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

If you enjoy hearing about the world of coffee, I recommend you check out my conversation with the founder of Pret, Julian Metcalfe, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uViyOJsc6O4 It’s the world’s most popular drink, with people drinking over 2 billion cups a day, but we still can’t agree on the most important facts about coffee. In this new episode Steven sits down with the world leading coffee expert, James Hoffmann. James won the World Barista Championship in 2007, is the co-founder of Square Mile Coffee Roasters and through his YouTube channel has become one of the leading figures in the world of coffee. He is also the author of ‘The World Atlas of Coffee’ and ‘How to Make the Best Coffee at Home’. In this conversation James and Steven discuss topics, such as: Where coffee really comes from How coffee is the world's most popular drug Why you can't tell how much caffeine is in your coffee How to get the maximum benefit from coffee How he went from not drinking coffee to an expert in 2 years Why coffee costs so much The best high street coffee you can buy How we are all addicted to coffee Why you get the coffee jitters What is the lethal level of coffee How caffeine is an insect repellent The history of coffee How coffee changed the world Why 1 cup of coffee will increase your life How he became the world’s best barista The best way to make coffee How to have a better cup of coffee Why coffee pods are rubbish His favourite coffee How he made his passion his life Why he became obsessed by coffee How he learned to communicate You can purchase James’ most recent book, ‘How to Make The Best Coffee at Home’, here: https://amzn.to/3SO1Xl1 Follow James: Instagram: https://bit.ly/3SOu0Rn Twitter: https://bit.ly/3ukOQOe Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  You're the former world barista champion. So we have cups of coffee here from different suppliers. So coffee number one.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd be surprised if that was expensive. I'd be a little bit outraged if that was expensive. That's kind of weird. That's really interesting. If you want the best experience for coffee, this one.

• 0:19Steven Bartlett?

  I can reveal that is.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  James Hoffman.

• 0:22Speaker 03

  The most famous people in the world when it comes to coffee.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  James has close to two million subscribers on YouTube.

• 0:27Speaker 03

  The most popular piece of coffee broadcasting on the planet.

• 0:31Steven Bartlett?

  You've committed a huge portion of your life to coffee. What advice have you got for me?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Okay, London has some of the best coffee shops in the world. Don't get an espresso machine for help.

• 0:40Steven Bartlett?

  Coffee pods.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  They're a microwave meal.

• 0:42Steven Bartlett?

  How long does it take to decay?

• 0:44Speaker 01

  The minute you open that bag, it's on its way out and it will happen really quickly.

• 0:47Steven Bartlett?

  You walk into the Starbucks, what do you order?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  If I'm being fully weird.

• 0:50Steven Bartlett?

  Be fully weird.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Fine, then I'm gonna.

• 0:53Steven Bartlett?

  Say I've got a hundred pounds for the machinery.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Coffee grinders are the right investment. They are more important than the machine.

• 0:59Steven Bartlett?

  What's your favorite cup of coffee?

• 1:01Speaker 01

  If I'm honest, it is.

• 1:03Steven Bartlett?

  Are we addicted?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  It's the world's most popular psychoactive drug. But you look at the science, coffee seems to be healthy and have a really positive impact wherever it's been measured. It's a great source of fibre. It is like having another vegetable into the diet. People tend to perform better on cognitive tests. It looks like coffee drinkers survive longer. The problem with it is that coffee has this really depressing future.

• 1:24Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:35Steven Bartlett?

  James, you've committed a huge portion of your life

• 1:41Steven Bartlett?

  to a drink, to a bean, to coffee.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  I love it. It brings me intense pleasure, like the whole thing. I think I fell in love with it 20 years ago. And I tried working in wine. People get falling in love with wine, right? Like people with the drink, with the culture, with where it's grown, all that stuff. The same can be true with coffee and turned out to be true for me. And I'm. Kind of obsessed with learning and coffee is so big. People see it as kind of niche. What I do is in a niche, but it's this global thing. It's in every culture. There's everything from botany to science to like health. All the rest of it's wrapped in this one thing. So I can spend lifetimes learning about it and never be done. It it it's just huge fun and it's one of those things that's capable of an incredible surprise. People's expectations of coffee are very low often.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  And and when you kind of show them what it can be, that's a very satisfying moment that never gets tiring.

• 2:36Steven Bartlett?

  Because I just thought of coffee as a drink that everyone seems to be pretty addicted to. But I imagine your perspective on on that is a little bit more artistic and expansive.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  I mean, yes and no. Coffee's existence kind of blows my mind as a thing that we all do. That for over a hundred years now, it's been normal to have the ground up seeds of a tropical fruit plant just sitting in your cupboard and you're going to steep that in water and drink it. That's a weird human thing that we do. And it's just been a part of everyone's lives for as long as they can remember. Coffee's just there. But it turns out in sort of the last 20 years, we've had this boom of specialty coffee, where we've kind of showcased how interesting it can be. You know, it's not just this commoditized thing. And I think that bit has sort of changed consumption around the world now, actually. I see it in every country. You know, people's opinions and expectations of coffee have shifted massively.

• 3:25Steven Bartlett?

  When I first started drinking coffee, which I think I was quite late to coffee, and I think I'm quite a a a low level consumer of coffee. Part of the reason I was put off drinking coffee was because it appears that the entirety of society are addicted to it. And it might have this sort of first principle belief that anything that has a significant upside must come with a significant downside.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 3:47Steven Bartlett?

  And and no one can tell me what the downside was. So I was just very reluctant to engage in an addiction. When I can see the upside, I can see people are more focused. They seem to be higher in energy. That's the appearance I have, but the downside was never clear. We are addicted, aren't we?

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Do you know, I don't like that word.

• 4:03Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  No, no, it's, you know, it's, um, yeah, it's the world's most popular psychoactive drug. It is the most widely consumed psychoactive drug. Yes, I would say it's absolutely bound itself into society now.

• 4:15Steven Bartlett?

  Are we addicted?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, addiction's complicated and I'm not an expert on addiction. I would say there's a level of dependency. If you stop drinking caffeine, you will suffer for twenty four to forty eight hours. And it might be a kind of big old headache. It might be something else. So, you know, you will have symptoms if you stop consuming it. But you can stop consuming coffee and then go for years without an urge to consume it again. So I wouldn't say addiction's quite the right word for it. But yeah, we are, I would say, deeply dependent on it.

• 4:45Steven Bartlett?

  Have you ever stopped drinking it for a prolonged period of time?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Not for a prolonged period of time. It's pretty hard for me not to, uh, sort of consume caffeine, doing what I do. Like, there's just a need to taste, a need to, you know, drink the stuff. I've stopped over periods. I've gone sick, I've gone a week or two without it. But, um, I've changed my attitude to caffeine generally. I'm much more careful around it because I think it is worthy of concern, the amount of caffeine you consume. Like, I'm very pro-coffee. I want people to drink and enjoy coffee. But at the same time, I, I am very nervous to encourage caffeine consumption that might be excessive. Because that's definitely not good for you.

• 5:21Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Sleep. Like, ultimately, anything in this world that interrupts your sleep, perhaps with the exception of children, is probably to be avoided, right? Like, sleep quality for every outcome, be it, you know, body composition, longevity, all the rest of it, like cognition. Sleep's so important. And I feel like we, we didn't culturally prioritize the sleep the way we are beginning to now. You know, I think more and more people are talking about the importance of sleep. And it's really easy to get into a cycle with caffeine of drinking too much coffee in the day. You have poor quality sleep. You're tired the next day. I'll fix that with more caffeine, which will give you lower quality sleep at night. And that cycle can go on and on and on. I think that's very, that's a bad thing, basically. I would say that's to be avoided.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  So I'm pro-cutting off caffeine early if you suffer with it in any way. And there's enough ways to track your sleep these days. I feel like everything's tracking our sleep. So you can tell if you've had a bad night's sleep. And if you drank coffee late, maybe don't do that anymore. Because, you know, caffeine has about a five-hour half-life. So, you know, even 10 hours after you drank a cup of coffee, there's still a decent amount floating around in your system, enough that might, you know, delay onset of sleep or reduce the quality of your sleep.

• 6:35Steven Bartlett?

