#113 – Coffee: Sourcing, Roasting & Brewing in a Mindful Ancestral Kitchen

What plant was allegedly first discovered in Ethiopia by a goat, boasts an almost 270billion USD market worldwide, has almost 10,000 shops dedicated to it in the UK and over 35,000 in the US, and you very likely may have partaken of some time already today? That’s right, the elixir of which Benjamin Franklin, the American statesman, author and inventor wrote, “Among the numerous luxuries of the table…coffee may be considered as one of the most valuable. It excites cheerfulness without intoxication; and the pleasing flow of spirits which it occasions…is never followed by sadness, languor or debility.” In this episode, return guest Rob, Alison’s husband, shares with us some of the history and processing of coffee. Types of coffee plants even before the roasting process, sourcing and of course, favorite brewing methods. Top up your cup of bean juice and maybe add a little raw cream, and let’s get rolling.

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Resources:

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Opening quote from About Coffee

Rob had a great experience getting coffee direct from here

Great link for varieties of coffee

Why coffee prices are rising

Episode 96: Cooking Ancestrally Through the Winter

Episode 63: Everyday Luxuries

Episode 12: Why I Gave Away My iPhone

Episode 59: Rob and Alison’s Experience with GAPS

Episode 87: Taking Your Health in Your Own Hands

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Well, hello, hello. I am not sitting across. I’m not sitting across from anybody, actually, but I’m not sitting across from Alison today. I’m sitting across to Alison’s counterpart, Rob. Hello, Rob.

Rob:
Hi there. Hi.

Andrea:
How are you? And welcome to the show that you have to sit through editing all the time.

Rob:
I’m fine. I’m intrigued at the possibility of causing myself annoying work by needing to edit out idiot things that I’ve said.

Andrea:
Yeah, that’s the nice part for yourself. If you say something you don’t like, I’m going to take that out.

Rob:
That is true. Yeah.

Andrea:
Just don’t start coughing because you know how annoying that was when I did that that one time.

Rob:
Yes. Yeah, I remember that vividly.

Andrea:
Me too. It was horrible. Well, anyways, so Rob is here as a guest. Just weird that you’re a guest because you also work on the podcast, like as much as Allison and I do, but you’re guesting on the show part today. So, super happy to have you here. This is a topic that I have asked specifically for multiple times, and you put together a massive, I’ll say, book of notes, and you’re going to share today all about coffee which I am really really excited to hear about for myself personally but before we start you know what’s coming I’m going to ask you what is the last thing you ate before we got together.

Rob:
Well, it was an experimental bread of Alison’s. She’s been making bread from emma flour, which she hasn’t used much in the past.

Andrea:
Oh, yes. She’s told me about that.

Rob:
It’s, I can’t remember what it’s called, di coca or something in Italy it was called. And it’s a bit like spelt flour or einkorn flour. It’s kind of somewhere between the two of them. and it’s because you guys have got a new sponsor in Grand Teton who’s also there asking Alison to write some blog posts for them that are around the topics that are around the things that they sell and one of them is Emma Flowers. So she’s got a sample from them and she’s also got some Emma from somewhere locally which is probably where we get it from long term. So she’s been making tons of Emma bread and it’s very, very nice. That’s all i can say about it really it does it’s kind of it’s more wheaty than spelt flour which is a nice change and we had some chicken soup with that, and yeah that was a chicken carcass that was which means that it was approximately let’s say three or four pounds something like that so i don’t know like uh maybe four or five dollars and it’s it’s going to feed us like the three of us three or four times i reckon oh like you just bought the bones yeah exactly it’s just like leftovers basically apparently they sell a lot of them um at the yeah the market we’re told and they always run out so we have to get there early to get them or reserve them for next time so yeah that’s that’s what i had yeah.

Andrea:
The chicken carcass is a great thing to be able to get your hands on because a lot of a lot of people just want like the primary muscle meat you know but when we would butcher for ourselves like a couple times we did, you know, usually we have like a spatchcock chicken or like a half a chicken or something. Sometimes we would actually take all the meat off and, like, make it into sausage or something. And so, then you have tons and tons of bones. I just kind of, like, smooshed them and divided them up and froze them in batches for broth. But I can imagine.

Rob:
Yeah, exactly.

Andrea:
If you were selling, like, a product and you had hundreds and hundreds of, like, chicken bones, it’s really nice to, you know, you can sell them for a really low price. You’re still making your money off the muscle meat.

Rob:
But yeah exactly you’re.

Andrea:
Getting paid to deal with the bones but somebody gets a a thing.

Rob:
Yeah we do make stock with them as well actually i’ve ditched my first thing in the morning coffee for some stock actually i’m still i’m still drinking the coffee but i’m just not drinking okay.

Andrea:
Okay confessions of a coffee.

Rob:
Drink yeah um.

Andrea:
Yeah and the the grains they’re u.s suppliers so you guys i’m i was really impressed that they sent alice and some so she could try them i didn’t even know that they would send them overseas but for you i don’t think it’s.

Rob:
Going to be a regular.

Andrea:
Yeah yeah like.

Rob:
That but it was.

Andrea:
Really good they’re really close to me so for me yeah that’s really.

Rob:
Cool i mean you could go see them you know.

Andrea:
I know it’s fantastic well and uh well cool okay well um before we go into the coffee segment i wanted to read this review from bond girl five, It says, love it. Just found this podcast. Both hosts are delightful. Keep it up. I love it. And just so you know, Rob, she wasn’t talking about you. She was talking about me and Allison.

Rob:
Well, and also.

Andrea:
You are yet to be seen.

Rob:
The title, it says very informative.

Andrea:
Oh, yes.

Rob:
So she’s not only emotionally attached to what you’re doing, but also on a practical level.

Andrea:
Well, I appreciate that.

Rob:
So that’s really cool.

Andrea:
It is nice that there’s, you know, me and Alison have our weird hyper focuses that we go on. And it is so gratifying that other people find it helpful and interesting. And in her words, even delightful, which I really appreciate her saying. Or, yeah, I’m a girl.

Rob:
Weird hyper focus is exactly the way I would describe what we’re going to talk about in a moment. My relationship with it is pretty much it.

Andrea:
Which makes you a weird hyper focuser. So I don’t know how that makes sense.

Rob:
Oh, yeah. Well, that’s already, that’s given. When you’ve heard someone play the same five and a half seconds of a song over and over again about a thousand times until they get it right. That’s a hyperfocuser for you, that is.

Andrea:
No, that’s true. That’s true. We also have, thanks to you, we can actually say now, the newsletter for our podcast.

Rob:
Ah, yeah. Okay.

Andrea:
Took us a minute to get up and going. I literally remember meeting Alison and I had in the very beginning where we said, we should do a podcast newsletter. And then we’re like, when? How?

Rob:
Are you using the AI to do it? Are you using the AI.

Andrea:
To do it? No, actually. Alison and I have, yeah, we went through every possible idea. But what Alison and I do now is we have a system where each one of us writes one episode or one newsletter per month. So, the only thing you get from us is newsletters that let you know when the podcast is coming out. When we’re putting out a new episode and we put a little bit of other stuff in there too but it’s not like we’re sending a zillion messages about i don’t know what because we don’t have the time so we’re not spamming you because we can’t that’s it um we just we just don’t have the time for that would make.

Rob:
Quite a good time tagline wouldn’t it we’re not spamming you because we can’t.

Andrea:
We’d We’d love to, but unfortunately, we’re unable. So, you just get handwritten notes from Allison and I. So, I think they’re coming out really nicely and I’m learning how to integrate it into my routine, which for me is always a slow process, but I’m getting there. And I don’t think we have any downloads for this episode. Do we, Rob? Nothing?

Rob:
No, we thought about doing it in the end. you know what but.

Andrea:
The information.

Rob:
Just works so much better spoken there will be a bunch.

Andrea:
Of links.

Rob:
In the show notes that will give.

Andrea:
This will be a great what they need for further research yeah yeah this is this is what people need though this is what i need i am people i tell you what though there will be i.

Rob:
Mean there’s an after show um that’s for sure.

Andrea:
Oh so oh there’s an after show who yeah yeah okay good definitely.

Rob:
You gotta stick around.

Andrea:
Baby’s gotta be quiet oh i gotta stick around for the after show you can maybe.

Rob:
For the after show you can bring the baby in and it won’t matter.

Andrea:
So yeah um they’re used to you.

Rob:
And us and you know.

Andrea:
Yeah yeah oh that’s okay um okay so there will be an after show for supporters of the podcast thank you for supporting us and if you want to find out more about supporting the podcast uh thank you rob for building us this amazing system we now all in-house have we take care of all our own podcast business now which is really really just a freeing feeling so you can go to ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash join if i am recalling rightly and you can okay good and you can um, see if you want to be a supporter of the podcast. And for those that are supporting, we just throw out so much extra stuff, which is awesome, including it sounds like an after show on coffee today. So Rob, without no, wait, let me say you’ve been on the show before.

Rob:
Yes. Alison was reminded you to remind me about it. Yeah.

