The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann

23:07It'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 a denazine that's in your blood. So yeah, there's a kind of downside that way. Again, big doses tend to come with bigger crashes. I think a lot of people now are pushing the idea that you should delay caffeine consumption a little bit later in the day. I think Huberman is big on like no coffee for the first 1920 minutes after waking to help sort of mitigate this effect and sort of clear out everything in your bloodstream before you start inhibiting a denazine reception.

23:44Is 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 they're right. You see a lot of people pushing L -thienin in there as a product which seems to have a synergistic effect and help people feel a little calmer while sort of maintaining the benefits from that. I think the evidence is reasonable on that. But again, those products tend to be a bit more sort of thoughtful about the amount of caffeine in them. And I think the amount of caffeine is really kind of key.

24:14You know, you might have something with say 100 milligrams of caffeine. That's a pretty acceptable dose. You might find that in a single espresso or in 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 bottle of Coca -Cola. But you can easily end up drinking 250 milligrams in coffee as well. If it's a lower quality coffee, it tends to have more caffeine in it. If it's brewed as a sort of very strong filter coffee.

24:47It's just knowing how much you're taking it that I think is kind of key. And 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 lethal dose of caffeine is really pretty high. A few people have got there, sadly. Really? But it's a huge amount of coffee. It's usually done with like pills or other sort of forms of caffeine consumption.

25:16To do it with just cups of coffee is like 50 or 60 cups of coffee in a very short time frame. A very strong coffee would be about what was necessary for a small person to hit. But sort of caffeine toxicity. So it's quite hard to do. And you either kind of your vascular 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. 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 it's kind of the most people don't think of coffee as fruit.

25:53And coffee fruit grows on these trees. They're usually about two meters 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. 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 one of the better term on the inside. But it is delicious. It's kind of like a tangy watermelon taste. Coffee fruits are very delicious. I recommend if you can try it, definitely try it.

26:21Caffeine 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 caffeine improves the memory of bees, which helps with pollination. So some flowers produce caffeine than they think for that reason. But the caffeine in fruit in coffee tree specifically is basically insect repellent, which is why the high you grow coffee, the less insects there are.

26:55And actually the lower the levels of caffeine you tend to see the plant produce. You became a competitive coffee. I don't know what you call it. You call it a player, barista. You became a competitive coffee barista when you were 25 years old. Yeah, about that. And then by 27 you named the world barista champion. Yes. I think I went hard. A couple of things. Yeah, I really fell in love with it. I got into coffee at 23. I didn't like coffee and drink coffee. And then I wrote a book called The Devil's Cup that just spoke. Yeah, and it's a fun book. I don't know how well it's aged, but it's just travel writing.

27:32So he traces the route that coffee took from Ethiopia to Yemen through Turkey into the Mediterranean, how it spread around the world. And what got me about that book was like coffees in every culture and it's different. Italian espresso culture is totally different to Scandinavian coffee culture, totally different to Australian coffee culture. Or coffee culture is in the US. I was like, well, this drink is kind of interesting. 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 yeah, in 2007, I won the World Brista Championships.

28:04So if you're the former World Barista champion, and I am a muggle, which I am, on coffee and many things, what do I need to know? What are the biggest myths and misconceptions about the drink of coffee that someone like me should be aware of? I'm trying to have better coffee. I'm not, you know, I'm never going to be like a coffee snob. But I want to make, I want nicer coffees that are good for me, that are healthy, and that tastes great. What do I need to know? What are the misconceptions? There's probably less misconceptions now than ever, I would say. 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.

28:51Like 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 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 you could enjoy more, because there's so much out there, there's so much diversity.

29:24That's the first thing. I think that 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's made at the farm level. 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, harvest the seeds. Process them carefully, and you can do a good job there, 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.

29:59And 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's easy to get wrong. And I think you can be disappointed 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.

30:29You 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 kind of average consumer is necessarily uninformed or confused, but potentially overwhelmed by choice still. Well, I see a variance in the price, so I assume there must be a variance in what I'm putting in my mouth. 100%. And I'm not sure what's marketing and what's quality. I've brought five different cups of coffee 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.

31:09Jack 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, so that one of the things I can assess pretty quickly is how darkly the coffee's been roasted. When you have 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 better coffee or earlier 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.

