The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee & Your Mental Health! James Hoffmann

you're the former World barista champion so we have cups of coffee here from different suppliers so coffee number one yeah I'd be surprised if that was expensive I'd be a little bit outraged if that was

expensive that's kind of weird that's really interesting if you want the best experience for coffee this one I can reveal that is James hofman the most

famous people in the world when it comes to Coffee News has close to 2 million subscribers on YouTube the most popular piece of coffee bro casting on the planet you've committed a huge portion

of your life to Coffee what advice have you got for me okay London has some of the best coffee shops in the world don't get an expressing machine for home coffee pods they're a microwave meal how long does it take to Decay the minute

you open that bag it's on its way out and it will happen really quickly you walk into the Starbucks what you order if I'm being fully weird be fully weird fine then I'm going to say I've got 100

for the Machinery coffee grinders are the right investment they are more important than the machine what what's your favorite cup of coffee if I'm honest it is I'll be addicted it's the

world's most popular psychoactive drug but you look at the science coffee seems to be healthy and have a really positive impact wherever it's been measured it's a great source of fiber it is like having another vegetable in the diet

people tend to perform better on cognitive tests it looks like coffee drinkers survive longer the problem with it is that coffee has this really depressing future why quick one this is really really

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deal James you've committed a huge portion of your life to a drink to a bean to Coffee yeah

why uh I love it it brings me intense pleasure like the whole thing I think I fell in love with it 20 years ago and uh I working in wine people get falling in love with wine right like people with

the drink with the culture with where it's grown all that stuff the same can be true with coffee and turned out to be true for me and I'm uh kind of obsessed

with learning and coffee is so big people see it as kind of Niche what I do is a a niche but it's this Global thing it's in every culture there's everything from botany to science to like Health all the rest of it's wrapped in this one

thing so I can spend lifetimes learning about it and never be done it it it's just huge fun and it's one of those things that's capable of incredible surprise people's expectations of coffee

are very low often and and when you kind of show them what it can be that's a very satisfying moment that never gets tiring cuz I just thought of coffee as a drink that everyone seems to be pretty

addicted to but I imagine your perspective on on that is a little bit more um artistic and expansive I mean yes and no coffee's existence kind of blows my mind there a thing that we all

do that for over a 100 years now it's been normal to have the ground up seeds of a tropical fruit plant just sitting in your cupboard and you're going to steep that in water and drink it that's a weird human thing that we do and it's

just been a part of everyone's lives for as long as they can remember coffee is just there but it turns out in sort of the last 20 years we've had this boom of specialty coffee where we've kind of um showcased how interesting it can be you

know it's not just this commoditized thing and I think that bit has sort of changed consumption around the world now actually I see in every country you know people's opinions and expect ation of

coffee have shifted massively when I first started drinking coffee which I think I was quite late to coffee and I think I'm quite a a low-level consumer of coffee part of the reason I was put

off drinking coffee was because it appears that the entirety of society are addicted to it and it might have this sort of first principal belief that anything that has a significant upside must come with a significant downside

sure and and no one can tell me what the downside was so I was just very reluctant to engage in an addiction when I can see the up side I can see people are more focused they seem to be higher

in energy that's the appearance I have but the the downside was never clear we are addicted aren't we do you know I don't like that word no no this you know it's um yeah it's the world's most

popular psychoactive drug it is the most widely consumed psychoactive drug yes I would say it's absolutely bound itself into society now it are we addicted yeah I mean addiction is complicated and I'm

not an expert on addiction I would say there's a level of dependency if you stop drinking caffeine you will suffer for 24 to 48 hours and it might be a kind of big old headache it might be

something else so you know you will uh have symptoms if you stop consuming it but you can stop consuming coffee and then go for years without an urge to consume it again so I wouldn't say

addiction is quite the right word for it but yeah we are I would say deeply dependent on it have you ever stopped drinking it for a prolonged period of time not for a prolonged period of time it's pretty hard for me not to uh sort

of consume in doing what I do like there's just a need to taste a need to you know drink the stuff I've stopped over period I've gone sick I've gone a week or two without it but um I've changed my attitude to caffeine

generally I'm I'm much more careful around it because I think it is worthy of concern the amount of caffeine you consume like I'm very Pro coffee I want people to drink and enjoy coffee but at

the same time I I am very nervous to encourage caffeine consumption that might be excessive because that's definitely not good for you why sleep like ultimately anything in this world

that interrupts your sleep perhaps with the exception of children is probably to be avoided right like Sleep Quality for every outcome be it you know uh body composition longevity all the rest of it

like cognition uh sleep's so important and I feel like we we didn't culturally prioritize the Sleep the way we are beginning to now you know I think more and more people are talking about the

importance of sleep and it's really easy to get into a cycle uh with caffeine of drinking too much coffee in the day you have poor quality sleep you're tired the next day I'll fix that with more

caffeine which will give you lower quality sleep at night and that cycle can go on and on and on I think that's very that's a bad thing basically I would say that's to be avoided so I'm

Pro cutting off caffeine early if you suffer with it in any way and there's enough ways to track your sleep these days I feel like everything's tracking our sleep so you can tell if you've had a bad night's sleep and if you drank

coffee late maybe don't do that anymore because you know caffeine has about a 5H hour halflife so you know even 10 hours after you drank a cup of coffee there's still a decent amount floating around in your

system enough that might you know delay on set of sleep or reduce the quality of your sleep isn't it Bonkers that people offer you an espresso after dinner in restaurants I don't I don't get it for some people they find it very calming

and they really enjoy it they love it they have no issues sleeping I cannot touch caffeine after like 3: p.m. I have

like a hard cut off and I'm done um but yeah I find the that you know there's the idea that it's a Digest a I'm not sure that's super well evidenced uh to

be honest having looked into it anyway but if people enjoy it I'm not going to get in the way of it but for and some people sleep like a baby afterwards I always amazed by those people that were like yeah I have coffee I got to sleep

like how how and there's big genetic differences and I think we we've started to see those and you can get genetic tests done that will give you an idea of your uh caffeine metabolizer kind of

rate are you slow are you fast but um yeah it's it's it's one of those weird things things where because how coffees made can impact the quantity of caffeine

in the end cup you can't accurately predict how much caffeine's in a coffee from a coffee shop right there's a bunch of variables that can happen that will produce a pretty big variance so this

incredibly popular drug we don't know how much we're taking most of the time which I think is kind of wild uh and maybe not a good thing and so I'm I'm kind of pro mindful consumption of this

stuff if that makes sense like uh just be aware of it and thoughtful about it and still enjoy it I want people to drink and enjoy coffee but I I want as much upside as possible as little

downside use the word drug there with drugs you get a sort of Tolerance that requires you to have more and more of the thing to get to the same levels of I

don't know psychoactiv is that the same with coffee where if I have one coffee today in a couple of months time I'm going to need two to get to the same level of like

alertness yes and no uh it seems to be that the benefits that we see of caffeine when it comes to cognition uh Disappear With habitual usage and actually adding more doesn't

change it that first coffee that feels so good is taking as sort of instead of going from zero to one it's taking us from minus one to zero it's removing the kind of withdrawal symptom almost and

bringing us back to a kind of level of like okay I'm here now and so if you really really want maximum benefit from caffeine be it cognition or sports or anything else then actually having a period without coffee beforehand will

give you the sort of greatest benefit afterwards so there's a habituation I guess but it doesn't escalate the way the drugs do like you you don't need to suddenly be drinking six eight 10 cups of coffee to have an effect you'll just

feel weird uh so yeah a little bit though again going back to my first principles one of my first principles in life generally and this is why I often avoid medicine paracetamol you name it I

will I'd rather take the headache than than start dabbling because I always think that there's a cost to something when I think about the way we live our lives in society we literally many people will have three or four cups of

coffee a day some people even more some people will just drink coffee all the way through the day throughout work and then have one on their way home from work as well and I look at that objectively and go that's Insanity that

this sort of the entire Western population is just like caffeinating themselves just to function and then you hear phrases like I like um oh I can't function I can't function I've not had

my coffee yet mhm and I just go this is you know but I don't know enough about coffee to understand if that's just you know maybe there is a free lunch as it relates to coffee or maybe sleep is the

only I think sleep's the primary concern you know if you and if you're not suffering any issues with sleep from your coffee consumption then you know if you look at the science I'm not a scientist I really I like to read the