Andrea:
So you have all it worked. We’re here. it worked yeah we did it you and allison did a show on everyday luxuries which is one of my favorite episodes and there was some stuff.

Rob:
On coffee and that as well um.

Andrea:
There was anywhere near.

Rob:
As in depth as what we’ve got here but.

Andrea:
Yeah but listening to that episode was part of why i said to allison do you think this is something that rob could wax on about and she said certainly he could, because I felt like it’s one of those things that we can just take for granted in our life, you know, coffee, or when you can turn your eye to it and give it a little bit of attention, and then it starts to become a really beautiful, enjoyable luxury in life and be recognized as such. So, that was, I’m really excited about this episode for that reason, because I feel like a lot of people are kind of gravitating away from the pre-ground uh.

Rob:
You know.

Andrea:
Dried up all the.

Rob:
Coffee and they’re wanting to it’s less like a beautiful treat it’s more like an addiction basically it’s like you just feel awful if you don’t have your caffeine here so you’re going to do something about it yeah there’s no there’s got to be more to it than that i think um, one hopes for me anyway um.

Andrea:
Were you on the episode i gave on my iphone or did you.

Rob:
Yeah i got a little piece didn’t you i got a brief section yeah and i had talked about screens and emf and i think i may have been on it we we did an after show i remember that on all sorts of stuff to do with technology so.

Andrea:
The after show on that isn’t even after a show it was like a full show wasn’t it it was like longer.

Rob:
I can’t remember no willie i just think it was a ridiculously long after show So I think we didn’t want me on the main feed, but we just carried on chatting for like an hour and a bit or something.

Andrea:
Well, that that show on the technology on the after show and on I gave away my iPhone episode, which I’ll link all these episodes in the show notes. You guys don’t have to try and search them or whatever. But that was enormously helpful for me. And so anybody who has questions about, you know, hey, maybe I work with technology, I kind of have to use a computer for my job or whatever, or you want to be able to use the computer, but you want to mitigate some of the damage or things like that. That is a really good episode. So I’ll link that in the show notes. And then you and Alison also did the gaps episode. And I’m thinking about it. You also did the show on taking charge of your own health. And so we actually did.

Rob:
Didn’t we? You remember? Okay. Yeah. I’d forgotten that one. Yeah okay yeah that taking charge of your own health was fun i’ve felt really good that’s another one of my favorites i actually felt like i’d sort of revealed some things that maybe i wouldn’t i wouldn’t even reveal them to a close friend talking across the table do you know what i mean i kind of hold those back and i because i was talking to allison and there’s nobody else in the room i sort of i let them out over the podcast and afterwards i thought oh god should i have done that well um yeah she told me she.

Andrea:
Told me you said ah did rob wondered if you you know if it was too much and i listened to it and i was like i literally went again to the top of my list one of my favorite episodes i love that one and i think it’s if somebody wants to know why, why am I doing this? Why do I care? And who am I to be making these decisions? I think that’s a really, or if you’re just trying to make decisions about your health, this is probably the boat many of our listeners are in, and you just, you’re the only person you know who’s making their own, calling their own shots on their health.

Rob:
We all are, aren’t we? That’s why we’re connecting online. It’s really hard.

Andrea:
Yeah, yeah, that’s true. So, anyways, if anybody’s heard you on those, which, i know many of our listeners have then uh you know that this episode is about to be a weird hyper focus lots of.

Rob:
Intense detail and.

Andrea:
Super duper interesting and probably some sort of british snark thrown.

Rob:
In yeah i’ll edit out all my cuss words every one of them um yeah oh.

Andrea:
No you use those all upsetting up the.

Rob:
Courts i’m sure you ran through your quantity so where do you want to begin well okay the coolest place to begin i while i was trying to do some research to just sort of answer some maybe some questions i never bothered to answer for myself and to re-look up some things that maybe i looked into like a decade ago or something like that i found that almost every website on the net on coffee starts with a little story and and I began to find that a bit boring after a while but then I just thought actually it’s such a good story that I just need to share it here so we’re going to do exactly the same thing as everybody else for once and and it just it said at the beginning of this site according to legend a goat herder named Kaldi was the first person who discovered coffee beans and their benefits, Kaldi noticed that after his goats ate the cherries of a particular tree in the ancient coffee forests of the Ethiopian plateau they were so full of energy that they didn’t want to sleep at night and that yeah that says an awful lot about coffee it really yeah I mean and it goes on to talk about how it was used for sort of for meditation and things about how it was kind of a bit compulsive and all the different methods of cultivating all the stuff we’re going to go into during this episode but that it says something about this amazing plant that you know the way you discover it is by your goats eating it and they can’t sleep so.

Rob:
We’re going to talk about the types of coffee beans that you can source and the processing methods and what they mean. We’re going to talk about roasting. We’re going to talk about different brewing techniques. Right at the end, stay to the end because we’re going to talk about health or not of coffee. And it can’t give you any definitive answers, but can give you parameters. That’s always what I do. So maybe you can make some choices around that rather than it just being an either or kind of thing. And then um we’re going to do an after show and in that after show we’re going to talk about my own pan roasting method and i’ll just go into like as much detail as i can about every little thing i do so that when you do it you can make your own choices and just create the pan roasting method designed around you and that that’s for podcast supporters only and also we’re going to chat about some flavorings because either using coffee as a flavor in drinks or using other flavors, with your coffee just for fun um and it’s so funny it says episode driver says let’s go to an ad break but this is such an unusual episode i don’t who’s the driver who’s going to say let’s go to an ad break i’ll.

Andrea:
I’ll drive this episode.

Rob:
I can edit this out if it’s really silly okay cool all right, So, we’re back.

Andrea:
Talk about coffee.

Rob:
Cool. So, why listen to me talking about this? Because there are tons, there’s people out there who have roasted coffee, there’s people out there who have farmed coffee, there’s people out there who have got a long line of patients in their practice complaining that they’ve got a problem with coffee.

Rob:
Just who am I to talk about this? Well, I’m not involved in anything professional.

Rob:
Related to coffee whatsoever. So there’s no financial interest there but also there’s no qualifications and i’m not sort of working with this daily however i am both completely addicted and completely obsessed and i also what might be of more interest to the listener is that i come from it’s come to it from a very ancestral angle in the sense that i’m suspicious of all new things like i question i think are we doing that to make money to save time in order to make money you know those is this a sort of a industrial thing that we’re trying to make some cash out of this product and i’m also really curious about how people did things pre-industrially because there’s often some really cool answers related to that as i’m sure most of the listeners are aware um and those answers it’s usually gentler on your body and tastes more interesting all the usual list of stuff so first let’s talk about sourcing because i guess that’s that’s where you start really um as a consumer types of beans there are i mean there are two main types of being beans coffee beans but there are some more so the the main type the one that’s the overwhelming majority of coffee worldwide.

Rob:
Well, not overwhelming, but it’s the largest proportion. It’s like 60% or something is Arabica.

Andrea:
Is this the plant that…

Rob:
Like is it yeah basically cherry tomato or literally a type of plant yeah like cherry tomato i i don’t know what the word is it’s it’s not species is it so there is a variety variety yeah variety sounds better okay yeah for sure all right um and there’s sort of there’s subtypes as well subclassifications so there is arabica that’s like the classification for this type of coffee that is as i say like 60 or whatever and it it tastes the best what can i say it needs it does happen to need cooler climates um and that means higher altitudes and the these places are for whatever collection of reasons we ain’t going to unpack that one in this episode but they’re they’re becoming more scarce so basically arabica is getting harder and harder to grow year by year um and also we’re doing our usual thing that we do with all crops of all types which is we’re getting more and more focused on one particular sub-variety so we’re becoming very very vulnerable to um one of them that hit in the 19th century was leaf rust blight you know sort of these pathogens and bugs and things like that we’re becoming a bit vulnerable to that sort of thing so it is it’s a little bit under threat and i heard recently we’re we’re just we’re.

Rob:
Using more coffee than we’re growing at the moment and that’s specifically means arabica because that’s most of the coffee we’re actually using more than we’re growing year on year and so there’s sort of these stores these mountains of greek green coffee beans and they’re oh they’re kind of going down and the price is kind of going up and, you know a little bit scary if you’re addicted to caffeine but it’s interesting like.

Andrea:
Cashing in on the savings.

Rob:
Well and it’s not being replenished necessarily exactly it’s exactly that and and weirdly it’s i think the other thing like this is this was from the bbc this was i’m this is one that i didn’t note in the notes so we might have to dig this out to put it in the show notes but they were saying that actually arabica consumption is fairly steady worldwide except china where it’s just going up they’re ditching their previous obsession with tea in favor of coffee for whatever no way collection yeah i mean it is a bit scary isn’t it um yeah coal petrol avocados all of it they’re just they’re eating it up so so there’s that um there’s also there’s robusta this is the.

