431: Chicago Hospitality Accountability with the CHAAD Project

27:23It's just, like, shitty beers and cheap shots. But it's exactly what you need. Exactly what you need. Your favorite Chicago restaurant. I was told I wasn't able to share my favorite restaurant. You can't play favorites? No. They were afraid that it would get too famous if I said it on a podcast. Oh, my God. I'm going to share it anyway. Everyone who's in Chicago already knows of it. So Rootstock is my favorite Chicago restaurant. Okay. I don't know about it. So what's the quick pitch on why it's your favorite? It is a small wine bar on the west side of Chicago. The people have been working there for like 10 plus years.

28:03Like the owner works there almost every day. Small food menu, about 10 items. Don't try to do more. Really nice wine lists. And they just really care about the hospitality and the service. Like if you go in there, the chairs are mismatched and some of them are kind of falling apart. The tableware is all different. I actually went in there the other day and my plate was really cute. It was like a vintage plate. and I asked the owner, I was like, where do you go buy your plates? And he said Village Discount, which is a thrift store. The best thrift store. Or you can get plates for like a dollar.

28:35So I just, I don't know. I love it that there's no, there's no pretentiousness with it. It's just like, well, here you have good food and good wine and people who love to do what they do. And I can't be upset with that. It does sound like the best Chicago restaurant. Okay. Your favorite Chicago coffee shop. um it's technically not a coffee shop it sort of is they have coffee um i like map room which is a beer bar but they do have coffee all day coffee shops are hard for me but for some reason i love i love the map room i like that you can have a beer and a coffee at the same time exactly when i was in um when i was in college i would go there to study yeah you have both options exactly i would get a coffee to start it off and then when i finished studying i would reward myself love it okay Lou Malnati's or Giordano's I've never had either wow when I wrote that I was like either they're gonna have a really strong opinion or they're not gonna care about deep dish I don't care about deep dish I think I've had Pequod's which is another place but yeah I'm not I'm not really deep dish person okay I'll just say on the mic that I went to college in Chicago and I lived really close to a Lou Malnati's so that's where my allegiances lie but I just think it's because I I ate like so much of it when it was snowing.

29:49OK, your favorite cookbook. So my go to actually when I need a recipe is to text all my chef friends and whoever responds. Your contact. Yes. Who knows how to make this? Please share. OK, something you'll never make from scratch.

30:07Cooking is not my favorite thing, so technically a lot of things. But pasta. I hate making pasta from scratch, except for gnocchi. I'll make gnocchi. Any other kind of pasta, no. Call your chef friends. Call your chef friends and invite me. And finally, a restaurant that's not in your neighborhood that you wish could magically be your neighborhood restaurant. So my favorite restaurant in my neighborhood closed recently. You could reopen it as part of the fantasy. I would want to reopen it. Creed's, which is a southern food place. I miss your mac and cheese and your smoked chicken. and your cabbage, and I think about you every day.

30:43Wow. Well, I'm going to be thinking about that, too. And I'm going to be thinking about a lot of this conversation. I really appreciate you coming on the show and talking with me. And I hope that everyone who's listening will sit with it as well. And I'll drop a bunch of links to Chad's work in the show notes as well. I appreciate you making space. Thank you.