research papers but I'm not doing the research but uh on almost every front coffee seems to be healthy and have a really positive impact wherever it's

been measured and across a whole range of different stuff so you know as to why caffeine's one part of it I think the fact that coffee contains a surprising amount of fiber is another one or the

quantity of polyphenols in there if you're interested in the gut microbiome like coffee seems to be really good for that and I think we know more and more the microbiome you know Tim Spectre has

taught us all the importance of that that it impact Us in so many different ways so on almost any front if you've researched is coffee good for you know longevity yes you see a reduction or

cause mortality that correlates to Coffee consumption is it good for uh cognitive decline yes you tend to see coffee consumption associated with uh less cognitive decline in old age or

liver function Cancer all of these things seem to have a positive association with coffee drinking but if it's messing with you sleep I don't think it's worth it that's just me

that's the the line for me of like it's not such an incred incedible benefit that that is worth the loss of Sleep Quality mhm yeah sleep has become just

the most sort of the biggest Obsession in my life over the last year I think for all of us I think it's it's just if you pay attention to this stuff you can't help but begin to obsess over it I

hope healthily you know so to avoid the impact of coffee impacting on sleep you think the best thing to do is because I've just not been drinking coffee after like 1 p.m. great okay I think that's a pretty good way to go I think decaf is

still a good option I think people kind of really negative about decaf because we have this caffeine first association with coffee a lot of people like why would I drink decaf what's the point you know you see a lot of death before decaf

or whatever but I think decaf can be really tasty which is good like it's a nice delicious hot drink and also yeah it's a little bit less of the downside if you are concerned about caffeine I'm so I'm so compar you and Tim Spectre are

the two people that have made the case I think the first time I spoke to Tim Spectre about coffee he was a little bit on the fence as to whether it was healthy or not he came back a second in

time and I think there's been a little bit of a shift in him he's now Pro coffee in terms of the gut microbiome which I thought was super interesting he says it counts as one of

my 30 fruit vegetables a week that I need to get which was really surprising so I helped my gut microbiome he talked about the longevity impacts as well which I thought was staggering that it can the studies seem to show that it

will extend your life yeah it's a reduction and all cause mortality so you're just less likely to die early I suppose is the easiest way to think about it or that's what we see from the studies and it's not that the studies

aren't without flaws but there's been a lot now and you tend to see people dying less often or less early uh when they drink more coffee not a huge amount of coffee and this is a if you ever go into

the research this is really important uh a cup of coffee to you or me might look like this a cup of coffee to a researcher is 120 Ms of coffee which is

about half of this so you'll see loads of studies say three cups of coffee three cups of coffee is when you see these benefits that's not a liter of coffee that's more like 3 to 400 Ms

total a day of say filter coffee or one or two or three espressos single espressos so the the definition of a a cup from all these studies is really confusing and problematic and I think

encourages excess coffee consumption uh but yeah three cups of coffee for heart disease for all sorts of things is is is seen to be associated with an

improvement in outcome why might that be what is it about the bean the coffee bean that is causing health benefits that's probably above my pay grade I would I would probably at this point I'm

probably aligned with Tim in that it's a great source of fiber and polyenals that it's just it is like having another vegetable into the diet it's more diversity of diet uh I think one study showed that for some people in the US

like cups of filter coffee were their primary source of dietary fiber now that's kind of wild and not really how things should be but it is a significant source of fiber if you think about it

that way you know a large cup might be three grams of fiber which doesn't seem like much until you start tracking your fiber intake and you realize oh that's a that's a a decent contribution for a drink um so yeah I think that's the

biggest part of it I don't think caffeine has been shown to be neuroprotective necessarily so I think people are trying to understand the mechanism more caffeine's been studied

separately and is much easier to study because you can dose it you can look at the effect of that to really do a study on coffee consumption is really hard you can't

really do a randomized control trial where you raise people from say 15 to 60 years old you control their diet exercise sleep and you just randomize the coffee consumption because then you might see something you could really say

coffee is good or bad we can just look at these large epidemiological studies and say well trying to control for diet and exercise and cigarettes and all these other things it looks like coffee

drinkers survive longer or have less issues and it might just be that healthy people are just attracted to Coffee we don't really know which which way around that is there's no strong mechanism but at this point I'd probably be aligned

with with Tim on this one that I think it's primarily going to be the gut the fiber Point's super interesting because he said to me that we're like as a society extremely fiber deficient yes I think the number he said that we needed

was about 20 is it grams of fiber a day I think so yeah so if coffee is giving us three or four of those grams that's almost sort of 25% of our um requirement which is pretty

staggering and I never really thought of coffee as a source of fiber neither did I until he told me I it just didn't cross my mind that this you know it's it's a drink how you know it's not like a thick I lived the life of like fiber

is is miserable cardboard Brown cereal that's fiber in my brain and the idea that this was fiber was inconceivable to me but you know then I read the studies and uh it was fascinating what about

mental health I've always wondered you know even things like depression anxiety I've always assumed a little bit that coffee because of the caffeine is going to be bad for anxiety I would certainly

say not a doctor but I would certainly say that if you someone suffers with anxiety cutting out caffeine would be something to test and to see if there's benefits to cutting caffeine out the there are a bunch of studies done on it

they're not uniform in their outcome some found different results for caffine consumption and I think because you're trying to study what is ultimately quite a generic term that covers a lot of different experiences and and uh

challenges that people face so yeah I I wouldn't say consume it regardless don't think about it I think if you struggle with anxiety it would be certainly be worth considering cutting it out what about

depression I think the same sort of thing is true there I I think there have been studies that correlate caffeine consumption to depression I think there are people who have used it and have found benefit from it again it's one of

those ones where I I just wouldn't blindly consume caffeine assuming a benefit to mental health if I have mental health challenges I think it's it's a place to check and it's pretty

easy to check cut out for a month it'll suck for a few days but you know you may see benefits or you may not but another sort of complicated tenous uh link has

been made towards cancer with coffee mhm most of the meta studies now seem to come down on for almost every Cancer there's a lower incident associated with coffee consumption this that again

that's not Universal some Studies have found differently again they're just really hard studies to do effectively I think I think that's the challenge of it I have certainly not seen any anything

that makes me uh concerned about drinking coffee uh from that perspective anyway I think there's a you know whatever impact it may have I think would be pretty minor compared to

something like uh cigarettes and I you know I remember I think you said on the internet some time ago uh you think in in 10 or 20 years time people will see

coffee consumption the way they see cigarette consumption yeah I did I remember saying that two years ago yeah and I and I think to some extent there's something in that I I think we are getting more thoughtful about caffeine consumption and I think caffeine is

going to be the root of it all rather than coffee as a whole yeah that's what I should have said I should have said caffeine and and I think there is change and I think you know we're definitely seeing that I don't think I think

there's enough health benefits in the coffee itself MH that we would benefit from keeping it around you know I don't think there's any health benefits associated with cigarette smoking but I I think coffee will have some benefits

but I think our attitude and our relationship with caffeine is going to change I think you're right about that yeah that's what I was getting at I I I almost didn't dis couldn't pull apart

coffee from caffeine because I'm a muggle on this subject matter but what I really mean is that addiction to this drug of caffeine and how it's like running everyone's life and we need three cups or four cups a day just to be

normal and to show up to work and think straight I go Jesus Christ like as is always the case with these sort of Health revolutions we kind of go to one extreme then we go to the other there's the counter movement there'll be like

the big decaf movement there's now because of neurod divers and anxiety concerns there's this jitter-free crashfree caffeine movement emerging in

things like matcha and Etc so H is decaf is are you seeing a rise in people choosing decaf and the great frustration of decaf is that decaf drinkers are

typically very poorly served by the coffee industry okay for a bunch of reasons coffee shop owners tend not to invest in decaf uh a lot of coffee roasting companies don't really care about decaf despite the fact that drinkers are the ones who are drinking

it just for the taste they are the purest coffee consumer actually cuz they just want the flavor they don't even want the caffeine just the flavor this so you know it's always been an important thing for me over the years uh

that decaf be good but yeah I'd love to see more decaf consumption going on I I I think decf can be really delicious and good if it's done properly all the way through from sort of farm to cup but

it's it's not as available as it should be to most people which kind of hurts me what about um Alzheimer's randomly something I've got increasingly more interested in over the last couple of years I think from doing this podcast

and speaking to health experts but it it has almost felt like this mystery disease that strikes some people for a reason that we haven't quite yet figured out perfectly healthy people can suddenly get the news that they have