  Isn't it bonkers that people offer you an espresso after dinner in restaurants?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't get it. For some people, they find it very calming and they really enjoy it. They love it. They have no issue sleeping. I cannot touch caffeine after like 3pm. I have like a hard cutoff and I'm done. But yeah, I find that, you know, there's the idea that it's a digestive aid. I'm not sure that's super well evidenced, to be honest, having looked into it anyway. But if people enjoy it, I'm not going to get in the way of it. But and some people sleep like a baby afterwards. I'm always amazed by those people who are like, yeah, I have coffee, I gotta sleep. Like, how? How? And there's big genetic differences. And I think we've started to see those and you can get genetic tests done that will give you an idea of your caffeine metabolizer kind of rate. Are you slow? Are you fast? But yeah, it's, it's, it's one of those weird

• 7:22Speaker 01

  things where because how coffee is made can impact the quantity of caffeine in the end cup, you can't accurately predict how much caffeine's in a coffee from a coffee shop, right? There's a bunch of variables that can happen that will produce a pretty big variance. So this incredibly popular drug, we don't know how much we're taking most of the time, which I think is kind of wild and maybe not a good thing. And so I'm, I'm kind of pro mindful consumption of this stuff, if that makes sense, like just be aware of it and thoughtful about it and still enjoy it. I want people to drink and enjoy coffee, but I want as much upside as possible as little downside.

• 8:01Steven Bartlett?

  You used the word drug there. With drugs, you get a sort of tolerance that requires you to have more and more of the thing to get to the same levels of, I don't know, psychoactive-ness. Is that the same with coffee where if I have one coffee today, in a couple of months' time, I'm going to need two to get to the same level of like alertness?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yes and no. It seems to be that the benefits that we see of caffeine when it comes to cognition disappear with habitual usage and actually adding more doesn't change it. That first coffee that feels so good is taking us sort of instead of going from zero to one, it's taking us from minus one to zero. It's removing the kind of withdrawal symptom almost and bringing us back to a kind of level of like, okay, I'm here now. And so if you really, really want maximum benefit from caffeine, be it cognition or sports or anything else, then actually having a period without coffee beforehand will give you the sort of greatest benefit afterwards. So there's a habituation, I guess, but it doesn't escalate the way that drugs do. Like you don't need to suddenly be drinking six, eight, 10 cups of coffee to have an effect. You'll just feel weird.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  So yeah, a little bit though.

• 9:10Steven Bartlett?

  Again, going back to my first principles, one of my first principles in life generally, and this is why I often avoid medicine, paracetamol, you name it. I would, I'd rather take the headache than than start dabbling because I always think there's a cost to something. When I think about the way we live our lives in society, we literally, many people will have three or four cups of coffee a day. Some people even more. Some people will just drink coffee all the way through the day, throughout work, and then have one on their way home from work as well. And I look at that objectively and go, that's insanity. That this sort of the entire Western population is just like caffeinating themselves just to function. And then you hear phrases like I, like, um, I can't function, I can't function, I've not had my coffee yet. And I just go, oh, this is, you know.

• 9:56Steven Bartlett?

  But I don't know enough about coffee to understand if that's just, you know, maybe there is a free lunch as it relates to coffee, or maybe sleep is the only.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  I think sleep's the primary concern, you know, if you, and if you're not suffering any issues with sleep from your coffee consumption, then, you know, if you look at the science, I'm not a scientist. I really, I like to read the research papers, but I'm not doing the research. But on almost every front, coffee seems to be healthy and have a really positive impact wherever it's been measured and across a whole range of different stuff. So, you know, as to why caffeine's one part of it, I think the fact that coffee contains a surprising amount of fibre is another one, or the quantity of polyphenols in there. If you're interested in the gut microbiome, like coffee seems to be really good for that. And I think we know more and more the microbiome, you know, Tim Spector has taught us all of the importance

• 10:46Speaker 01

  of that, that it impacts us in so many different ways. So. On almost any front, if you've researched, is coffee good for longevity? Yes, you see a reduction in all-cause mortality that correlates to coffee consumption. Is it good for cognitive decline? Yes, you tend to see coffee consumption associated with less cognitive decline in old age or liver function, cancer. All of these things seem to have a positive association with coffee drinking. But if it's messing with your sleep, I don't think it's worth it. That's just me. That's the line for me of like, it's not such an incredible benefit that that is worth the loss of sleep quality.

• 11:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, sleep has become just the most, sort of the biggest obsession in my life over the last year.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Thank you for all of this. I think it's just if you pay attention to this stuff, you can't help but begin to obsess over it, I hope healthily.

• 11:39Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. So to avoid the impact of coffee impacting on sleep, you think the best thing to do is, because I've just not been drinking coffee after like 1pm.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Great.

• 11:49Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  I think that's a pretty good way to go. I think decaf is still a good option. I think people are kind of really negative about decaf because we have this caffeine-first association with coffee. A lot of people are like, why would I drink decaf? What's the point? You know, you see a lot of death before decaf or whatever. But I think decaf can be really tasty, which is good. Like it's a nice delicious hot drink. And also, yeah, there's a little bit less of the downside if you are concerned about caffeine.

• 12:11Steven Bartlett?

  I'm so, I'm so confused. You and Tim Spector are the two people that have made the case. I'm thinking the first time I spoke to Tim Spector about coffee, he was a little bit on the fence as to whether it was healthy or not. He came back a second time and I think there's been a little bit of a shift in him. He's now pro-coffee in terms of the gut microbiome, which I thought was super interesting. He says it counts as one of my 30 free vegetables a week that I need to get, which was really surprising. So it helped my gut microbiome. He talked about the longevity impacts as well, which I thought was staggering, that it can, the studies seem to show that it will extend your life.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a reduction in all-cause mortality. So you're just less likely to die early, I suppose is the easiest way to think about it. Or that's what we see from the studies. And it's not that the studies aren't without flaws, but there's been a lot now and you tend to see people dying less often or less early when they drink more coffee. Not a huge amount of coffee. And this is, if you ever go into the research, this is really important. A cup of coffee to you or me might look like this. A cup of coffee to a researcher is 120 mils of coffee, which is about half of this. So you'll see loads of studies say three cups of coffee, three cups of coffee is when you see these benefits. That's not a liter of coffee. That's more like three to 400 mils total a day of, say, filtered coffee or one or two or three espressos,

• 13:31Speaker 01

  single espressos. So the definition of a cup from all these studies is really confusing and problematic. And I think encourages excess coffee consumption. But yeah, three cups of coffee for heart disease, for all sorts of things is seen to be associated with improvement in outcome.

• 13:51Steven Bartlett?

  Why might that be? What is it about the bean, the coffee bean, that is causing health benefits?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  That's probably above my pay grade. I would, I would probably, at this point, I'm probably aligned with Tim in that it's a great source of fibre and polyphenols, that it's just, it is like having another vegetable into the diet. It's more diversity of diet. I think one study showed that for some people in the US, like cups of filtered coffee were their primary source of dietary fibre. Now, that's kind of wild and not really how things should be, but it is a significant source of fibre. If you think about it that way, you know, a large cup might be three grams of fibre, which doesn't seem like much until you start tracking your fibre intake and you realise, oh, that's a, that's a decent contribution for a drink. So yeah, I think that's the biggest part of it. I don't think caffeine has been shown to be neuroprotective necessarily. So I think people are trying to understand

• 14:43Speaker 01

  the mechanism more. Caffeine's been studied separately and is much easier to study because you can dose it, you can look at the effects of that. To really do a study on coffee consumption is really hard. You can't really do a randomised controlled trial where you raise people from, say, 15 to 60 years old. You control their diet, exercise, sleep, and you just randomise the coffee consumption. Because then you might see something where you could really say coffee is good or bad. We can just look at these large epidemiological studies and say, well, trying to control for diet and exercise and cigarettes and all these other things. It looks like coffee drinkers survive longer or have less issues. And it might just be that healthy people are just attracted to coffee. We don't really know which, which way around that is. There's no strong mechanism.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  But at this point, I'd probably be aligned with, with Tim on this one, that I think it's primarily going to be the gut.

• 15:33Steven Bartlett?

  The fibre point's super interesting because he said to me that we're like, as a society, extremely fibre deficient.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:39Steven Bartlett?

  I think the number he said that we needed was about 20 grams of fibre a day.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah.

• 15:44Steven Bartlett?

  So if coffee's giving us three or four of those grams, that's almost sort of 25% of our requirement, which is pretty staggering.

• 15:52Steven Bartlett?

  And I never really thought of coffee as a source of fibre.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Neither did I, until he told me. It just didn't cross my mind that this, you know, it's a drink. You know, it's not like a thick.

• 16:00Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  I lived the life of like fibre is miserable cardboardy bran cereal.