31:08Jordan Michaelman, welcome to This Is Taste. It's so great catching up, man. You're a fixture here on Taste, and I love working with you. You're the co-founder of Sprudge and real leading lighting coffee writing, but you also write fiction. And, man, we will have you in the studio. But I want to have this conversation focused on N.A. Beer. You've written this terrific piece, and you call it the most exciting category in drinks today. So catch us up on N.A. beers over the past five years. You write about it so colorfully. I'm linking to you in the show notes. Definitely go read the piece. um so why why do you think na it has has grown and a beer has grown so quickly i've unexpectedly become kind of not just uh not just uh the writer but also a client like i'm also like just a fan of na beers i think they're really good and uh all this interesting growth has happened in it over the last seven or eight years and then really reaching a big velocity uh in the last five years and some of that is growing interest in sort of wider conversations around like sober bar culture zero proof yada yada and all the rest of it but there's also some kind of like more concrete you know sort of technological innovation down to it which is the work that the uh the brewing company athletic brewing figured out which was a style of brewing any beer the way it's been supposed to be almost it's essentially brewing a full normal beer and then pulling off at the process right at the very end before all the alcohols arrive in the brewing process so you wind up with a fully flavored beer that just hasn't been finished in terms of alcohols and so it's under 0.5 percent and lands as like an na beer i think really what they figured out was this idea of saying na beer is something that could taste good like it doesn't need to just be like sort of the sad old Klaus Thauber or O'Doul's or like these sort of old brands which were made in a different style in which the alcohol was like boiled off and it was extremely skunky and just not a great experience if you ever tried a lot of them are like way too sweet or um it's almost tastes like you're drinking kvass or something they're like these like bread waters it's this it's this weird thing whereas what Athletic was able to figure out um was beer that really tasted like beer and could actually have like typicity in beer style.

33:30So like your NA golden ale tasted like a golden ale, your NA IPA tasted like an IPA. But that process that they figured out was not patentable much to their chagrin. And now dozens and dozens of other companies from very large national breweries to like really small little indie guys have sort of rushed into the space, all kind of picking up on this idea of like that brewing style um and we've seen some of the largest beer brands in the world also really up game with sometimes they're beers that are made down south sometimes they're beers where the alcohol is removed by reverse osmosis which doesn't impact the flavor in a really negative way um and yeah all of us what was um a category in drinks that nobody really paid any attention to at all has become a space where there's been this sober gold rush into it of so many different beers in different styles and different big breweries and small breweries and it's the kind of thing where the offering has just grown so much so quickly.

34:38And I think that's really exciting from a consumer perspective and it is certainly exciting from a like drinks writing perspective. Yeah, it's such a good point. And I think we all kind of won in this lack of patentability for the athletic company. And they're doing great. You know, if you go to any grocery store, any market, you're going to see a stack of athletic there. And really what I've observed and you write about it and you can kind of expand, but, you know, a lot of times when these categories get big and there's a lot of copycats, we end up seeing just so much bad stuff in the market.

35:12And for any beer, it's been shocking that how great the quality has been. Even the small guys who are just like figuring it out on the fly are creating some incredible brews that for us, like, you know, for me who doesn't drink alcohol, I'm able to drink like sour beers, Guinness. I'm able to, you know, split the G in my own way. I'm like able to try even like cervezas, like the Mexican beers are tasting like Mexican beers. And so it's really just refreshing to have this category just bloom so quickly. Yeah. And the blooming has happened in all these different kinds of ways. Like, you know, you've sort of got, I think, breweries like Athletic or Best Day Brewing or things like the Zero Guinness or the Heineken Zero, which is outstanding, or the Corona Zero, which is actually very good.

36:03And you get to put the lime in it and it comes in the same kind of bottle. You know, it's like it's really feels very fun and permissive. And I think it's important, you know, for people who are approaching it from the POV of not drinking alcohol. They are delicious beverages of their own standing, regardless of what your relationship happens to be like at that given moment with alcohol. And something I really wanted to try to talk about with the informed readers at Taste is to be able to be like, yeah, this stuff is delicious. Like, it's really fun and really interesting, almost like superseding the NA part of the conversation.

36:37They're all just really good beers. It's so true, Jordan, because, you know, you're hearing in bars and I've talked to folks who own restaurants and bars about NA beers. And like, you know, it's not for sober dudes. It's for all people, people who want to maybe take a round off, who've maybe had a cocktail, who've had an aviation. And they're like, OK, I'm good with one aviation. I'm going to I'm going to head and have a best day and to wind up my night. And I feel like this is modern drinking. It's really how folks, I think, are thinking about their alcohol consumption measured and better is kind of what I'm observing.