Alzheimer's is there a relationship from the studies that you've seen between Alzheimer's um and coffee yes and I'm going to sound like a broken record where you see once again up to about

three cups of coffee a day saw an association with reduced cognitive decline in reduced incidents of Alzheimer's so it's uh again I'm not saying that coffee is causing this I'm

saying in the studies the people who drank coffee had better outcomes but you can't just say because they drank coffee that's a really important disconnect in these kind of things that doesn't happen

often enough I had um Dr Daniel aan on the podcast and one of his he's like a neuroscientist that scans I think he scanned a quarter of a million brains

now he is one of the only people that has really expressed a concern about the impact that coffee has on the brain because he says it reduces the amount of blood flow to the brain MH and that is a

net negative thing have you ever heard about that that point of view before I haven't heard much about that most of the studies I've read that looked at cognition see that kind of lift that caffeine will give you um in that you

know people tend to perform better on cognitive tests after caffine than or with caffeine than without um I'm surprised in that I I had thought caffeine was a v dilator which would in

theory allow more blood flow around but maybe it's not you know I haven't scanned a quarter million brains uh so I'm not an expert on this one but that's the first time I've heard someone talk about blood flow to the brain and coffee

specifically you know I used to believe that coffee was basically giving me energy mhm and then it was actually Daniel Arman Dr Daniel Arman that helped me understand what's actually going on

right he says it's just like blocking something yes it's it's it's stopping a compound called adenosine working in your blood and adenosine calms you down lowers your heart rate makes you feel tired and sleepy and caffeine just gets

in the way of that receptor and stops it working so a lot of people experience a kind of accumulation of adenosine and so while they're consuming coffee their body is trying to put out adenosine lower the heart rate calm them down it's

not working and eventually your body clears the caffeine and you have a kind of Crash afterwards where you suddenly just feel extremely tired because finally your receptors are clear to receive the amount of adenosine that's

in your blood so yeah there's there's a kind of downside that way again big doses tend to come with bigger crashes you know I think a lot of people now are pushing the idea that you should delay

caffeine consumption a little bit later in the day uh I think huberman is big on like no coffee for the first 90 120 minutes after waking to help sort of mitigate this effect and sort of clear

out everything in your bloodstream before you start inhibiting adenosine uh reception is that why people get like crashes and stuff like that because a lot of drinks that are coming to market

now that are like caffeine based products are promising you that you won't get crashes and Jitters so I was wondering if there right you see a lot of people pushing alanine in there as a product which seems to have a synergistic effect and and help people

feel a little calmer while sort of maintaining the benefits from that I think the evidence is reasonable on that but um again those products tend to be a bit more sort of thoughtful about the amount of caffeine in them and and I

think the amount of caffeine is really kind of key you know um you might have something with say 100 milligrams of caffeine that's a that's a pretty acceptable dose you might find that in a single espresso or say a small cup of

filter coffee if you take a pre-workout that's often 300 milligrams of caffeine and so there's all these ways that we can consume caffeine quite easily Coca-Cola is pretty low I think like 50 60 milligrams of caffeine in a can or a

bottle of Coca-Cola but you can easily end up drinking 200 250 milligrams in coffee as well if it's a uh lower quality coffee it tends to have more caffeine in it if it's brewed it's a

sort of very strong filter coffee it's just knowing how much you're taking that I think is kind of key and why why does that matter is that again about sleep or is it just because if you take huge

doses then there'll be significant consequences like crashes and stuff like that yeah I think it's the more you dose the longer it's going to take to clear from your system the more that will be in your blood come time to go to sleep

you know I think the the lethal dose of of caffeine is really pretty high a few people have got there sadly but it's it's it's a huge amount of coffee it's usually done with like pills or other sort of forms of caffeine consumption to

do it with just cups of coffee is like I think 50 or 60 cups of coffee in a very time frame a very strong coffee would be about what what was necessary for a small person to hit sort of caffeine

toxicity so it's quite hard to do and you die have a cardiovascular issue or I think it's more unpleasant than that as I recall yeah I think it's a sort of neurological thing as well it's not I don't think it's a good death if I'm

honest um not that you know maybe there are good ones but yeah I don't think it's a good way to go coffee was originally a snack kind of kind of yeah the coffee fruit was so uh

it's kind of most people don't think of coffee as fruit and coffee fruit grows on these trees they're usually about 2 met tall full of these sort of ripe red cherry looking things we call them coffee cherries they're about the size

of a grape but inside there's these two seeds kind of like a peanut facing each other and they take up most of the fruit uh so if you eat them they're not very satisfying they're mostly seed bit of skin and a little bit of kind of fruit

flesh for want of a better term on the inside but it is delicious it's kind of like a Tangy watermelon taste coffee fruits very delicious I recommend if you can try it definitely try it um caffeine

exists in coffee primarily as an insect repellent that's why the plant produces it so that if an insect attacks the fruit it gets a whack of caffeine and it's like nope and it leaves the fruit

alone so that's its function in nature other plants produce caffeine there's some interesting stuff about how uh caffeine improves the memory of bees which helps with pollination as kind of

so some flowers produce caffeine uh and they think for that reason but the the caffeine in fruit in coffee trees specifically is basically insect rep which is why the higher you grow coffee the less insects there are and actually

the lower the levels of caffeine you tenden see the plant produce you became a competitive coffee I don't know what do you call it do you call it a player Barista Barista you became a competitive

coffee Barista when you were what 25 years old yeah about that yeah and then by 27 you named the world Brea Champion yes I I I think I went hard uh you know

a couple things yeah well I really fell in love with it you know what I mean like like I got into coffee at like 23 I didn't like coffee didn't drink coffee and then I wrot a book uh called The Devil's cup that just this book yeah

yeah yeah and it's a fun book it's it's I don't know how well it's aged but it's just travel writing so he traces the route that coffee took from Ethiopia to Yemen through kind of uh turkey into the Mediterranean how it's spread around the

world and what got me about that book was like coffee is in every culture and it's different Italian espresso culture is totally different to Scandinavian Coffee Culture totally different to Australian Coffee Culture or you know

what Coffee Culture is in the us I was like well this drink is kind of interesting like it's a part of every society now and then I started to drink it I fell in love with it and I just went deeper and deeper and deeper and um

yeah in 2007 I won the World withth Championships so if you're the former World barista champion yeah and I am a

muggle which I am on coffee and many things what do I need to know what are the like the biggest myths and misconceptions about the drink of coffee that someone like me should be aware of

of I'm trying to have better coffee I'm not you know I'm not I'm never going to be like a coffee snob but I'm I want to make I want nicer coffees that are good

for me that are healthy um and that taste great what do I need to know what are the misconceptions there's there's probably less misconceptions now than ever I would say like the I think more

people are coming round to the idea that coffee is not just a bitter painful experience that you go through to get the caffeine on the other side side like it's a little trial each morning that we come to enjoy I think people Now

understand more and more that there is an astonishing sort of range of flavor in coffee 20 years ago there wasn't 40 years ago there was no diversity of flavor in coffee coffee was brown and

mean and miserable and that was it and now you can have coffees that taste kind of fruity and floral you can have coffees that taste earthy and rich or chocolatey or whatever else like so I I think the thing that I want to kind of

get out into the world is whatever you enjoy I'm pretty sure there's something could enjoy more because there's so much out there there's so much diversity that's the first thing I think the the second thing that I think people do understand

is that you know coffee's kind of made three times in a weird sort of way coffee is made at the farm level and we would understand that with wine like a grower grows the grapes they make the

wine at that point and the producer of raw coffee carefully grows fruit harvests the seeds processes them carefully and you can do a good job there or a bad job and you've kind of got a peak quality moment there coffee

is made again when you roast it it's transformed completely from a kind of green plant smelling thing into one of the most aromatic things in the world and then it's made again when you make

it and at each of these stages you can lose the quality completely you can do a terrible job roasting it make it taste awful and you can do a terrible job Brewing it and make it taste awful and I think for a lot of people coffee making

was not particularly a skill coffee making was not complex or hard and it shouldn't be complex but it it's easy to get wrong and I think you can be dis appointed by a coffee that you've made

without really understanding why and a lot of what I'm interested in is like okay you don't need to understand everything about this process you need to work out what are the most important things to understand and get those right

