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00:00:01.000This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by Onnit.com.
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00:06:37.000And what's important about people like you is that people like me who really do love coffee, but I know nothing about it and I'm not going to do all that research.
00:11:25.000And then they start to get kind of snobby about stuff.
00:11:28.000And so it's a struggle for coffee people all the time.
00:11:31.000Because what I know, and I've learned in my many years of doing this thing, is that, especially in the morning, people just want their coffee.
00:11:41.000They don't want to fuck around with all this stuff like that.
00:11:49.000I worked for many, many years as a barista behind the bar, making people their coffee in the morning.
00:11:55.000So do you really appreciate when someone's a connoisseur, the difference between a guy who's like, I just want a cup of coffee, and a guy who's like, what's your blends today?
00:12:27.000All you want is a cup of coffee and people to be nice to you for the first couple of hours of your day, usually.
00:12:33.000Most of the time when I don't have any time and I just want some sort of caffeine product, I have one of those little espresso things where you put those little capsules in there and you punch it down.
00:12:43.000You press the button and a shot of espresso comes out.
00:13:47.000So if, like, you guys made coffee here today and you did it in a great way by boiling the water in a kettle and then you have a French press and you use it.
00:14:22.000That's where we get, you know, guys like me get fired up over stuff like that.
00:14:25.000Well, we bought, today is the first day of using it here, what I have at home, which is, I think it's called Breville, B-R-E-V-I-L-L-E, and it'll show you, like, you could have one button for oolong tea, the other button for French press, and so this is the French press button, so I assume that they get it right.
00:15:11.000What I was going to say is the machines, whether it's a pod machine or a capsule machine like you're talking about or a Mr. Coffee type machine, Black& Decker, whatever, all those kinds of coffee machines.
00:15:22.000One of the big challenges with those things is if they don't get hot enough.
00:15:25.000If they're brewing coffee at 180 degrees, it's going to taste like crap.
00:15:56.000It's like if you looked at it under a microscope, took a slice of it, and then looked at that under a microscope, you'd see all the cellular structure of the coffee.
00:16:28.000Now, if you don't do that well enough, you leave all the good tasting stuff in the coffee and That sponge, the coffee cell walls, you know, and it doesn't get in your cup and your coffee doesn't taste very good.
00:16:43.000And plus, you've wasted all the good stuff, you wind up throwing it in the trash.
00:16:48.000If the opposite thing happens, if you extract too much out of the coffee, if you squeeze that sponge until it's perfectly dry...
00:16:56.000Then the last stuff to get extracted tastes kind of bitter and like tannic.
00:17:06.000It has a characteristic that we call overextracted.
00:17:10.000And so that bitter tannin comes from a prolonged exposure to hot water?
00:17:14.000Either the water being too hot, or you brewing it for too long, or, for example, if you boiled coffee like they used to do in the cowboy days, they used to boil coffee over the campfire.
00:17:27.000That will make the coffee taste bitter and acrid and awful, and it's because it's overextracted.
00:17:32.000And that over-extraction is what creates tannins?
00:18:02.000And so this organization that I work for called the Specialty Coffee Association, we, in the 1950s, they started to do some science about this and how to brew coffee properly and get the coffee to where it tasted best to the most people.
00:18:15.000And they had thousands of people tasting different coffees, you know, and they determined what the...
00:18:23.000Perfect extraction of a cup of coffee was to most people in the world.
00:18:29.000And then they designed amount of extraction.
00:18:35.000So I'm going to get technical on you again.
00:18:37.000So I already told you 195 to 205 is the right temperature.
00:18:41.000The extraction that you want to get is between 18 and 22 percent extraction.
00:18:48.000Now, this is coffee geek stuff that nobody wants to hear, but this is the kind of stuff that we talk to each other about.
00:18:58.000If you have a favorite coffee place where the baristas are, like, really good and they make the coffee taste really good, chances are they know about that...
00:19:05.000And they're trying to get the coffee within that extraction window so it tastes great.
00:19:11.000If you exceed 22%, and something closer to 30% of the coffee is actually extractable, you could get 30% of the material out of the coffee if you wanted.
00:19:22.000If you totally squeeze the sponge dry, but 18 to 22% is where it tastes good.