Rob:
Um it’s more caffeine in it and it’s also cheaper to grow and can survive growing in lower altitude so it’s kind of i mean robust you know it’s a more robust crop um it’s said that it doesn’t taste as good i have to say i mean it normally that’s what they make the freeze-dried coffee out of the instant coffee mostly or they might blend it with arabica or whatever and cheap coffee basically is made out of Robusta. I have tried, I’ve actually home roasted a bag of organic Robusta beans from Green. And I have to say it was quite nice. I really enjoyed it. It was a little bit bland. It was really strong. I mean, I’d mix it with, ideally, I think I’d just, I’d mix it with Arabica just for the sake of making it a little bit more mellow and giving it a little bit more flavor but it wasn’t a bad cup really but i suppose that was like a posh organic grower of it um so maybe it was a very very good robusta um yeah what have i written here i preferred it to starbucks which is perfectly true um yeah it’s like everything yeah exactly well that probably is a mixture of arabica that’s not really the high bar.

Rob:
That’s true that’s true um there is yeah there’s a couple of others there’s liberica i don’t know how to do that without just using my fake italian accent um used to be 20 percent of the world’s coffee in the 19th century now it’s about two percent.

Rob:
Um and i’ve never tasted this one well yeah it is really and it does it sort of speaks of what we’ve done to coffee and i think we’ll we’ll probably come back to this again and again through the sourcing through the roasting and through the brewing like at every step of the way, we’re kind of making it into this thing that’s sort of easier to mass produce more addictive, um less interesting you know because it would be really interesting to try a few different varieties of coffee but this this one it’s i think possibly this one has got a there’s one of one of them has got a much larger bean um it’s like about three times the size or something it’s this massive thing i’ve never tasted this one apparently it’s got less caffeine than arabica tastes somewhere between the um arabica and robusta and interestingly it was more robust when it came to leaf rust blight in the 19th century it basically didn’t affect it at all Whereas both Arabica and Robusta had a real hard time throughout that. So who knows? Yeah, maybe that will become more popular as we start looking for varieties that can survive unscathed through these things. There’s another one called Excelsa, more resilient, despite having less caffeine, which might be interesting there. Although it said somewhere it’s been reclassified as a subclass of Liberica so.

Rob:
Yeah, don’t know. Not an expert on that. There’s surprisingly little information about these things out there on the net to sort of to work on, because they’re just that what there are, there are tons and tons of sub varieties of Arabica. And there is a link there that um we’ll stick in the show notes where they go into a lot of detail, on some of them but it is it is just the case that we’re even not only are we just using arabica but we’re actually just using like one or two of the sub varieties of arabica it’s um.

Andrea:
Pretty depressing.

Rob:
Reading really when you get to it um.

Andrea:
Well we we talked on one of our one of our patron shows a while ago when we all got together on the zoom call about bananas and how bananas there used to be many more i mean there still are varieties of banana but there used to be many more and how they say like we don’t even have we don’t even know the taste of banana and that they say you know those banana candies everybody’s like that doesn’t taste like a banana but apparently that’s what a banana used to taste like yes and so if you imagine if you compared those bananas full of flavor to the bland bananas now nobody would want these bland ones but since it’s the only one we know it’s the only one everybody cares for and so i think about you know you’re talking about these varieties if we got whittled down to one blander variety nobody would know any else you know there’s nothing to compare it to exactly i.

Rob:
Think maybe i mean if there is a thinking about it now talking to you there is a difference in coffee in the sense that it has a kind of snobbish um connoisseur thing going on with it where people like their perfect cup of coffee and they’ll.

Andrea:
Go for.

Rob:
Like the really interesting ones to get there’s just this set of people probably myself included who are really curious about an interesting cup of coffee and that that’s meant that, A lot of the nice ones still exist, but at the same time, you’ve got the sort of forces of commercialism just weighing down on it, sort of whittling away to the smallest number of varieties when there were so many. And there still are, really, they’re just not, they’re not cultivated commercially and probably are dying out as a result of not, you know, the places where people would have grown them. They don’t bother growing them anymore. they’re better off growing something they can make money out of that’s more consistent you know oh yeah um other considerations when you’re buying pesticides um there’s the list of chemical contaminants in large scale produced coffee is truly terrifying it really is okay.

Andrea:
I don’t know anything about this so could you.

Rob:
Yeah i’ve heard a.

Andrea:
Little bit but like i don’t really know i couldn’t tell you anything about it.

Rob:
So i mean it is like farmers who are doing it on a smaller scale, they’re less likely to need the pesticides in the same way and organic coffee growers obviously they’re not allowed to and so it does i think looking at that it feels a lot nicer not to be just drinking a cup of concentrated pesticides i mean i there’s i i don’t understand the science behind how dangerous they are or they aren’t these pesticides but if i can avoid having them i think i probably will and the interesting i mean it’s normally the nicer coffees that wouldn’t have pesticides in them anyway so that’s a kind of win and, win-win situation as far as I’m concerned do.

Andrea:
You use them in the growing in the processing or both.

Rob:
Um in the growing in the growing yeah I mean we’ll talk about the processing methods there are there are processing methods you might want to avoid getting involved with but um pesticides yeah it’s just it’s just the farming basically um and then I mean when you’re buying them actually here we go here’s another link that um I haven’t put here in these notes but might be a good idea i did i i once for for a while i did a few orders from a grower in uganda who i was just i was on what was then called twitter and i said something about coffee and they were just messaging everybody who said something about coffee saying you can buy your coffee beans direct from us we’re an organic producer and um really mount elegon or something like that i can’t remember i’ll put that in there for the show notes.

Andrea:
Is that the one you were getting in Italy?

Rob:
Yeah exactly and I got it got it from them a few times I just I couldn’t find anywhere to get green beans in Italy just wherever I asked them they’re like oh no no probably if I’d have been Italian and I’d asked a coffee roastery can I get green beans they’d have been fine with it but they weren’t having it with me. Later on I did find places to get it in Italy but yeah as I say I was buying direct from this grower and it is I was having to get like the the quantities I was having to buy were just kind of a bit too much but it was very good i must admit and like consistently really high quality um but you can the other thing you can do is you can find a local roastery and provided they’re sourcing organic beans or you know they describe the farming conditions of the beans to your satisfaction you can usually ask them and get some green coffee beans off of them and get them roasted yourself or if you ask them about how they’re roasting you can buy what they’ve roasted.

Rob:
And we’ll talk about the differences there between roasting it yourself and getting them from a, uh a local roastery i mean i i’ve i’ve been recently i’ve been ordering them from somewhere in monmouth which is near where we are it’s in wales so just over the border from us and they’re they do really really good coffee and i do every time i order green beans from them i order a few of their packets that they roast and i would say like overwhelmingly the difference is that their roasting is more efficient than mine so when I first have it it’s like this fantastic kind of caffeine hit drug and it’s wonderful and it’s and it’s lovely to have really dark coffee as well because they can roast it darker without burning it than I can but then after a while I just get thoroughly fed up with it and I want my my own roasted back partly because I get some sort of lovely pan roasted flavors from it and partly because my roasting is less sufficient and so it doesn’t have the same levels of caffeine in it and um so it’s nice to have something that’s a bit less addictive it’s more it’s more like halfway between a tea and a coffee honestly what i drink most of the time uh which is kind of nice yeah.

Andrea:
I’m interested in learning a little bit about that in the after show too because i have heard that if you buy the green beans you can store them.

Rob:
And you can nice to be able to yeah just.

Andrea:
Have to have batches so is there anything else you want to cover on that section or should we um take a quick break and then go to the processing methods what do.

Rob:
You think i think we’ll take that break.

Andrea:
All right welcome back let’s go.

Rob:
Into processing.

Andrea:
Methods this is an.

Rob:
Interesting thing.

Andrea:
For me We have done a tour of a roastery that Gary gets coffee beans from. And so, we’ve toured their facility before and it was kind of fun seeing. It’s very small in the scale of coffee roasters. Oh, okay. And like it’s all just in, you know, one small building. And so, we’ve gone in and seen their big machine with the things spinning around, moving the beans constantly.

Rob:
Oh, okay.

Andrea:
And then friends of mine owned a coffee roasting company out of their home and they had like this one room with a huge machine in it for roasting coffee beans on like a, you know. Still tiny in the face of it, but larger scale compared to what you’re doing on a pan. And that was really cool to see too. And when they sold their business, they gave us lots of little cute like cups and things like that that we’ve enjoyed using. But I have never roasted my own coffee. And I’m curious to hear about the processing methods that you have here.

Rob:
Well, okay. So this, what I meant by processing methods, processing, processing in the uh in the notes it was actually the stage before that and actually this is the bit that i had to do the most research on because i really didn’t know and it’s really fascinating when you learn a bit about it before it gets to the roasting it’s like what happens first of all you pick the beans the cherries in fact is what they are at that point and then what do you do with them before they become green coffee beans that you can roast well really there’s there’s three ways that they’re processed one of them is the natural way and that’s that’s what we all like on this podcast you see so the the natural way what they do they just leave these cherries out in the sun to dry and then when they’re dry the whole of the husk is removed off them and there you have a green coffee bean which is then collected and someone goes away and roasts it and we’ll talk about the roasting later the second method is called the honey method and honey has nothing to do with actual honey what it means is that there’s a kind of sweetness to the flavor and basically what that means is some of the husk is removed before they dry it out in the sun.