and then you're most of the way there I don't think the the kind of average consumer is necessarily uninformed or confused but potentially overwhelmed by choice still well I I see a variance in

the price so I assume there must be a variance in what I'm putting in my mouth or and I'm not sure what's marketing and what's you know quality yeah um I've

brought five different cups of coffee yes from five local shops Outlets Etc and I'm going to I don't know which ones

are which so my team got me these five cups of coffee Jack is just bringing them in now so we have five different cups of coffee here from five different suppliers you're smelling them all when you're smelling them is there anything

you're noticing just from smelling them yeah like um so one of the things I can assess pretty quickly is how Darkly the coffee has been roasted when you have uh the longer you leave coffee in a roasting machine the darker the color of the beans will

be and for a long time I think people Associated darker roasts with with better coffee Oiler beans looked kind of fancier whereas it's swung the other way and lighter roasts now are considered better or more expensive because they

kind of preserve more of the inherent qualities of the raw materials um so these are all reasonably dark roasts just from smell so I can kind of the smells I'm coming off there are more in

the kind of heavy uh not burnt smells well some of them actually smell a little bit burnt and kind of uh harsh but U nothing's particularly fruity or floral smelling so it's just for me a kind of gauge of where things are going

to be so there's going to be an expectation with that of bitterness in in perfume shops they give us sometimes coffee beans to smell to kind of try and wash out our nasal senses I guess does

that work yeah it totally does we we we are it's why dogs sniff really fast that you're looking for change your sense of smell Works quite well on change uh and so yes you will get what's called suppression if you smell the same kind

of smells over and over they become less and less intense it's why people end up wearing too much of the same perfume they've worn for 20 years because they can't literally can't smell it anymore we can they can't and it's also

evidenced when you go for a run and then because you can smell yourself you have to ask your friend if you smell so Dave do I stink yeah cuz your brain your nose I guess is habituated to them there's a

good hack if you ever want to break apart how like something like Coca-Cola smells if you take a component smell of Coca-Cola like lime right cuz Coke just tastes Coke to people but it's actually lime naroli cinnamon orange nutmeg and

if you smell a bunch of cinnamon and then smell Coke it smells weird because you've deleted cinnamon from Coca-Cola's FL like Aroma profile and you can do that with say lime and smell and it's like whoa I've thrown the balance out by

kind of deleting that and suppressing that it's a dull but fun kind of trick the interesting thing with talking about Coca-Cola there is I remember those Coke and Pepsi studies from back in the day

where people would rate Pepsi as tasting better unless they had it in a Coke can so when they could see the brand of the Coca-Cola they rated it better but when

they could see it in a plastic cup they rated Pepsi better and I wonder here as well because you you don't know what these coffees are you don't know what brands they are neither do I yeah um

what the results are going to be so coffee number one yes have a taste and a smell so that's a to me a pretty standard kind

of commercial coffee taste there's not a lot going on there relatively high in bitterness to me I say that's a fairly bitter cup of coffee um and that's coming I would say mostly from roast and

if something's good or bad it can be bad because it wasn't made that well that day it could be bad because it was not great raw materials and finding why is sometimes tricky I wouldn't say it's particularly expensive cup of coffee no

it didn't taste it patol station coffee you can say that I like that I you can say yeah I'm gonna just lead you into saying terrible things and I'll say nothing yeah yeah that's it tasted like it came out of like a um vending machine or something to me yeah I'd be surprised

if that was expensive I'd be a little bit outraged if that was expensive what would you rate that one out of five let's do

10 um for me and what coffee can be I'd say that's like a two I would say that was a five out of 10 yeah think I think it's kind of fair I probably should be fair and call it a four out of 10 cuz I've

tasted way worse than that okay let's go for number two now this one would be a little bit more divisive for a lot of people because it's got a little bit more acidity in it it's like a little bit re describe salmonis almost like it's a

little zingy tasting generally acidity is is associated with quality in coffee which is a real sticking point for a lot of people it's down to the fact that when you grow coffee the higher you grow it the slower it grows the the sweeter

it will ultimately be but you do get more acidity in higher coffees some people don't want that in their coffee they really don't want sour coffee so that tastes like it's got better raw

materials in there for me than this one roast a little bit lighter bruise a little bit better I'd like it to be a less kind of sour thing it's a little bit old obviously it's sat around for a while but I would say it's a for me it's

a better cup than this one like it's got a little it's got a little characteristic to it like it tastes of something that's a little bit fruity in there yeah it's got a per more of a personality hasn't it the aftertaste is a little bit something going on there

mhm M and what' you rate that out of out of 10 in your preference there's things I'd like to change about it so like six seven somewhere there like um but it has I think better raw materials in it that

that does appeal to me okay I'm going to say six as well okay I can reveal M that number one yes was MacDonald's

coffee that's not surprising that that's kind of what I would have expecting McDonald's to taste like and it was that cup of coffee cost us £130 so probably the cheapest thing here

feel like McDonald's are aiming at the kind of Cheaper end okay your assessment there was probably fair you did originally give it a two out of 10 I I feel not bad about that but it's fine

there you go so um number two you talked about there being sort of a bitterness to it and an little bit more acidity in this tastes like the raw materials are of a higher quality quity certainly the

number one that is an independent local coffee shop Y and that cup of coffee is double the price of the McDonald's one at

about3 per cup let's move on to number three okay very different taste for me it's more akin to number one than anything else like it's again it's a darker roast it's got a bit more

body to it feels a bit Fuller bit little bit richer bit earthy at the same time for me um it's Fuller isn't it it is a little bit Fuller and the first one was quite

wry to me yeah and that's in part going to be How It's Made in part how it's roasted in part you know where it's from um price-wise I wouldn't expect it to be much more than the McDonald's if I'm

honest that that tastes again like a um yeah like a a reasonbly commercial grade coffee I wouldn't say it tastes bad roast a little

dark yeah it's another kind of um yeah 343 actually this is something about the there's a sort of earthiness that I don't enjoy in coffee some people really like earthy flavors I

really don't and that's just a preference thing so that is Costa Coffee interesting there you go number four you're doing a swirling I can see you can do doing a real I try I like to

slurp usually do a little Iration but Dan a microphone it's brutal um okay so that's um probably the darkest roast of all of them I would say it doesn't taste

like the raw materials are particularly bad until I could have a guess at who that's from um but it is definitely a darker roast so more bitterness again

quite full um so you know my gut says that's a sort of Starbucks style thing to me try the last one as well then before we reveal before I get into trouble that's kind of weird um

it's a little bit Vegeta to me if I'm honest um it's not it's not my favorite again it's it's within the world of coffee roasting it's darker it's not as dark as this one yeah I like it probably

less than this one here so I'd probably be back to like a four again so number four which was the one you gave five out of 10 is Pratt is it yeah wow and

number three sorry number five yes is Starbucks is it yeah there you go so of the High Street chains then the coffee that you

rated highest in our taste test yeah was Pratt yeah second was Costa and then third was Starbucks but I would say from

my point of view the variance between them surprisingly small yeah uh they're not I don't think they taste particularly different to each other in a in a big way I think the independent

stood out a long way from the others right it was clearly different it has a lot more flavor and character going on which is good which is what you know I I

like about coffee but um you know I think the the chains the brand experience may be different but at the root there's not a huge variance in the coffee experience I

agree I wouldn't really I mean there are I can taste differences but but it's not as a profound difference as the McDonald's taste and then the independent taste which was really full

of Personality yep and interestingly the um the price Varian is the independent cost £3 cost is 3 20 pret's 320 and Starbucks is

£360 really yeah it always blew my mind for years and years I would work with loads of like essentially startup coffee shop owners and their mindset would be oh I need to be like the same kind of price as Starbucks or maybe a little bit

more and you're like what are you possibly thinking that you have the same kind of supply chain that they do that you're going to make and you know they make great margins you you're not buying 20 million paper cups a week you know

what I mean like nothing makes sense but people feel very tied to this idea that you know the price is set by the chains and I think that's changed now and people are more comfortable charging

above that but for a long time people were terrified to charge more than the chains even if the product was noticeably better and you know a real frustration for me and and that's why I'm always going to bat for Independence

because it's not like you can spend more you can get a better product by someone who cares deeply about it and and and I think it's there's a risk in going to an independent if you're traveling and you know Starbucks the model is built on I

know where to Quee who to talk to where to stand after I place an order what kind of food I can get there it's very safe if I dropped you in Moscow and told you to get coffee you'd go to a chain because you know how it works and You'

get it done Independence feel like a risk but the reward I think is often there for sure and there's more Independence than they're better than ever now so you know I'm I'm very Pro independent coffee shops I want to talk