37:11Yeah, I agree with that. But I'll share for me personally, I have a number of people in my life that I'm really close with and consider dear friends who don't drink. But we like to still go out. I mean, we like to go to a bar, be in a room full of people. And so when I go out with them, I don't really want to drink either. That's not what's important to me. What's important to me is that we're all hanging out. And so that's what's really been fun for me is drinking a lot of cool NA beers in those kinds of situations because I feel like I'm missing out at all. and actually uh it's kind of fun um and yeah i mean i've had some great you know traveling around i love we talked about on the story you know all the different regional i love traveling somewhere and having a local beer you know and being able to do that with n.a beers is really fun let's talk about the actual product testing you did for this piece it was really rigorous and you really dove in and we we all benefit from it how much did you end up drinking and buying and like were you buying at local you live in portland oregon so were you buying at physical retail shops um or were buying online i know it's a little easier to buy any beers online and really um how good and not good was like your i think you said you tasted maybe 60 beers yeah yeah yeah for sure by the end of it probably around 60 individual beers some from the same breweries um and then some from you know one-offs from breweries and stuff and i think i really kind of traveled around with the story uh over the course of the last six months i've kind of taken it packed it up in my pocket and taken it with me different places so drinking cool n a beers running around bars in new york and down in Southern California and out in the net kingdom.

38:44And then also here in Portland where I live in Portland, I should shout out this place. There's this awesome, awesome like beer, beer world mega store called John's marketplace. Actually there's two of, there's one that's in the city and the one that's out in the suburbs. And they have, I mean, just a whole galaxy of every kind of beer from every corner of the world and tons and tons of little indie locals and like a cool beer bar inside of it or whatever. But they have more than 200 individual SKUs of NA beer now available, plus dozens more of like hop waters and other kind of interesting stuff, which is like, I think the next set of conversations that hop water is also really.

39:25We'll get into hop water to not like, you know, confuse this conversation. It's a different category. It's like kind of adjacent. But I definitely think the hop water movement has been extremely cool, too. Dude, I tried a ton of beers. And, you know, the ones that I had, like, there was some that I had that I was maybe, I wouldn't say I had anything that I thought was, like, actively bad. There was maybe ones that I was a little disappointed by. I think it can be sort of hard. I mean, beer is beer, whether it's NA or not. And there's some in the IPA category especially. I had some NA beers that were, you know, the IPNAs is what they're sort of cheaply get called.

40:00uh where like i was like this is almost an ipa but it's like not quite bitter enough where it feels like it's sort of holding back a little bit um and then i had other ones where i was like this is that thing this is doing that bittering thing that i want an ipa to do uh which is which is interesting and it happening in an a context so definitely like that was the part of the category that i maybe tried the most within to figure out which was the one that i was going to say or one or two that I was going to say that would be a good fit for shouting out in the story. And there was some that I had that I was like, I think these are just okay.

40:37And then there's some that I had where I was like, this is really good. Love it. So in the piece, and you definitely should check out the link and get the full rundown, but I'd like to get a general sense, maybe your favorite beer or two in these categories. And we're going to start with what you've called the best of the big guys. Is there a favorite of yours? I think the Guinness Zero is outstanding. And drinking that Guinness Zero in the context of being at a pub or at a British bar or watching the Euro soccer tournament or something with your friends, it's delicious. It tastes great. It tastes great with food.

41:15It tastes great in the atmosphere. I think it's got so much to recommend to it. And I appreciate that everything about it feels it pours the same. It's got the foam. It comes in the can with the widget. I mean, really every part of that experience is just like drinking a classic Guinness. The other one that I think is great is Heineken. The Heineken Zero had an experience out at a bar in New York City. We were at Macho Monday at a gay bar in the Lower East Side. And we ordered two Heineken Zeros. And the bartender said, sure, here you go. And we started drinking them. And we got about halfway through.