31:44So 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, not burnt smells, or some of them actually smell a little bit burnt and kind of harsh. But 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 perfume shops, they give us sometimes coffee beans to smell to kind of wash out our nasal senses, I guess. Does that work? Yeah, totally does. We are, it's what dogs sniff really fast, that you're looking for change, your sense of smell works quite well on change.

32:21And 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 you get, Dave, do I think? Do I see, yeah, because your brain, your nose, I guess, is habituated to though. There's good hack if you ever want to break apart how it likes it when I cook a cola smells.

32:51If you take a component smell of Coca -Cola like lime, right? Because coke just takes a coke to people. But it's actually lime, neurology, 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 fleck. It's a 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.

33:26So 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 don't know what these coffees are. You don't know what brands they are. Neither do I. Yeah. What the results are going to be. So coffee number one. Yes. Have a taste to the smell.

33:52So that's a, to me, a pretty standard kind of commercial coffee taste. It's not a lot going on that relatively high in bitterness to me. So that's a fairly bitter cup of coffee. And that's becoming, 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 good. Patural station coffee. You can say that. I like that. You can say, yeah, I'm going to just lead you into saying terrible things.

34:25And I'll say nothing. Yeah. Now that's the taste that it came out of like a 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 ten. For me and what coffee can be, I'd say that's like a two. I would say that was a five out of ten. Yeah, I think it's kind of fair. I probably should be fair and call out a four out of ten because I've tasted way worse than that. Okay. Let's go for number two.

34:57Now, this one would be a little bit more divisive for a lot of people because it got a little bit more acidity in it. It's like a little bit of, it's supposed to be a little bit of a salinous almost. Like it's a little zingy tasting. Generally, acidity is associated with quality and coffee, which is a real sticking point for a lot of people. It's down to the fact that would you grow coffee, the higher you grow it, the slower it grows, the sweeter it will ultimately be. But you do get more acidity in higher grown coffees. Some people don't want that in their coffee. They really don't want sour coffee.

35:25So 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 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 part more of a personality as in it. Yes, it's a little bit, something going on there. Mm -hmm. And what would you rate that out of ten in your preference?

35:54These things I'd like to change about it. So like six, seven, somewhere there. Like, but it has, I think, better raw materials in it that does appeal to me. Okay, I'm going to say six as well. Okay. I can reveal that number one was McDonald's coffee. That's not surprising. That's kind of what I would have expected from the Dollars to taste like. And it was that cup of coffee cost us £1 .30. So I put it the cheapest thing here. I 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 ten. I feel not bad about that, but it's fun.

36:38There you go. So number two, you talked about there being sort of a bitterness to it and an inde - Like a little bit more acidity in this. It tastes like the raw materials are of a higher quality. Certainly the number one. That is an independent local coffee shop. Yep. And that cup of coffee is double the price of the McDonald's one at about £3 per cup. Let's move on to number three. Okay.

37:09Very 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. It feels a bit fuller, a bit richer, a bit earthy at the same time for me.

37:25It's fuller, isn't it? It is a little bit fuller. And that's... The first one was quite watery to me. Yeah. And that's in part, it could be how it's made, in part, how it's roasted in part, you know, where it's from. 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... Yeah, like a reasonably commercial grade coffee. I wouldn't say it tastes bad. Roasted a little dark. Yeah, it's another kind of... Yeah, three, four, three, actually. This is something about the... There's this sort of earthiness that I don't enjoy in coffee. Some people already like earthy flavors, I really don't.

38:01And that's just a preference thing. So that is... Cost of coffee. Interesting, yeah. Number four.

38:10You're doing this swirling, I can see. You can do it in real. I try... I like to slurp usually. You do little air -ration, but down a microphone, it's brutal. Okay. So that's probably the darkest roast of all of them. I would say it doesn't taste like the raw material, it's particularly bad. And so I can have a guess at who that's from. But it is definitely a darker roast. So more bitterness, again, quite full. 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. Probably answer trouble.

38:48That's kind of weird. It's a little bit vegetable to me, if I'm honest. It's not my favourite. Again, 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 ten, is Pratt. Is it? Yeah. Wow. And then five. Three. Sorry, number five. Yes. Is Starbucks? Is it? Yeah. There you go. So over the high street chains then, the coffee that you rated highest in our taste test was Pratt. Yeah. Second was Costa. And then third was Starbucks.

