was a word that I would not have known how to pronounce. So how is that spelled? Yeah. Let me see if I can think of it on the fly. S -C -H -U -Y -L -K -I -L -L. It's from Dutch. It's Google. It's Google. Yeah, it looks like Scoi -K -L, but people say Scoi -K -L. Apparently Hidden River in Dutch. Hidden River. Oh, okay. The Dutch. The Dutch. Like Fish River. Great. Okay, Scoo -K -L Plunge. Here we are again with water as our... When I was in high school, I worked very, very, very part -time, like twice a month at a local cafe, because it was a bookstore cafe in my hometown, and I wanted to be artsy and it seemed like a cool hangout. And the boss was this guy who seemed like Noah Lai, he's very soft -spoken, but very smart. So I asked if I could get a job there and he let me work there some phone shots, but not really knowing. You know, he trained me some, but definitely a different approach than what I learned of ultimately. I think I've always been fascinated by coffee, like, eventually once I started liking the taste of it. I spent some time in Italy on a broad program, drinking some espresso, which now might not be the kind of espresso I want to drink, but it's really special in its own way, very important style obviously. But after I finished college, which was in 2008, really good time to find a job, especially as a music major, was applying to a few jobs and the only place that really gave me an interview was this cafe that was opening up. When it finally opened up, I got some training, which was my first look into how complicated or, you know, how detail oriented coffee preparation could be. You don't always have to take the level of detail like that I learned to make decent coffee, but if you want the coffee to be really good, something I discovered then like it takes a lot of attention to detail like weighing things and trying to be repeatable in the, in your technique. So I got some training there from a representative from the coffee roaster we were using at that cafe. And like, I thought, you know, I was just going to be like a cool guy slinging coffee behind the counter. But then it became this sort of puzzle that I got to explore. Like, how do I make the coffee taste good? Or like, if it's not tasting as good as it could, what steps can I take to make it taste better? And that sort of puzzle approach made me like kind of like deeply affected me to trying to figure it out, forked at a couple other cafes in Philly, trying to expand my knowledge, did some Brewster competitions, got to meet a lot of people in the wider industry, did a little bit of traveling like from Philly visited New York to visit some cafes and get over caffeinated and like just drink delicious things. Sounds like a wonderful field trip. Yeah. Yeah, it's wonderful because I did taste it was very what mind -opening like it tasted some really delicious copies at some of the shops I went to but then it also Reminds me of like how I didn't always have the healthiest relationship with caffeine Yeah, so I went to a maybe six or seven coffee shops in a day and had a double espresso or a drink with a double espresso in each of them By the end of the day, I felt really really bad. Why do I feel so anxious? Why do I feel like I need to leave my body? It shouldn't have been a surprise. So when you're tasting coffee now as a coffee trainer, how many coffees a day are you potentially, how many different cups are you potentially putting in your mouth? Yeah, that's a, I never really counted it. Definitely like have to taste at least, You know, some days, at least 20, sometimes more. Uh, a big part of my job is as a Brutista trainer, uh, we have a little lab for the company I work for currently. Sometimes I teach up to four people at a time and they're each making bunch of drinks. This like repetition is a good way to really nail like this right texture, the right temperature, making sure the espresso tastes good. So they're each making a bunch of drinks and They're taking little sips of it to try to give them feedback. It might be up to 100 or more. I'd have to think about it a little harder next time. - So in the wine world, we have spittoons, which is this wonderful kind of old West term, something from like a Western. You know, you're spitting the tobacco into this giant urn, you know, the cowboys. But we have them in wine and there's a little spit bucket sometimes with a kind of inverted conical flow right to hide right well it's it's sort of a lid with how would you describe it the funnel yeah like a funnel like lid and so there's kind of rather you know to prevent sex flash you know yes and also to kind of hide the the much from from view do you have something like this or you just kind of kind of got a little a little paper actually yeah some of my co -workers use this plastic thing. That's exactly what you're describing, but like handheld. Oh, individual ones. Those are a bit challenging to open. And when you've been drinking a lot of espresso and milk drinks, that's like even grosser to me than what I end up doing, which is I usually just use a paper cup and try to discreetly spit into it because I feel like it's kind of a spew. Yeah, because if you spit out wine, it's kind of gross, but it doesn't look much different than wine. But If you spit out like a latte, there's something just about milky coffee coming out of my mouth that I don't think people want to see, so I try to like discreetly like hold the cup up to my mouth and just get rid of the coffee and milk out of my mouth. Well, you have a lovely beard and mustache, because you can grow that really into a great, great big sort of hide behind them. Yeah, actually for a period, especially before 2020, I had a bigger beard and sometimes my mustache would get a little out of hand and so trying to evaluate cappuccinos with my mustache and I'd have to take a sip and then hide my mouth so people wouldn't see how gross Alex, but I'm at this point now where basically when I'm at my coffee job, any coffee I drink, I have to spit out because I've realized over years that my biggest problems with caffeine and a caffeination came from varying the levels from day to day. So I need to get a certain amount of caffeine, no less than that, but then above that is bad. So you keep your... Keep it consistent. That's right. How many cups of coffee do you actually consume? I'm a huge trader these days. I realized, and it might be psychosomatic or all in my head, but I do feel like when I drink tea, My caffeination doesn't get me quite as anxious, and as someone with some level of background anxiety all the time, I guess it's interesting to see how many people like me gravitate towards the coffee world, but then these days I feel like if I drink some tea, I can feel a little bit more moderated in my anxiety level, but then also making sure I get the right amount of caffeine. I usually just drink two cups of tea a day. Like in the morning, back to back, or do you space it out? I try to space it out, yeah. So what I do is I drink like some Oolong in the morning, like five grams as my dose. You measure it with the scale, great. I can't control it. I have to do it. And then I drink that, and then usually around like 1 or 2 PM, I feel the need. Like I start getting a little bit of withdrawal. And then that's my time. That's telling me like, OK, time for my second cup. Sometimes I'm hanging out with my friend on a Sunday afternoon, and I will have forgotten that I haven't had my tea yet, and then in the middle of our hang, I'm like, "Oh, wait, I need to get caffeine right now," because if I don't, I'm going to have a headache, and I won't be good to hang out with. So, do you use Oolong for your second cup, or do you bury your second cup? I mean, yeah, most of the time, I'm mostly just drinking Oolong tea these days. just love the flavor and the way it makes me feel. But I, you know, I love the green tea, love the black tea. That's awesome. Do you get as intensely involved in researching your tea choices as you do in your coffee or? If I'm being honest, not to the same level. Sure. There's obviously a huge world of tea drinking out there