00:19:46.000We know a little bit, you know, but when it comes to these sort of things like times of extraction and temperature, does it vary depending on what kind of coffee you have?
00:20:07.000When coffee pros sort of start to work with a coffee, we'll experiment with different temperatures, different kinds of extraction, different coarseness of grind to try to get it right.
00:27:37.000A couple weeks ago, here in Los Angeles, there was a battle between a guy called Nick Cho.
00:27:46.000Nick Cho is one of the owners of this coffee company who roasted this coffee we're drinking.
00:27:52.000And then the inventor of that machine, the steampunk, went head to head.
00:27:57.000And had like a man versus machine kind of thing.
00:28:00.000And Nick was just using very simple little brewer that he poured the water on, just totally manual.
00:28:08.000And then the other guy was manning the steampunk.
00:28:13.000And they were like having this head-to-head where they each had to brew six different coffees for these three judges and they couldn't see what they were drinking, all this stuff.
00:28:32.000And the point is that you can make coffee delicious by being really good at mastering the variables, knowing what grind looks right, knowing how hot the water is, etc.
00:28:45.000Or you can entrust that stuff to a machine.
00:28:49.000They just get the water right every time.
00:28:52.000They get what we call the turbulence, like how much it gets stirred every time.
00:28:57.000And if you can replicate something very precisely again and again and again, the coffee is going to be really good.
00:29:02.000I get a sense, though, that you're a purist and that you prefer to use manual equipment, almost like if you drove a car, you would want a manual gearbox.
00:29:15.000Well, I told somebody, somebody was interviewing me for something a while ago, and I told them I don't own a coffee machine in my house, and I don't.
00:29:22.000That I have essentially the same setup that you have.
00:29:25.000A water boiler that boils the water for me, a good grinder.
00:29:29.000I noticed you have a good grinder in there.
00:29:46.000Okay, that's an interesting thing to bring up, because one of the things that I like about French press is when you get that sort of bubbly surface, and then when you pour it into a mug, you get kind of like a little foam on it.
00:30:18.000Okay, so that's called body or aftertaste, and aftertaste.
00:30:22.000Those are technical coffee tasting terms.
00:30:26.000And so body is the feeling, the texture of the coffee in your mouth, and aftertaste is the flavor of the coffee that remains in your mouth once you're gone, once it's gone.
00:30:36.000And aftertaste, especially, is really important because you drink coffee in the morning, you're driving to work, you still have that flavor of coffee in your mouth.
00:33:38.000And we don't know if it's true or not, but this is the legend, is that in ancient Ethiopia, that Ethiopian warriors would take the fruits of the coffee.
00:33:53.000And the two beans are like flat up against each other, like the pits of the cherry.
00:33:58.000But around that is like a fruit layer, like a sweet fruit layer.
00:34:02.000The fruit tastes sort of like, it's kind of slimy, but it tastes like a mix of watermelon and jasmine.
00:34:09.000And then there's kind of a tough leathery skin outside.
00:34:13.000And the legend says that the Ethiopians would take that fruit and We're good to go.
00:34:30.000And they would make balls out of them and put them in their packs.
00:34:35.000And then just before a battle, these warriors would eat this power bar thing.
00:34:42.000And it was like fat from the animal fat to give you energy, and then the sugar from the coffee fruit to give that blast of energy, and then the caffeine together.
00:34:56.000Now, some people say that this is like an invented story.
00:35:00.000Other people say that this is what the ancient Ethiopians actually did before fighting a battle.
00:35:06.000What is known is that the ancient Ethiopians were known as Especially intense warriors.
00:35:35.000They've been putting that in coffee for a long time.
00:35:37.000But there was also like a yak tea that the Himalayans used, the Tibetans used, that was mixed with this yak butter and tea to make like this creamy sort of a concoction.
00:35:49.000What I like about mixing it with the butter and the MCT oil is that it gives you a long-lasting effect of the caffeine.
00:35:57.000Your body has to break down all those fats and sort of blend it in and connect it with the caffeine.
00:38:08.000And coffee evolved in the same place, which is crazy to begin with.
00:38:15.000And the Ethiopians consumed it somehow.