39:33But I would say from my point of view, the variance between them surprisingly small. Yeah. They're not, I don't think they're taste particularly different to each other in a big way. I think the independence 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 like about coffee. But you know, I think the chain's, the brand experience may be different, but at the root, there's not a huge variance in the coffee. I agree. I mean, there are, I can taste differences, but it's not as a profound differences.

40:09The McDonald's taste and then the independent taste, which was really full of personality. Yep. And interestingly, the price variance is, the independent cost three pounds. Cost is three pound twenty, Pratt's three pound twenty, and Starbucks is three pound sixty. Really? Yeah. It always blew my mind for years and years. I worked with loads of, like, this actually start up coffee shop owners. And then minds that would be, or I need to be like the same kind of price at Starbucks, or maybe a little bit more. And you know, what are you possibly thinking that you have the same kind of supply chain that they do that you're going to make?

40:40And you know, they make great margins. You're not buying twenty million paper cups a week. You know, 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 change 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 that's why I'm always going to bat for independence, because it's not that you're going to spend more. You can get a better product by someone who cares deeply about it.

41:13And I think it's, there's a risk in going to an independent, if you're traveling. And, you know, Starbucks, the model's built on, I know, where to queue, who to talk to, where to stand after a place in order. What kind of food I can get there. It's very safe. If I dropped you in Moscow until you get coffee, you'd go to a chain, because you know how it works and you'd 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 very pro independent coffee. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead.

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42:22Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett. Jobs. You have quite a lot of businesses. 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 those businesses? It's a good question. My first business, I started back in 2008 just after I won the Wilburous Chabachips, which is a coffee roasting company.

42:57That still is, I suppose, my primary business today, even if I don't run that anymore. This is an amazing MD. I just try not to start fires and be useful where I can do. Over the years, we've started other things. Distribution companies, importing stuff. We have a coffee shop. We've done training businesses, education, equipment businesses, the big commercial espresso machines in there. I started a coffee recruitment business that I ultimately sold a little while back. I've started a magazine. I've started a bunch of other stuff. Then, 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.

43:41With 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 matters. What is it that people care so much about as it relates to coffee and new audience care about? That's a great question. Because I think coming into this, I, for years and years, as people did back then, wrote a blog. I wrote a blog to 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 I start making videos.

44:13I think having worked in the coffee industry for 20 years, we had tried to talk to people about coffee and nothing really hit. People weren't really interested in it. They didn't like the way we talked about it and suddenly YouTube, I found a way to connect with people. 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. That remains a question that I will be asked, I think, for the end of my days. It's like, I should make a switch machine. Yeah, well, I'm genuinely want to know which machine I should buy because...

44:42Well, I don't know. It depends what your needs are. It might need... What's your budget? What do you want to spend? What kind of experience do I? But I love an espresso. I want to... I like speed and I want... I mean, I'm like everybody. I want it to be super fast and really nice. The problem with espresso specifically 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 her because you will spend a ton of money and get the best machine in the world, put it on your counter after a week, you'll be like, I just can't be bothered.

45:19I don't want to do this. And I think suddenly the £2 .53 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 definitely options there. And you can buy a machine and grinder and spend, you can get an incredible setup for like £500, bearing on one espresso machines.

45:56An incredible setup will be £2 ,000 to £3 ,000. If you're looking at the top end of stuff, you can go all the way up to, I can spend £10 ,000, £15 ,000 of your money. If you let me, if that's where the budget sort of top out in home espresso. But it's kind of, at that point, it's like 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 moment now of thinking about how to solve this morning coffee problem. So I'm trying to find something I can maybe install. 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.

46:33I ideally, I'd just speak to it and say, please give me a coffee. And it would just come out, you know? Yeah, 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, we 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, like, 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.

47:02And there's some great high kind of convenience solutions to coffee. But if you want to have fresh coffee made at home and it's 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 100, 200 pounds to solve this coffee problem. In total. In total, for the machinery.

47:37Okay, so the bad news is that, good bad news. Coffee grinders are the right investment, right? They are more important than the machine. You can give me a twin -equid 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 20 pound coffee grinder and a five grander's machine, I can make pretty terrible coffee. Average coffee at best, right? So the grinder, how it cuts the coffee, essentially, you'll often see people have a little worthy blade grinders, push a button, it spins madly, just smashes it to pieces. But there's no real control of the size of the pieces.