and I have certain places I like to buy teas from. There's like a certain tea shop in the village that I like to get some oolong from. I have a I have a friend out of state who sometimes buys some tea off of him because he has a little tea business. As a wine professional, I don't think you need to feel like a trader and I will also share the secret that many of us, after working tasting wine all day, will just at the end of the day really reach for like a nice pill snare. Yeah, something like this. Now, you're also into wine as well. I am into wine. Yeah. Love wine. And beer cocktails. Tell me a little bit about your path through different beverages. Studying beverages. I guess a big part of me getting into the world of drinks after I was involved in coffee was through beer because I was in Philly. Philly still is and at the time was a big beer town. Some of that might have something to do with the state control over liquor and wine, which has been changing in the last few years. And it also might have to do just with like the background of people living there and like, you know, it's like a working class city in my mind. So beer is just like everywhere you go. And you told me about the citywide special. That's right. Yeah, I wanted to tell you about the citywide special. That's my drink. Or like, that's the drink I wanted to share about with my town, my adopted hometown at Philly. So when you're out at a dive bar in Philly and you want to feel the buzz, many of the, the dive bars still apparently used to be more popular back in the, maybe the seventies. This drink where, well, I guess it's not a drink, it's a pairing of really cheap whiskey and some cheap beer, which is usually yingling lager. So you take the shot, maybe heaven hill or something like that, or Jameson, if, if you're at a good bar, if you had a nice dive. And then you just drink the lager afterwards, which when you're in Philly, if you call it yingling lager, they correct you and they're like, okay, a lager. - Oh, right, it's the only one. - Which is the only one. - To realize as like a 21 year old going out to the bars and I'd be like, hey, can I get a yingling lager? They're like, okay, lager. - Yeah, the brand name is not necessary. Please come on, what else would you, what other lager would you be drinking? - I can't drink like that anymore because, you know, I was 22, 21. And then when I was a barista, you know, 22, 23, going out with some other baristas to the drag shows and that kind of thing, having a good time, that definitely affects me different now. So, but then even when I was still in Philly, I was trying to start getting interested in cocktails, this idea of like, mixing things together, trying to find a balance or some sort of synergy between different kinds of ingredients started fascinating me. So I started going to some cocktail bars and buying some ingredients from the the state stores. And I think that was a big introduction to me really understanding the concept of balance, because that was one of those things from my early presta trainers and bosses had talked about. But for a while I was a little bit suspicious like balance isn't really a thing. I just wanted to be exciting. But eventually, like I realized When things are at certain proportions, like they just are even more amazing. Like when you get that sweetness and acidity In unison or a little bitterness, but not too much I think getting into cocktails helped me actually be a better Brutista and a better Brutista competitor And then I was still pretty fascinated by cocktails when I moved to New York City in 2014 It's a really fun city for cocktails. Yeah, New York City is a great cocktail town plenty of different styles of cocktails. One of the places I would frequent early on was specializing in bitter cocktails, like lots of Amarros. We love that, the Italian stuff. Yeah, and the vermouths. And there were just some cocktails that I still to this day would love to drink all the time. But then eventually, I started thinking more about wine. Remember, realizing that it was a whole world that I had very little knowledge or context for. After, like, dating this one guy and drinking some tasty wines with him because he was always really good at picking out bottles of wine that we enjoyed, I realized I wanted to explore wine and understand it better. So I started going to certain wine stores that I had some trust in, asking for some recommendations and starting to take notes and then exploring what I liked, trying to figure out the styles, the grapes, the winemakers, the regions. So one of my early experiences was a coworker telling worker telling me, "Hey, if you're getting into wine, drink some wines in the Loire Valley." So I just drank a lot of Shannon, some Muscaday, some Pune and Loire, give me all that stuff. Oh, I love me some Loire Valley that is a great region. Obviously, there's some very serious wines out of that region, but a lot of them are everyday kind of wines, Go -Well food, great acidity, great sense of place. Yes. A lot of different styles for such a region, like a region we talk of as like one overarching region. Yeah. Every different town has some different grapes as you go along the valley. That's right. So that was a cool thing to explore. And then, so once I started getting into wine, I drank even fewer cocktails because, you know, if I'm going to be drinking, like I don't want to drink too much, I have to have some sort of sense of moderation. But once I started exploring wine, I Became like a pursuit that I spent a lot of mental energy on like trying to figure it out It is it is fun being being the person that your friends start to know or the people that you're with they're like Hand you the wine list and and it's actually instead of I think that having a little more knowledge can really increase Enjoyment even just a little more knowledge because then you're you're seeing they're looking at the wine list and thinking instead of thinking oh my god I'm not the person who should have this job, then you can kind of look and say, "Oh, well, do they have any of that wine that I'm interested in?" Or, "Oh, that's something that I'd like to try." Or, "Maybe I've heard of this producer before." Just being able to kind of read the wine list and have some of that information start to mean something can be a really fun process. Yeah. And one thing I like, along with what you're saying is one of the pursuits was like, "I just wanted to get better at picking things I knew I would like, so now I can either add a wine bar, pick out something from the list that I know I'm going to like or if there's something there I'm not familiar with, it could be a learning opportunity. Right. Then the thing that you don't know becomes curiosity instead of like, "Oh gosh, I'm in the dark. I have no idea. I don't know what to choose." Yeah. And just say, "Ooh, I've never heard of this. Let's get that." Yeah. And it's someone who hasn't necessarily academically studied wine yet but spent a bit of energy trying to explore it and now work in it. >> There's a case, you also do a little wine retail alongside the coffee training, which is cool. So you can balance, keep all those different liquids and balance in your day and your evening. >> Yeah. I still feel like though that there's so much that I need to learn, that there's so much to learn. I know a bit, but then some people ask me some things that I just have no clue about. And I have to be honest and humble about that. Now I realize, like, you know what, I don't know about that wine. Oh, man, you know, I like to, I like to say that wine is the most, the more, you know, the less, you know, subject that I've ever encountered. It's, it's, there's no way to really, if anyone is not humble about it, I don't, I suspect they don't know much because, you know, like, I also like to say, you know, you could learn every, if you could learn every single wine in the world, which I don't know who can, it would all change the following year, the following vintage as we like to say. That's right. Yeah. Well, when I was new to wine, kind of like when I was new to