Rob:
But then some of it’s left on and what happens i think really in um both in the natural method and in the honey method, that husk that’s left on kind of ferments. And so it goes a little bit sweet. And some of that flavor is imparted to the beans. So that’s, I think that explains to me why, like some coffees, I always used to think it was a bit in the roasting, but I realized that’s not the case now. It’s actually in the sourcing. Some coffees are…

Rob:
Um process with this natural or honey method and there’s sort of gradations depending on how much of the cherry you take off between it being natural or it being honey and it makes the coffee a little bit sweet because it ferments and and then when you taste it you get that sort of slightly sweet flavor from it rather than just the really bitter flavors that you get from coffee and that that stays there even up to the point of being really dark roasted so i remember there was a cafe that i used to go to in italy and some of the other episodes where i talk about coffee i go on about how the italians just roast their coffee to death they really do and yeah in this place because i guess they were using honey roasted or even natural roasted coffee, there was a sweetness from that pulp being left on the beans ferment while it dried and so that sweetness came into the cup even after it had been roasted for that long now i’m not absolutely.

Andrea:
Everything is it.

Rob:
Yeah they roast they roast it a lot they really really um the italians do such dark roasts you think about what an italian espresso is like and it’s really weird like when it’s funny before i moved to italy um with allison like many sort of 15 years ago the first time we moved there the fashion in the uk for coffee was a long way away from that the roasts was sort of you might say light medium is what it felt like to me that coffee was a sort of a browner color and it was bitter but it wasn’t like really dark coming back from italy the last time like last year and most of the coffee here in this country now is like the coffee in italy it’s like because the style has the fashion has changed that much but it’s just really really dark yeah, And the third method of processing is the washed method. And this is basically where they remove all of the outer pulp.

Rob:
And the beans are sort of separated in water and then put in a water tank. And apparently, the microorganisms that are naturally on the coffee, there’s like enzymes there, kind of dissolve a layer off the outside and then they’re mechanically dried. And actually you can you can mechanically dry all three of these methods that’s another thing to remember um but then you’d you probably you’d lose a lot of the fermentation that would happen if you left them out in the sun so you presumably you’d lose the sweetness see i’m a bit vague on this i wanted to find somebody to interview to get this a little bit clearer but so that i mean the wash method although it’s like a modern thing and it’s not the in quotes natural method actually you’re really just putting them in water these beans and and leaving them there while the microorganisms on the coffee are doing their work and dissolving layers off of the bean and then that’s made possible by the fact that they can now be mechanically dried so actually.

Rob:
I know like listeners here are probably pretty suspicious like me of modern ways of doing things But I can’t think of any reason health-wise or sustainability-wise or anything really why you choose one method over another. Maybe you choose natural or honey methods for flavor sometimes. But you’d probably say there’s less chance of animals or mold contaminating something that was washed and then naturally dried quickly compared to something that’s just left out in a field. You know so a natural processor or a honey processor they’re they better really know what they’re doing do you know what i mean otherwise yeah some animals come along and wee on your coffee you know um so that’s the the various and you’ll see now this is the thing that when when you get your coffee from a private roastery that’s sort of doing things on a small scale you’ll see they’ve probably got one or two varieties listed that are natural method or And so.

Andrea:
Try them.

Rob:
They’re sweeter. They really are sweeter. And it’s lovely, especially the honey method.

Andrea:
How does this play into the decaf? Is that related to the growing or is that related to the processing? Is that all in the roasting?

Rob:
So um where do we take the goodness there’s two yeah it’s it’s a funny one that i mean there is okay there’s the commercial method that is used in most decaf coffee and i wouldn’t touch that with a barge pole because basically they um steam the beans to open the pores and then soak them in some solution that binds with caffeine i don’t know what chemicals are in that i don’t care i don’t want anything to do with that and then they dry them and then you’ve got your decaf coffee great stuff there is what there is is there’s the swiss water method and there’s another one maybe a gravity i can’t remember there’s a there’s a couple of methods that are a little bit more friendly and i they basically what they do is they soak the beans in hot water and then use activated charcoal to leach out the caffeine it sounds it sounds pretty safe you know is it doesn’t sound too bad um i my objection to it though is still i feel like we’re getting a little bit too good uh making coffee and making large quantities of it so okay we’re getting pretty good at making the caffeinated variety but if even if you take the caffeine out and go okay well now i can just drink coffee with impunity the whole time it’s got theobromine in it you know which is a psychoactive from chocolate that’s also in coffee.

Rob:
Small quantities, yeah. It’s got a couple of others that I won’t embarrass myself by trying to pronounce on air.

Rob:
There’s also just the smell and the taste are all acting on you the whole time, making it addictive. Coffee can raise your cholesterol, apparently, due to… Another thing that I can’t pronounce. I wrote it here. There’s just the, these are unfortunately details that I’m not qualified or have the patience to look up and get into in any detail. But I think on a sort of instinctive level, I feel like coffee has, we’ve got to have a sort of a symbiotic relationship with that plant, which means growing an amount of it that is not going to destroy the environment you know not having to monocrop it to the point where it becomes vulnerable to diseases um and at the same time not just that the other ingredients in that plant other than caffeine were not designed to be ingested in the quantities that apparently you could get away with ingesting them with caffeine so maybe there’s a place for it but it’s very expensive as well like the so we’re just focusing on oh.

Andrea:
Take out the caffeine but we’re.

Rob:
Kind of not realizing there’s.

Andrea:
Other effects happening too that.

Rob:
It’s really it’s a complicated crop it really is and there and there’s also there’s also results of cultivating coffee in that large quantity and maybe you know it’s like the the phrase give us this day our daily bread it’s like our daily bread not our thrice daily bread you know that’s that’s there for because it’s actually quite hard to make bread and believe it or not the same thing is true of coffee like and just because we’re getting so good at being so efficient at these things that we can just have like three or four cups a day it’s like well great and then oh you find you can’t because you’ve got too too much caffeine all right well we’ll pay for expensive swiss water processed coffee and then we can continue having three or four cups a day right and they’re just somewhere along the We’re going to pay for it somewhere if it’s not in the farming or in something to do with our health that is not caffeine related. So I’m not a massive fan of leaving aside the taste, which is they’re getting better at it, but it’s still…

Rob:
It’s not going to replace the real thing you know okay so roasting okay roasting roasting yeah okay i’m curious about this part this is the really exciting oh this this is so good right you gotta you’re gonna love this bit um roasting today is done in a drum it’s basically a version of the 19th century tumbler invented by a mr jabez burns that was his name that’s insane yeah it’s brilliant isn’t it um the drum rotates it gives the beans even contact with the surface you know they don’t sit there kind of burning for a while at a controlled temperature and it gives you really consistent results and suddenly you can mass market coffee it’s also i guess um we’ll talk about i tell you what we’ll talk about caffeine levels in the health section just just for now take my word for it it’s more efficient at making a higher caffeine coffee than what you would have had previously okay so it also at the same time as making it ready for the mass market it also conveniently for the mass market makes it more addictive great stuff well.

Andrea:
That’s great for.

Rob:
Sales yeah yeah feels really good when you drink it though hey um previous to this I’ve seen three techniques mentioned regularly in historical context so yeah.

Rob:
Putting the beans oh i think listeners are going to love this one putting the beans on a stone in the embers of a fire now i i know like you you and gary especially are like amazing at lighting fires and we’ve taken advice from you on on wood fires recently when we happened to move into a place that had one um i’m terrible at it and i just cannot imagine what you would have to do to a keep a fire lit at the right level and b move coffee beans around so that they didn’t burn on a stone in a bunch of embers for presumably like half an hour or up.

Rob:
Apparently the wood wood smoke flavor is really nice sometimes oh wow so that might be an experiment that someone wants to try i would love to try that if somebody fancies sending me some or equally probably probably more practically just take a photo of them and rave about them on the discord channel somewhere some brag about them yeah exactly have a go at it and tell me what they taste like because i’d really love to give that a go the second method which is a very um well-established traditional method which people still do today i’ve got a friend who was saying um his mom did it throughout his whole childhood um and it’s pan roasting and it’s simply a flame and a pan and you stir them around make sure they don’t burn and people still do that um sometimes like per cup you know they’ll just put them in the pan and roast them for 15 minutes and then.

Rob:
Grind them and drink them you know um and yeah we’ll talk about i mean i i have my own kind of flow for that and i but i’ve tried a lot of different ways on sort of electric hobs and gas hobs and things like that so i’m hopefully going to give in the after show for supporters just a really detailed description of how to construct your own flow with this rather than faffing about with it breaking beans and stoves like you’ve never done any and grind and grinders in fact when you don’t roast them enough all sorts of things go wrong and i.

Andrea:
Remember that’s one of the first things i remember allison telling me about was how she said um yeah if you’re gonna grind these beans green beans because you make her green coffee sometimes.

Rob:
Don’t you yeah i allison used to make green coffee for quite some time and yeah she’s broken a few grinders in yeah, and i’ve but also like the ones that you can do a much more a much lighter roast that’s more like the green beans and they’re a lot harder to grind as well and you do you need something pretty heavy duty really to wow um to have a good fight with those beans because green beans are so hard oh my goodness they’re explains.