48:15So some will be tiny particles. I'll be big rocks. Really hard to evenly brew tiny pieces, the same way you'd 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 the cut to a specific size. So all the coffee 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 a hundred to 200 pounds for a good grinder. And I'd love to tell you it wasn't the case.

48:50And grinders are getting, it used to be like 500 pounds for a good grinder at home. It's coming down all the time. But yeah, I'd say I'd need like 150. Okay. Maybe off you. I can then I 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 shop one could. But that's where you're going to spend money. And then you could just get a simple pour of a cone and just pour water 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 you and Johnny.

49:24The first thing you said there was people want to know what machines and stuff. And they interrupted, so please do. No, no, I mean, for me, the strategy initially was, so 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 at some point they might be willing to spend a bit more money on it. That's that's the sort of top line goal. What I'm then trying to do is find them and reviews are going to sort of find people. Someone will be like, which is the best person machine to buy.

49:51They find me. If I entertain them. If I build trust with them, I hope they'll keep watching. And then I can take them on a journey 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 machine reviews and equipment reviews. In part through kind of techniques. So if you've got a French press, what is the best way to use that? I want to be there to help you do that. But 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.

50:25And that sort of trust is super important to me in terms of like building an audience. Because coffee has this really depressing future. 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 sort of get cooler temperatures is that the world heats up. It's to go higher up the mountain. It's already mountain growing. It's already growing at 1 ,500 meters, 2 ,000 meters. The problem with mountains is that the higher you go, there's generally less of the mountain.

51:01You know, in this less area around the world that can grow specialty coffee, 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 that's not a great system, so to speak. There's a lot of problems with how coffee production is incredibly unfair towards the people who produce it. But if we are to remain custom as we need to be comfortable spending a little bit more on coffee in the future.

51:37And if you enjoy coffee, spending an extra pound of bag, two pounds of bag, if you really enjoy it, fine. No problem at all. You know, I mean, I will keep coffee as a part of my life. But that's kind of one of the motivating factors. For me, I want more people to enjoy it just because I like bringing pleasure to people. Like, wow, that's great, you know what I mean? But in the future, 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 using and that are getting more and more popular?

52:10Yes. Wake up in the morning, grab the pod, whack it in that bum, hit burn. Shhh. How comes coffee? Yeah. The best analogy I can make is that they're a microwave meal and microwave meals are what they are. They are of a quality. They are super convenient. It's a fair amount of waste attached to them. And you could probably do better with a little bit of effort and it would cost you less. Do you use those pods? Not really. Not the, like, there are some and they're that are kind of separate and different. I don't want to get into it right now. I think a lot of their sort of small nespresso castile capsule ones are very popular.

52:49I just wish they're a bit more recyclable. There's a bit of waste associated with those. But ultimately they're very expensive. Actually, for what you're paying a lot of money for that and you're paying for the convenience, I think, 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're spending money for five grams of coffee because that's what it is. But the convenience is very strong and it's been so successful. I can't argue with convenience. We love a little convenience. But the possibility of quality is far greater once you move beyond those.

53:23You know, I mean, like any time 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 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 coffee. People have tried to ban it a few times. It was seen as a kind of seditious drink that's kind of... So from a political perspective, they tried to ban it here in the UK briefly.

54:01I think King James, I also tried to ban it. It doesn't last very long. We tend to get pretty grumpy if you try and ban it. They asked the Pope to ban it at one point and he was like, no, it's great. And so he didn't do that. That was hundreds of years ago. But yeah, coffee was often linked to 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 of them to that point, we were drinking a lot of weak beer. That was the sort of safe, high -calorie, high -bibir to mean kind of a drink that we drunk.

54:39And we were all a little bit drunk most of the time from drinking a couple of litres or three litres 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 we get obsessed with it. Coffee houses appear everywhere. There is the story that in the square mile in the early 1700s, there were 2000 coffee shops. Now that's excessive. It wasn't that many. It was probably... but it was several hundred. It's like they were everywhere. And they quickly diversified and sort of specialised into specific things.

55:12And so very famously, in 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 so that just happened to specialise in shipping insurance, that coffee house. Others specialised in politics, others specialised 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 the university degree. And so they were these incredible places for a while.