coffee, I felt like I knew a lot. And I was a little bit proud. Like, yeah, I have good taste. And then eventually like, oh wait, there's so much, yeah, so much I don't know. Well, let's talk about a little bit about what you do now. Let's start with this idea of what you were calling a sense of place. In wine, we talked a lot about the concept of terroir, which could be described as a confluence of all the factors that give this wine a sense of place. So you end up with a glass of wine that could not taste the way it does if it were grown anywhere else. These factors include what type of grape you're working with and the climate, elevation, soil, you know, even local culture and history, everything about this place where these grapes are grown. So is there a similar term like terroir for talking about a sense of place in coffee farming or do you just say sense of place? Yeah, honestly, that does exist in the coffee world. I think on the whole, we don't necessarily talk about it quite as much. We do talk about how coffees from certain countries tend to have a certain profile. And to some degree, we do talk about coffee variety. Like, you know, you have your Cabernet's and your Chardonnay's in wine. In coffee, there's like Bourbon, Tipica, Paca bone, tibica, pacamara. Are they different species of coffee or are they just subtypes, what are these plants that we're dealing with? Cool. Yeah. So coffee, as many of your listeners may know, it comes from a plant. It's a tropical plant that produces a fruit. We call it a coffee cherry. In each coffee cherry, usually there's two seeds where coffee is grown. After the coffee is harvested, those seeds have to get dried out and then ultimately those seeds are roasted and become what we call coffee beans. Oh, but it's not a bean at all, is it? Not technically, yeah. It's like, if you wanted to be a real pedant, you could, like, if you wanted to be really pedantic, you could say, like, "Oh, I'll have some toasted coffee seeds, please." That does sound funny. But no one, yeah. No one's at that. So, oh yeah, so you're asking me about different varieties, different species. There are different species of coffee. coffee. Most coffee that we drink in the US and in the world comes from a species called Kafea Arabica. You've probably heard of Arabica coffee. That's from that species. Definitely has a reputation for tasting sweeter, tasting less bitter, maybe having a little bit brighter acidity than the other main species that's also grown to a lesser extent. There's coffee grown of the species. The species is Kafea Canephora, often called Robusta, or Robusta for its most popular variety. Robusta doesn't have the same cache, the same reputation. It tends to be more bitter. Sometimes it can be a little rubbery in taste. But this is one of those things too, where like a lot of times some of the best soils were kept for the better, like the species with the better reputation or apica. So sometimes you're also kind of like not giving robust the benefit that you're giving this other one. So there is some shifting attitudes about Robusta in the coffee industry. Like maybe if we planted it in better places, harvest, you know, took better care of those plants, harvested it, you know, in certain ways, processed it certain ways that could benefit the flavor in some ways. So that's something to look out for, especially like with global climate change, a lot of coffee farmers are finding that where Arabic has been planted well for hundreds of years, maybe aren't going to be quite as reliable the next, you know, decades to centuries. On November 15th, 2024, I launched Motodibere magazine, published as a weekly newsletter, with the help of editor and columnist Michelle Thomas. We write and curate essays about regional culture through drinks and dialect. The newsletter is really the best way to stay informed about all the tentacles of the Motodibere universe, whether it's this podcast, the travel show, or whatever local drinks and local sayings we're reporting on next. Please take a moment to visit Motodibere .com to sign up for the newsletter now. While that's so interesting, and I really, a lot of a lot of bells are ringing for me with wine as well. The example that immediately springs to mind for me as an Italian wine person is specifically in Piedmont, Piedmont region of Italy. The big grape is Nebiolo. And there are also all of these other amazing native varieties like Barbera is pretty big as well, but there's also Fraza and Dolcetto and all these other great Pella verga. Yes, love me some Pella verga. And so some of these grapes were seen, this idea of something being kind of lesser, sometimes the other thing is just more popular, or I guess with the Neveolo, you just get this incredible complexity in these long lift wines. I can see why it's the prominent grape. But there was a situation where, you know, the Nebiolo being really the product that was most associated, all of the best vineyard sites would be given over to Nebiolo. Darrell Bock For about those other vines. Nicole All right. And, you know, with a few exceptions where the terroir would just be so great for Barbera in the Nica subzone, for example, for Barbera or Dulliani area for Dolcetto. You know, but if But if you've got some of these vines and some of these other vines, if you have what might be not as good of a site, you're going to put your maybe lesser grapes there. But it's like, "Oh, well, actually, if we were giving Fraser some of the better sites, then we would see what it can really do." And I guess I'm just somebody who likes to see everybody's potential realized, including these playouts. So, it's nice to hear the It's getting, it's getting its due. It's going to keep an open mind. I kind of also, in my mind, compare Robusta to, like, Vitus labrusca and some of these North American species that for a long time haven't been considered, like, the best grapes for winemaking. But you can have some pretty tasty wines made from them, and maybe it's worth exploring that, especially when you're a winemaker in North America, working with some local grapes. Yes. Local Yes. That's so interesting. And that was the other thing I was thinking too of what you were saying about kind of there being a main species that kind of the fine coffee is made from. But then there's also this other thing that's maybe less common. So virtually all of the fine wines that we know and drink in the world are made out of the Vitus finifera species. But as you mentioned, there are several others, American grape, you know, from this hemisphere over here, The Vittis labrusca being one of them and yeah, there's several and they are also really talking about those grapes and their capacity to, you know, continue to maybe kind of save wine as we move along in the hopefully, hopefully we can, you know, get with it. But as the climate is changing, that becomes definitely those great varieties and hybrids, you know, hybrids between species, you know, are definitely been a part of the conversation. So that's really interesting stuff. And there's hybrids between Robusta and Arabica planted somewhat widely now in like around the world. I think for the most part, they've been bred to try to give you the flavor profile of Arabica. Yeah, flavor profile of Arabica, but then some of the hardiness of Robusta like resistance to pests and certain diseases and just growing faster. Sure. So we were talking about caffeine levels and stuff too. So yeah, talk to me a little bit about that between the different species. Is there a difference in the end product? That's what we say. It's one of those things I haven't looked into the research on. I actually looked at scientific studies, but you talk to most coffee people will tell you that Robusta has twice as much caffeine as Arapica. The robust one. That's right. And that may be part of why it can't be more robust, because caffeine does work as a sort of insecticide that interrupts the neural pathways of insects, that sort of thing. So that kind of makes me think about how when I was in third grade or something like that, I saw some anti -drug campaign