• 16:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  That's fibre in my brain. And the idea that this was fibre was inconceivable to me. But, you know, then I read the studies and it was fascinating.

• 16:14Steven Bartlett?

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

• 16:24Speaker 01

  I would certainly say, not a doctor, but I would certainly say that if someone suffers with anxiety, cutting out caffeine would be something to test and to see if there's benefits to cutting caffeine out. There are a bunch of studies done on it. They're not uniform in their outcome. Some found different results for caffeine consumption. And I think because you're trying to study what is ultimately quite a generic term that covers a lot of different experiences and challenges that people face. So, yeah, I wouldn't say consume it regardless, don't think about it. I think if you struggle with anxiety, it would certainly be worth considering cutting it out.

• 16:59Steven Bartlett?

  What about depression?

• 17:01Speaker 01

  I think the same sort of thing is true there. I think there have been studies that correlate caffeine consumption to depression. I think there are people who have used it and have found benefit from it. Again, it's one of those ones where I just wouldn't blindly consume caffeine, assuming a benefit to mental health. If I have mental health challenges, I think it's a place to check. And it's pretty easy to check. Cut it out for a month. It'll suck for a few days. But, you know, you may see benefits or you may not. But.

• 17:28Steven Bartlett?

  Another sort of complicated tenures link has been made towards cancer with coffee.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Most of the meta-studies now seem to come down on for almost every cancer, there's a lower incidence associated with coffee consumption. This day again, that's not universal. Some studies have found differently. Again, they're just really hard studies to do effectively, I think. I think that's the challenge of it. I have certainly not seen anything that makes me concerned about drinking coffee, from that perspective anyway. I think there's a, you know, whatever impact it may have, I think would be pretty minor compared to something like cigarettes. And I, you know, I remember, I think you said on the internet some time ago, you think in 10 or 20 years' time, people will see coffee consumption the way they see cigarette consumption.

• 18:16Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I did. I remember saying that two years ago.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, to some extent, there's something in that. I think we are getting more thoughtful about caffeine consumption, and I think caffeine is going to be the root of it all, rather than coffee as a whole.

• 18:27Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's what I should have said. I should have said caffeine.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  And I, and I think there is change, and I think, you know, we're definitely seeing that. I don't think, I think there's enough health benefits in the coffee itself that we would benefit from keeping it around. You know, I don't think there's any health benefits associated with cigarette smoking, but I think coffee will have some benefits, but I think our attitude and our relationship with caffeine is going to change. I think you're right about that.

• 18:51Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's really what I was getting at. I almost didn't, couldn't pull apart coffee from caffeine because I'm a muggle on this subject matter. But what I really mean is that addiction to this drug of caffeine and how it's like running everyone's life and we need three cups or four cups a day just to be normal and to show up to work and think straight, I go, Jesus Christ, like, as is always the case with these sort of health revolutions, we kind of go to one extreme, then we go to the other. There's the counter movement. There'll be like the big decaf movement. There's now, because of neurodiversity and anxiety concerns, there's this jitter-free, crash-free caffeine movement emerging in things like matcha and et cetera. So hmm, is decaf, are you seeing a rise in people choosing decaf?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  The great frustration of decaf is that decaf drinkers are typically very poorly served by the coffee industry.

• 19:44Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  For a bunch of reasons, coffee shop owners tend not to invest in decaf. A lot of coffee roasting companies don't really care about decaf, despite the fact that decaf drinkers are the ones who are drinking it just for the taste. They are the purest coffee consumer, actually, because they just want the flavour. They don't even want the caffeine, just the flavour.

• 19:59Steven Bartlett?

  I guess.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  So, you know, it's always been an important thing for me over the years, that decaf be good. But yeah, I'd love to see more decaf consumption going on. I think decaf can be really delicious and good if it's done properly all the way through, from sort of farm to cup. But it's not as available as it should be to most people, which kind of hurts me.

• 20:20Steven Bartlett?

  What about Alzheimer's? Randomly something I've got increasingly more interested in over the last couple of years, I think from doing this podcast and speaking to health experts. But it has almost felt like this mystery disease that strikes some people for a reason that we haven't quite yet figured out. Perfectly healthy people can suddenly get the news that they have Alzheimer's. Is there a relationship from these studies that you've seen between Alzheimer's and coffee?

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yes. And I'm going to sound like a broken record, where you see once again, up to about three cups of coffee a day, saw an association with reduced cognitive decline and reduced incidence of Alzheimer's. So it's, again, I'm not saying that coffee is causing this. I'm saying in the studies, the people who drank coffee had better outcomes. But you can't just say because they drank coffee. There's a really important disconnect in these kind of things that doesn't happen often enough.

• 21:12Steven Bartlett?

  I had Dr Daniel Amen on the podcast and one of his, he's like a neuroscientist that scans, I think he's scanned a quarter of a million brains now. He is one of the only people that has really expressed a concern about the impact that coffee has on the brain, because he says it reduces the amount of blood flow to the brain. And that is a negative thing. Have you ever heard about? That that point of view before.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  I haven't heard much about that. Most of the studies I've read that looked at cognition see that kind of lift that caffeine will give you in that, you know, people tend to perform better on cognitive tests after caffeine than or with caffeine than without. I'm surprised in that I had thought caffeine was a vasodilator, which would in theory allow more blood flow around, but maybe it's not, you know, I haven't scanned a quarter million brains. So I'm not an expert on this one, but that's the first time I've heard someone talk about blood flow to the brain and coffee specifically.

• 22:05Steven Bartlett?

  You know, I used to believe that coffee was basically giving me energy. And then it was actually Daniel Arman, Dr. Daniel Arman, that helped me understand what's actually going on.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:15Steven Bartlett?

  He says it's just like blocking something.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Yes, it's it's it's stopping a compound called adenosine working in your blood and adenosine calms you down, lowers your heart rate, makes you feel tired and sleepy and caffeine just gets in the way of that receptor and stops it working. And so a lot of people experience a kind of accumulation of adenosine. And so while they're consuming coffee, their body's trying to put out adenosine, lower the heart rate, calm them down, it's not working. And eventually your body clears the caffeine and you have a kind of crash afterwards where you suddenly just feel extremely tired because finally your receptors are clear to receive the amount of adenosine that's in your blood. So yeah, there's there's a kind of downside that way. Again, big doses tend to come with bigger crashes. You know, I think a lot of people now are pushing the idea that you should delay caffeine consumption

• 22:59Speaker 01

  a little bit later in the day. I think Hoopman is big on like no coffee for the first 90, 120 minutes after waking to help sort of mitigate this effect and sort of clear out everything in your bloodstream before you start inhibiting adenosine reception.

• 23:14Steven Bartlett?

  Is that why people get like crashes and stuff like that? Because a lot of drinks that are coming to market now that are like caffeine based products are promising you that you won't get crashes and jitters. So I was wondering if they're.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Right. You see a lot of people pushing L-theanine in there as a product which seems to have a synergistic effect and help people feel a little calmer whilst 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, you know. You might have something with, say, a hundred milligrams of caffeine. That's a, that's a pretty acceptable dose. You might find that in a single espresso or in, say, a small cup of filtered coffee. If you take a pre-workout, that's often three hundred 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 fifty, sixty milligrams of caffeine in a can or a bottle of Coca-Cola. But you can easily end up drinking two hundred, two hundred and fifty milligrams in coffee as well.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  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 filtered coffee. It's just knowing how much you're taking that I think is kind of key.

• 24:20Steven Bartlett?

  And why, why does that matter? Is that again about sleep? Or is it just because if you take huge doses, then there'll be significant consequences like crashes and stuff like that?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think it's the, 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, I think the, the lethal dose of, of caffeine is really pretty high. A few people have got there sadly.

• 24:41Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  But it's, it's, it's a huge amount of coffee. It's usually done with like pills or other sort of forms of caffeine consumption. To do it with just cups of coffee is like, I think fifty or sixty cups of coffee in a very short timeframe. A very strong coffee would be about what, what was necessary for a small person to hit a sort of caffeine toxicity. So it's quite hard to do.

• 24:59Steven Bartlett?

  And you, you'd die of a cardiovascular issue or?

• 25:01Speaker 01

  I think it's more unpleasant than that.

• 25:03Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  As I recall, yeah, I think it's a sort of neurological thing as well. It's not, I don't think it's a good death, if I'm honest. Um, not that, you know, maybe there are good ones, but yeah, I don't think it's a good way to go.

• 25:14Steven Bartlett?