55:46Eventually, our colonial interest shifted to tea. And the coffee house went into the decline and sort of 1700s and 1800s. But for about a hundred years, London was the most incredible coffee drinking city in the world. When coffee came to the UK, and when it came to the Western world, was there productivity boom? Yeah, 100%. Huge change in culture. Mass, because we were no longer drunk all the time. So yeah, it arrives in London, I think in 1652, is the first coffee shop that's right. Just near bank cheap station. You can see a little blue plaque on the wall if you go looking for it there. Yeah, we absolutely fell in love with it.

56:23It became a part of industry culture, politics, everything. It's supercharged to the nation. There are people who argue that are, you know, we awake from this drunken stupor. And then I'm like, well, what's the rest of the world got to offer? And we go and become the colonial horror show that we were after that. And you can blame coffee for that. But there's a bit of a stretch. But yeah, it was a massive shift in society. 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 because they sound similar. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

56:54But then I heard at one point that tea also has caffeine in it as well. A little bit. No, when near the quantities of coffee. But, you know, if you're drinking 10 to 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 favorite cup of coffee? You get muskets asked this all the time. I do get asked this all the time. And I still, after 20 years, don't have a great answer. I drink a lot of filter coffee. What is filter coffee? So filter coffee is not from an espresso machine.

57:23So 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. The drink is going to be the same kind of strength as an americano. But it's a sort of, it's a weaker thing. 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 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 the kind of great bit about coffee.

57:58Yeah, I'll drink an espresso sometimes if I want a little short shot of something tasty. 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 tiny space here. If I could only drink coffee from one country for the rest of my life, it would probably be coffees from Colombia. They just have a real spread of flavors, but it's really just incredible coffees come from that part of the world. But there's amazing coffee from just about every producing country.

58:31If you're within the tropical cancer and the tropical 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. And there's going to be great coffee in all of those places. And there'll be cheap and low quality coffee in all those places too. But yeah, the range that the spread is massive. Do you pull 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.

59:05Milk is a very, 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 one thing to note when it comes to all of the studies that look at coffee and is coffee healthy, there'll be like, yes, coffee's healthy if you drink it black. And if you're 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 not quote and quote, as healthy a drink. For me, putting milk or sugar into coffee kind of hides the flavors a little bit.

59:37And so I want to test it without. I get why people want to put it in there. I don't have an issue with people sweetening or adding a little milk or cream. But you kind of lose some of what makes coffee so interesting.

59:54In 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, because I used to think that coffee was a shelf staple. 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. The challenge coffee has is that we just can't see it to change. If I dice up an apple and I leave it for a couple of hours, you can see the change in it. It's stailing in a bunch of different ways.

1:00:30When 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, grinding it fresh is the way to do it. Also, grinding coffee is one of the best smells in the world. Why would you not have that as part of your life? And so, yeah, coffee is fresh food. And if you treat it like fresh food, it tastes way better.

1:01:03How long does it take to decay? So that's a good question. If I had it 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 -ground 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, it's going to taste awful compared to in a coffee shop. Yeah, you get a lot less for your money in terms of flavour. It will have degraded. They can gas flush it and they'll pack the bags within gases and stuff.

1:01:42But 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 there are another step in the morning between you and getting your coffee 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 manufacture. 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.

1:02:16What do you think the future of coffee is? We've talked a little bit about the history of coffee, but what do 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 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 that was part of their lives. And when the pandemic happened, people couldn't do that. The growth in coffee equipment at home was astronomical.

1:02:52This was something people wanted to invest in and were not willing to let go of. I wasn't really sure, pretty pandemic. You said how much people really love coffee. I'm like, well, they like it a lot, but maybe they'd let it go if it got too expensive. But in that moment, where we took it away, people like absolutely not coffee stays. And that was really heartening to me. And that was all over the world. 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 promise of specialty coffee, where we've said, you know, the promise of specialty coffee, where we've said coffee can be better.

1:03:27It'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 longevity point of view for the industry. People want to keep drinking coffee. Like I said, the challenge on one side remains coffee production's future. It's going to be increasingly difficult to grow. Great quality coffee in the future with climate change. We're already seeing the impact of that now. What 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.

1:04:02But for a while, 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 wouldn't 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 spend good money on two great cups of coffee a day than just five average ones just to get them through. I'm okay with lowering consumption and increasing the quality of it. That works very well for me. Because I think it'll bring more pleasure to people ultimately.