41:53And we looked at the bottles. And we were like, oh, wait. these are normal Heineken's. They didn't give us Heineken zeros. They gave us normal Heineken's. And then they gave us Heineken zeros and apologized. And we started drinking them. We were like, this is, if we hadn't looked at the bottle, we would have never known. Oh, wow. Like it is indistinguishable. I mean, it does every crispness and it's got kind of hydrating, but it's beer. And like, there's this, like the calorie count of it's the same. Like everything about it is like weirdly identical. and I mean that as a compliment like it really is just like drinking a Heineken okay the next category is Lifestylers Best Day Brewing which I think has come on really strong in terms of I just see those beers all over there's quite a lot of access to them all around the country and the Best Day Colch is quite good so good when I saw that that's a California brewery and I was just down in Atlanta, Georgia at like a house we had rented and one of the folks who was staying with us brought a whole Best Day case.

42:57And like the thing was gone by the end of the night. Everyone was drinking these NAs. It was so cool. Yeah, it's outstanding. I've liked all of the Best Day beers that I've had. In particular, I think their Kohl's, especially in the summertime, is just, it's really best of class. Like very, very good. So you have a category called regional. And I think that means kind of like smaller, maybe more boutique. Maybe bring some names that maybe we don't know about folks who are listening who definitely know N.A., but maybe there's some really good ones to seek out. Yeah, for me, it's kind of that idea of like, if I'm traveling somewhere, I always think it's fun to drink whatever it is that you like to drink, that you can only get there, right?

43:35Like the wine you might only find there, the beer you might only find there or whatever. And the NA category is grown enough that you're starting to have that stratification, right? Like you're starting to have these NA beers that you can only find in a certain place. I was in Texas a couple of months ago for the Hot Lock Festival at the end of May. And while I was there, I started seeing around this really cool, it's called Rick's Near Beer. And I'd never seen it before and come to realize it's only available in Texas. It's brewed in Austin. And they are delicious. It is like a crisp Texas lager which tastes great with tacos or barbecue.

44:14I had one get built into a michelada at a restaurant there in Austin called Este that was like, I think about it every day. It was one of the greatest drinks I've ever had. NA or not, beer or not, cocktail or not, or whatever. This is like a beverage, a consumable beverage, this michelada that they make at Este. And you can get it with a Mexican cerveza or you can get it with this Rick's Near Beer. And it was so, so good. So another cool regional beer in Southern California at the Great Erewhon, which depending on if you believe the same couple thousand people on Instagram, is the godhead through which all food and drink trends is reflected and refracted.

44:59They don't have a ton of NAB there, which I think is telling, but I did try this cool brand called Rancho West, which is brewed out in Malibu and is doing this very kind of like Cali lifestyle beer. They're interesting. They're one of I think a growing style of brewery where they make an NA beer, but they also make conventional beers. And I thought their Rancho West lager was quite good and kind of gave me a Cali feeling. I drank one at a cool Cali restaurant and thought it all kind of felt very appropriate in California. I love that. It's very similar to St. Agrestis, the way that St. Agrestis, the company that makes the Phony Negroni, is also making their own Amaros and they have a whole like bottled Negroni movement, but they're also doing this NA.

45:49So I think it's cool when you get these smaller distilleries or breweries that do both and they do both equally well. It's cool. There was one other regional one that kind of came on at the end. I had been trying so much stuff and was getting really close to kind of closing copy on the story or whatever. And then like one last thing came in at the end and I ended up really impressed by it, which is from Good Time Brewing, which is in New York. and they are just an NA dedicated brewery. I think it's a fairly new company and they make my, it was my favorite IPA that I tasted for the story and I just am sort of already like dreaming about getting some like summer New York park, like gentle dirt bag time, drinking my like Afrak of these good time brewing IPNAs that they make.

46:39It's a really good product and New York listeners should seek that out in their in their classy bodega of choice that very cool and and another new york brand i like is al's al's ale i'm sure if you tasted that one you're testing but that was that's another one that comes to mind for me um jordan do you have a best overall that like just in all categories that we should seek out that we should just order whenever we see it automatically the hit a chino nest that like from that brewery in japan uh uh i tried it for the story and was like okay i'm going to include it. And then just a couple of days ago, I was at a friend's surprise 40th birthday party in Portland, which was very fun.