that was showing a spider trying to weave a web after ingesting various. - I think the dare program. I think the spider. I wonder if the poor spider. - It was like, you know, this is the spider on psilocybin. This is the spider on nicotine. This is the spider on caffeine. This is it on heroin. - Does it really do that? - I feel like I saw something like that. It may have been from-- - No, no, I saw those images as well, but I wonder now I'm like, was that a real study, the little spiders. How did they even give them these things? So, yeah, a lot of those compounds are alkaloids, which are part of some of the, in some cases, the plant's natural defense system. So, the way that an insect or an arachnid is affected by the caffeine is going to be a lot different than our experience with caffeine as humans. That's pretty different from arachnids. That's right. Yeah. So, I'm not really learning much from how caffeine or heroin affects a spider. you know, I'm a human. I have different like nerve endings. And so caffeine, like for us as humans, it interrupts like the adenosine receptors, like attaches to them. So when your body builds up adenosine, it's a signal to your body like, Hey, it's time to kind of chill out, wind down, time to rest. But if you put some caffeine in your system, it blocks those blockers, blocks those receptors, have this illusion of more alertness or less tiredness. Yeah, Aravica has less caffeine. I guess I'll summing that up. And there are some other species that are maybe growing wild in parts of Africa, some of which are being looked into to be cultivated as a crop, especially again with Aravica maybe having some issues or some like concerns about its future around the world, some of which do have different caffeine levels. I've also heard that espresso has less caffeine than regular coffee. So is that more of a processing changer? Do you use a different type of coffee to make espresso than you? Forgive me for my ignorance on this basic point. It's a big world. Yeah. It's like, that's such a good question. And it's such a layer, like it would require such a layered response, some of which I'm prepared for, but maybe not fully. But one quick little aside is that Italian espresso making like It uses at least a little bit of Robosta in their espresso blends, so which gives you a little more crema, gives you more caffeine. Crema being - Crema being like the layer on top of the espresso, like when you have some fresh coffee, there's carbon dioxide from the roasting process trapped in the bean. When you brew it with pressurized water, which is what happens during espresso brewing, it emulsifies some of the oils in there with the water and traps in a bunch of the air bubbles, like some aromatics, some dioxide. So when you have pretty fresh coffee and you brew it under high pressure, it develops this sort of creamy film substance on top. We call crema, Italian for cream. I had an experience working brunch at an Italian restaurant, which of course, you know, you're very serious about the coffee there. But you know, I was just kind of dipping my toe into that world trying to do my best with the... And I remember having a customer looking at the drink that I had pulled and saying, Where's the crema? And at first I thought, oh my goodness, you know, what a fuss budget. And then, you know, then I thought, no, no, no, he's right. This is this is a lovely thing. And I think I just kind of obliterated the crema with the way that I shot this hot water from the spigot right in there. And I like, I think I wrecked it. That's right. Actually, one of my early experiences of Brutisto was I made an espresso, and then I poured water over it to make it an Americano. And then all of the espresso dissolved. dissolved and then the customer's like, "Where's the crema?" You have this identical experience. Yeah. And some of that comes from a sort of paranoia or like the sort of superstition that might be a better word for it. I think it is true that all good espresso's will have crema on them because it relates to the freshness of the coffee, it relates to certain things that are happening during the brewing process. But not all shots, not all espresso's that have crema will taste good necessarily. So it's like, some people say, "Oh, it has crema, it'll be good." My mindset might be like, "Okay, there's crema. It might be good." Instead of like, "If there's no crema, what went wrong during that brewing process?" Sure. Oh yeah, and I guess just even more context, I don't know if you need it, but when I think about espresso, I think you could use any kind of coffee beans to brew it. So I think of espresso as just a brewing process. Using pressurized hot water, usually around nine bars of pressure to brew the coffee. So you're brewing it under pressure. So it happens a lot faster. And you could use any beans. - Like a pressure cooker. - Yeah, that's right. So like maybe-- - Like the instant pot of coffee. - Yeah, so maybe it happens like less than 30 seconds to brew an entire espresso. Italians might use seven grams of coffee to brew a single espresso, 14 for a double. In the US, when I was starting to get So, being a barista, a lot of places were using 21 grams to brew an espresso, calling it a triple espresso, which is... Bigger. Yeah. Big, big American, big coffee. Big coffee. Yeah. Get me my caffeine now. So, I think since then, that was like 2009, as an industry, we sort of backed off kind of a little bit, slightly more healthy relationship with the caffeine in the drinks. But nowadays, a lot of US coffee shops in the specialty market are using 18 to 20 grams of coffee and calling it a double, even though it's only a little less than what we were doing as triples a few years ago. So, part of the amount of caffeine in the drink comes to how much ground coffee you used to brew it. So, when I use nowadays, I'm using 18 grams of coffee to brew in a double espresso. It's going to have probably not any more caffeine in it than I would get if I used 18 grams of coffee to brew a drip coffee. And with the typical coffee to water ratio that a lot of places would use in the U .S., with 18 grams of coffee, with coffee grounds, I would probably be getting an eight ounce beverage. - I see. So if you think I'm gonna get less caffeine, I'm gonna order a latte. - Mm -hmm. - There are most places pulling what they're calling a double shot, which is barely under 2009's triple. So 2009's triple. Okay, so I can see this getting a lot more complicated really fast. And then there's been, there's one coffee professional that I look up to, I respect and pretty much like anything he says. I'm like, okay, there's probably a lot of truth to that. He did like some very preliminary testing on espresso caffeine levels. His name's James Hoffman. And he found that for a lot of the espressos he was brewing and getting around the, around his city, the caffeine level is actually a little lower than you would expect from it. The given dose, like the 18 grams versus using that amount of coffee for a drip coffee, the amount of coffee grounds for a drip coffee. So maybe the quick brewing process doesn't get all of the caffeine coming out of the espresso as much as we might have thought. Different. Now, you said you could make an espresso drink without any kind of coffee beans. That's right. But there must be some kind of difference in the roasting pattern or the blend. What's if you're at the store and you have. espresso. What does that mean, dark or roasted? Okay, great. So when we think about coffee roasting, there's a couple of different factors that influence the final taste, one of which is, first of all, just how long you're roasting the coffee for. Like, is it eight minutes? Is it 12 minutes? But then another huge impact, maybe even bigger impact, is how hot those coffee beans are getting during the roasting process. I've never actually roasted coffee, but spent a lot of time in the room with roasters who are talking about it. So take what I say with a grain of salt, but, you know, there's definitely going to be a giant difference in the flavor profile of a coffee. If you get it