1:04:35They enjoy the coffee, they drink more. It's not this mindless, cheap thing they're endlessly consumed. 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 you turn? Which shop would you go into? I mean, we're talking about coffee here when I say a moment of pleasure. Just say, just, you thought something else. I mean, so how? No, how? Where would you turn? Because I'm walking through London all the time. And as a mug, I look up and I go, okay, all these logos, they're all saying coffee.

1:05:06Where should I be? Should I be going for a 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. That's true of most major cities now. Incredible coffee isn't. It's very available now. If you know where to look and I go and 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.

1:05:37I get, 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, I mean, someone's aesthetics, someone's vibes, 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 bands that talk 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.

1:06:08And 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 the best hack. Do you throw me in a random city? I'll find a good coffee shop and ask the question, where should I eat? Is the best bakery? Good challenge for you here. Okay. I throw you into a random city. Let's just call that city London. Yep. And I put you in front of all of the chains. They're all the same distance from your feet. Which one does James walk towards? And why? A really difficult question.

1:06:45If I'm honest, if you made me buy a coffee drink, I assume I have to buy a coffee drink, right? Yeah, you can't just get like a muffin. I'm up in a spark in water and run away. You have to get your favorite coffee from these chains. That's much harder. Because otherwise I'd go to Starbucks and get like a dessert and a cup and go. Because there's, you know, there's enough sort of fan sugar in there. There's a good time. You know what I mean? I can't deny there's a little bit of delight in a little Frappuccino. Well, I like filter coffee and so by and large, I would typically probably end up at a Starbucks, because they're one of the few that do filter coffee.

1:07:20It's sort of a brute -ass filter coffee, distinct and different from an Americano. 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. So that would be the lazy answer to that. You walk into Starbucks, would you say? If I'm being fully weird. Be fully weird. Fine. Then 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 coffee 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.

1:07:56And I'm going to get a small cup or what is it there? Can I have a tall? I'll say, who knows? I talk up of that filter coffee because it's going to be the freshest, brood 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 look at the timers, and then you make a request to have the one that's freshest. Yes. Because I would rather have, say, a darker roast that I don't enjoy as much that's fresher, than a lighter roast that's been sitting around a couple hours or so.

1:08:23I don't know whether I kind of know what their use times is. It might be an hour, an hour and a half. I want it fresher than that. So that's my thing. I think in a lot of Starbucks, if you ask them to make a French press for you, they still have to do that. So yeah, there's like an option that's like an often menu option. Some have said yes over the years. Some have just been straight -known. But that was a good little hack for a while. But yeah, by and large, I'll get filter coffee from the freshest part that they have. What is your sleep like? Pretty good. I work hard at that though. Like I pay a lot of attention to sleep because it's important to me, and it's important for future me.

1:08:56And I'm trying to do a better job. I'm old enough now that future me is an important thing. In my 20s, future me was not very important to me. In my 40s, I've got to think differently. You seem like a very obsessive person. I wouldn't say obsessive. I was, I was, I mean, I'd be so disagreeable. So you're so passionate, it's a better word. You're starting lots of businesses. You probably got more ideas than you have hours in the day. Comfortably. You remind me myself in that. There's a cost to this obsession. Yes. What is the cost? Yeah, I think probably, like if you stopped me and said, would you do for fun?

1:09:31I'd have to stop and think about that for quite a long time. Because it's a really tricky question. They're like, oh, wait, what do I do as I work? And I do coffee things and then I'd 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 think that's probably not unusual in a certain group of people. But yeah, I do sometimes think 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 I don't know what to do with it if I had time to do nothing.

1:10:02But I occasionally grieve emptiness in the day. As you play 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? Because I always think I'm doing that. I think in five years time or in ten 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, yeah. I've been lying to myself that way for 15 years. I would love to, I think part of me knows that I enjoy what I do. And if I sold all my businesses tomorrow, I'd just start another one. And that's going to happen for a while.

1:10:40And maybe if I get older, it changes. You know what I mean? I'm like, oh, maybe I'm done doing this so whole thing. But it's the part of you learns that these can be fun. Like the game is fun 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 what is more important than health? What is more important than health? Now there's nothing is more important than health.

1:11:14So why am I not making the time for the additional cardio and making the time, you know, to get a little bit more lifting and a little bit more hit in? Why am I not making that time now? Because there's no good reason. Well, I am starting to now. 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. Peter, it here has broken my brain to me. I haven't saw all of this. But like, 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.