Andrea:
Why it was goats eating them then.

Rob:
In the beginning okay i think a goat is pretty much the only animal in existence that would a be able to do that and b would persist at it you know it’s just like oh it’s just food crunch um goodness yeah last idea metal cylinders with holes in them apparently you can rotate them over a fire and that was done probably it’s a kind of like a precursor to the drum roast roast that um we use more efficiently these days is.

Andrea:
This metal cylinder with a hole in it you’re alluding to something that someone can do or it’s a method.

Rob:
Lots of it they’ve got lots of little holes in it so basically i think the idea is you you basically you’ve got your fire like your flame like you would with a pan but you’ve got all your beans in like a sort of a a drum that just has lots of little holes like a sieve or a colander or something but not big enough for the beans to go through um and so the cylinder rotates and they all roll around inside it so they never get like because they get turned round and tipped they they never sit there and burn over the over the flame if you see what i mean okay and um that seems like a really cool idea i mean i could almost build one of them actually oh that’d be actually really fun it might just have just a little bit less efficient maybe than the drum which is possibly quite a nice thing um i I mean, the thing about the nice thing about pan roasting, right, is that your pan, like a cast iron pan, that’s what I use. And putting something on a pan and roasting it like that and frying it like that, it imparts a sort of biscuity kind of toasty flavor. And you just for whatever reason, you just don’t really get that from a drum. At least I never have from any roastery that I’ve done.

Rob:
Um bought coffee from they they can roast very very evenly they can roast and probably do a better job of not burning it than me honestly because i’ll be there roasting and i’ll be like, reading something while i’m doing it or whatever yeah the worst one if i do my accounts that’s the worst one actually and then i just end up with this burnt mass of beans at the end of it because i just didn’t stir them properly so it actually it responds really well to turning them really carefully but you can turn them really carefully you get this lovely kind of crispy flavor that you do not get from a drum roast and and that can be a really positive thing and yeah you miss that from commercial roasteries um yeah and in in the after show as i say we’ll talk about it how to make a lighter lower caffeine less addictive brew with lots of interesting flavors in it.

Andrea:
Okay so you’ve kind of told you told us a bit about growing we’ve got our opinions now you shared somewhat on the processing the natural the honey the washed and then you talked about the roasting so the everybody’s cracking out their stone and.

Rob:
Building the fire.

Andrea:
So now that we’ve got our roasted beans going or we’re choosing to not roast them and break our blender.

Rob:
Well, yeah, that’s that, yeah.

Andrea:
Let’s take a quick break and come back, and maybe you can talk about brewing when we get back.

Rob:
Cool.

Andrea:
Okay, so brewing coffee, this is where the opinions are going to start turning up too.

Rob:
Well, this comes down to taste more. There are some maybe health considerations there, but it’s more, yeah, it does come down more to taste. So there’s just, there’s a bunch of options, you know, it’s not so bad. There’ll definitely be opinions on that, I’m sure. The simplest one is just to pour hot water over your ground coffee beans through some kind of a sieve or muslin or something like that. And the water that comes out underneath.

Andrea:
I have a question about that. When we were talking about the caffeine I meant to ask you, and it works here too. The uh when we did the episode on tea megan told me that she would brew tea again and it would have less caffeine in it do.

Rob:
People brew.

Andrea:
Coffee again or is that.

Rob:
Like is that a thing yeah yeah i mean i guess the thing with the oh it’ll have less caffeine in it it applies to coffee as much as it applies to tea i would imagine not that i’ve ever been able to scientifically measure it but I’d say it probably does because Swiss water method is basically using water to wash out the caffeine. So I think it probably does work.

Rob:
But yeah, so do you use coffee? Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard that possibly the Turkish…

Rob:
Just they just do they have like a different name for.

Rob:
Each brew of the coffee so you start off with the strong one at the.

Rob:
Beginning then you have the second one and the third one and the fourth one’s almost water basically you know and i do i mean i’ve gone through phases of second brewing my coffee and and flavoring it as well we talk about that in the after show um but yeah you do i mean you can just pour you can pour on the coffee again they used to i tell you what they used to use um coffee grinds as a kind of medicinal thing so they’d have people eating um coffee grinds or coffee that hadn’t had water poured over it like as a kind of medicinal tonic in like 16th 17th century yeah yeah either either ground coffee like literally eating it medicinally horrible stuff or eating the grinds afterwards and it’s funny because i heard um i found that in my research somewhere along the line to my shock but i did actually i heard um some doctor on one of the uh kind of health slash medical slightly woo woo new age podcasts that i listen to um talking about how he just eats like a tablespoon of coffee grinds every day because he’s just convinced that from studies that they will do him x y and z good things for his health and i can’t recall what they were but coffee grinds taste horrible they really do taste horrible and it’s like yeah yeah i’m not doing it for the fun of it i just think um so it’s but i’m only here for the fun of.

Andrea:
It so like health benefits i’m happy to hear about but.

Rob:
Yeah i do mostly entertainment of coffee yeah yeah so but definitely definitely you can you can brew your coffee again and and you will get, a lighter less caffeinated drink and it’s fine and it also i think it depends a bit on how long you leave your coffee brewing the first time. Like if you only leave it for two or three minutes, you’re going to have a stronger cup the second time, you know?

Andrea:
Right. You’re talking like in a percolator or something where it like sits…

Rob:
Oh, yeah. So it depends. I’m talking about a French press or cafetiere, depending on which side of the Atlantic. I can’t remember which way around it is either. I call it a cafetiere, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

Andrea:
We say French press over here. You do?

Rob:
Okay.

Andrea:
Because we like to attach French onto things so that we sound.

Rob:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, cafetiere is a, I believe that would be a French word. It doesn’t quite fit with Italian for me.

Andrea:
I didn’t say we actually use French words. We just like to attach French, like French fries.

Rob:
Yeah well that in a way that illustrates it doesn’t it because instead of saying cafetiere you said french press but anyway so um pour over coffee that’s the simplest one apparently although it’s it’s really quite skilled because you have to pour the coffee extremely slowly over the coffee through some sort of a filter to get a result and that’s like really quite a skilled thing and again like for me that comes back to the sort of what we’ve done to coffee kind of thing that we’ve made it more and more convenient so now instead of that press your button on your espresso maker bing it’s like the microwave finished and it just and it makes it really easy and then people are so sad that they’re addicted to it you know and it’s like well you’ve made it so easy, it’s not surprising is it really so yeah pour pour over coffee it’s it’s easy in a way but it also takes a fair bit of skill to pour it slowly and patience to pour it slowly enough to get some nice coffee uses.

Andrea:
He has like this copper kettle with the it’s called a gooseneck right it has like a.

Rob:
Long right.

Andrea:
Stem or whatever spout when he makes his pour over and i i actually did not myself start drinking coffee until uh very recently like i had it every once in a while but i didn’t really drink it very often and i started because we got a different french press and it was slightly larger than the one we had before and i would make gary’s coffee every morning or every afternoon depending on what shift he was on before he left for work and then there would be like two or three ounces left over so i started drinking it by what you left i was like you.

Rob:
Mean you swap between the pour over and having a french press was that the.

Andrea:
Well he got the bigger french press and then around that time he also got like he had two different sizes then i accidentally broke his pour over by knocking it off the counter okay and it wasn’t passive-aggressive i promise yeah and then um, and then he’s had the one he’s had now and then we’ve had he’s just still had the same like it’s a cloth like you said muslin or whatever that you put in the top it’s still the same one you’ve had a sort of an.

Rob:
Automated is that an automated rate of dripping or is it him having to pour it over manually sorry i’m just.

Andrea:
Really curious yeah no this one that’s called a chemex i think is how it said and it’s like a glass like a globe on the top on a, kind of spout on the i don’t know how to describe it everybody just google it they know what i’m talking about and you pour it over with the gooseneck so he was either using that or the french press then okay then right before the baby was born yeah then we moved to the big french press and then there started being like two or three ounces left over and i was like oh this is nice and i have it with like some milk or whatever um then uh so like so i like having it but i don’t think i tolerate very much i don’t know if you build a tolerance or something but like i don’t think you do it doesn’t take as much to get me going i guess you would say but um then right before the right after the baby was born he got this called a mocha master where it is a button that you push so you put in the water and then you have the grounds in like this drip thing and then it like slowly drips the water over the grounds into the pot and then maybe we call.

Rob:
That a percolator over here.

Andrea:
Yeah i don’t know i haven’t had one since i was.

Rob:
Like 20 years ago but.

Andrea:
I don’t actually know what any of it’s really called but um so he uses that most of the time now and we got that because i was trying to find all the steps that i was usually involved in and eliminating myself from the picture as much as possible so that the baby then i like yeah i could make his breakfast and coffee and stuff easily while he was working and um not have to stand there and pour coffee for like 25 minutes or whatever yeah that’s crazy isn’t it yeah does he prefer the.

Rob:
Does he prefer the pour over or drip, whether automated or not, to a French press? I’m curious. Does he like the flavor?