  Coffee was originally a snack?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Kind of.

• 25:17Steven Bartlett?

  Kind of.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, the coffee fruit was. So, uh, it's kind of, most people don't think of coffee as fruit. And coffee fruit grows on these trees. They're usually about 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, bitter skin and a little bit of kind of fruit flesh, for want of a better term, on the inside. But it is delicious. It's kind of like a tangy watermelon taste. Coffee fruit's very delicious. I recommend, if you can try it, definitely try it. Um, caffeine exists in coffee primarily as an insect repellent.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  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 and they think for that reason. But the caffeine in fruit, in coffee trees specifically, is basically insect repellent, which is why the higher you grow coffee, the less insects there are and actually the lower the levels of caffeine you tend to see the plant produce.

• 26:28Steven Bartlett?

  You became a competitive coffee, I don't know what you call it. Do you call it a player, barista?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Barista.

• 26:35Steven Bartlett?

  You became a competitive coffee barista when you were, what, 25 years old?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, about that, yeah.

• 26:39Steven Bartlett?

  And then by 27, you're named the world barista champion?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Yes. I think I went hard. You know, a couple of things. Yeah, well, I really fell in love with it. You know what I mean? Like, I got into coffee at like 23. I didn't like coffee, didn't drink coffee. And then I read a book called The Devil's Cup that just...

• 26:57Steven Bartlett?

  This book?

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's a fun book. It's, I don't know how well it's aged, but it's just travel writing. So he traces the route the coffee took from Ethiopia to Yemen through kind of Turkey into the Mediterranean, how it spread around the world. And what got me about that book was like, coffee's in every culture and it's different. Italian espresso culture is totally different to Scandinavian coffee culture, totally different to Australian coffee culture, or, you know, what coffee culture is in the US. I was like, well, this drink's kind of interesting. Like, it's a part of every society now. And then I started to drink it, I fell in love with it, and I just went deeper and deeper and deeper. And yeah, in 2007, I won the world barista championships.

• 27:34Steven Bartlett?

  So if you're the former world barista champion?

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:39Steven Bartlett?

  And I am a muggle, which I am on coffee and many things. What do I need to know? What are the, like, the biggest myths and misconceptions about the drink of coffee that someone like me should be aware of? I'm trying to have better coffee. I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm never going to be like a coffee snob, but I'm, I want to make, I want nicer coffees that are good for me, that are healthy, and that taste great.

• 28:06Steven Bartlett?

  What do I need to know? What are the misconceptions?

• 28:08Speaker 01

  There's probably less misconceptions now than ever, I would say. Like, I think more people are coming around to the idea that coffee is not just a bitter, painful experience that you go through to get the caffeine on the other side, like it's a little trial each morning that we come to enjoy. I think people now understand more and more that there is an astonishing sort of range of flavour in coffee. Twenty years ago, there wasn't. Forty years ago, there was no diversity of flavour 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.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  There's so much diversity. That'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, harvests the seeds, processes 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. And then it's made again when you make it. And at each of these stages, you can lose the quality completely.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  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. You need to work out what are the most important things to understand, and get those right. And then you're most of the way there. I don't think the the kind of average consumer is necessarily uninformed or confused, but potentially overwhelmed by choice still.

• 30:13Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I I see a variance in the price, so I assume there must be a variance in what I'm putting in my mouth.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 30:19Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm I'm not sure what's marketing and what's, you know, quality.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 30:24Steven Bartlett?

  Um. I've brought five different cups of coffee.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:28Steven Bartlett?

  From five local shops, outlets, et cetera. And I'm gonna, I don't know which ones are which. So my team got me these five cups of coffee. Jack is just bringing them in now. So we have five different cups of coffee here from five different suppliers. You're smelling them all. When you're smelling them, is there anything you're noticing just from smelling them?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, um, so that one of the things I can assess pretty quickly is how darkly the coffee's been roasted. When you have, uh, the longer you leave coffee in a roasting machine, the darker the color of the beans will be. And for a long time, I think people associated darker roasts with with better coffee, oilier 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. So these are all reasonably dark roasts just from smell. So I can kind of the the smells I'm coming off there are more in the kind of heavier, not burnt smells, well, some of them actually smell a little bit burnt and kind of, uh, harsh. But, uh, nothing's particularly fruity or floral smelling. So it's just for me, a a kind of gauge of where things are going to be.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  So there's going to be an expectation with that of bitterness.

• 31:36Steven Bartlett?

  In in perfume shops, they give us sometimes coffee beans to smell to kind of try and wash out our

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:41Steven Bartlett?

  nasal senses, I guess. Does that work?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it totally does. We we we are, it's why dogs sniff really fast, that you're looking for change. Your sense of smell works quite well on change. Uh, and so, yes, you will get what's called suppression. If you smell the same kind of smells over and over, they become less and less intense. It's why people end up wearing too much of the same perfume they've worn for 20 years because they can't, literally can't smell it anymore. We can, they can't.

• 32:04Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:13Steven Bartlett?

  Dave, do I stink?

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Do I? Yeah.

• 32:15Steven Bartlett?

  Because your brain, your nose, I guess, is habituated to though.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  There's a good hack. If you ever want to break apart how like something like Coca-Cola smells, if you take a component smell of Coca-Cola like lime, right? Because Coke just tastes of Coke to people, but it's actually lime, neroli, 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 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.

• 32:45Steven Bartlett?

  The interesting thing with talking about Coca-Cola there is I remember those Coke and Pepsi studies from back in the day where people would rate Pepsi as tasting better unless they had it in a Coke can. So when they could see the brand of the Coca-Cola, they rated it better. But when they could see it in a plastic cup, they rated Pepsi better. And I wonder here as well, because you don't know what these coffees are. You don't know what brands they are. Neither do I.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:11Steven Bartlett?

  What the results are going to be. So coffee number one.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:14Steven Bartlett?

  Have a taste and a smell.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  So that's a, to me, a pretty standard kind of commercial coffee taste. There's not a lot going on there. Relatively high in bitterness to me. So that's a fairly bitter cup of coffee. And that's coming, I would say, mostly from roast. And if something's good or bad, it can be bad because it wasn't made that well that day. It could be bad because it was not great raw materials. And finding why is sometimes tricky. I wouldn't say it's a particularly expensive cup of coffee.

• 33:47Steven Bartlett?

  No, it didn't taste of petrol station coffee.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  You can say that. I like that. You can say, yeah, I'm going to just lead you into saying terrible things and I'll say nothing.

• 33:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. It does taste like it came out of like a vending machine or something to me.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd be surprised if that was expensive. I'd be a little bit outraged if that was expensive.

• 34:03Steven Bartlett?

  What would you rate that one out of five?

• 34:06Steven Bartlett?

  Let's do 10.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  For me and what coffee can be, I'd say that's like a two.

• 34:13Steven Bartlett?

  I would say that was a five out of 10.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's kind of fair. I probably should be fair and call that a four out of 10 because I've tasted way worse than that.

• 34:22Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Let's go for number two.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Now, this one will be a little bit more divisive for a lot of people because it's got a little bit more acidity. And it's like a little bit, as we might describe it, salmonous almost, like it's a little zingy tasting. Generally acidity is associated with quality in coffee, which is a real sticking point for a lot of people. It's down to the fact that when you grow coffee, the higher you grow it, the slower it grows, the 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. So that tastes like it's got better raw materials in there for me than this one. Roast a little bit lighter, bruise a little bit better. I'd like it to be a less kind of sour thing. It's a little bit old, obviously. It's sat around for a while. But I would say it's a, for me, it's a better cup than this one.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's got a more of a personality, hasn't it? The aftertaste is a little bit, something going on there. And what would you rate that out of, out of 10 in your preference?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  There's things I'd like to change about it. So like six, seven, somewhere there. Like, um, but it has, I think, better raw materials in it that that does appeal to me.

• 35:34Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, I'm gonna say six as well. Okay. I can reveal

• 35:42Steven Bartlett?

  that number one

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:45Steven Bartlett?

  was McDonald's coffee.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  That's not surprising. That's, that's kind of what I would have expected McDonald's to taste like.

• 35:52Steven Bartlett?

  And it was, that cup of coffee cost us one pound thirty.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  So probably the cheapest thing here. I feel like McDonald's are aiming at the kind of cheaper end.

• 36:01Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, your assessment there was probably fair. You did originally give it a two out of 10.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  I, I feel not bad about that, but it's fine.

• 36:08Steven Bartlett?

