250: James Freeman

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. People in coffee have a sense that we're on an escalator, always continuing to evolve, to innovate, to push the industry forward. But I actually think we're on a pendulum. And, you know, fashions, tastes, and coffee swing back and forth.

0:52This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard.

0:59As the founder of Blue Bottle Coffee, James Freeman has seen the rise of specialty coffee from a very unique vantage point. Freeman joins us in the studio to talk about his company's influence, as well as where coffee is heading today. We find out about his Dream Cafe project in Japan and what excites him most about making coffee at home. We also talk about James' excellent book, The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee. This is a seriously interesting talk with one of the great characters in the world of food and drink. I hope you enjoy it.

1:37James Freeman, welcome to This Is Taste. Thanks for having me, Matt. I'm really excited to see you. I interviewed you about maybe 10 years ago, 14 years ago. I don't know. Time is different. X number of years ago. Only pre-COVID and post-COVID. I agree. And it was when you're releasing your book with 10 Speed, and I just love that book so much. It really was a pioneering book that merged recipes with coffee intelligence with, like, essay writing. Yeah, it was fun. I loved the collaborators. Caitlin did the food section, and all her head notes are so fun and smart. And then as is her way, she's very rigorous about testing.

2:15So they are easy to make. They're very good to make. Clay, the photographer He really did a lot with structure Of the book He was the one that came up with Grow, roast, drink, eat And then there was Tara Duggan Such a good journalist And she did a lot of the grow Like just the expository writing About coffee origins And then it was a good eye A careful eye On my ebullience In terms of writing You mean your wordiness Guilty. Yeah. And then, yeah, and then I just sort of had fun writing about, like, these subjective feelings about coffee. Like, what does it feel like to roast coffee? It's like it's your book and then God in a cup or God in the cup.

3:04I feel like both of those books really informed me as a coffee drinker and they were really pioneering books. That's nice to hear. No, James, I wanted to have you in. I have so many questions. Coffee's a real micro theme here and we love talking to all sorts of folks. You just got back from Japan about a month ago. I did. I came back. I always get round-trip tickets, you know? I mean, why? Damn, I know. So tell me a little bit about what you're doing there. And I know our mutual friend Kira Akudo said, I should ask you about Kyoto and what you were doing in Kyoto and what the heck you were roasting and brewing.

3:33Yeah, yeah, yeah, Akira. Great guy. Shout out to Kira. Exactly, exactly. He says what I think. It's kind of thrilling to hang out with him. Yes, Kyoto. So to step back, I have been only kind of tangentially involved with Blue Bottle Coffee since the Nestle transaction, you know, going from sort of influence without authority now to kind of like leaning into the power of my own insignificance, which has been oddly freeing. So what happened is before COVID, I was in Japan and Korea and I had just been to the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Nakameguro. You know, 20 ,000 square feet. Beautiful. Got untold millions, billions of yen.

4:25And that's the pinnacle experience of Starbucks, right? And it's big. It's glamorous. It's gaudy. It's got a pizzeria. It's got cocktail bars. You know, that's the pinnacle. experience. So on the way back home on that long flight, I was just sort of interrogating that concept within myself. Like, what is the pinnacle experience? What might the pinnacle experience for a blue bottle of coffee be? What would I say that the pinnacle experience ought to be? Because back in the day when I opened cafes, like they were very, very thoughtful and autobiographical. And And I chose those to be the pinnacle.

5:03Cafes in San Francisco, in New York City. Yeah, anywhere. But that phase was over. And so like, okay, well, Howard needs 20 ,000 square feet in pizzeria for his pinnacle experience. I really need 400 square feet and a record player for my pinnacle experience. I want a small room, modest, beautiful. and I want all focus to be on the coffees, the extraction of the coffees, every little moment, every little spoon. Let me jump in and ask you. Yeah, jump in. Espresso machine? Are we doing a drip setup? Are we doing siphon? What's the setup? Well, the thing in Tokyo is basically none of the above. None of the above.