Andrea:
It’s funny. What he says is… He says he really enjoys making, like, a really nice, like, he has a stovetop espresso maker or the stainless steel Bialetti for making espresso as well. Like, he really enjoys making special cups of coffee, but he also was in the Navy, and he’ll drink, like, dredge coffee out of, like, a machine that sat there for six hours or whatever, just for the sake of the caffeine. So he’s like i don’t know he’s like i’m i really enjoy an ice cup of coffee but also like i’ll just drink it if i need to just to get through the day so he’s like i’m this weird mix of i enjoy things to be nice but then also um he’ll take the bottom of the barrel if he has to so as to which one he prefers i don’t know he would probably say he prefers the pour over yeah if i asked him i mean that’s that’s the my preference is espresso i like the espresso and what.

Rob:
What do you do with the espresso do you just you bolt it down or you put some cream with it or how.

Andrea:
I bolt it down um well i either bolt it down or i sip i sip espresso i like it with right.

Rob:
Because i just can’t i maybe put a little bit of i don’t know water or if i’m in a cafe i sometimes ask for coconut milk or whatever just something.

Andrea:
To make it a little bit.

Rob:
Longer and then i just sit.

Andrea:
There which italians thought.

Rob:
I was crazy i mean they’re just like what because they just.

Andrea:
Walk in.

Rob:
Literally bolt it down and then walk.

Andrea:
Out and that’s.

Rob:
Their relationship with coffee shops you know.

Andrea:
I i don’t know i think some of my uh maybe allison and i should do an episode on this and unpack this some of my eating habits are based on either coming from a big family and having to quickly get the resources before they’re gone or um knowing that the drink’s gonna be cold if i don’t drink it right now because i’m gonna get called away to a baby or something and it’s gonna not gonna be there when i come back okay yeah sometimes i feel like i either i either drink it really quickly my coffee or i take a little sip and then three hours later i’m like oh look this is still here i probably shouldn’t drink that while it was hot I love that.

Rob:
Yeah. So, I mean, we’ve got the pour over is like the really the traditional way of doing it. And if you can automate that with a machine, well, great. You just save yourself a bunch of time. French press thing. I mean, I love my French press because you can very easily stick a bit more water in there and get a second cup.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Rob:
Maybe flavor that cup with something maybe to make it.

Andrea:
I like the French press a lot.

Rob:
Yeah exactly and also i use it for making tea as well like herbal teas and things like that and just take coffee out and and it makes a perfectly good tea maker as well so i’m very happy with that espresso basically forcing very very hot water bordering on steam through coffee, um mocha pot is just forcing it at a lower pressure effectively so you can just it’s doing the same thing on a stove basically right um the odd one for me is americano that i’ve never i’ve never really understood what goes on with this first of all there’s an americano and there’s a long black and apparently americano is pouring water onto an espresso and long black is pouring espresso onto water it’s like well whatever whatever i i i can do weird hyper focus but that that’s just ridiculous that’s just too much yeah you know.

Andrea:
Where the americano name came from.

Rob:
Um tell the story well.

Andrea:
Okay i just happen to have read this forever ago so you can tell me if it’s wrong but that when the americans were in italy during the war they didn’t like that the dark roasted super strong espressos so they.

Rob:
Would always ask could.

Andrea:
You add water to this please and so.

Rob:
They called it americanos that i have heard i knew i’d heard it before but i couldn’t remember what it was that’s why i threw it on you yeah i it’s that sounds exactly right because that’s exactly what i did in the weird thing about it is it’s like maybe they’re just, italian americanos are just always seem really lame to me they really do seem like something that’s been watered down and they’re much more satis their americanos are actually in the end much more satisfying as a um espresso or they do a thing called macchiato which is like um it’s a bit of milk with it basically it’s a espresso with a little bit of milk and they’re to me they’re a lot more satisfying than their americanos even though i prefer my coffee long, in the uk you can always long as in lots of water in it um but in the uk you can, drink these kind of massive long coffees that are satisfying and it makes me think in the uk They must be doing like double, triple shots or something to make it really satisfying with these massive kind of, I don’t know, like 16 ounce cup mugs. I’m not even sure what they are, but they’re enormous, you know, incredible amount of caffeine.

Andrea:
You know i wonder baristas mail in and tell us please because if if i get if i get a drink at a coffee place which probably like you we don’t do that very often but if i go somewhere then what i’m going to ask for is typically going to be an americano with cream or a brave someone just told me the other day is a better name for it i don’t okay yeah yeah Yeah, this is the thing though, if we ran out of our interest in the French now, we’d just make everything Italian and then it sounds like true coffee or something. But anyways, I always get the smallest cup that they have. When i order for gary then he always wants a triple shot americano with cream i think he always drinks just black coffee at home but when we go yeah i’m i’m trying to make it.

Rob:
Long enough to.

Andrea:
Be of any interest that’s what it is because yeah if i have ever said a 16 ounce americano then they say um and do you want the extra shots and i’m like i don’t know what you’re talking about but whatever it is then yeah sure whatever it normally is um if i drink that i would probably, be vibrating off the walls and like not be able to sit anymore that’s also very obvious effects doesn’t it but gary will drink it and then go take a nap so i don’t know what that means, oh well that’s adrenals but that’s.

Rob:
Entirely the fact that it i guess that it takes half an hour for the caffeine to kick in.

Andrea:
Anyway so yeah what.

Rob:
Will happen is he’ll actually wake up from that nap which is probably quite convenient.

Andrea:
You know yeah he.

Rob:
Doesn’t want to go like go to sleep for half the day and then not.

Andrea:
Do anything.

Rob:
The rest of the day he’s thinking of having a nap you know so.

Andrea:
He finishes.

Rob:
His coffee and then he’s got half an hour to nap and then it starts to kick in and then.

Andrea:
After another 15.

Rob:
Minutes he’s gonna be awake no matter what so that.

Andrea:
Makes sense that’s.

Rob:
A bio hack that is and that you know that’s really cool i like that um.

Andrea:
He’s he for gary it’s difficult because he’s always trying his circadian rhythm there’s no there’s no regularity to it like i’ve him and my midwife always chuckle that they have the same schedule because they just never know when they’re going to be awake and when they’re going to be asleep and is that his work that’s done that basically yeah yeah that’s his work so he’s he’s up and down up and down all the time so he’ll just sort of, kind of drink coffee steadily throughout his whatever his awake time.

Rob:
Is i do think i mean coffee is i’m not sure i don’t know maybe you can concentrate a bit better maybe you’re a bit more alert but i think you know most of that maybe all of that but certainly most of that is you just feel so lousy from not having your coffee that you need it in order to feel okay.

Rob:
So it really like actually what you’re getting from coffee is a way of being able to sort of manhandle those periods when you’re awake so like regular listeners and friends of allison and that sort of thing will know that i i have two kind of work incomes in my life one of them is computing and one of them is music and the computing one i’m up at 5 a.m and as soon as i’ve done my various sort of morning things i’m sat down at the computer and i’m doing some computer stuff before gabriel awakes and we do some homeschooling the music one often it involves being out very very late at night and oh interesting so you know those two schedules just do not work at all and the thing is what i can do the solution is not more coffee what the solution is is that on the days where i’m going to have to be out very very late at night i have my coffee mid to late afternoon even early evening and then I’m very much awake and able to do whatever I need to do until like midnight 2am no problem and then okay the next morning I feel like rubbish obviously so somewhere I’ve got to catch up but the thing is whereas on a day where I’ve got to do things earlier in the day I’ll have the coffee earlier in the day and therefore I’ll be able to sleep better at the end of it and it’s just sort of right it’s a.

Rob:
Really effective way of managing the times when you’re functioning and you’re not functioning so much but if you know if i’m tired and a bit dopey when i’m reading to alison and gabriel late in the evening it’s not really a problem i just read to them and i’m a bit tired and dopey right right um so i would suspect like gary’s got something similar going on that if he has to work shifts and really like there’s times he’s just got to be awake it’s like you’re hammering the coffee to do those things and then the times when you can get away with being all dopey you just that’s fine you know yeah um but he.

Andrea:
Does he does feel like like he doesn’t want to always be forcing himself to basically be awake so the downside.

Rob:
Of him.

Andrea:
Is that he feels like when he has a day when he doesn’t have to go to work he feels like he spends a lot of his time feeling groggy and dopey because he doesn’t want to just force himself.

Rob:
To be awake but also he can’t.

Andrea:
Yeah so it’s a little bit of a push and pull and i know um i’ll i’ll shout out leah on this too she she’s a girl who loves her coffee and she’s got you know three little kids and um, When your little children aren’t sleeping, but somehow, or they’re not all sleeping at the same time, but you have to be conscious because you have little children in the house and you can’t just go take a nap. You kind of just have to propel yourself through the day somehow. And that’s another challenge that I know a lot of moms run into is, you know, the baby was up all night, but then I have, you know, four other kids that I need to teach school during the day. And um i’m the person who’s not sleeping in this equation.