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yourself and let me know how you get on you you have H quite a lot of businesses um I've read somewhere that you'd started I think 11 or 12 different companies getting on for that I think at this point now what are what are those

businesses um it's a good question uh my first business uh I started back in 2008 just after I won the world roast championships um which was a Coffee Roasting Company um and that still is I

suppose my primary business today even if I don't run that anymore and there's amazing MD in there and uh I just sort of try not start fires and be useful where I can do uh over the years we've

started other things uh distribution companies kind of importing stuff or uh we have a coffee shop we've done training businesses kind of education that kind of stuff uh equipment businesses kind of the big commercial

espresso machines in there I started a a coffee coffee recruitment business uh that I ultimately sold a little while back um I'm trying to think of other I've started a magazine I've started a bunch of other stuff and then this you

know getting into YouTube That's become a weird business in and of itself that I didn't plan to start but is now a kind of all consuming business with with the YouTube business you must have learned a lot about what

people are interested in as it relates to coffee because you'll see you talk about certain things and people just seem to gravitate towards those subject matter what what is it that people care so much about as it relates to coffee and your

audience care about that's a great question because I think coming into this I I for years and years as people did back then wrote A Blog and I wrote a Blog to sort of share information about coffee because it was great for me to learn and also there's a benefit to

sharing I think if you give things come back to you in the world and then people stop reading blogs and started making videos and I think having worked in the coffee industry for 20 years we had

tried to talk to people about coffee and nothing really hit and people weren't really interesting they didn't like the way we talked about it and suddenly YouTube I found a way to connect with people and it turns out we vastly

underestimated how broad and how deep people's interest in coffee is yeah people care about which machine should I buy and that remains a question that I will be asked I think for the end of my

days EXC me which machine no I'm genuinely want to know which machine I should buy because well I don't know it depends what your needs are like what's your budget like what do you want to spend what kind of

experience do you want right like but I love an espresso and I want I like speed and I want I mean I'm like everybody I want it to be super fast and really nice

so the problem with espresso specifically okay is that good espresso is a little bit tricky and it means to get really great espresso at home you kind of want to have it as a hobby and

if that does not appeal to you then don't get an espresso machine for home because you will spend a ton of money and you I can get you the best machine in the world put it on your counter after a week you be like I just can't be

bothered I don't want to do this and I think suddenly the £253 that the Independent Business charges you you're like oh that's great I will happily pay you to go through the pain of making

espresso because it's messy it's slow it's convoluted It's Tricky it's frustrating and as a hobby really rewarding but as a way to caffeinate yourself in the morning not the best

what about an Americano like a great Americano like a great filter coffee yeah there's there's definitely options there and and you can buy a machine and grinder and spend

what you can get an incredible setup for like 500 bearing in mind espresso machines an incredible setup will be two three 4,000 if you're looking at that like the top end of stuff you can go all

the way up to I can spend 10 10 15,000 of your money if you let me Jesus uh if that's that's where the budget sort of top out in in home espresso but it's kind of at that point it's like home home audio where people just they want

the best possible thing and if they have the budget that market exists I'm moving into a new house so I'm like right in the now of thinking about how to solve this morning coffee problem so I'm

trying to find something I can maybe install and and the thing with me is I don't I ain't got a huge amount of time so I kind of just want an iPad I ideally I'd just speak to it and say please give

me coffee and it would just come out you know yeah we're not there yet we're not there yet the coffee industry is improving and the automation side is improving by and large this sort of super automatic stuff where you just push a button and everything happens and

coffee comes out there's a bunch of dull technical challenges that mean they can't make as good a coffee as you could do if you were willing to do a little bit of work I thought so and that's I'm not going to lie to you that's just the

truth of it they're getting better and there are more and more solutions um and there's some great High kind of convenience uh solutions to coffee but

if you want to have fresh coffee made at home and it to be as good as possible I'm going to ask you to do tiny bits of work just just pour beans in a grinder put grinder ground coffee into a little

machine and push a button which machine well it depends on your aesthetic at this point then right like there's some really nice filter coffee it depends how much coffee you need like how much how much do you need in the morning I've got

say I've got 1002 200 to solve this coffee problem in total in total for the Machinery okay so the bad news is is

that good and bad news coffee grinders are the the right investment right uh they are more important than the machine you can give me a 20 quid filter coffee

brewer from Amazon but if you give me a decent grinder I can get some pretty good coffee out of it if you give me a 20b coffee grinder and a 5 grand machine I can make pretty terrible coffee

average coffee at best right so the grinder how how it cuts the coffee essentially you'll often see people have little whirly blade Grinders you push it but it spins madly just smashes it to

Pieces but there's no real control of the size of the pieces so some will be tiny particles other'll be big rocks really hard to evenly Brew tiny pieces the same way You' brew a massive piece

of coffee and so you get a kind of bitter sour coffee as a result of it good coffee grinders have spinning discs inside that cut to a specific size so all the coffe is pretty much the same size mostly and that's much easier to

work with but they cost more money because they need better Motors and nicer cutting discs and that kind of stuff not crazy amounts

but yeah you're looking at like at least 100 to 200b for a good grinder okay and I'd love to tell you it wasn't the case and grinders are getting it used to be like 500 for a good grinder at home it's

coming down all the time uh but yeah i' would say I'd need like 150 okay maybe off you okay and then I can get you a really great grinder that should last a lifetime and make you cafe quality

coffee it's not it's not you know it just couldn't do it 500 times a day the way a coffee shops one could but that's where you're going to spend money and then you could just get a simple pourover cone a little and just pour

water uh onto coffee on top of a mug and life be really easy that way going back to this point though about what you've discovered about people's interest in coffee from the YouTube Journey the first thing you said there was people want to know what machines and stuff and

I interrupted so please do no no I mean for for me the strategy initially was so I I my bigger umbrella goal of YouTube is that I want people to enjoy coffee more for a bunch of reasons and I want

them to see it as a more valuable piece of their life so that at some point they might be willing to spend a bit more money on it that's that's the sort of Topline goal what I'm then trying to do is find them and reviews are to sort of

find people someone will be like which is the best disor machine to buy they find me if I entertain them uh if I build trust with them I hope they'll keep watching and then I can take them

on a journey uh into coffee and I can open up new kind of avenues of exploration for them that's the kind of goal that's what I'm trying to do so in part we do that through machiner reviews and Equipment reviews in part through

kind of techniques if youve got a French press cfer what is the best way to use that I want to be there to help you do that but it's it's a lot of it's about building trust so that down the line we can go and talk about something

totally different and you'll listen and you'll trust me and and that sort of trust is super important to me in in terms of like building an audience um because coffee has this really

depressing future uh climate change is bad for coffee really really bad and to some extent maybe we don't deserve to have coffee after we've ruined the planet I'd hear that argument but as

temperatures increase around the world coffee needs cooler temperatures to grow and the only way you can get cooler temperatures as the world heats up is to go higher up the mountain it's already Mountain grown it's already growing at