  There you go. So, um, number two, you talked about there being sort of a bitterness to it and then like a

• 36:15Speaker 01

  A little bit more acidity in this. It tastes like the raw materials are of a higher quality, certainly than number one.

• 36:23Steven Bartlett?

  That is an independent local coffee shop.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:26Steven Bartlett?

  And that cup of coffee is double the price of the McDonald's one at about three pounds per cup. Let's move on to number three.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:39Steven Bartlett?

  Very different taste.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  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, a little bit richer, a bit earthy at the same time for me.

• 36:55Steven Bartlett?

  It's fuller, isn't it?

• 36:56Speaker 01

  It is a little bit fuller.

• 36:57Steven Bartlett?

  The first one was quite watery to me.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's in part going to be how it's made, in part how it's roasted, in part, you know, where it's from. 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

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a reasonably commercial grade coffee. I wouldn't say it tastes bad. Roast a little dark.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's another kind of

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, three, four, three, actually. There's a something about the, there's a sort of earthiness that I don't enjoy in coffee. Some people really like earthy flavors. I really don't, and that's just a preference thing.

• 37:32Steven Bartlett?

  So that is Costa Coffee.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Interesting, there you go.

• 37:35Steven Bartlett?

  Number four.

• 37:40Steven Bartlett?

  You're doing a swirling, I can see. You can do a real.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  I try, I like to slurp usually, a little aeration, 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 materials are particularly bad, until I can have a guess at who that's from.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  But it is definitely a darker roast, so more bitterness, again, quite full.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  So, you know, my gut says that's a sort of Starbucks style thing to me.

• 38:11Steven Bartlett?

  Try the last one as well then, before we reveal.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Before I get into trouble.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  That's kind of weird. It's a little bit vegetably to me, if I'm honest.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not my favorite. Again, it's, it's within the world of coffee roasting, it's darker. It's not as dark as this one. Yeah, I like it probably less than this one here, so I'd probably be back to like a four again.

• 38:35Steven Bartlett?

  So number four, which was the one you gave five out of 10, is Pratt.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Is it?

• 38:40Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 38:41Steven Bartlett?

  And number. Three, sorry, number five.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:47Steven Bartlett?

  Is Starbucks.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Is it?

• 38:48Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 38:50Steven Bartlett?

  So of the high street chains then, the coffee that you rated highest in our taste test.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:56Steven Bartlett?

  Was Pratt.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:58Steven Bartlett?

  Second was Costa and then third was Starbucks.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  But I would say from my point of view, the variance between them surprisingly small.

• 39:07Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Uh, they're not, I don't think they taste particularly different to each other in a, in a big way. I think the independent stood out a long way from the others, right? It was clearly different. It has a lot more flavor and character going on, which is good, which is what, you know, I, I like about coffee. But, um, you, you know, I think the, the chains, the brand experience may be different, but at the root, there's not a huge variance in the coffee.

• 39:33Steven Bartlett?

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

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 39:44Steven Bartlett?

  And interestingly, the, um, the price variance is the independent costs three pounds. Costa's three pound twenty, Pratt's three pound twenty and Starbucks is three pound sixty.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Really?

• 39:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  It always blew my mind for years and years. I would work with loads of like essentially startup coffee shop owners and their mindset would be, oh, I need to be like the same kind of price as Starbucks or maybe a little bit more. And you're like, what are you possibly thinking that you have the same kind of supply chain that they do, that you're going to make? And, you know, they make great margins. You, you, you're not buying 20 million paper cups a week. You know what I mean? Like nothing makes sense, but people feel very tied to this idea that, you know, the price is set by the chains. And I think that's changed now and, 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, uh, you know, a real frustration for me.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  And, and that's why I'm always going to bat for independents because it's not like you're going to spend more. You can get a better product by someone who cares deeply about it. And, and I think it's, there's a risk in going to an independent if you're traveling and, you know, Starbucks, the, the model's built on, I know where to queue, who to talk to, where to stand after I place an order. What, what kind of food I can get there. It's very safe. If I dropped you in Moscow and told you to get coffee, you'd go to a chain because you know how it works and you'd get it done. Independents feel like a risk, but the reward I think is often there for sure. And there's more independents and they're better than ever now. So, you know, I'm, I'm very pro independent coffee shops.

• 41:12Steven Bartlett?

  You have quite a lot of businesses. I read somewhere that you'd started, I think, 11 or 12 different companies.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Getting on for that, I think, at this point now.

• 41:19Steven Bartlett?

  What are those businesses?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  It's a good question. My first business, I started back in 2008, just after I won the World British Championships, which is a coffee roasting company. And that still is, I suppose, my primary business today, even if I don't run that anymore. And there's an amazing MD in there. I just try not to start fires and be useful where I can do. Over the years, we've started other things, distribution companies, kind of importing stuff, or we have a coffee shop. We've done training businesses, kind of education, that kind of stuff. Equipment businesses, kind of the big commercial espresso machines in there. I started a coffee recruitment business that I ultimately sold a little while back.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  I'm trying to think of other things. I started a magazine. I've started a bunch of other stuff. And then there's, you know, getting into YouTube, that's become a weird business in and of itself that I didn't plan to start, but is now a kind of all-consuming business.

• 42:14Steven Bartlett?

  With the YouTube business, you must have learned a lot about what people are interested in as it relates to coffee. Because you'll see you talk about certain things and people just seem to gravitate towards those subject matters.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:25Steven Bartlett?

  What is it that people care so much about as it relates to coffee and your audience care about?

• 42:28Speaker 01

  That's a great question. Because I think coming into this, I, for years and years, as people did back then, wrote a blog. And I wrote a blog to sort of share information about coffee, because it was great for me to learn. And also, there's a benefit to sharing. I think if you give things come back to you in the world. And then people stopped reading blogs and started making videos. And I think, having worked in the coffee industry for 20 years, we had tried to talk to people about coffee, and nothing really hit. And people weren't really interested. They didn't like the way we talked about it. And suddenly YouTube, I found a way to connect with people. And it turns out, we vastly underestimated how broad and how deep people's interest in coffee is. Yeah, people care about which machine should I buy? And that remains a question that I will be asked, I think, for the end of my days.

• 43:11Steven Bartlett?

  Excuse me, switch machines? I genuinely want to know which machine I should buy, because...

• 43:15Speaker 01

  I don't know. It depends what your needs are. Like, what's your budget? Like, what do you want to spend?

• 43:19Steven Bartlett?

  Budget's big. But I love an espresso. And I like speed. And I want, I mean, I'm like everybody. I want it to be super fast and really nice.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  So the problem with espresso specifically

• 43:33Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Is that good espresso is a little bit tricky. And it means to get really great espresso at home. You kind of want to have it as a hobby. And if that does not appeal to you, then don't get an espresso machine for home. Because you will spend a ton of money and you can get you the best machine in the world, put it on your counter. After a week, you'd be like, oh, you just can't be bothered. I don't want to do this. And I think suddenly the two pounds fifty, three pounds 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.

• 44:13Steven Bartlett?

  What about an Americano? Like a great Americano?

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Like a great filtered coffee?

• 44:17Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  There's definitely options there and you can buy a machine and grinder and spend. You can get an incredible setup for like 500 pounds. Bearing in mind espresso machines, an incredible setup will be two, three, four thousand pounds. If you're looking at like the top end of stuff, you can go all the way up to, I can spend 10, 10, 15,000 pounds of your money if you'd let me.

• 44:39Steven Bartlett?

  Jesus, no thanks.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  If that's, that's where the budgets sort of top out in, in home espresso. But it's kind of, at that point, it's like home, home audio where people just, they want the best possible thing. And if they have the budget, that market exists.

• 44:51Steven Bartlett?

  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, 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. Ideally, I'd just speak to it and say, please give me coffee. And it would just come out, you know?

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're not there yet. We're not there yet. The coffee industry is improving and the automation side is improving. By and large, this sort of super automatic stuff, where you just push a button and everything happens and coffee comes out. There's a bunch of dull technical challenges that mean they can't make as good a coffee as you could do if you were willing to do a little bit of work.

• 45:29Steven Bartlett?

  I thought so.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  And that's like, I'm not gonna lie to you, that's just the truth of it. They're getting better and there are more and more solutions.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  And 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 be as good as possible. I'm going to ask you to do tiny bits of work. Just, just pour beans in a grinder, put grinder, ground coffee into a little machine and push a button.

• 45:53Steven Bartlett?

  Which machine?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  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 do you need in the morning?