5:44So I came back and I was like filled with enthusiasm for this idea, blithely thinking that this enthusiasm would translate into action within the company. And it translated into meetings is what it translated into. And then, you know, and then COVID. So I have a certain amount of compassion for the people running the company quite well through COVID. That's not easy. Nobody was laid off. That was admirable. Oh, cool. So maybe it was going to be a cafe, a permanent cafe in Los Angeles. Maybe not. So design, design, meeting, meeting, nothing happened. And then this idea, then it kind of sunk. You know, and I was a little bit sad about that because, like, I wanted what I wanted.

6:31Like, that was my story at Blue Bottle. You had the record player picked out. Yeah. You had the records picked out, probably. Are we talking, like, post-punk? No, Matt. You're a clarinet player by trade, so is it classical? No, I mean, a little bit. I wanted – I was, you know, very inspired by Daibo's Cafe and Daibo's book. Do you ever read the Daibo Coffee Manual? There's a beautiful letterpress. It's like 35 pages long. My favorite book on coffee, Nahoko Press. I think he's out of print, but maybe not. And he talks about the records he liked. He liked, you know, Bill Evans a lot. He liked Keith Jarrett, the Kohn concert, which was surprising to me.

7:12a little bit hippie for Mr. Diveau. That's amazing. There's a great shop in Seoul that had Keith Jarrett on all the time. Yeah. That's cool. It's a good, Keith Jarrett definitely fits with coffee. Sorry to interrupt. No, no, no, no. It's fun to talk about records. Yeah. So, yeah, what I learned long ago was I cannot be responsible for 100 % of the playlist. So the idea was like collaborate and actually to speed up the narrative, the very second day I was in Tokyo, I went with a few colleagues, dear colleagues at Blue Bottle, and we went record shopping for this thing. So it was my input and my friends.

7:49So you're saying this thing, and this thing is potentially this 400-square-foot box coffee shop in Kyoto that you're working on opening? No, it opened. It is like it opened. It's open. What's it called? Well, it used to be open. It's temporary. Everything's temporary. Yeah. You know, every cafe is a pop-up, right? This lasted for about six weeks. Oh, so, okay. And you were at the bar and pulling shots. No, no, no. So it's in the first Blue Bottle Kyoto Cafe near Nansanji Temple. It's this perfect room upstairs that seats four people. And there's a table. Joe Nagasaki designed it, but it's in 100-year-old Machia.

8:30There's a table, some Bertoia chairs, and there's a little bit of infrastructure right outside the room. And so what my colleague Benjamin Brewer and I, over the years of COVID and after, came up with these ways of making coffee that I don't think have been made. I don't want to sound grandiose, but it was very unusual ways of making coffee. I love this. Please say more. Okay. Because there isn't a lot of innovation on the drink side. I mean, that's unfair. Let me strike that because there is a lot of innovation, but we don't really, as consumers, see it everywhere because it's so specialized.

9:05Right. Right. I wouldn't call this innovation. I would call this simplification. Okay. Great call. That's what I would call it. So we ended up with these courses, four or five courses, and a couple little sweet bites to eat in between a couple of the courses. And the first course was just this little refreshing sort of cascara yuzu little soda. Wonderful. It's beautiful. My mouth is just smacking thinking about that. Very good. Yeah. And then we had a tasting course of three coffees to taste that you could taste at the same time. And it was super fun coming up with these coffees. One was a very famous farm in Panama, Finca Debra.

9:49Yeah. A gesha, a very beautiful gesha from them. One was a keemalat from Yemen, the very first place coffee was produced as agriculture. I mean, obviously, it arose naturally in Ethiopia, but it was agriculture in Yemen. And then the other was a coffee from Fringe in Goleta in California. So we had basically a 500-year-old growing region and a 20-year-old growing region. And people that this lot from Fringe, F-R-I-N-J, was a nine-pound lot. It was an extraordinary lot. James Hoffman and I talked about that lot on his episode, and I'll link to that show notes with James. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wonderful to hear about California-grown coffees.

10:32I mean, holy cow. And Jay Ruski is doing great work. The coffee is beautifully detailed. There's a wide range of, like, you know, California is expensive. So California coffee is going to be expensive. But it goes from expensive to sort of eye-watering based on, you know, the lots and— So, James, let me ask you just in U.S. dollars, what is the cost of this tasting, these flights? And I ask because, you know, tell me first. I think, you know, like sort of the freedom of being a line item in a marketing budget means I don't have to care. Yeah, totally. But I think it's around 75 bucks. Oh, my gosh.