47:18They had the Hidacino Nest. It was a very hot day and we were outside and I drank like three of them and it tastes so good. It's this like yuzu ginger, non-alcoholic beer that they make out there in Japan. And I think that beer is fantastic. So if you ever see that somewhere, drink it. It's delicious. I also, I really rate very highly everything that they make at a brewery called self care, which is in Olympia, Washington, kind of out in my neck of the woods here in the Northwest, but can be shipped anywhere you want in the country. An interesting thing about all these NA beers is that you can just buy them on the internet, like soda pop.

47:52You do not have to go through a three tier alcoholic sales and distribution outdated market for how stuff gets bought and sold for alcohol in America. You can just buy them and they will ship them straight to your house at minimal cost, which is one of the interesting things about this particular drinks category one of the things that i think has helped it like grow and be as successful it has been is that there is a good economics behind it like that can work for breweries yeah self-care is um uh it's the non-alcoholic label of a very well-regarded brewery in olympia called three magnets it's won every kind of award and helped kind of popularize some hazy ales back a decade ago or hazy apias and stuff um a really great brewery and uh they uh spun off some like pandemic relief money into being like okay we're gonna try to make this na brewery um and has had a bunch of success with it a bunch of growth with it and they basically make now an na version of almost every style of beer they brew at three magnets so you can have you you know, citrus cervezas and hazy IPAs and, you know, gozes and all these kind of like obscure beer styles that they're doing NA versions of, which is really cool.

49:11And I've never had a bad beer from them. Their Italian Pilsner is absolutely delicious. Everything I've ever had from them, I think is really top, top class. And they're one that like to other people I know who are NA beer geeks or people who are seeking out cool and eight beers. They're sort of the first thing I'm like, order stuff from them. I think, I think the beers are fantastic. You will not be disappointed. Love that rec. Read the piece. There's links throughout it that you can buy from. Definitely take Jordan's advice. I want to transition a little bit and close this conversation. Talk about some of your other beverage writing on taste.

49:44You're, you're really, truly one of the best writers in the industry when it comes to not just wine and spirits, But diving into mineral water, you've won a James Beard Award for your work at Punch. You wrote a great piece about mineral water and you've continued to write on taste about mineral water. And I really encourage you and I hope you write more, write longer. I'd love to get a sense. It's just it's another N.A. category in essence. But I just returned from Greece and I had some incredible bottles and I was like texting you along the way. Give some tips to our listeners. You know, maybe they're out there going to Europe on vacation, heading to Italy, heading to Greece.

50:23Like, how can we have a great mineral water experience when visiting countries? And on the second part is how do we abide in the States? Yeah. OK, so for travel to Europe, mineral water is your threat. And actually, I think everybody is always looking for that way when they're traveling to not look like a schnook, you know, to like not look like an ugly American or a rube. and being excited about mineral water where you are and asking about it is actually a really good sign like so it's a cool thing to know about and ask for um and you got to just make like a whale you know keep your mouth open the whole time and let every single kind of water float its way through while you're there try as much as you possibly can and if you do it right you know especially somewhere like italy or greece or god anywhere in eastern europe but also in the uk and Spain and all the rest of it, you can drink a different mineral, cool mineral water every day.

51:16And a lot of them will be stuff that we don't get back in America, which is really fun. You know, it's not like, I mean, these days, you know, you travel around and it's the same hundred bottles of natural wine in Brooklyn as it is in Paris, you know, and it's like, why did I, why did I fly for eight hours? It's all the same shit. But water's not like that. A lot of it doesn't travel and really geolocates. It's maybe one of the last cool drinks things that like truly geolocates. You have to go to a place to get it and drink it. And like when you were in Greece, I was looking at all these cool bottles I'd never even seen before, much less be able to buy statesides.