• 46:03Steven Bartlett?

  I've got, say, I've got a hundred, two hundred pounds to solve this coffee problem.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  In total?

• 46:07Steven Bartlett?

  In total, for the machinery.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Okay, so the bad news is that, good and bad news. Coffee grinders are the right investment, right? They are more important than the machine. You can give me a twenty quid filter coffee brewer from Amazon, but if you give me a decent grinder, I can get some pretty good coffee out of it.

• 46:28Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 46:29Speaker 01

  If you give me a twenty pound coffee grinder and a five grand 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 little whirly blade grinders. You push it down, it spins madly, just smashes it to pieces. But there's no real control of the size of the pieces. So some will be tiny particles, others will 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 that cut to a specific size. So all the coffee's 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.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Not crazy amounts, but yeah, you're looking at like, oh, at least a hundred to two hundred pounds for a good grinder.

• 47:20Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And I'd love to tell you it wasn't the case. And grinders are getting, it used to be like five hundred pounds for a good grinder at home. It's coming down all the time. But yeah, I'd say I'd need like a hundred and fifty.

• 47:31Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Maybe off you.

• 47:33Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  And then I can get you a really great grinder that should last a lifetime and make you cafe quality coffee. It's not, it's not, you know, it just couldn't do it five hundred times a day the way a coffee shop's one could. But that's where you're going to spend money. And then you could just get a simple pour-over cone. And just pour water onto coffee on top of a mug and life be real easy that way.

• 47:53Steven Bartlett?

  Going back to this this point, though, about what you've discovered about people's interest in coffee.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:57Steven Bartlett?

  Journey, the first thing you said there was people want to know what machines and stuff and I interrupted, so please do.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  No, no, I mean, for for me, the strategy initially was, so I I my bigger umbrella goal of YouTube is that I want people to enjoy coffee more for a bunch of reasons, and I want them to see it as a more valuable piece of their life. So that at some point, they might be willing to spend a bit more money on it. That's that's the sort of 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 espresso machine to buy? They 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.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  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, caffier, what is the best way to use that? I want to be there to help you do that. But it's it's a lot of it's about building trust so that down the line, we can go and talk about something totally different and you'll listen and you'll trust me. And and that sort of trust is super important to me in in terms of like building an audience, 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.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  And the only way you can sort of get cooler temperatures as the world heats up is to go higher up the mountain. It's already mountain grown. It's already growing at fifteen hundred meters, two thousand meters. The problem with mountains is that the higher you go, there's generally less of the mountain. You know what I mean? There's less area around the world that can grow specialty coffee, great great quality coffee. So the future is there'll be less great coffee in the future. Cheap coffee will be around for a while. It doesn't need the same kind of conditions, but great coffee has a difficult future ahead of it. And there are millions of people whose livelihoods depend on that. And and that's it's not a great system, so to speak. It's like, there's a lot of problems with how coffee production is incredibly unfair towards the people who produce it.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  But i- if we are to remain customers, we need to be comfortable spending a little bit more on coffee in the future. And if you enjoy coffee, spending an extra pound a bag, two pounds a bag, if you really enjoy it, fine. No problem at all. You know, I mean, I will keep coffee as a part of my life. But but uh that that's kind of one of the motivating factors. For me, I want more people to enjoy it just because I like bringing pleasure to people. Like, wow, that's great. You know what I mean? But in the future, I I want coffee consumers to still be there through the challenges that coffee production faces.

• 50:37Steven Bartlett?

  What about these pods? The coffee pod machines that a lot of people are um using and that are getting more and more popular. Wake up in the morning, grab the pod, whack it in there, bum, hit button.

• 50:48Steven Bartlett?

  Drink.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Out comes coffee. Yeah. Um, 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. There's a fair amount of waste attached to them. And um you could probably do better with a little bit of effort and it would cost you less.

• 51:07Steven Bartlett?

  Do you do you use those pods?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Not really. Not the like, there are some and they're they're kind of separate and different. I don't want to get into it right now. Um, I think a lot of the sort of small Nespresso kind of style capsule ones are very popular. I just wish they were a bit more recyclable. There's a bit of waste associated with those. But ultimately, they're very expensive. Actually, for what you're you're paying a lot of money for that, and you're paying for the convenience, I think, 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 like you're spending money for five grams of coffee because that's what it is.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  But the convenience is is very strong and it's been so successful. I can't argue with convenience. We love a little convenience. But the possibility of of quality is far greater once you move beyond those. You know what I mean? Like, anytime we go convenience, we have to sacrifice something. And it's usually quality and it's usually value. Ultimately, we're going to pay more for that convenience. So I get it. I get not wanting to make espresso, but wanting something like espresso in the mornings. They've really succeeded in sort of filling that market. But they are, to me, still a kind of microwave meal.

• 52:20Steven Bartlett?

  Is there any culture that doesn't drink coffee?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  No, everyone drinks, everyone drinks coffee. People have tried to ban it a few times. It was seen as a kind of seditious drink that's kind of, uh, so from a political perspective. They tried to ban it here in the UK briefly, I think, uh, King James, I would say, tried to ban it. Doesn't last very long. We tend to get pretty grumpy if you try and ban it, uh, it had a sort of, they asked the Pope to ban it at one point and he was like, no, it's great. And so he, he didn't do that. That was hundreds of years ago. But yeah, coffee was often linked to, uh, politics in the early days. So London was the greatest coffee drinking city in the world for a while. From sixteen, late sixteen hundreds, coffee just comes here to the city of London and takes over. Because up until that point, we were drinking a lot of weak beer.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  That was the sort of safe, uh, high calorie, high B vitamin kind of drink that we drunk. And we were all a little bit drunk most of the time from drinking a couple of liters or three liters of weak beer a day. Coffee arrives and it's this safe drink that is totally the opposite to beer. It is stimulating and it transforms London society of the time. And, uh, we get obsessed with it. Coffee houses appear everywhere. There is the story that in the Square Mile in the early seventeen hundreds, there were 2,000 coffee shops. Now, that's, that's excessive. It wasn't that many. It was probably, but it was several hundred. Like, they were everywhere and they quickly diversified and sort of specialized into specific things. And so, uh, very famously, Lloyds of London, the insurance broker, started as a coffee shop called Lloyds of London.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  And people did business at the tables. Those became offices. And to this day, runners in there are still called waiters. And, and so that just happened to specialize in shipping insurance, that coffee house. Others specialized in politics, others specialized in literature. They became known as penny universities because you could pay a penny to get into a London coffee house and you would gain the education just from listening to people talk of a university degree. And so they were these incredible places for a while. Uh, eventually our colonial interest shifted to tea and the coffee house went into the decline in sort of seventeen hundreds, eighteen hundreds. But for about a hundred years, London was the most incredible coffee drinking city in the world.

• 54:33Steven Bartlett?

  When coffee came to the UK and when it came to the Western world, was there a productivity boom?

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent. Huge change in culture, massive, 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 Chieve Station. They can see a little blue plaque on the wall if you go looking for it there. Yeah, we absolutely fell in love with it. It became a part of industry, culture, politics, everything. Like it's supercharged 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, you know, horror show that we were after that. And you can blame coffee for that, but that's a bit of a stretch. But yeah, it was a massive shift in society.

• 55:19Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:27Steven Bartlett?

  But then I heard at one point that tea also has caffeine in it as well.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  A little bit, nowhere near the quantities of coffee. But you know, if you're drinking 10, 12 cups of tea a day, it's probably worth paying attention to how much is in there. And how you steep your tea and all that kind of stuff will have an impact on how much caffeine is in there.

• 55:43Steven Bartlett?

  And what's your, what's your favorite cup of coffee? You get, must get asked this all the time.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  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 filtered coffee.

• 55:53Steven Bartlett?

  What is filtered coffee?

• 55:54Speaker 01

  So filtered coffee is not from an espresso machine. So it's going to be brewed either in a filtered 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. Yeah, I'll drink an espresso sometimes if I want a little short shot of something tasty.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  But, but the idea that I can, if I want, have 10, 15 minutes to myself to enjoy this thing and see some benefits afterwards, that's a wonderful thing. So I like coffees from all over the world. I feel like I'm forcing myself into a 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 really just incredible coffees come from that part of the world. But there's amazing coffee from just about every producing country. If you're within the tropic of Cancer and the tropic of Capricorn, that kind of belt around the earth, then you can probably grow coffee above certain altitudes. And almost every country that is in that band does grow coffee. So there's a lot of different places

• 57:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:28Steven Bartlett?