11:10It's just remarkable. And this is we'll talk about the value of coffee. To get truly the most exceptional coffees in the world, and this is something I've talked about on the show, for only for$75. It's of anything is incredible. Right. To get a$75 bottle of wine at a kind of a mediocre Italian restaurant in Manhattan means it's kind of sad. Yeah. And you're getting this exceptional from three distinct growing regions roasted. And were they all done drip, hand brewed? Yes and no. So Benjamin Brewer had this idea of separating the extraction from the filtration. What a name, by the way. Just got to say.

11:48Guy in coffee with the name Brewer. I know. I know. And his initials are BB. Yeah. So, yeah, he had this idea. And also it worked as theater too. So we had two, imagine three very thin, elegant glass cylinders with about 250 milliliters of water in them, hot water. And then we just dusted about eight or 10 grams of these extraordinary coffees on top very gently. And then you got this snow globe going that you could just watch, you know, listen to Bill Evans or whoever, Miles came later. Bill Evans, there was a Ryuchi Sakamoto record that one of the team picked that was beautiful with this chorus, just like the – it really underscored sonically what you were seeing.

12:31And so that was also – that extraction was very flexible, two to four minutes, just let it snow globe down, and then filter it. Benjamin had his favorite filter paper just in a Hario dripper just because it fit. Like a standard V6C. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the dripper geography didn't matter. It was more about the paper. So let's talk about paper. I know, sorry, listener, this will be short. Filter paper is super interesting. How do you have a favorite filter paper? Oh, because, you know, you just have to be deep, deep nerd. But also it's like it's not subtle. When you taste the difference. Oh, I agree.

13:06It's not subtle. Oh, I know. Yeah. Trust me. So you can suck on paper towels. You can lick cardboard. Or you can have something really beautiful and refreshing. That you don't taste that paper pulp. Backing up. You started roasting coffees at a farmer's market while you were working as a professional clarinet player in San Francisco. Actually, I stopped clarinet playing and then started. And then, so there was no overlap. But you essentially were selling coffees at a farmer's market. I'd like to get, for our listeners, a little sense of that time when you're selling it out of these markets. And the second part, quickly, is when you exited the company and you've just illustrated how you're still involved on a kind of peripheral level.

13:48How was the feeling when you sold your company to Nestle? Oh, geez. Okay. Let's take the first question first, and then I'll take the second question second, and then I'll go, like, lie down for a couple minutes. I know. I know. This is therapeutic, but I just have always wondered because I think I met you last before you sold. So let's go. Right. That was a long time ago. A long time ago. Yeah. Coffee at the farmer's market. It was a, in retrospect, it was a great time to start with coffee. And it was great for a lot of reasons because it was, you know, people would tell me like, why are you starting a coffee company?

14:20It's so saturated. And what they meant was, first of all, I loved that metaphor, saturated, as it applied to coffee. And then it's like, oh, because there's Pete's and Starbucks. And obviously nobody will make things that are any different from or better than those two companies. It still is a mentality today, by the way. Oh, that's interesting. For many of the public. But anyways. So blissfully unaware of the general mentality of the public. It's kind of nice to be sheltered in the citrus orchards of Ojai, California. Yeah, but I just want, like always for me, I wanted to make what I wanted to drink and see.

14:58I wanted to make a cafe that I wanted to go to. So I would make that cafe. And then people would come. And that was great. I wanted to drink coffee that I wasn't seeing or I wasn't drinking. And so that's why I chose the roast profiles that I roasted because I just wanted that thing. You wanted to taste the coffee. You wanted roast profiles that actually illustrated the agriculture and not over-roasting into a quote-unquote dark or quote-unquote French roast. Yeah. I mean, yes and no. Yes and no. I mean, this this I think what you say is what a lot of coffee professionals also say and think and believe that they and only they have some privileged insight into what a coffee actually is.