Rob:
Well it is i mean coming back to italian coffee habits they do you see most of them i think something like i can’t remember if it’s three quarters or four fifths of italians drink three coffees a day and you hear that you’re like oh my goodness how are they doing and it’s really strong coffee as well like wow but they’re drinking espresso and they’re drinking most of them right as far as i could see from people’s habits are drinking one shot so three one shot espresso espressos throughout a day like one in the morning one at lunchtime one in the afternoon as compared to probably an english person would be there having a double shot in a long coffee maybe we’re we’re theorizing but they’re only doing that one yeah well exactly with a load of milk and sugar or whatever I mean I wonder what they’re really addicted to when you get to that but and then sort of struggling with some days oh I need a second one you know and then other days it’s actually not really as different it’s just a different kind of pattern of drinking although I suppose there’s more people who don’t drink coffee and are habitual tea drinkers and that kind of thing and certainly in the UK.

Rob:
Day but yeah I wonder whether maybe for a mother with a child who’s just got to be alert maybe the three three little coffees pattern is actually quite useful because then you’re just going to be alert throughout the day that’s a good whereas you know provided they sleep at night can’t help you with that I’m afraid right whereas for someone like me it’s like one coffee in the morning and then it’ll have completely worn off by the evening and that’s lovely on the days I have to stay up really late, wine coffee late in the afternoon, then I can stay up late enough. And then the worst, actually, I mean, getting onto the health thing, which we’ll do next, the worst thing I can do is then on the day when I’m groggy and tired, like you were describing with Gary, is then have some coffee as well on that day, because then I feel really lousy. It’s quite amazing how bad you can make yourself feel with caffeine when you actually need it. It’s a serious problem I think caffeine is great in some ways as long as you don’t need it basically and it’s a great way of moving that need for sleep around the day at will a little bit, there was another note here about cold brew just leave the thing in cold water overnight it doesn’t seem to be more complicated than that i.

Andrea:
Know i tried it a few times i love cold i love cold brew so really oh wow yeah i would say my my two favorites would be espresso or cold brew and i feel like cold brew there’s like this really silky smoothness to it that i just prefer so when i read about it it takes a lot of coffee grounds like more than when you do hot so i grind it you know like weigh it and grind it and then what i read was you pour through one quick dose of hot like boiling hot water so it’s wetted with hot water and then you fill it with the cold and then i put it in the fridge or leave it on the in the sun for like eight hours or whatever, and then when you strain it out oh my goodness it is just so i i i love it i love it more than the hot brood but it takes a long time and a lot of yeah yeah and a lot of grounds and then i always feel kind of like oh i shouldn’t be using so much of this you know coffee just for me so i don’t end up making a whole lot of it but i do like that and there’s a once years ago you’re inspiring.

Rob:
Me to do it again.

Andrea:
Oh there well i had also heard that it was lower in caffeine which i don’t know if that’s accurate or not that’s just something i heard and i got an insert for i have one that fits a quart jar and one that fits a half gallon jar i don’t know what the equivalents would be over there okay but um they just like drop down inside like an infuser or something so you could put herbs in them and i’ve done that before like you do herbs or fruit or peels of you know citrus or whatever if you wanted to make some kind of a different tea so you could use them for lots of things kind of like the french press.

Rob:
No

Andrea:
I just make the cold brew in in that and then once it’s all brewed i just kind of decant it into whatever i’m going to be pouring it out of and keep it in the fridge for i don’t know like a week or whatever however long it takes for me to drink it.

Rob:
That does sound really good you know it’s it’s 29 degrees here at the moment which for for the uk is like stonkingly hot it’s honestly that i would have called that cool last year yeah where i was but um yeah it’s making it’s all relative sound really good yeah yeah.

Andrea:
Well cold cold brew over a couple pieces of ice and then some cream poured on top is pretty.

Rob:
Much well peak.

Andrea:
Summer for me.

Rob:
Yeah that sounds great oh you know what we found a we found a source of raw milk now so maybe i can get cream from like jersey cows well if.

Andrea:
You can get oh if they’re jersey cows if you can just get unseparated milk then you you’d have like.

Rob:
Then we got some cream haven’t we yeah you’ve got a fair amount of.

Andrea:
Cream on top.

Rob:
Of every.

Andrea:
On top of every jar of milk so is coffee healthy tell us.

Rob:
You know you know that on this podcast we’re.

Andrea:
We’re all about blanket statements and unequivification.

Rob:
Oh yeah yeah okay so let’s completely miss all the nuance um maybe yeah we don’t like nuance sometimes we’re not an hour into this podcast because.

Andrea:
You like nuance.

Rob:
Yeah i’m not pretty good at that okay so yeah i can’t i can’t summarize things into into one but this is one of those things you can’t really summarize into one small sentence unfortunately i mean okay so once you let’s say that you’ve got the sourcing and the preparation right you know so if there’s not not going to be any mold issues from where you’re getting it from um let’s say that you’re roasting it nicely so that um.

Rob:
There’s not any burn on it or anything like that. There’s no pesticides in the farming.

Rob:
And once you’ve got through those basics, and okay, so it’s nice and fresh as well. It’s not been sitting around for ages. Then you get into just really your consumption patterns and how it interacts with your own body. And I mean, what, okay, so what coffee does is it blocks the receptors for the chemicals that make you sleepy. So you don’t know that you’re sleepy that’s the first thing it does you are sleepy but you don’t know it um and also it gives you a little stimulant that is quite good for making helping you concentrate it’s a bit of a really it’s a bit of an upper i mean i the reason i i didn’t drink coffee for like 10 15 years or something after university and i used to absolutely love at university, but I went into a sort of a narcissistic health drive tunnel that lasted a good decade or so. And coming out of that, I just felt like, I know how much I enjoy this. I want to start drinking this again, and I don’t care whether it’s healthy anymore. That was kind of the way that I felt about it. And what it did for me was it felt like an antidepressant. And I quickly went from one coffee a week to two coffees a week to five coffees a week to every day until… Usually what happens is I’ll get sick or something and then coffee won’t taste very nice and I’ll stop drinking it for a couple of weeks.

Rob:
And invariably, Alison and Gabriel will petition me to start drinking it again because they say I’m a miserable meanie without caffeine in my system.

Andrea:
And so then I start drinking it again. Don’t take your drugs!

Rob:
And then I’m back to… No, seriously, that’s what it is. I feel like it’s an upper for me, basically. And apparently… It’s one of those things. It’s really insidious as an upper in the sense that you do. It’s not like, you know, when you drink alcohol, you know, you’re a bit tipsy. You know, you’re a bit drunk. You know, it’s just it’s really obvious, whereas it’s not quite so noticeable. It certainly it doesn’t change your personality. It doesn’t sort of alter your speech so that you’re slurred or whatever it’s it’s very much it happens in the background you just feel more alert and, maybe in my case i would say happier the thing is though when you stop it okay you get all the withdrawal symptoms or whatever but what you never get that you can be off it for like one week two weeks three weeks four weeks and you still don’t really feel like yourself because you’ve got if you’ve been taking this caffeine for years certainly in the quantities that you get it in coffee you’re just the background hum of your mind is caffeinated and suddenly when you’re without it you really miss it and so I mean I did go into it sort of with my eyes open that was like I’m going to be properly addicted to this so I’m going to try and make it healthy and also really half the thing with the pan roasting is actually try to make it hard enough for myself to.

Rob:
Drink it that I’m not going to drink that much of it that I’m ever going to be totally addictive so it is a it’s a pain having to roast I always get I get a couple of packets from the roastery as a treat you know they sent me a couple of extra packets as well this time by mistake and so I’ve been drinking the sort of properly roasted coffee for quite some time now and it’s so compulsive and addictive it’s you know the more efficient and caffeinated you make it so probably i should explain about the caffeine right um dark roasts are more high in caffeine than light roasts and and that seems logical you know you sort of feel that intuitive intuitively but it’s actually i i wrote it out here because it’s it’s such a odd um, yeah okay so.

Rob:
Oh where did i write it where did i write it and this is this is the moment where i because i wrote it out nicely and now now i’m just gonna have to remember it never mind i can’t find it okay well it’s basically that when you’ve got caffeine in a green bean what happens is when you dry it, you’re gonna that bean is going to get lighter and lighter so if you were to make a cup of coffee with beans that have been um only very very lightly roasted then they’ve not lost much of their water content so if you use the same volume of beans for that lightly roasted cup as you do for a heavily roasted cup that’s lost lots and lots of water bean for bean, you’re going to find that there’s more caffeine, in fact, in the light roasted one. Because funnily enough, the roasting process, bean for bean, is going to lose you caffeine. But because it loses so much water for weight rather than volume, there’s a ton more beans in the heavily roasted one. And so the heavily roasted coffee is therefore going to have significantly more caffeine in it and i see yeah so.

Andrea:
If you’re saying i’ve got you know 10 beans um then you can maximize your caffeine in those and it wouldn’t actually be by roasting it darker but if.

Rob:
You said.

Andrea:
I can have.

Rob:
An thing is then you need 20 yeah yeah i see what you’re saying i see what.

Andrea:
You’re saying oh how interesting.