51:50That's really, I think that's really fun. Ask about it, do it every restaurant, every little bodega, every grocery store, everywhere you go, try to try as much as you possibly can. Because it's one of those things that like, a lot of times you can only get them there. And that's part of like what's fun in travel. um you know back in the states um it's a little bit more telescoped and you're much more likely to kind of run into the like the nestle hegemony of being like aquapana or pellegrino or perrier or whatever um which are actually all good waters to be clear um and and real mineral waters you know spring waters like delicious um but it is definitely a little flattened for what's there for availability the place that i you know i've written about this before for taste uh that I keep going back to is like European import grocery stores, Eastern European grocery stores, or sometimes get called like continental markets or like they, they'll use the term like a Russian grocery store, but it isn't really Russian.

52:53It's sort of oftentimes they're kind of pan-Soviet, pan-Slavic grocery stores, but that's where you'll find, you know, of the mineral waters of Eastern Europe, and only a small percentage of them are imported, but Essentuki and Borghomi, some of the really cool mineral waters that are from Armenia or from the Ukraine, that's where you're likely to find those waters is in Eastern European grocery stores. They are your friend if you enjoy water. Yeah. And I want to shout Azunonepo in Athens. I was drinking that all day. I don't know if you tried that one. I haven't. I've never seen it in America.

53:33Yeah, I know. And I talked to some guys about getting it. I was trying to figure it out. But to your point, you just can't get it in the States. And it's really great. And I probably should ask this at the beginning. But really, when you're tasting mineral water, give us a sense of how you judge it and how you prize it. Because I think it's a little abstract, right? Because we do drink a lot of waters that aren't mineral water that are from a source, but the flavor has been kind of taken out through processes, asmosis, etc. But give us a sense of what you should be looking for and how you taste it.

54:08Yeah, I mean, I think that they're all a little different. Some of what you're setting yourself up to do is kind of an exercise in subtlety, right? Like you're saying, okay, well, water's a water, but it's not just water, right? That's the thing that Martin Rees, the guy who's the water sommelier, he talks about all the time. This idea of water being as diverse of a product category in terms of flavor experiences and texture and how it feels to drink it and what it pairs with as beer or as wine. That there's this great diversity of experience in it. And some of that requires a little bit of letting the puzzle shift in your mind for how you think about water.

54:46But I think it also just comes from trying lots of different things and realizing that this water might taste kind of heavy or almost sort of oily or this water might be a little bit more taste like it's clean or like it's raining outside and you went and stood and opened your mouth and drank the rain. You know, there's all different kinds of experiences. A lot of times that that can be sort of tracked down to like how many dissolved minerals are actually are in the water. I have a water that I'm sitting here looking at right now that comes from Essentuki old source number 17. And when I sit and I look at it, there's five servings per container in this bottle.

55:30It's a 500 milliliter bottle. And one of those servings has 2 ,700 milligrams of potassium, which is 60 % of my daily serving. So if I drank this entire bottle in one sitting, I would have like four X my potassium for the day. There's also like 150 milligrams of calcium in this in this bottle. So like, it's crazy. You're drinking these waters that have more potassium than a banana and more calcium than a glass of milk. And it's water. Unbelievable. And obviously all of these minerals are playing out on the palate. You're going to be tasting new flavors. And I just encourage you to seek it out.

56:13And also, you know, the style of carbonation too changes as well. And we're talking about sparkling or gassy mineral water. You're getting a very different experience there too. So it's almost like you're judging the flavor and the way it's been carbonated. That's exactly right. And there's some that are naturally carbonated. Like they come out of the earth with the carbon dioxide trapped. And so they're naturally carbonated waters. Vichy Catalan from Spain is one of my personal favorites that is in that style. It also has a very high TDS and it's salty and tastes delicious with good grass-fed beef or dairy cow beef.