00:38:19.000But then somehow, probably by the people on the other side of the Red Sea in what's now Yemen, which was then called Arabia Felix, This is like in about 1100. They said,
00:38:35.000wait a second, some of the Ethiopian slaves brought some coffee seeds over there and they started planting coffee in what's now Yemen.
00:38:49.000And they started growing it and it turned into a big deal.
00:38:52.000And they were the first ones that actually exported it out of the area.
00:38:58.000And the main port at that time in Yemen was called Mocha.
00:42:46.000They wanted to plant some coffee, the French did, for their colonies.
00:42:50.000And so this one guy named Gabriel de Clou, he was responsible for bringing the coffee from France to Martinique.
00:43:00.000But, so he brought this one plant, and he had it in a glass box, but they ran out of wind on the journey, and so they were stuck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
00:43:09.000Gabriel Declue was sharing his water ration with this plant to keep it alive.
00:43:14.000He managed to keep it alive, planted it, and that one plant was the parent of most the coffee in Central America, South America, etc.
00:43:26.000So, now, there's a scientific impact to this because all the genetic diversity that was in Ethiopia, all the thousands of different coffee varieties that were in Ethiopia, imagine how that got narrowed down from getting brought from Ethiopia to Yemen in the first place.
00:43:43.000Then whatever plants those Dutch spies stole to put the coffee in Java, then that one plant that went to...
00:43:53.000That went to the New World, that went to France first and then to the New World.
00:44:07.000And that's a problem for us because if there's a disease that that one genetic variety of coffee is susceptible to, it can wipe out the whole coffee deal.
00:44:18.000It's so incredible that one particular area of the world was the only place where this stuff was growing.
00:44:24.000And now it's considered to be a completely worldwide beverage.
00:46:56.000The names that you get besides Sadamo will often be, or even Yergeshev, will often be the specific name of a washing station where they wash the coffee itself.
00:47:23.000And then I noticed, I listened to a podcast you did recently that had a nutritionist and you were talking about washing, washed coffee being important.
00:48:05.000What the ancient Ethiopians did is they just picked it and they set it on the ground or on a mat to dry.
00:48:13.000The coffee would shrivel up, turn into a raisin.
00:48:18.000Once it was totally dry, they'd pound it in a mortar and pestle and the seeds would separate from the dried up husk and then you could roast the seeds and drink the coffee.
00:48:31.000So that was the original method of doing coffee.
00:48:34.000But when they moved coffee from Ethiopia, which is very warm and dry, and they could grow it in Indonesia and in Central America, and it would grow fine, but when they tried to dry it, it was tougher because there's more rain there,
00:48:49.000it's more humid, and the coffee would mold and get musty and taste crappy.
00:48:54.000So in Costa Rica, they invented a different thing.
00:48:58.000And what they did was they ran it through a machine that would strip off the leathery skin.
00:50:12.000And those two processes, those two major processes, we call them either dry processing and wet processing or the natural method and the washed method.
00:50:24.000So washed and wet processing are the same thing.
00:50:27.000And dried and natural is the same thing.
00:50:31.000So in a certain way, changing climates and moving coffee plants to other geographic locations presented a lot of pretty unique challenges.
00:54:52.000So some people, I've seen people talk about high caffeine coffee and they're just using Robusta in it to sort of amp up the caffeine level.
00:57:33.000There was a recent article that I was reading today online about chocolate, that chocolate is going to be extremely rare in the future because of our overconsumption of chocolate.
00:57:45.000We consume so much chocolate they can't keep up with the production.
00:57:48.000The demand can't keep up with the production.
00:57:50.000And they've got a similar problem that coffee does.
01:00:25.000He was telling me recently, he's planted the right varieties of coffee, including this one, the mocha variety that has these little tiny beans.
01:01:16.00015 or so years just traveling to coffee farms all over the world, working with coffee farmers to get their quality better and kind of learn about all this stuff.
01:01:26.000Because that's kind of a new phenomenon too, is coffee roasting companies that are interacting more directly with farmers and getting the quality thing really worked out, understanding.
01:02:03.000So, going back to the history, so the Dutch, you know, they planted their thing in Java, and they basically enslaved the local population to work on their coffee farms.