to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, 410, 420, up to maybe 500 or so degrees Fahrenheit goes through a few different stages in this roasting process. If you roasted darker, you get it hotter. Generally, it's going to have more of those flavors of when You think about if you are cooking a pizza, sometimes you might, or even bread, like you get like a very light brown, if you bake it kind of less or in a lower temperature. But then if you bake it a lot, like if you get that sort of like thin crust pizza with those burnt spots on the bottom, develop some of those like more carbonized flavors, like almost like something burnt a little bit, Which to me, I love a lot in certain moderation. When you start getting those even darker roasts, it'd be kind of like, in my opinion, like my bias, I kind of think about it as if you burnt the whole pizza, if it's like a very dark roast. But in coffee, like that gives you that sort of bold, like smoky flavor and tends to mute the acidity. I guess that's the big takeaway here is that - So a lighter roast would have a higher acidity? Generally, Generally, yeah. That's right. And a lot of times the coffees that people want to highlight, like for their varietal character or their taste of place, might be worse to the little lighter so that, you know, you're not covering those delicate aromas with the taste of, like, you know, smoke. Espresso being a form of coffee that's been brewed very concentrated, typically, and in a short amount of time tends to highlight the acidity of that coffee. So generally, if you brew any coffee maybe faster than ideal, you notice a lot of acidity because some of those acidic flavors, the brightness, that comes out. Generally, we notice there's a very strong trend like those flavors come out early on in the extraction process. It takes a little more time to extract the sweeter and then the more bitter sweet flavors than the very bitter flavors. So when you're brewing a coffee, 30 seconds under pressure. And then having it be very concentrated, like not very diluted, if you have a coffee that has a lot of acidity, it's going to be extremely acidic as espresso. So some people who like that sort of vibrant taste of coffee might like a light roasted Ethiopian or Kenyan coffee as espresso, but most coffee consumers will be very, very concerned or very like surprised by that flavor profile or might need a little bit of context to understand like what's going on here. Like is this coffee? Because it might taste more like fruit juice, depending. So generally though, the trend is for darker roasted coffees to mute the acidity, bring out that sort of rich dark chocolate smoky flavor. And that's what you would use for your espresso? That's what most people would use for their espresso. Yeah, if you're in the grocery store and you see something labeled as espresso coffee, that's that roaster saying, we think that this would be good as espresso probably because we selected certain coffees maybe with more muted acidity, probably roasted it a little darker. So now we're talking about a blend. Oh wow. So there's roasting and then there's blending, right? That's right. So tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, so different coffees around the world are maybe noted for different kinds of flavor profiles like certain coffees from Central America might have a citric acidity but like in a very balanced way that the coffee might also taste kind of nutty and chocolatey. And that's when we think about coffee that's processed in the dominant way that's processed around the world. So after the coffee's harvested, the outer layers of fruit are removed through various steps. And then the coffee being itself is dried without any of its own fruit still on. So if you leave the fruit on, it's what we call a natural processed coffee, delivers some of these flavors of dried fruit. Oh, - Oh, so what does that coffee taste like? Have you ever eaten a coffee cherry? - I have, yeah. I've been to Guatemala three times now, and some of the farmers have been gracious enough to let me chew on a few coffee cherries. My memory of it is it tastes kind of like a cherry, kind of like melon. Sometimes, maybe depending on the variety, might even have a little of this sort of green pepper flavor. Kind of like, what do we think of a Capron cherries? To at least a small degree. - Yeah, Pyrazine's being the sort of scientific name for that bell pepper flavor. - That's right, yeah. - The green bell pepper. But you get in Sauvignon Blanc as well, yeah. - Oh yeah, that's right. When you eat a coffee cherry, there's not actually much fruit on, like around the seeds. So you maybe get a one drop or two of juice. You get some of this fruity flavor and then you have a little tough skin to still chew on. So it's like one of those things that's like a very fleeting experience. You tasted that burst of fruit and then gone and then hopefully you have evaluated it. I haven't gotten to have that experience. I did get to visit a coffee finca, which I learned was the term for coffee farm in Guatemala, you know, just kind of on the hillside and seeing these little coffee plants and big butterflies flying around and kind of people bellowing at each other from side to hillside, like in a Ricola commercial, like the cough drops and, you know, that just I had it was a wonderful day. I was really excited to get to have that experience. Cool. So yeah, I'm not a ground investor or anything like that. So again, take my, what I say with a grain of salt, but in general, my understanding of coffee plants, like they range and height, depending on variety, and also pruning practices. But maybe an average coffee tree or coffee tree lit, it might be about six feet, maybe seven feet. There's a widely planted variety of Arapica called berbon, which has a mutation called coutura, which is a dwarf, we could say dwarf berbon, spelled like bourbon. There's some history there for another day with another part of this podcast, but Couture maybe is like three feet tall. Usually there's this one trunk going up that's generally pretty thin because sometimes we're thinking about coffee plants that are only like three to 20 years old with branches coming outwards. Relatively large, sort of waxy sometimes leaves. You know, a flower, this little white flower that comes up maybe after the rainy periods And where they're grown, and then that's where the coffee cherries grow eventually, which ripen at various rates, even on the same branch. And then we find that a lot of the best coffees tend to, kind of when we think about wine tasting better when it has struggled to some degree, it's not quite as extreme with coffee because apparently some of the best coffees need a lot of nutrients in the soil, but with coffee - Right, whereas wine, wine vines like to kind of in the opposite that a culture being the opposite of agriculture, they like those poorly unfertiled soils cause a good result of wine, which is again another conversation, but yeah, no, no, no, no, I'm not, you're not derelict. This is all just, just making connections. - But one connection that I have seen that's very strong is like in coffee, we do find shade. That is a thing that can really help coffee cherries ripen slower so that they don't ripen too fast. So if coffee ripe and slower, has a little more time to build up the sweetness, like the sort of perceived sweetness, and then have a more balanced acidity, like a more pleasant acidity. And some of that is amplified by coffee being planted in the mountains. You have that big shift like diurnally between the day and the night, like we're in the tropics. You have that warm, like 70 degree Fahrenheit day up when you're in the mountain. And then at night, it gets down to 50 degrees or something like that. Maybe slows the Krebs cycle or you know, again, I'm not a Krebs cycle. I'm not a, oh gosh, I'm not a biologist or what is that? Oh gosh, let's see. It's a process that happens in plants. I think it has something to do with citric acid. It's like a metabolism, a system of metabolism for the plant to get energy and to ripen. It's like one