15:43It's like I love it. Way to slap smack me down. I love that shit, James. You did that in such a nice way. Oh, I love it. I appreciate no snobbery zone here. So let's. Oh, yeah. No, no. No, and I'm not calling you a snob because I think this is an interesting and important point is like we have a subjective insight into what we think coffee should be. Just like somebody roasting at Pete's has a subjective insight into what he or she thinks coffee should be. Right. And whose subjective insight is more valuable? Whose is more interesting? That's not for me to say. I know which one I prefer. I know which one I'd rather drink.

16:21I had an amazing gesha at La Cabra, an espresso just now, which could mean after my Hayes Valley espresso, why I'm talking so very fast. I think there's a way to slow down the speed on Spotify or something like that. As an aside, before we started recording, I walked over to the 55th and 6th Avenue location, which is right by our office. And I go there maybe once or twice a month. I like it. It's in my rotation. And I see you on the street. We just see each other randomly. And then you were heading there as well. You had never been to that location. No, no, no. It's just amazing. Like I walk in, I literally think about you every time I walk in.

16:57Oh, but sweet. Well, because you're the brand and I love the brand and I'm a big fan of Blue Bottle. But then we went there and you had a Hayes Valley. Right. Yeah. That's what I do when I go to a Blue Bottle shop, have a Hayes Valley espresso. That's fun. It's like talk about Proustie and like this taste memory, right? Yeah. It's deep. So you're at the farmer's market. You're roasting at a profile that you liked. Yeah, that intended to be lighter than the surrounding. you know, the semi-sphere of coffee roasted at that time. Yeah. And because I just liked what I liked. I liked these tastes that I thought were very interesting.

17:30I had been a hobby roaster before. And a lot of time, you know, what brought me to the farmer's market was this insight like, whoa, coffee is fresh food. At the time I was roasting, I've said this story a lot, but there's literally no place I could go in the Bay Area where I could get a coffee, coffee beans that I knew when they were roasted. Nowhere. The date stamp. It's remarkable to think about a time like that. And it wasn't that long ago. No, we're not talking about— 20 years. Yeah, a lot has changed. It's a brand-new industry. Yeah. We have to remind everyone, this is such a brand-new industry.

18:03When you think about all of food culture in the world, this is a very young industry, and you're roasting with a lighter roast, and you're opening a cafe that is probably doing some things a little differently than other cafes. What do you—describe those early cafes. Oh, yeah. I mean, just at the farmer's market. It was crazy. It was nuts. It's like I'm going to prepare every coffee to order. Yeah. You know, I didn't invent that. You know, Monmouth coffee came up with the 70s and even before. Intelligentsia was hand brewing, I'm sure, in Chicago in 97. Probably. Yeah, probably. They, you know, Japan in the 70s.

18:37The whole notion that this third wave I feel like is such a misguided attempt to privilege our particular moment in coffee above all others that I don't particularly agree with that term. But yes, I was going to be the crazy guy at the farmer's market with big kettles of boiling water making coffee to order one at a time. I was going to pull shots to order, and I had little steam pitchers, and if it was macchiato, I would steam milk to order in a little pitcher and latte in a bigger pitcher at that time in San Francisco. So I would call it like the sourdough bread starter approach to making steaming milk because they would have these giant milk steamers.

19:23And then they'd keep adding milk on top. It's like the Laura method for wine. Right. When did the first milk hit the bottom of that pitcher? And then just like the sound, the sonic environment, the scream of this re-steamed milk being steamed like 500 degrees. You know, that was very unpleasant. sonic environment to be in too. So we tended to steam milk at a lower temperature. So it would be maximally sweet, pulled shots to order very slow, you know, a lot of coffee in the portafilter, slow extraction to develop this, this sweetness, which is kind of, you know, thought of as being old fashioned now.

20:04A little bit, but when you talk about sweetness and as a reminder, you know, sweetness isn't necessarily the addition of sugar or sucrose, it's actually flavor profile in coffee that I consider just interesting. It's when coffee deviates from the burned or blah to like something else. And that's what sweetness is to me. Yeah, there's actually very little sugar in roasted coffee. So this word that people use, that coffee professionals use, sweetness, I think it should be used more specifically among coffee-educated people who've done a lot of cuffing. Because I think it's misguided to use the word sweetness when you're talking to the general public because it is in fact not sweet.