1500 M 2,000 M the problem with mountains is that the higher you go there's generally less of the mountain you know I mean there's less area around the world that can grow specialty coffee

grow great quality coffee so the future is there'll be less great coffee in the future cheap coffee will be around for a while it doesn't need the same kind of conditions but great coffee has a

difficult future ahead of it and there are millions of people whose livelihoods depend on that and and that's it's not a great system so to speak it's like there's a lot of problems with how

coffee production uh is incredibly unfair towards the people who produce it but if we are to remain customers we need to be comfortable spending a little bit more on coffee in the future and if

you enjoy coffee spending an extra pound a bag two pounds a bag if you really enjoy it fine no problem at all you know what I mean I will keep coffee as a part of my life but but uh that that's kind

of one of the motivating factors for me I want more people to enjoy it just cuz I like bringing pleasure to people like w that's great you know what I mean but in the future I I want coffee consumers

to still be there through the challenges that coffee production faces what about these pods the coffee pod machines that a lot of people are um using and that are getting more and more popular wake

up in the morning grab the Pod whack it in there boom hit button drink out comes coffee yeah um the best analogy I can make is the they're a microwave meal

and microwave meals are what they are they are over quality they are super convenient there's a fair amount of waste attached to them and um you could probably do better with a little bit of

effort and it would cost you less do you do you use those pods not really not the like there are some and there that are kind of separate and different I don't want to get into right now um I think a

lot of the sort of small espresso kind of style capsule ones are very popular I just wish they were a bit more more recyclable there's a bit of waste associated with those but ultimately they're very expensive actually for what

you're you're paying a lot of money for that and you're paying for the convenience I think that for the same price per kilo you could buy some of the best coffees in the world for what you're spending on a capsule because you

you're spending money for five grams of coffee because that's what it is uh but the convenience is is very strong and it's been so success I can't argue with convenience we love a little

convenience but the possibility of of quality is far greater once you move Beyond those you know what I mean like anytime we go convenience we have to sacrifice

something and it's usually quality and it's usually value ultimately we're going to pay more for that convenience so I get it I get not wanting to make espresso but wanting something like

espresso in the mornings they've really succeeded in sort of filling that market but they are to me still a kind of microwave meal is there any culture that

doesn't drink coffee no everyone drinks everyone drinks coffee people have tried to ban it a few times it was seen as a kind of seditious drink that kind of uh sort from a political perspective they tried to ban

it here in the UK briefly I think King James I want to say tried to ban it doesn't last very long we tend to get pretty grumpy if you try and ban it uh it had a sort of they asked the pope to ban it at one point and he was like no

it's great and so he he didn't do that that was hundreds of years ago but yeah coffee was often linked to uh politics in the early days so London was the

greatest coffee drinking city in the world for a while from 16 late 1600s coffee just comes here to the city of London and takes over because up until

that point we were drinking a lot of weak beer that was the sort of safe uh high calorie high B vitamin kind of drink that we drunk and we were all a little bit drunk most of the time from

drinking a couple liters or three liters of weak Beer a Day coffee arrives and it's this safe drink that is totally the opposite to beer it is stimulating and

it transforms London Society over the time and uh we get obsessed with it coffee houses appear everywhere there is the story that in the square mile in the early 1700s there were 2,000 coffee

shops now that's that's excessive it wasn't that many it was probably but it was several hundred like they were everywhere and they quickly Diversified and sort of specialized into specific

things and so uh very famously Lloyds of London the insurance broker started as a coffee shop called Lloyds of London and people did business at the tables those became offices and to this day runners

in there are still called waiters and and so that just happened to specialize in shipping insurance that coffee house others specialized in politics others specialized in literature they became

known as Penny universities because you could pay a penny to get into a London coffee house and you would gain the education just from listening to people talk of a University degree and so they were these incredible places for a while

uh eventually our Colonial interest shifted to tea and the coffee house went into the decline in sort of 1700s 1800s but for about a 100 years London was the most incredible coffee drinking city in

the world when coffee came to the UK MH and when it came to the Western world was there productivity boom yeah 100% uh huge change in culture massive because

we were no longer drunk all the time um so yeah it arrives in London I think in 1652 it's the first uh coffee shop that's right just near Bank Tube Station you can see a little blue plaque on the wall if you go looking for there and

yeah we we absolutely fell in love with it it became a part of Industry culture politics everything like it it supercharged the nation there are people who argue that are you know we we awake from this drunken stuper and then are

like well what's the rest of the world got to offer and we go and become the colonial you know horror show that we were after that and you can blame coffee for that but that's bit of a stretch but

uh yeah it was a massive shift in society I I think for most of my life assumed that tea didn't have caffeine in it I don't know why I just always thought coffee caffeine I think cuz they sound similar yeah yeah yeah yeah but

then I I I heard at one point that tea also has caffeine in it as well a little bit nowhere near the quantities uh of coffee but you know if you're drinking 10 12 Cups of Tea a day it's probably worth paying attention to how much is in

there and how you steep your tea and all that kind of stuff will have an impact on how much caffeine's in there and what's your what's your favorite cup of coffee you get mustus asked this all the time I do get ask this all the time and I still after 20 years don't have a

great answer I drink a lot of filter coffee uh what is filter coffee so filter coffee is not from an espresso machine so it's going to be brewed either in a filter coffee machine or by hand you'll see a lot of people pouring

water over coffee uh the drink is going to be the same kind of strength as an Americano but it's a sort of it's a it's a weaker thing I'm I'm not obsessed with espresso the same way I want a cup of black coffee because I want to take my

time because as you taste a cup of coffee if it's a great cup of coffee as it cools down it's it's flavor kind of opens up and becomes really interesting and complex and so I like the idea that

I can sit for 10 15 minutes and if I want to have a really enjoyable kind of Journey of flavor that for me is is the the kind of great bit about coffee yeah I'll drink an espresso sometimes if I

want a little short shot of something tasty but but the idea that I can if I want have 10 15 minutes to myself to enjoy this thing and see some benefits

afterwards that's a wonderful thing so I like coffees from all over the world I feel like I'm forcing myself into a a tiny space here if I could only drink coffee from one country for the rest of my life it would probably be

coffees from Columbia uh they just have a real spread of flavors but some really just incredible coffees come from that part of the world but there's amazing coffee from just just about every producing country if you're within the

Tropic of uh cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn that kind of belt around the earth then you can probably grow coffee above certain altitudes and almost every country that is in that band does grow

coffee so there's a lot of different places that grow it um and there's going to be great coffee in all of those places and they'll be cheap low quality coffee in all those places too but yeah there's the range that the spread is

massive do you pour sugar and milk into your coffee I don't use sugar and milk and I get why people do because most coffee benefits from sugar and milk milk

is a very uh it has a weird Quirk it's a bitter blocker it inhibits bitterness so when you put it into a harsh bitter cup of coffee it does soften that we of course like sweet things I think uh one thing to note when it comes to all of

the studies that look at coffee and is coffee healthy they'll be like yes coffee is healthy if you drink it black and if you putting a lot of cream and a lot of sugar into your coffee there are the health

benefits very quickly taken away you know what I mean it's it's not quote unquote as healthy a drink for me putting milk or sugar into coffee kind of hides the flavors a little bit and so

I I I want to taste it without I get why people want to put it in there I don't have an issue with people sweetening or or adding a little milk or cream but you kind of lose some of what makes coffee so

interesting interesting in this book yes how to make the best coffee at home one of the points you make is quite surprising you say that

once a um cuz I used to think that coffee was a shelf staple mhm I used to think you get it you can grind it you can put it in the cupboard and it kind

of lasts forever yeah and it doesn't change you make the case that I'm wrong it is sadly not the case it's fresh food unfortunately Ely the the challenge coffee has is that we just can't see it

change if I disp an apple and I leave it for a couple of hours you can see the change in it it's staling in a bunch of different ways when you smash coffee into little pieces when you grind it to

find powder you Kickstart a bunch of chemistry that you can't undo and some of that's oxidation where oxygen transforms things and turns fats a little bit rancid over time you lose a bunch of the Aromas locked inside the

bean it just gets less interesting tasting if you want the best experience for coffee cfee grinding it fresh is is the way to do it also grinding coffee is one of the like the best smells in the

world why would you not have that as part of your life uh and so yeah coffee is fresh food and if you treat it like fresh food it tastes way better how long does it take to Decay it's a good question so if I had

it in the in the cupboard you know once you grind coffee most people would easily detect a difference a day later and they would

say it tasted notably worse two days later and so buying pre-round coffee is buying High convenience but the cost is you never got to experience how good that coffee was at the moment it was

ground so if I buy it in supermarkets yeah it's going to taste awful compared to in a coffee shop yeah you get a lot less for your money in terms of flavor it will have degraded they can gas flush

it and they'll you know pack the bags within gases and stuff but the minute you open that bag it's on its way out and it will happen really quickly and so the downside is coffee grinders cost a

little bit of money and they take up a little bit of space and they're another step in the morning between you and getting your caffeine in the system I understand that but if you want the best value for money a bag of beans costs the

same as a bag of ground coffee even though the ground coffee has more cost in terms of manufacturer but the value of the beans is just way higher it just tastes way better and so having a

grinder lets you get better value for money in the coffee that you buy going forwards what do you think the future of coffee is we've talked a little bit about the of coffee but where where you think the coffee industry and public

opinion around coffee goes from here you know I think we've Fallen pretty deeply in love with coffee in a different kind of way in the last few years I think the the