of those things. So it's like - How do you spell it? K -R -E -B -S. Cool. Interesting. And we're learning about it in high school biology and /or chemistry, but - No, no, no. We talk about diurnal shift in wine a lot and wine is often grown on the hills and the mountains. That's right. And that's part of the reason why. And that's why you can grow this grape in these really hot places, you know, sometimes like if you're in Spain or something, then the elevation is really important. But it can still taste great because, yeah, maybe - Because then that cools down and down. The ripening was slowed down to develop a little more concentration of flavors. Yeah, but I didn't know that term or that kind of scientific reason for maybe why that would be. I wonder if that's course cycle. We'll ask a bit of a culturist. That's right. Let's look into that. So that's why coffee grown in the mountains tends to have a better reputation because generally better balance of acidity, maybe a little brighter acidity, and maybe more perceived sweetness. So when you're talking about a blend, Blending versus single varietal in wine grapes, a lot of times you're still talking about grapes that are being grown in one region. With a coffee blend, it seems like you, the sense of place, maybe you are actually pulling coffee from different parts of the world to make your blend? Is that what you were telling me? - That's right, that's right. So some blends you might see, they might be from multiple countries within a single continent. But then some blends you'll see like might have a coffee from Guatemala paired with a coffee from Ethiopia. For instance, maybe like a wash coffee from Ethiopia could lend it some more like delicate floral aromatics. I remember learning this word, "yourgechef." Back when the coffee shop explosion started to happen. You know, like you, I'm an already type. So, you know, I was a coffee shop adopter and they started to filter far into the Midwest. I was right in there ordering my Yergechef, yeah. - That's right, yeah. - Is anybody saying that right, ish? - I don't speak the local language of, or I don't know exactly which local language they speak in Yergechef. Sometimes I say Yergechefe, but I don't know if that's accurate at all. But a washed coffee from Yergechef was one of my aha moments early on in coffee. It's like, wow, coffee can be floral. It can be like zesty and can be like tea -like, like taste like green tea to some degree. Can we talk a little bit about the water again? So do you want to use your scoogle punch in your coffee making or are you gonna filter that water? What's the, what's the, when you're brewing your coffee, what, what are you looking for in the water? Cool. So obviously, all this comes down to how fusty you are with your coffee drinking. Like, I'm obviously on one end of the spectrum there, like being especially fussy. So, when I was living in Philly, I would at least want to have it be filtered through, you know, one of the filters you keep in your kitchen fridge or what have you. Like a bridge. That's right. I worked for a company in Philly where the owner was especially fastidious and especially like well informed about these topics. And when he opened, he installed a reverse osmosis system in the basement so that all of our water would be filtered like very heavily because he knew like the flavor of the Philly water was not going to be doing any benefits. There's also been some research done which is a little bit about my pay grade about like the mineral composition, like the hardness, the softness of water, how they influence how coffee brews and then ultimately tastes. But generally you don't want something too hard. You don't want it with much flavor to it, which when you drink water out of It really taps. It has a flavor. Sure. You want the coffee to shine. Yeah. If you if you really focus on the coffee flavor Yeah, you don't want these other flavors coming in on that And one thing that does surprise people is just how much of a cup of coffee is water with typical Us like coffee to water ratios and when people are making recipes to brew coffee Coffee in your final cup is at least 98 % water if not like 98 .4 or more more water, like up to 99 % water. So if the water has a flavor, it's going to be impacting the flavor of the coffee. So let's talk a little bit about your evaluation. Like when you were a barista competitor or when you are not in a competitive sense, but in an education sense, when you're training people making coffee drinks, what are some of those areas where you're giving people notes or judging these things? Yeah, I spent a lot of time talking about balance. And when we talk about balance and coffee, we have to remember that, like wine, coffee comes from a fruit, there's going to be some level of acidity, especially with the coffees that tend to score higher and be more specialized in the specialty coffee industry. So every coffee I'm working with has some level of acidity. And acidity is awesome. It can be delicious. It can add some vibrancy to the coffee, but too much is pretty off -putting even to some of us who like acidity. So we don't want our coffee to taste sour, although when I was a new brewery, I was so excited by that. Like it was so different from the coffee I was used to. But coffee also, of course, has - You kind of went all in like like a super hoppy IPA like, whoa, all right. There's more of that interesting priced flavor. Let's turn up the dial. - And kind of in how in the beer industry, there's been a bit of a backlash against the super hoppy. Like there's also been, at least in what I see of the coffee industry, a backlash, maybe not a backlash, but like a moving away from just having like high acidity coffees and maybe saying, you know what? Sweetness is pretty good. Sweetness is pretty important. And when you brew a coffee, like a good coffee and you brew it right, there often is a sort of sweetness that comes out that kind of balances the acidity, makes it more like bright rather than sour. And then of course, coffee is going to have some bitterness because coffee has, you know, it's roasted. There's various compounds in there that add this sort of bitter quality to the coffee, like roasted nuts and dark chocolate kind of flavors. Or if it's extreme, like maybe tastes like having an aspirin on your tongue for too too long. In fact, if you taste caffeine in its isolated form, it's like straight up bitterness. It's just like that sort of pill in the back of your tongue. It's not just the roasting. It's the caffeine that tastes bitter. Yeah. It's a combination. Absolutely. Yeah. So coffee is like a robusta that have more caffeine that might be part of why they have a higher perceived bitterness, at least in part. So when we think about balance, we're trying to think about those things in harmony like sweetness, acidity and bitterness. So I talk about that a lot. Then having it at a good concentration, like using the right amount of coffee to water. And then just hoping that the aromatics in the ground coffee come through that you've extracted them, kind of like let them come through in a way that flatters the coffee. So how does your technique when you're making a pressurized drink come into achieving that balance? Why do you need to, besides picking the blend and making sure the machine is well calibrated, which I feel like coffee people talk about a lot too, just being around Italians are like, the espresso machine needs service regularly, these kinds of, you know, things, but why do you need to go around training individual baristas all day and spitting their, the 100 coffees you taste into, into your little cup, what are But what are you helping them with? - Cool, yeah. So just general consistency of technique is important, like making sure we're using the right amount of coffee because the little metal basket that holds the ground coffee that we use to brew espresso, we call it a portafilter basket, making sure you're using the right amount of coffee that it's designed to hold, that's important. So getting the right dose is what we call that. Then redistributing