20:42You got to have a little fruit acidity. That's why I had to clarify. Yeah. No, I'm glad you did. I'm glad you did. Yeah. And, and so like there's some fruit acidity there, there are other things going on, but especially when you're, you're making coffee espresso that's supposed to have steamed milk on top, then all those fruit acids, I don't think go particularly well with steamed milk, which is why I still like a sort of a more developed roast level in an espresso in a shorter, thicker shot because what tastes better with milk? Like Malyard reaction kind of taste or cranberry juice? I choose Malyard.

21:19Can we talk about espresso for a second? What? Because I've asked many about espresso and Jeff Watts comes to mind, one of the founders of Intelligentsy and we definitely went long about talking a joke about Jeff about why he hates espresso essentially and how it kind of with pressure and the way it's roasted, it kind of like the farming element and the flavor profile gets like leaves the coffee. Do you agree or disagree with this? Oh, I agree with the kind of the moralizing stance. I agree with this objectification of espresso as a thing that should be a certain way or should not be a certain way.

22:01You know, I think it's – what was it? Like 10 or so years ago, a very interesting thing happened. And it – I mean to step back. People in coffee have a sense that we're on an escalator, always continuing to evolve, to innovate, to push the industry forward. But I actually think we're on a pendulum. And, you know, fashions, tastes in coffee swing back and forth, swing back and forth. I so agree. Media is the same way, by the way. Media is – we're not an escalator. We're a pendulum that's inside. Yeah, yeah. And so many, many things that people are thinking now about coffee have been thought before, 20 years, 100 years, you know, X number of years ago.

22:42So an interesting thing happened in coffee, in espresso, and it was sort of inevitable because if you remember drinking like gimme coffee in New York in – what year was that? 2007 or 2008. It was like the triple basket, you know, filled with coffee, super, super dense shot. And I kind of like that. I still kind of like that flavor. I mean, Shout to Gimme, wonderful, wonderful company. I'm a huge fan. Yeah, as am I. They were one of the few people in New York in those years that really knew how to make coffee. Yeah. And I like that taste. I still like that taste. It doesn't taste like any particular growing region.

23:24And that's, yeah. You know, and it doesn't taste like any particular agriculture. The question to ask then, is that right or wrong? And I don't see that as a right or wrong question. If what you're looking for is particular insight into the agriculture or the varietal of the coffee, then of course espresso should not be the thing you order at a cafe. And I think the foundational element of coffee buying and paying fairly and having terroir and giving the farmers as much credit as the barista, I think the tendency is to say, yes, we need to have that flavor profile that is from a region and recognize it.

24:03And espresso is smashing that model. That's kind of the argument against espresso. Yeah, that's true. And that's a legitimate argument. But then you have to look at what you're selling in your cafe. You are selling 80 percent, 90 percent of the drinks you're selling are drinks that people are putting steamed milk on top of. And hence, you're unable to taste the agriculture anyway. So you might as well give them something that pairs beautifully with milk. Grieffully, and we all love a cortado. We love lattes and oat drinks. And it's wonderful, especially at certain times of day. Some people like having a morning latte or cappuccino with milk.

24:45I kind of like draw a parallel between where we're at right now with coffee and cocktail culture in the early 2000s, mid 2000s when 80 % of people were ordering vodka sodas and Bud Lights but then there was like the Manhattan and Negroni and look where we are now with cocktails I'm hoping, my hope is that in 20 years coffee will ultimately be more brew drip hand brewed than espresso but I would like to believe that's true. However, I mean, if you look at how people are building cafes now in the U.S., obviously there's constraints around construction and budget and things you can't do in the U.S.

25:28because it's hard or expensive. But I do think there's so much emphasis now on batch brewing, even in the specialty shops, that how can you make an argument that coffee is special and like incredibly rarefied if you're saying like, oh, cool, 20 seconds, here you go. I don't know when, you know, this has been sitting for 20 minutes in this pot that is not beautiful. It's true. I mean, that's why hand brewing what Nigel's doing at Drip is so interesting. Exactly. But in taking that four to seven minutes to get a coffee, obviously that does not work for a lot of people in their daily routines when they want coffee at a cafe?