pandemic caused a seismic shift in coffee consumption around the world people had grown used to going out to coffee shops drinking good quality coffee and and that was part of their

lives and when the pandemic happened and people couldn't do that the growth grow in coffee equipment at home was astronomical this was this was something people wanted to invest in and were not

willing to let go of I I wasn't really sure pre- pandemic he said how much people really love coffee I'm like well they like it a lot but you know maybe they'd let it go if it got too expensive but in that moment where we took it away

people were like absolutely not coffee stays and and and that was really heartening to me and that was all over the world every every Market every country I spoke to people they saw the same thing huge interest in coffee at

home so I feel good about that I feel like the the promise of specialty coffee where we where we said you know the promise of specialty coffee where we said coffee can be better it's a bit more expensive but it

tastes more interesting people have enjoyed that and found that to be true so right now I feel very good about coffee consumption from a uh longevity point of view for the industry people

want to keep drinking coffee like I said the The Challenge on one side remains coffee Productions future it's going to be be increasingly difficult to grow great quality coffee in the future with

climate change we're already seeing the impact of that now and changing rainfall patterns all sorts of other stuff is making coffee harder to grow that's going to put the price of it up in the future for the high quality stuff but

for a while I I think it will sort of stay I don't think we're willing to let go I think we are going to be paying more attention to caffeine in the future and I think that's a good thing I would encourage people to pay more attention

to caffeine in the future and that may decrease our consumption overall and I'm also okay with that too I'd rather people spent good money on two great cups of coffee a day than just five

average ones just to get them through like I I'm okay with lowering consumption and increasing the quality of it that works very well for me uh because I think it will bring more pleasure to people ultimately they enjoy

the coffee they drink more it's not this mindless cheap thing they endlessly consume it's a moment of pleasure and I think it can be this moment of absolute delight and interest and pleasure if you were looking for your moment of pleasure

walking through the Streets of London yes where would would you turn which shop would you go into I mean we're talking about coffee here when I say moment of pleasure just just in case you

you thought no um where would you turn because I'm walking through London all the time and as a muggle I look up and I go okay all these logos they're all saying coffee where should I be should I be going for

random independent and rolling the dice should I be going to a chain what's your POV London has some of the best independent coffee shops in the world you know like and that's true of most major cities now like incredible coffee

is in is very available now if you know where to look and I guarantee that's the tricky bit knowing in advance by and large though there's enough written about on the internet if you search best specialty coffee in whatever city you'll

find a great list of 20 that will be a good experience it might be a bit more expensive but it will be I think a better coffee experience I get I I buy coffee from chains when I have to I get

that but given the choice I would love to go and visit an independent business see someone's expression you know what I mean someone's aesthetic someone's Vibe someone's experience it can be different and why wouldn't I want to explore

different and new so I think it's just an opportunity for Discovery loads of like U bands that tore the world get obsessed with coffee because it's a great way to explore a city it's a great way to kind of find the new

neighborhoods and just check places out and just have something fun and enjoyable in the day and I think coffee is a great way to explore new cities and you talk to people who work in great coffee shops they'll recommend you the

best bars the best restaurants like that network is so easy to tap into there that it it's the the best hack if you throw me in a random City I'll find a good coffee shop and ask the question

where should I eat the best bakery got to challenge for you here okay I throw you into a random City let's just call that City London Y and I put you in

front of all of the chains yes they're all the same distance from your feet yeah which one does James walk towards and why really difficult

question if I'm honest if you made me buy a a coffee drink I assume I have to buy a coffee drink right is that mu muffin and sparkling water and run away

um you have to get your favorite coffee from one of these that's much harder cuz otherwise I'd go to like Starbucks and get like a dessert in a cup and go because there's you know there's enough sort of fat and sugar in there it's a good time you know what I mean like I

can't deny there's a little bit of delight in little Frappuccino um well I like filter coffee and so by and large I would typically probably end up at a Starbucks cuz they're one of the

few that do filter coffee where it's sort of brewed as filter coffee distinct and different from an Americano uh and sometimes you can be mean and ask them to make a specific coffee and they have

to do that for you if you ask just right uh so that would be the The Lazy answer to that you walk into the Starbucks what you say uh if I'm being fully weird be fully

weird fine then I'm going to look world I'm going to look at the tanks they'll have two tanks of like filter coffee prepped they'll have timers counting down on them which is how old they are because the longer filter coffeee sits

the worse it tastes and so I'm going to look for the one that has the longest time left on the tank before they have to throw it away and I'm going to get a small cup or what is it the kind a tall is it who knows uh a tall cup of that

filter coffee because it's going to be the freshest brewed thing that they have and that's my kind of answer it's a bit weird to start looking at timers though but once you notice it you'll see them sitting there interesting so you walk in

you you look at the timers and then you make a request to have the one that's freshest yes cuz I would rather have say a darker roast enjoy as much that's fresher than a lighter roast that's been sitting around a couple hours or something like that I don't know what

that kind remember what their use times is it might be an hour hour and a half I want it fresher than that so that's that's my thing I think in a lot of Starbucks if you ask them to make a French press for you they they still

have to do that um so yeah there like an option this like an off menu option some have said yes over the years some have just been like straight no uh but that was a good little hack for a while but yeah by and large I'll get filter coffee

from the freshest pot that they have what is your sleep like pretty good I work hard at that though like I I pay a lot of attention to sleep because it's it's important to me and it's important for future me and I'm trying to do a

better job I'm old enough now that future me is an important thing uh in my 20s future me was not very important to me I'm in my 40s I've got to think differently you seem like a very

obsessive person I wouldn't say obsessive I would would disagree you're so you're so passionate is a better word you're starting lots of businesses you probably got more ideas than you have hours in the day comfortably you remind

myself in that there's a cost to this Obsession yes what is the cost uh yeah I I think um probably like uh if you stopped me

and said what do you do for fun I'd have to stop and think about that for quite a long time because it's a really tricky question of like oh wait what do I what do as I work and I do coffee things and then I sleep and then you know there's like whatever home life oh yeah I've

sort of sacrificed a little bit of that and I don't think I have a hobby if that makes sense like I I I think that's probably not unusual in in a certain uh group of people but yeah I do sometimes

think the the the kind of feeling of like I've got so much to do all the time I think a lack of space would probably be my loss and and I don't know what I'd do with it if I had time to do nothing

but I occasionally grieve emptiness in the day as you play your your life forward are you mentally planning to make some

adjustments to the way that you're living now as you look forward into the future cuz I always think I'm doing that I think in 5 years time or in 10 years time I'll do this I'll sell this thing and I'll just be a little bit more chill

a little bit more chill yeah yeah I've been lying to myself that way for 15 years um I would love to I think part of me knows that I enjoy what I do and I

and if I sold all my businesses tomorrow I just start another one and and and that's going to happen for a while and maybe if I get older like it changes you know what I mean I'm like oh maybe I'm

done doing this whole thing but it's it's it's the part of of you learns that these can be fun like the game is fun uh of making things creating things and then growing these things it's just fun

so yeah I'd love to I think for me I'd love to just find more time for stuff like exercise and that kind of stuff investing there and you could argue and probably should argue that I should be doing that now because how is what is

more important than health what is more important than health and the answer is nothing is more important than health so why am I not making the time for the additional cardio and making the time you know to get a little bit lifting a little bit more hit in why am I not

making that time now there's no good reason well I am starting to now like I'm I'm resting with it enough I'm like fine I'm going to make my life even more complex squeeze my day even shorter and

I will find the time um you know Peter AER has broken my brain too you know it happens to all of us but like um yeah I definitely go through the thing of like

yeah I will do this I'll spend less time on this stuff I'll have more time I'll do yoga I'll spend you know more time on myself in the future but I think I know I love what I do I really enjoy it and

it changes all the time and know one day is the same as the next and I love that and I can cope with that if your kids come to you though your two young kids and they say Daddy I want career advice

yeah based on the journey that you've been on yourself and the path that you've walked when you look back at the sort of the key components of the success you've achieved in a very

specific industry what advice would you give to them I think lean into the things that genuinely interest you because there's opportunities in everything even if it's like pen Lids or