that coffee around the basket so that it has a uniform, like it's uniform in density. And then when we compress that coffee before brewing it, we call that tamping the coffee, we want to make sure that we're going straight down, not going asqueo because we want, again, that pressurized hot water needs to go through the coffee pretty evenly. And if you go at an angle, that might be leading to some variance and like how different parts of the coffee bed there they're getting extracted. They talk about uneven extraction. That was one of the things too, like early on in my coffee industry experience, I was suspicious of. And then after tasting enough shots that were like brood poorly, like, and they tasted bad, like, oh, wait, this idea of even extraction is also important, like making sure that all the coffee particles are getting the same exposure to water so that they, you know, give up their flavors in a predictable way. So Just that sort of technique is important. And then the most important thing I would say is Being able to calibrate the grain size That's the thing that surprises a lot of people and it surprised me when I was new to this to this world And it's a big part of the puzzle is that When you brew an espresso you have to think about how much coffee used to brew it or at least in my my style of brewing espresso My the world I'm in So you think about the amount of coffee, grams that you've used to brew it, the dose, how much final beverage you have produced, what we call the yield, which relates to how much water you used to brew it, and then we measure that in grams. And then we measure the time. So how many seconds was it brewing for? Again, thinking about those flavors that extracted at different times throughout the brewing process, like acidity kind of comes out mostly in the early stages, and then we get more bitterness the longer the coffee and the water in contact for. So finding this little happy middle ground between like too sour and too bitter, a lot of that comes down to how much time it brews for, especially when you're brewing espresso. And it can be a make or break, like a couple seconds can make a huge difference when you're brewing espresso, especially when you're using kind of lighter interested, like interesting coffees or medium -rested coffees even. So you brew an espresso, make sure you're getting the right amount of water out for the amount of coffee grounds you're using, and then checking the time, noticing the flavors. And then if the flow rate was too high, that meant it brewed too fast, it probably happened in a short amount of time, you want to extend the time that it brews for. And The biggest way to control that, as a barista, is making the grind size finer. So you'll want to have a grinder that can adjust grind size, like usually a burr grinder is how we do that. So if you make a little finer, creates a little more resistance to the pressurized hot water coming from above, and then you brew the espresso again with the same amount of coffee, but slightly finer grind size, it'll take a little longer to produce the same yield. So, being in tune with that, paying attention to that, as a barista is going to have a big impact on the flavor of the drinks you're making, as long as you're being consistent with all of those other factors, like getting the right dose, tamping it evenly. And the amount of time that you put the water through. Yeah, being aware of the temperature of your machine, that kind of stuff. Oh gosh, that's so interesting. So what if a person is having an espresso at home And is maybe not going to get quite as deeply into all of these things and they could and then they could talk to their family every day about about the things they're learning if they are curious person who wants to dive into that puzzle like you did. But you know, maybe if there's like one piece of advice for your your home espresso machine people to achieve better results, what would you what would you end up telling most people do you think at home? Yeah, this may not be a but get a scale. A kitchen scale is good just to try to see if you can be consistent with how much ground coffee you're using to brew it. And then you can check the final beverage weight like just to see how much, you know, kind of have an idea of how much water was used to brew the espresso. Check in on your coffee to water ratio to try to keep that consistent. So you'll find a few like less coffee, sometimes more coffee. Another another time that'll impact like how easily the water can flow through which affects how long it takes for that espresso to brew which has a big impact on flavor. So a little trial and error to see what you like, right? What to see what works for you. That's important. Yeah, like being okay brewing a bad shot because when you go up to a machine, like the first shot you brew is probably not going to be good. You have to evaluate it and then make a change. And if you keep the coffee and water amount, it's consistent. It's a little easier to figure out what other things might be going wrong. Well, a lot of the things with this wine and language, beverage and language project that I like to bring in is how we learn from making mistakes. So you can't be too ashamed or you won't be able to move forward. So a little trial and error is what trial and error is a nice way of saying making mistakes. That's right. That's one reason I love being a Barista trainer is because even if I make a mistake, it can be a good opportunity for my trainees to understand like oh I did this thing and this was this was the result like I added the foam like to the milk too late you know and now we have a bubbly milk instead of that creamy like micro foam that we're going for how we didn't even get to know it was really nice talking with you it was a pleasure yeah no so if I want to come back to well okay maybe two more things oh yeah One is just quickly, you started at the top of the show saying, "Well, I got into coffee in Italy, but that's not what I drink anymore." That's right. What did you add as a big fan of Italy? What were you talking about? What did you mean? True. Yeah. So, back in 2007, when I was drinking Espresso's in Italy, this is complicated and maybe, again, I need to go back to Italy and reevaluate my preconceived notions. But when I think about Italian Espresso now, a lot of it is on the more bitter side of what I prefer, like on the darker roasted side than what I'm accustomed to drinking now, and would definitely need some sugar. And an Italian espresso with a little sugar in it, freaking delicious. But what I like to drink now is like has a little more of its own inherent sweetness because of the coffee and then the way we brew it. It also has a little more acidity than they would be happy with in Italy. So if an Italian were to drink my espresso, they might be like, "This is not espresso. This is some other thing," which is fine. They were allowed to think that. But yeah, I think like now I just want a little more brightness and a little more sweetness in the coffee. So your taste has just changed a little bit. Yeah. But the magic of it was something you were originally kind of interested to both at the coffee shop in Philly, but also in Italy. Just like that culture, like you just go to the bar, you just stand there, you drink the espresso, and then you I thank you. Oh, yeah. And I also glossed over you being a musician, which I, you know, I didn't, I'm a musician myself as listeners of this, this project might know and, but I didn't think that that was something I would be focusing on, but musicians just keep coming to me and the culture of music keeps being part of this cultural conversation. So what were you studying in music school? Yeah. I got a degree in music, which is, you know, BA in music, which in my program was what Some might call it musicology, thinking about the theory, evaluating core progressions and voice leading and all that stuff. And then of course, the history, which in my program was focused on what some people might call European art music, like what other people might call classical music, thinking