56:49It's an amazing combination. But there's other ones where the gas is added, and there's not necessarily one is better than the other. It's just sort of in different styles. Something that's like, this is a little out there. I know this is a little weird, but a lot of the waters in Eastern European that are in eastern europe that are drunk um for health purposes also like our spas where you go and like bathe in the water too like not that you're drinking it at the same time that you're bathing in it like there's a bottling source and then there's like the part where like the spa happens but like pouring the water over yourself is also like i think because of the mineral content quite rightly has been looked at throughout history as having like potential benefits for like you know skin health and for hair health and for things like that and um maybe this is like a little out there for people but some of these bottled waters like if you have a sauna in your house or like or even if you just want to try it in the shower like if you pour a little bit over it over your head you also like get an experience of that water that's kind of really interesting too and And some of them, I swear, you can feel the minerality of it or feel kind of like the salt and the weight of it on your skin in a way that is also reflected in how you drink it.

58:09And that's kind of an interesting way to think about the water. That's what I like about you, Jordan. You're going to topical applications of mineral water in spas at home. I like to get – I'm out here in Portland, man. There's not a lot necessarily going on all the time, and shit gets a little weird. I love it. No, it's exactly why I love working with you, buddy. And just to close quickly, I have to ask you, I couldn't nod about coffee. Oh, yeah, yeah. And we could go in many directions. But just give our listeners a couple recs if they're buying coffee online. Are there any coffee companies that are just popping in your head that they should seek out?

58:49Maybe I don't know about them either. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's like a couple of these places, you know, I was talking about with water, like, oh, you got to travel somewhere to just sort of find the coffee right. And it really geolocates. Well, I think that there's some cool companies in America, like cafes, that are bringing in tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny coffee roasters from the other side of the world that they have the cultural fluency and the connections and the travel to be able to get. That otherwise, you would have to go there and probably have to have a hookup or a guide to be able to find what all this cool stuff was.

59:31Here in Portland, we have this really awesome cafe called Electrica that's run by a buddy of mine named Seiji Nanbu. Seiji's from Portland, but his family's from Japan, and he goes back all the time and is bringing in roasters from Japan and teas, matchas, hojichas, all this awesome tea from Japan. And he's created this little wormhole between Portland and Japan for like what the coffees he's able to serve are and what the teas he's able to serve are that otherwise you really would have to fly over there and like know somebody to go and find. I think another place that's doing that that's really pretty amazing is down at Kumquat, the cafe in Los Angeles in Highland Park.

1:00:18They just announced a really cool program that they're doing, I think, for the next month or so of serving like tiny, tiny Korean micro roasters that are like we've maybe written about them once or a couple of them on Sprudge. But there was a bunch that I'd never even seen or heard about before. That's so rad. I love Kumquat. That place rules. Is Mesh involved in that or is Mesh not even that small? I don't know if that was one of the ones. They just posted it all on Instagram and there was like seven or eight of them that I saw. And like I'd heard of a couple of them. And I'm the guy from Sprudge, so I'm supposed to know all of this.

1:00:53A puncher. Yeah. Dude, it was really cool. So like that kind of stuff where it's like you couldn't even get it online. But then there's these people in America like at Electrica or Kumquat that are like going to make the wormhole for you. and then you can get it from that and that rules um you know i mean but then the coffees are all going to be from at port war right or columbia right so then you're sort of like it's just it it knits together the map of how hyper hyper global there's nothing you consume that's more international than coffee uh and um there's something really cool about these places in america that are like setting up the wormhole for you and making it so you can get this stuff that otherwise you would never be able to get.

1:01:37I think that's fun. I love it, Jordan. I'll leave it there. Thank you so much, Jordan Michaelman, for joining This Is Taste. We'll have you back on. I really appreciate the work on all your journalism on Taste, and it's just a pleasure talking with you.

1:01:53This Is Taste is hosted by Matt Rodbard and me, Eliza Abarbanel. The show is produced by Shalia Harris and Pat Stango and edited by Clayton Gumbert. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for updates on all cool things happening.