1:11:46I'll spend 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 no 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, you're two young kids. And they say, Daddy, I want career advice. Yeah. Based on the journey that you've been on yourself and the part 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 leaning to the things that Jenny will interest you, because there's opportunities in everything.

1:12:21Even if it's like pen lids or I don't know, bars. If genuinely passionate about it, then there's opportunity there. Coffee was not a growth industry. No one was proud that their kid worked in coffee in the early 2000s. Jeremy, 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. 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.

1:12:56And passion is another piece of it. And I hope they have the opportunity to be passionate about something. And I figure, that's what your 20s are for. I find the thing you're excited about. And then in your 30s? Do it. Do it really well. Don't do it stupidly 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. Because that's what culture was then. It 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, I, you know, that was when my career really took off.

1:13:32And yeah, I'd won this World Breast Archibaldship thing in my 20s. 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 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, I'll get a 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 to door.

1:14:08I 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, because some people will have passion. But they won't be able to become the number one world Breast Archampion. When you reflect and do kind of a skills audit of yourself, 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 was going to, one of the things I really noticed about you is your communication skills.

1:14:38So I had dual practice. As I said, I wrote this blog, which was about digesting information and 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 a training, a national training manager for an espresso machine company. And in the back of my card, a commercial machine, projector, screen, like I was a mobile cafe and I would travel the whole UK, build out a kind of, let's, 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.

1:15:10And so it was public speaking of a sort 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. Tronage? Oh, that was 2526. 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 yeah, It's not just everything like communication. Isn't it?

1:15:44You know, if I was thinking, if I had young kids now, 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 core centers on the phone. Yeah. It's no surprise to me now that 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, wow, 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's rooted in empathy.

1:16:23That skill's rooted in not an ascript, but seeing who you've got on the other end 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 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 a reliable vendor of happiness. You should walk in that building and walk out happier in a better mood. Happier.

1:16:55That's the kind of key thing, but that's required. That requires someone on the other side looking at you and being like, what do you need today? I'm 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 order, I'd say clearly an incredibly hard worker.

1:17:27That's going to be a great tell when through your career. 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 a compelling way. The way you speak, the intonations, all of that, keeps people with you. 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.

1:18:04Sure. You're clearly a practitioner. And a great, like, not parrot because you're not repeating things. You've learned these things yourself, 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 in fact, me, 20 years of doing anything, you can become a master. So, yeah, that's my assessment. And then you're like a likable individual. You're a very likable guy. You've got to make it 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. Yeah, I don't think I've any reason not to be.

1:18:36What 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. 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 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.

1:19:17Good. I hope to found the flames of that after this. Yeah, and I'm really going to, I really, no, I really mean that. I feel like you might have just sent me on my own little coffee jelly. Oh, come and have coffee with me somewhere. We'll go and get a bunch of stuff. We'll 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 to... No, I'm just having a few questions. There it is, I'm just having a road from here. Like any time, we'll do it. I appreciate that. I'll take you up on that. Okay, so we have a closing tradition on this podcast with the last guest.

1:19:44Leave the question for the next guest, and I cannot believe I have to ask you this bloody question. I'm ready. 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 from Brian Johnson? I don't know, Brian. The little device was sold out by the time I saw it. 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. Fuxx it, Brian.

1:20:23But thank you so much. Do you know what? These books are just absolutely beautiful. Thank you very much. Have you just done two of them? Just the other one just came out. The Atlas is a second edition now, and then the other one just came out. The world's 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, or I tell you what, get someone a great book if they're a coffee fan.

1:20:52That is the book. That is absolutely gorgeous. And then the second book, How to Make the Best Coffee at Home. I mean, 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. As to how to build your own little home setup and the process, that is important to great coffee. That is right. Yeah, yeah. The first one was written as a guidebook. His coffee got big and weird and confusing, and there was just a lot of information suddenly. I kind of wrote the first one as a guidebook to this new wave of coffee. And the second one really is people have embraced coffee at home.

1:21:24I 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, 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. They're different. You can link them both in the description below for anyone who wants to check them out. Thank you. James, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I fans, by the way. I really enjoyed this. Thank you. And I am excited to go and get a wonderful Mac Donald's coffee, immediately after this conversation is done.

1:21:53So thank you. Thank you. 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 it.

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