about Renaissance music through Bach and his impact into everything else that happened after 1750. But then it may be up to like, you know, the mid 20th century for a lot of it. Although there were some classes that were offered about more contemporary like art music in quotes. But I just love like kind of in a similar way that drew me to wine and coffee, just like the sort of visceral pleasure. This is like deep sense of like this is amazing, like this is something very special. Like when I would listen to certain pieces of music and be moved to having shivers, I just wanted to understand that better and be able to analyze that sort of sense of analysis of like being able to look at a score of music and like figure out a structure on a big scale and then also on like a micro scale, like note to note, that was something that has fascinated me. So you feel that some of those analytical mind that you brought to the music study that you are applying it to this new thing that fascinates you in different drinks. You find some connections between your music studies and your beverage life. Yeah, analyzing something, but in a way that still doesn't remove from the inherent pleasure of the thing. I still feel like this wine is delicious. It doesn't matter if I know why it's delicious, but it's also cool or even more neat if I can understand some of the choices and the inherent qualities that make that wine so delicious. I would say that, for me, is the purpose of increasing wine knowledge, not to use as some kind of a flex, but to increase pleasure, you know, because if you understand everything that went into this result in the glass, I think it can definitely increase your appreciation. That's right. Beyond just the sheer delicious taste, which, you know, let's get real, is, you know, number one. number one. None of this matters unless we can share it with other people. I have special bottles of wine. I'm saving for the right moment with someone else. It's awesome if I can drink a wine and think it's delicious, but I enjoy the wine even more if I can share it with someone who maybe isn't in the wine industry. Or maybe is, but I know we'll like this wine too. And then pieces of music, they're not written just for one person. It's about being in a place together and experiencing this time in a certain way, in a way that can kind of transform your experience of the time. Oh, that's lovely. I totally agree. I just want to be in a room now, like listening to some great music, a little coffee in one hand, a little wine. A little wine in another. Yeah, we can do that. In Italy, we can do that. In Philadelphia, we can do that. In New York, wherever we are, to bring together with our beverages and the cultural story of all of these things. I really liked the way that you were talking about how you found the balance that you needed for the chemical compounds that you're consuming here. Just as a beverage professional, whether you're working in wine or with coffee, how you came to doing what you needed to do in order to spend maybe so much more time with these drinks than maybe a regular person would in the course of their day. Yeah. As a coffee professional, it took me much longer than it should have to figure out why I felt so bad so much of my time. And realizing that the way that my body metabolized caffeine might be different than some of my coworkers who could drink more coffee than me. For me, if you are already addicted to caffeine, be aware of how much you're consuming. And for me, a big thing that helped was trying to keep that level consistent. Like as I mentioned earlier, that's right. Yeah, like the same amount of tea every day. But why I might have felt bad early on in my career, like was some days I was having a lot of coffee and some days I would be having hardly any. And then realizing I felt bad both days and not realizing like, "Oh, it's because I'm fluctuating so much." If you're not addicted to caffeine yet, find ways to try to avoid that. I have a friend into is a barista who always picked one day of the week to not drink coffee, just to make sure that her body wasn't so used to it. I think she's now addicted to caffeine, but I feel like also like caffeine addiction is, you know, it's as far as drugs go, it's manageable and socially acceptable, but it's also like takes up so much of my time and my energy, like trying to make sure I hit the right amounts and like feel okay. Yeah, I like what you're saying about seeing what other people are doing and wondering why you can't do the same. And I think there can be this machismo in a way, you know, like this toughness or what you can take, which, you know, I mean, there's just no reason to put yourself, you know, your body, your health, you know, your safety at risk, whatever drink you're drinking, to just try to match what somebody else is doing. Like all of our bodies different and to just kind of listen to that and respond to your own needs without looking, you know, I mean, maybe those other people, you know, are fine, you know, or maybe they feel terrible too. And, you know, they're just, you know, waiting to, to calibrate, like listen to your body, pay attention to what you're doing. And if you want to taste something, like, don't be shy to spit it out, like maybe if you're in a cafe, try to be discreet into a little paper cup and like hide it a little bit. But I feel like being curious to taste things but then not overdoing it just out of the curiosity or the excitement for it. Or what you think the social expectation is for how much you should be drinking compared to what somebody else is doing or like this, you know, kind of that scene in Indiana Jones or something like that. You know, like, you don't have to, it's not a contest. That's right. What's really winning there is just, you know, at the end of the day for yourself. You need to feel okay. And obviously that has very strong connections to wine drinking and alcohol, because alcohol has a pretty strong impact on our bodies and is basically a toxin. So just because other people are drinking full glasses of wine, you don't have to keep up with them. Maybe ask for smaller pores or, again, don't be shy, go into that spiky cup, or the spittoon, pay attention to your body and don't do things, as you're saying, just because you're trying to prove something. You know, I got my own competitive nature, believe me, like I, you know, but I think as someone who's like that, I think that that advice to, you know, kind of slow down and be a little more aware can be even more important. So if you're like me and, you know, you, you get competitive, no matter what it is, suddenly there's, oh, this is a contest, I'm suddenly interested in this thing that I actually, when I think about it, I don't even really care about, you know, then, then watch yourself even more to say what's, what's really at the definition of a win here. - That's right. - Yeah, so thank you so much. It was really awesome talking to you. Yeah, we definitely are not just doing alcohol here. Local drinks and local sayings can be any drink, any language, so it's really fun to be able to include what is definitely one of my favorite drinks in a big part of my day, it's my cup of coffee or two. So thank you so much, Brian, again. And To all of our listeners, thank you so much for listening and for being fans of the show and being supporters of the show. And I just want to say, as I like to say, wherever you go and whatever you like to drink, always remember to enjoy your life and never stop learning. First time I sit, it's been a pleasure. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you. Support us on Patreon, Grab the newsletter at MotorDBerry .com and subscribe to the YouTube channel at MotorDBerry to watch the travel show MotorDBerry TV. Music for the show was composed by Arcilia Prosperi for the band O. Purchase their music at the link in the notes.  

Music composed by Ersilia Prosperi for the band Ou: www.oumusic.bandcamp.com

Produced, recorded and filmed by Rose Thomas Bannister

Audio and video edited by Giulia Àlvarez-Katz

Audio assistance by Steve Silverstein