I don't know 100% if genuinely passionate about it then there's opportunity there coffee was not a a growth industry no one was proud that their kid worked in coffee in the early 2000s you know I mean like oh they're

doing that before they get the next job in the thing or they're doing that to pay themselves through here to work in coffee was not like a career that was a weird thing to think then I loved it and I was

encouraged in it and given opportunity in it it and I flourished in it and so for me whatever the future of work holds I think creativity and empathy are important parts of that and passion is

another piece of it and I hope they have the opportunity to be passionate about something and you know I figure that's what your 20s are for right like find the thing you're excited about and then

in your 30s do it do it really well uh don't do it stupidly like I did like I did I fell for the whole hustle grind nonsense and I worked too many hours and I nearly hated the thing that I loved cuz that's what culture was then was

like you've got to work every hour and if you're not sleeping under your desk what are you even doing which is a lie and stupid and deeply unhealthy in my opinion but you know uh I you know that

was when my career really took off and yeah I'd won this world BR Championship thing in my 20s but nobody cared in the UK nobody cared there was no no one was

impressed by that if I was the world's best sandwich maker that was a career but coffee whatever different now but but you know yeah I I feel like I think people know that now

there's more time to just kind of work out what you want to do and that's okay to not be getting stuck into the perfect thing right away like it's okay to mess around and find out what you like or what you

don't like I did a bunch of terrible jobs too I worked in casinos I sold gas and electric door too I worked in music publishing and I hated all of them and that was great because now I know what I don't want to do when you think about

particularly though your success in this industry cuz some people will have passion they won't be able to become the number one world Breer Champion when you reflect and do kind of a skills audit of

yourself yeah what what do you pull out of there and go that's the reason why I was able to go so far in this particular industry I think I had a lot of practice at communication that's what I was going to one of the things I really noticed

about you is your communication skills so I had dual practice one as I said I wrote this blog which was about digesting information well enough to explain it back to someone else and so that was a great process for me secondly

I had a weird job where I was training uh I was kind of national training manager for an espresso machine company and in the back of my car had a commercial machine projector screen like I was a mobile Cafe and I would travel

the whole UK build out a kind of Set uh travel the whole UK build out a lecture room lecture to 30 random people for three hours pack it down and go to the next city or next town or whatever else

and so it was it was public speaking of A Sort uh with a totally cold audience who did not care or really be that interested can you win them over can you communicate can you teach them that was

an incredible two years of my life of doing that every week trying what age oh that was 25 26 and I was a terrible public speaker beforehand and now I love it I love being on stage I love that

kind of communication and it helps to make videos and it helps to talk to people and it helps to kind of chew your thoughts before you spit them out again and uh yeah isn't that just everything like communication isn't it you know if

I was thinking if I had young kids now what what the most useful thing I think I could do for them is to give them some kind of repetition-based

sales experience I spent four years working in call centers on the phone yeah it's no surprise to me now that I I'm a podcaster and I've done sales and I've done I raise investment and I tell stories and I speak all around the world

and I've been all around the world this week speaking and I go well those four years working on those phones where I made no money was the essence of the development of that skill but I think

it's also realizing whether you did it consciously or not that skill is rooted in empathy that skill is rooted in not in a script but seeing who you've got on the other end and and building something building a conversation around who they

are the kind of customization of communication that comes with empathy and that's kind of why I love the service industry and and and encourage people to spend time working in cafes or

restaurants because it's a great place to have to read people all the time what do they need right now because that's what a coffee shop should be it should be reliable vendor of happiness you

should walk in that building and walk out happier in a better mood happier that's the kind of key thing but that's require that requires someone on the other side looking at you and being like

what do you need today and not just asking you that but do you want a conversation do you want to know about the coffee or do you want me to just shut up and make it as fast as I can that empathy piece that reading of

people is so important and such a great skill that you can take out of hospitality into whatever else you want to do and I don't think Hospitality really kind of advertises that aspect of

it enough when I look at you if I was to do a skills audit I'd say clearly an incredibly hard worker that's going to be a great Tailwind through through your career um curiosity huge amount of

curiosity which I think kind of couples up with the word learning that you used at the start you love to learn yeah and your wealth of knowledge because of that curiosity is huge your ability to then articulate what you know and what you've learned and what you've condensed I

think is a huge one but not just articulate it tell stories that are like compelling in in a comp way the way you speak the intonations all of that keeps people with you um and then yeah I guess

the repetitions of like the craft itself like knowing how to make great coffee Yourself by actually spending a long time doing it which is different from being a parrot like practitioners and parrots are two separate things sure you're clearly a practitioner and a

great like not parent because you're not repeating things you you've learned these things yourselves but you're a great talker but also a great practitioner that's very kind of you and then you've got 20 years behind you and [ __ ] me 20 years of doing anything you

can you know you become a master so yeah that's my assessment and then you're like a likable individual you're very likable guy you got nice constant your resting face is a smirk I like a smile

which is endearing I think I'm broadly happy you seem like a happy guy so I don't think I have any reason not to be yeah what is um what is the message to the world then the closing message to the world about coffee if you had to

give one if you were speaking to everyone on planet Earth right now and you had to just give them a few couple sentences this is your megaphone to the entirety of the world 8 billion people if you want it to be coffee is really

great fun I if you are willing to put in a little tiny bit I guarantee you will get way more out however you enjoy your coffee whatever you enjoy about coffee it's got more to give and and it's I

promise a ton of fun that's what I walk away here with as many with all the other insights into you your life coffee itself the big thing I walk away from this conversation

with is an increased excitement about coffee good I hope to uh fan the Flames of that after this yeah and I'm really going to I really no I really mean that I'm I feel like I'm you might have just sent me on my own little coffee Journey

oh come and have coffee with me somewhere we'll go and get a bunch of stuff we do a little coffee tasting for you and see what you really like I know you've got no time so that's not a real invite but thank you% it is I'm just up the road from here like anytime we'll do

it I appreciate that I'll take you up on that all right okay so we we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest and I cannot believe I have to ask you this bloody question I'm

ready you will you will think I'm lying when I read this okay but I have to read it because that's my job I'm ready no you're not okay what is the duration of your

nighttime erections did you just have Brian Johnson on here is that is that from Brian Johnson um I don't know Brian the

little device was sold out by the time I saw it yeah uh I I yeah I don't know we should all be finding out apparently neither do I I mean Jesus Christ that's

not going to make the conversation cards that question [ __ ] sck Brian um but thank you so much do you know what these books are just absolutely beautiful thank you very much these have you have you just done two of them or is there

more the atlas is a second edition now and then the other one just came out the world atlas of coffee is one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen in my life and it's got they did a great job beautifully Rich um Photography in it

lots of History all of the equipment questions that I've been asking you about so if anyone really wants to understand coffee oh I tell you what get someone a great book if they're a coffee fan that is the book that is absolutely

gorgeous and then the second book how to make the best coffee at home I mean we we we touched on this a little bit but it goes into such great muggle detail because even as an idiot I can

understand all of this stuff um as to how to build your own little home setup and the process that is important to great coffee that is right yeah the first one was kind of written as a guide book is coffee got big and weird and

confusing and and there was just a lot of information suddenly I kind of wrote the first one as a guide book to this new wave of coffee and the second one really is people have embraced coffee at home I just want to make it as easy as

possible by focusing on the stuff that matters and not all the kind of Voodoo or weird sort of uh odd Traditions around that and just the stuff that really makes a difference you didn't have to make them so beautiful but

they're such beautiful books throughout so I'm going to link them both in the description below for anyone that wants to check them out thank you James thank you so much it's been a pleasure I feel inspired really enjoyed this thank you

and I I'm excited to go and get a wonderful MacDonald's coffee immediately after this conversation's done so thank you thank you a quick word on hu as you know

they're a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company it is finally here 3 years of work from hu to try and make a bar a snack bar that is nutritionally complete as of the

recording of this episode they finally released these bars that are high in protein 27 vitamins and minerals and just 2 gram ofar sugar The Impossible

has been done and it tastes so godamn good often these snack bars these like high protein snack bars taste like you're eating Play-Doh or cardboard or something it's so hard to make one that

is nutritionally complete and that tastes good and ladies and gentlemen here we have it I'm going to put the link in the description to get your bar below try it out and tag me and let me know exactly how you get on because it's

so nice to finally have a bar that is nutritionally complete and that actually doesn't taste like cardboard and that tastes delicious The Impossible has been accomplished do you need a podcast to

listen to next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done so I've linked that episode in the description below I know

you'll enjoy [Music] it