  Do you pour sugar and milk into your coffee?

• 57:31Speaker 01

  I don't use sugar and milk. And I get why people do, because most coffee benefits from sugar and milk. Milk is a very, 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, they'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, the health benefits very quickly taken away. You know what I mean? It's not quote unquote as healthy a drink. For me, putting milk or sugar into coffee kind of hides the flavors a little bit. And so I want to taste it without. I get why people want to put it in there. I don't have an issue with people sweetening or adding a little

• 58:16Speaker 01

  milk or cream. But you kind of lose some of what makes coffee so interesting.

• 58:25Steven Bartlett?

  In this book,

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:28Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:46Steven Bartlett?

  And it doesn't change. You make the case that I'm wrong.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  It is sadly not the case. It's fresh food, unfortunately. The, the challenge coffee has is that we just can't see it 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 staling in a bunch of different ways. When you smash coffee into little pieces, when you grind it to fine 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, is the way to do it. Also, grinding coffee is one of the, like, the best smells in the world. Why would you not have that as part of your life?

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Uh, and so, yeah, coffee is fresh food. And if you treat it like fresh food, it tastes way better.

• 59:36Steven Bartlett?

  How long does it take to decay?

• 59:38Speaker 01

  It's a good question.

• 59:39Steven Bartlett?

  So if I had it in the, in the cupboard, you know?

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Once you grind coffee, most people would easily detect a difference a day later.

• 59:49Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:01Steven Bartlett?

  So if I buy it in supermarkets?

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Steven Bartlett?

  It's gonna taste awful compared to a coffee shop.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get a lot less for your money in terms of flavor. It will have degraded. They can gas flush it and they'll, you know, pack the bags within gases and stuff. But the minute you open that bag, it's on its way out and it will happen really quickly. And so the downside is coffee grinders cost a little bit of money and they take up a little bit of space and there are another step in the morning between you and getting your caffeine in, in the system. I understand that. But if you want the best value for money, a, 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.

• 1:00:50Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think the future of coffee is? We've talked a little bit about the history of coffee, but where, where do you think the coffee industry and public opinion around coffee goes from here?

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  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 and people couldn't do that, the growth in coffee equipment at home was astronomical. This was something people wanted to invest in and were not willing to let go of. I wasn't really sure pre-pandemic, you said, how much people really love coffee. I'm like, well, they like it a lot, but you know, maybe they'd let it go if it got too expensive. But in that moment where we took it away, people were like, absolutely not, coffee stays. And

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  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 said, you know, the promise of specialty coffee, where we said, coffee can be better. It's a bit more expensive, but it tastes more interesting. People have enjoyed that and found that to be true. So right now, I feel very good about coffee consumption from a 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

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  change. We're already seeing the impact of that now, changing 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. But 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 would encourage people to pay more attention to caffeine in the future, and that may decrease our consumption overall. And I'm also okay with that, too. I'd rather people spent good money on two great cups of coffee a day than just five average ones just to get them through. Like, I'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. They

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  enjoy the coffee, they drink more. It's not this mindless, cheap thing they endlessly consume. It's a moment of pleasure. And I think it can be this moment of absolute delight and interest and pleasure.

• 1:03:17Steven Bartlett?

  If you were looking for your moment of pleasure, walking through the streets of London?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:22Steven Bartlett?

  Where would you turn? Which shop would you go into? I mean, we're talking about coffee here when I say moment of pleasure. Just in case you thought something else.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  I'm in Soho.

• 1:03:33Steven Bartlett?

  Where would you turn? Because I'm walking through London all the time. And as a muggle, I look up and I go, okay, all these logos, they're all saying coffee. Where should I be? Should I be going for a random independent and rolling the dice? Should I be going to a chain? What's your POV?

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  London has some of the best independent coffee shops in the world. You know, like, and that's true of most major cities now. Like incredible coffee is very available now if you know where to look. And I guarantee that's the tricky bit, knowing in advance. By and large, though, there's enough written about on the internet. If you search best specialty coffee in whatever city, you'll find a great list of 20 that will be a good experience. It might be a bit more expensive, but it will be, I think, a better coffee experience. I get, I buy coffee from chains when I have to. I get that. But given the choice, I would love to go and visit an independent business, see someone's expression, you know what I mean? Someone's aesthetic, someone's vibes, someone's experience. It can be different. And why wouldn't I want to explore different and new? So I think

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  it's just an opportunity for discovery. Loads of like bands that tour the world get obsessed with coffee, because it's a great way to explore a city. It's a great way to kind of find the new neighborhoods and just check places out and just have something fun and enjoyable in the day. And I think coffee is a great way to explore new cities. And you talk to people who work in great coffee shops, they'll recommend you the best bars, the best restaurants. Like, that network is so easy to tap into there, that it's the best hack. You throw me in a random city, I'll find a good coffee shop and ask the question, where should I eat? Where's the best bakery?

• 1:04:58Steven Bartlett?

  Got a challenge for you here.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:05:01Steven Bartlett?

  I throw you into a random city. Let's just call that City London.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:05:05Steven Bartlett?

  And I put you in front of all of the chains.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:10Steven Bartlett?

  They're all the same distance from your feet.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Steven Bartlett?

  Which one does James walk towards? And why?

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Really difficult question. If I'm honest, if you made me buy a coffee drink, I assume I have to buy a coffee drink, right?

• 1:05:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, you can't just get a muffin.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  A muffin and sparkling water and run away.

• 1:05:30Steven Bartlett?

  You have to get your favorite coffee from one of these chains.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  That's much harder, because otherwise I'd go to like Starbucks and get like a dessert in a cup and go. Because there's, you know, there's enough sort of fat and sugar in there. It's a good time. You know what I mean? Like, I can't deny there's a little bit of delight in a little frappuccino.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Well, I like filtered coffee and so by and large I would typically probably end up at a Starbucks because they're one of the few that do filtered coffee where it's sort of brewed as filtered 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.

• 1:06:06Steven Bartlett?

  You walk into Starbucks, what do you say?

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  If I'm being fully weird.

• 1:06:12Steven Bartlett?

  Be fully weird.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Fine, then I'm gonna look.

• 1:06:14Steven Bartlett?

  You're the world's briefest.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  I'm gonna look at the tanks, they'll have two tanks of like filtered coffee prepped. They'll have timers counting down on them, which is how old they are. Because the longer filtered coffee sits, the worse it tastes. And so I'm gonna look for the one that has the longest time left on the tank before they have to throw it away. I'm gonna get a small cup or what is it there, kind of a tall, is it? Who knows? A tall cup of that filtered coffee because it's gonna be the freshest brewed thing that they have and that's my kind of answer. It's a bit weird to start looking at timers though, but once you notice it, you'll see them sitting there.

• 1:06:44Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. So you walk in, you look at the timers and then you make a request to have the one that's freshest?

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  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 of hours or something like that. I don't know what their use times is, it might be an hour, 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.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  So yeah, there's like an option, there's like an off menu option. Some have said yes over the years, some have just been like straight no. But that was a good little hack for a while, but yeah, by and large I'll get filtered coffee from the freshest pot that they have.

• 1:07:20Steven Bartlett?

  What is your sleep like?

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  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 and I'm trying to do a better job. I'm old enough now that future me is an important thing. In my twenties, future me was not very important to me. And in my forties, I've got to think differently.

• 1:07:39Steven Bartlett?

  You seem like a very obsessive person.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say obsessive. I would disagree.

• 1:07:44Steven Bartlett?

  You're so passionate is a better word. You're starting lots of businesses, you've probably got more ideas than you have hours in the day.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Comfortably.

• 1:07:51Steven Bartlett?

  You remind me of myself in there. There's a cost to this obsession.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:54Steven Bartlett?

  What is the cost?

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Probably like if you stopped me and said, what do you do for fun? I'd have to stop and think about that for quite a long time because it's a really tricky question of like, oh, wait, what do I? What do I guys 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, I, I think that's probably not unusual in, in a certain uh group of people, but yeah, I do sometimes think the, the, the kind of feeling of like, I've got so much to do all the time. I think a lack of space would probably be my loss and, and I don't know what I'd do with it if I had time to do nothing. But I occasionally grieve emptiness in the day.