Rob:
Um and so i mean cough caffeine itself has if if you google the health effects it has a ton of really positive effects i suspect to be honest they’re mostly written by people who are addicted to caffeine and they’re just willing it to be healthy they’re just like oh it’s got to be good it’s got to be good please please let it be good and it but i think it probably does and i For me, I mean, the chief health effect is that thing of being able to kind of manipulate the times when I’m awake and the times I’m not. And as long as I don’t try to do an activity that requires me to be really, really alert and awake when I’m not, you know, on the groggy day, basically, or on the groggy part of the day, then I’m actually fine. I’m just, okay, I’m used to this is the part of the day where my mind’s not caffeine in it. And so I like…

Rob:
Really having my caffeine early and early in the day because then I just do the things I can be dozy with at the end of the day I usually have like one fairly small cup of Earl Grey tea as well somewhere else in the day which has unbelievably less caffeine than most coffee, does I believe it’s incredible like when you see the difference and and certainly with the stronger ones so yeah I’m bunching it up earlier in the day seems to work for me but I can imagine for some people it might be better to sort of spread it out um in terms of negative effects i mean i think the point about it is if you’re abusing it then there is a problem because like i said it makes basically it makes you no longer aware that you’re sleepy so if your body is sending you signals like you’re sleepy really really time to sleep now time to sleep please you know and there’s there’s going to be all sorts of things that are going wrong at that point and if you’re using caffeine to ignore them then you’re going to be causing yourself some serious problems that makes sense because i’m thinking of yeah.

Andrea:
Like like when somebody takes up a pain pill because their back is hurting like in in one sense that might help you you know get home and get to bed or whatever but if you’re using taking the pain pill and then you’re just continuing to lift.

Rob:
Boxes or something exactly that it’s exactly all the.

Andrea:
Signals are being ignored.

Rob:
Yeah i mean i think the whole thing the whole thing with caffeine is that it’s when you used to have to do all of that farming you know you got to grow your beans then you’ve got to ferment your beans and dry them and get all the pulp off them then you got to roast them and roasting, involved a pan and turning them around and around and around and then you got to brew them and brew them involved pouring some very hot water very slowly over it and you know what start a fire yeah and the roasting yeah and the exactly yeah oh yeah doing it in the fire with the embers and that thing and the roasting being as it was was less efficient and so there was less caffeine in it so it was less addictive you know there’s a balance somewhere along the line you’re gonna go.

Rob:
I think I’m going to spend some time with my family or I don’t know exactly do something else other than feed my addiction to coffee the balance whereas now it’s it’s kind of like the thing of having a cupboard full of, like chocolate bars or candy bars or whatever you know they’re just there and they’re within reefs and it’s like bang i’ve got it it’s so easy to become addicted to really concentrated caffeine now and i think that’s if i mean that’s why all of these ancestral methods even if you weren’t convinced that they made the thing healthier in itself what they do do is they just they force a kind of balance to your relationship with this substance that is incredibly addictive addictive because you just have you have to spend so much money and time in getting to that cup that you’re just you’re not going to over consume it and cause yourself harm you’re just not going to do it because it takes too much effort.

Andrea:
Yeah well that’s the it’s the equation that i always use with sugar which is like glucose and sugar they’re so hard to get in the natural environment you know if you wanted honey you had to climb a tree and survive all the bee stings and bring down the comb and chew it chew the honey out of the beeswax you know it wasn’t so easy as just opening a bucket which is what i do now and just scooping honey out and if you wanted sugar not only is the sugar available but it’s you know refined more and more and more to the point that the body has nothing to do but just receive it you know mainlined and i always tell people you know buy really really high quality sweet ingredients when you’re making your cookies and things and they say but it makes the cookies really expensive to which i say yeah that that’s introducing the natural balance because then you can’t eat 12 of them you’re like everybody gets one then they’re gone so it but but then you feel like you’re you’re restoring a little bit of that natural order yeah it’s the.

Rob:
Same with all these things like once we do our modern western a thing of just mastering them and dominating them so we can just.

Andrea:
Have them all the time.

Rob:
Well, yeah, and what we get in return is we’re addicted to them and we’re dependent on them.

Andrea:
Instead of you have to get up, roll the rug back, somebody’s got to play the fiddle and you got to dance and now you all are entertained.

Rob:
Yeah, exactly. Make up a story.

Andrea:
Yeah, yeah. Somebody has to sit there and tell a story while you feed them mead to keep them going. Now it’s just kind of flop down and push the button in the isolation of your room and watch some story in a really expensive scene being acted out that you had nothing to do with and just be entertained.

Rob:
I had a great section on hydration. This is what the artificial intelligence in my web browser has to say about coffee and hydration. It’s great. Coffee is often thought to dehydrate you due to its caffeine content, which acts as a mild diuretic, increasing urine production. However, studies show that for regular coffee drinkers, the diuretic effects are minimal and do not lead to significant dehydration. Coffee contains about 98% water, so a moderate amount of coffee can contribute to your daily fluid intake without causing dehydration. For habitual coffee drinkers, the body builds a tolerance to caffeine within one to four days, reducing the diuretic effects. Additionally, the amount of fluid lost through increased urine production is generally offset by the water content in the coffee. Isn’t the AI clever? What I kind of wanted to ask it actually is that 98% water in an espresso or in an Americano? Oh, good question. But my browser AI isn’t that clever.

Andrea:
Maybe they just mean like the pour over coffee or whatever. But I have heard that actually recently. I’ve heard, you know, in the sort of health-o-sphere when people are talking about hydration and everything, they’ve said you need to start counting your coffee and tea intake towards your hydration, which is kind of funny because we were always told, don’t count the coffee and tea.

Rob:
Yeah. Um yeah i mean i think it’s it’s a bit in a way i think it’s probably more complicated than that i think the i mean the nice thing okay if you put milk with it your body will probably assimilate that liquid quite well and so that will be more hydrating than it having just been water to some extent um but it depends how much water you’re drinking besides that and how much you’re you You know, those things are kind of complicated and subtle depending on what your body’s having to deal with aside from it.

Rob:
Also, I think that, I mean, the ideal, right, would be to down your espresso and then just be sipping water throughout the rest of the morning because then you’ll assimilate that water quite well because you’re sipping it in little bits and your body will assimilate it. Whereas like that i got to a stage at one point where i was fairly rapidly drinking, quite a long coffee with a lot of water and i think that’s like the worst scenario in a sense because and especially like if you’re really thirsty because what you’re doing essentially is you’re getting all the diuretic effects all in one go you’re drinking all that liquid in one go so you’re probably not actually absorbing very much of it and so it is dehydrating and it you know, for a long coffee, you’ve got to think, well, if that stops you drinking other water, that’s not having a dehydrating effect as well. Yeah, it might not dehydrate you, but it might stop you drinking because you’re like, oh, I’ve drunk enough now. So I’m not going to drink anything that is going to hydrate me. So it’s a, basically, this is why I’ve started drinking chicken stock or beef stock or whatever first thing in the morning.

Andrea:
Yeah. Yeah.

Rob:
And so if I’ve drunk that and then I don’t know like two or three hours later I have a coffee that means that when I get to the coffee I’m perfectly hydrated so it’s not going to ever push me into dehydration because I think I really was actually pushing myself into dehydration having it first thing and yeah I suppose I have also heard people who know a lot more about health than I do talking about um, just letting the body wake up of its own accord in the morning rather than giving it a jolt in order to.

Andrea:
Get it going.

Rob:
I hit a point at one point when i was doing like wim hof breathing freezing cold shower and drinking a big coffee to basically give myself a big kick up the ass into action so i could get.

Andrea:
On get on.

Rob:
With my day and it it’s not if you’re needing that in order to do whatever it is you’re doing then maybe that isn’t a sustainable scenario it certainly wasn’t for me i think.

Andrea:
There’s your difference between listening to the productivity podcast and the health podcast, which is like get all the action out of it and you know live hard die young and the other one is like oh can we make this last i want a nice i want.

Rob:
A nice life.

Andrea:
I just want a nice life.

Rob:
That’s that’s all i want.

Andrea:
Now is it too much you used to have a.

Rob:
Lot of other desires lots and lots of them but now just make it peaceful and nice that’s it.

Andrea:
Yeah yeah i mean what what else what else is there really that that’s coffee can be a.

Rob:
Part of that coffee can somehow.

Andrea:
Oh i’m good to hear or i’m glad to hear that’s good to hear let’s try to say two sentences at the same time well then that that that is i i suppose the next thing to ask about would be the coffee roasting but we’ll take that to the after show yeah yeah and was there anything else you wanted to put on the main feed about the coffee situation no.

Rob:
Nothing at all.

Andrea:
That’s that is everything.

Rob:
Yeah in the after show we talk about um the pan roasting technique and also some fun flavors and some things you can do with coffee flavoring other drinks.

Andrea:
Great so.

Rob:
If anyone wants to join as a supporter of the podcast or if they already are then they can listen to that.

Andrea:
Yeah wonderful well thanks rob this was really cool and i appreciate you taking the time putting together the detailed notes and answering all the questions and um it.

Rob:
Was a lot of fun.

Andrea:
Yeah i.

Rob:
Can’t help it hyper focus remember yeah.

Andrea:
Thanks for having me on you bet, okay