• 1:08:39Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm. As you play your, your life forward, are you mentally planning to make some adjustments to the way that you're living now as you look forward into the future? Cause I always think I'm doing that. I think in five years' time or in 10 years' time, I'll do this, I'll sell this thing and I'll just be a little bit more chill.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  A little bit more chill. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been lying to myself that way for 15 years. Um, I would love to, I, I, I think part of me knows that I enjoy what I do. And I, and if I sold all my businesses tomorrow, I'd just start another one. And, and, and that's going to happen for a while and maybe if I get older, like it, it changes. You know what I mean? I'm like, oh, maybe I'm done doing this whole thing. But it's, it's, it's the part of you learns that these can be fun. Like the game is fun uh of making things, creating things and then growing these things. It's just fun. So yeah, I, I'd love to, I, I think for me, I'd love to just find more time for stuff like exercise and that kind of stuff, investing there.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  And you could argue and probably should argue that I should be doing that now because how is, what is more important than health? What is more important than health? And the answer is nothing is more important than health. So why am I not making the time for the additional cardio and making the time? You know, to get a little bit more lifting, a little bit more hitting. Why am I not making that time now? Cause there's no good reason. Well, I am starting to now, like I'm, I'm wrestling with it enough. I'm like, fine, I'm going to make my life even more complex. Squeeze my day even shorter and I will find the time. Um, you know, Peter Attia has broken my brain too. You know, it happens to all of us, but like, um. Yeah, I definitely go through the thing of like, yeah, I will do this. I'll spend less time on this stuff. I'll have more time. I'll do yoga.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  I'll spend, you know, more time on myself in the future, but I think I know I love what I do. I really enjoy it and it changes all the time and no one day is the same as the next. And I love that and I can cope with that.

• 1:10:31Steven Bartlett?

  If your kids come to you, though, your two young kids, and they say, Daddy, I want career advice.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Steven Bartlett?

  Based on the journey that you've been on yourself and the path that you've walked. When you look back at the sort of the key components of the success you've achieved in a very specific industry. What advice would you give to them?

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  I think lean into the things that genuinely interest you because there's opportunities in everything.

• 1:10:54Steven Bartlett?

  Even if it's like pen lids or I don't know.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  A hundred percent if genuinely passionate about it, then there's opportunity there. Coffee was not a, a, a growth industry. No one was proud that their kid worked in coffee in the early two thousands. Do you know what I mean? Like, oh, they're, 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. And passion is another piece of it. And I hope they have the opportunity to be passionate about something. And, you know, I figure that's what your twenties are for, right? Like, find the thing you're excited about.

• 1:11:40Steven Bartlett?

  And then in your thirties?

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Do it. Do it really well. Don't do it stupidly like I did, like I did. I fell for the whole hustle grind nonsense and I worked too many hours and I nearly hated the thing that I loved. Cause 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. And yeah, I'd won this World Brother Championship thing in my twenties, but. Nobody cared in the UK. Nobody cared. There was no, no one was impressed by that. If I was the world's best sandwich maker, that was a career, but coffee, whatever. Different now, but, but you know, yeah, I, I feel like, I think people know that now.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  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 to mess around and find out what you like and 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. I worked in music publishing and I hated all of them. And that was great because now I know what I don't want to do.

• 1:12:46Steven Bartlett?

  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 brewster champion. When you reflect and do kind of a skills audit of yourself,

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Steven Bartlett?

  what, what do you pull out of there and go, that's the reason why I was able to go so far in this particular industry?

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  I think I had a lot of practice at communication.

• 1:13:07Steven Bartlett?

  That's what I was gonna, one of the things I really noticed about you is your communication skills.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  So I had dual practice. One, as I said, I wrote this blog, which was about digesting information well enough to, explain it back to someone else. And so that was a great process for me. Secondly, I had a weird job where I was a training, I was kind of national training manager for an espresso machine company. And in the back of my car, 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, uh, travel the whole UK, build out a lecture room, lecture to thirty random people for three hours, pack it down and go to the next city or next town or whatever else. And so it was, it was public speaking of a sort.

• 1:13:46Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13:58Steven Bartlett?

  What age?

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Oh, that was twenty five, twenty six. And I was a terrible public speaker beforehand. And now I love it. I love being on stage. I love that kind of communication. And it helps to make videos and it helps to talk to people and it helps to kind of chew your thoughts before you spit them out again. And, uh, yeah.

• 1:14:14Steven Bartlett?

  Isn't that just everything? Like communication, isn't it? You know, if I was thinking, if I had young kids now, what, what the most useful? Thing I think I could do for them is to give them some kind of repetition-based sales experience. I spent four years working in call centers on the phone.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Steven Bartlett?

  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, well, those four years working on those phones where I made no money was the essence of the development of that skill.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  But I think it's also realizing whether you did it consciously or not, that skill's rooted in empathy. That skill's rooted in not in a script, 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 of 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. That'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? And not just

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:15:55Steven Bartlett?

  When I look at you, if I was to do a skills order, I'd say clearly an incredibly hard worker. That's going to be a great tailwind through your career. Curiosity, huge amount curiosity, which I think kind of couples up with the word learning that you used at the start. You love to learn.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:16:37Steven Bartlett?

  You're clearly a practitioner and a great, like, not parrot, because you're not repeating things, you've learned these things yourselves, but you're a great talker, but also a great practitioner.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  That's very kind of you.

• 1:16:46Steven Bartlett?

  And then you've got 20 years behind you and fuck me, 20 years of doing anything, you can, you know, you've become a master. So, yeah. That's my assessment. And then you're like a likeable individual. You're a very likeable guy. You've got a nice constant, your resting face is a smirk. I like a smile, which is endearing.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  I think I'm broadly happy.

• 1:17:05Steven Bartlett?

  You seem like a happy guy.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think I have any reason not to be.

• 1:17:08Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. What is, what is the message to the world then? The closing message to the world about coffee? If you had to give one, if you were speaking to everyone on planet Earth right now, and you had to just give them a few couple of sentences, this is your megaphone to the entirety of the world, eight billion people.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:39Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  Good. I hope to fan the flames of that after this.

• 1:17:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And I'm really gonna, I really, no, I really mean that. I'm, I feel like I'm, you might have just sent me on my own little coffee journey.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:18:05Steven Bartlett?

  I know you've got no time, so that's not a real invite, but thank you.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  I'm just up the road from here. Like anytime, we'll do it.

• 1:18:11Steven Bartlett?

  I appreciate that. I'll take you up on that.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:18:13Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so we have a closing tradition in this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, and I cannot believe I have to ask you this bloody question.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  I'm ready.

• 1:18:22Steven Bartlett?

  You will, you will think I'm lying when I read this.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:18:26Steven Bartlett?

  But I have to read it because that's my job.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  I'm ready.

• 1:18:29Steven Bartlett?

  No, you're not.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:18:31Steven Bartlett?

  What is the duration of your nighttime erections?

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Did you just have Brian Johnson on here? Is that, is that from Brian Johnson? I don't know, Brian, the little device was sold out by the time I saw it.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  I, I, yeah, I don't know. Well, we should all be finding out, apparently.

• 1:18:50Steven Bartlett?

  Neither do I. I mean, Jesus Christ, that's not going to make the conversation cards, that question. Fuck's sake, Brian. But thank you so much. Do you know what? These books are just absolutely beautiful.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 1:19:00Steven Bartlett?

  These, have you, have you just done two of them?

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  The Atlas is a second edition now, and then the other one just came out.

• 1:19:07Steven Bartlett?

  The World Atlas of Coffee is one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen in my life, and it's got-

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  They did a great job.

• 1:19:13Steven Bartlett?

  Beautifully rich 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. That is the book. That is absolutely gorgeous. And then the second book, How to Make the Best Coffee at Home. I mean, we, we, we touched on this a little bit, but it goes into such great muggle detail because even as an idiot, I can understand all of this stuff. As to how to build your own little home setup and the process, that is important to great coffee.

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  That is right. Yeah. The first one was kind of written as a guidebook as coffee got big and weird and confusing. And, and there was just a lot of information suddenly. I, 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. I just want to make it as easy as possible by focusing on the stuff that matters. And not all the kind of voodoo or weird sort of odd traditions around that and just the stuff that really makes a difference.

• 1:20:09Steven Bartlett?

  You didn't have to make them so beautiful, but they're such beautiful books throughout. I'm going to link them both in the description below for anyone that wants to check them out.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:20:15Steven Bartlett?

  James, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely delightful. Really enjoyed this. Thank you.

• 1:20:20Steven Bartlett?

  And I am excited to go and get a wonderful McDonald's coffee immediately after this conversation is done. So thank you.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:20:30Steven Bartlett?

  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.