01:02:13.000This is in the, you know, in the 18th century...
01:02:17.000All the European powers were trying to get colonies everywhere.
01:02:22.000The Spanish doing their colonies in Central America.
01:02:25.000The French doing their colonies in West Africa.
01:02:29.000The English were trying to colonize Kenya.
01:02:47.000World history, and unfortunately, coffee was part of that.
01:02:51.000But since then, so then, you know, the Enlightenment happened, democracies started to spread around the world, but still many of these countries that were former colonies had poverty problems, like Central America and stuff like that.
01:03:08.000The place that I first started working with coffee farmers was in Nicaragua.
01:03:12.000And in Nicaragua was formerly a colony, you know, and had that problem.
01:03:50.000And so, in many parts of the world, you've got small farmers that are just trying to get by, you know, and put food on their plates.
01:03:57.000And so, one of the great things that special coffee companies can do is get engaged with those farmers and try to celebrate the product, get people to pay more for it, because it tastes really delicious, and it becomes a better livelihood for farmers all across the world.
01:04:19.000So your friend in Santa Barbara, what was his name again that owns this place?
01:05:29.000Coffee is kind of an unusual, I mean, Hawaii is kind of an unusual situation because the University of Hawaii is involved and they can actually call up the University of Hawaii and get some advice from them.
01:05:51.000I mean, there's lots of people out there.
01:05:55.000And in fact, the US government through USAID is out there trying to give good support to these guys.
01:06:03.000The first thing you do is you teach them to taste coffee.
01:06:06.000And amazingly, and some of your listeners may have had this experience, I've had this experience.
01:06:12.000You go to wherever, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Peru, or whatever, a place that's famous for its coffee, and you go into the hotel and they've got Nescafe and the instant coffee in the restaurant or whatever.
01:06:25.000And it's because in a lot of these places, people don't drink the coffee.
01:06:30.000They grow the coffee, but they don't drink it.
01:07:15.000And all these countries, by the way, are aware of this problem and are trying to diversify their genetics.
01:07:20.000So do they contact you through the coffee website?
01:07:23.000Is that how they go to Specialty Coffee Association of America?
01:07:29.000Starting in 2000 or so, we and our group that we're affiliated with called the Coffee Quality Institute, Had this program called Coffee Corps.
01:07:45.000It's sort of like the Peace Corps for coffee people.
01:07:46.000And guys like me would sign up and volunteer for two weeks to serve in a coffee farming community.
01:07:54.000And if we had a skill, we might have marketing skill or accounting or tasting.
01:08:11.000How to taste their own coffee and taste it like we do.
01:08:15.000Look for things like sweetness and flavor and aroma and stuff like that.
01:08:19.000And just that is extremely powerful because if you're running a coffee farm and you know how to taste it like your buyer is going to taste it, then you can say, all right, this tastes better.
01:10:01.000It naturally likes to be protected by other trees.
01:10:05.000However, if you take it out and put it in the full sun, it'll be more productive.
01:10:09.000It'll produce a lot more coffee, but in general, that coffee won't be as good.
01:10:13.000So a farmer has to, like, figure out the benefit, you know, if he puts it in a shade, the coffee will taste better, but it won't be as productive.
01:10:28.000All the time, you know, it's like the better you make it taste, the less there is of it kind of thing.
01:10:34.000And so a farmer is always trying to make that balancing act between having his farm be more productive versus having the quality be higher.
01:10:43.000What is the ultimate taste expression?
01:10:45.000What is the move to forget about no money involved, no financial reward?
01:10:50.000You're only trying to achieve the greatest taste ever.
01:14:10.000We get dialed into what people like and show them other options if they want.
01:14:16.000So to continue what I was asking you before, say if someone contacted you from, let's say, somewhere in South America, and they wanted you to go over there and, hey, we need to fix our flavor profile, what would you do besides planting trees?
01:14:30.000So step one is start tasting the coffee themselves.
01:14:36.000Well, okay, so you can either shade the coffee or not.
01:14:40.000One easy way that a farmer can change the quality of their coffee is how ripe it gets.
01:14:46.000So as coffee gets riper, it gets sweeter, obviously, but you don't want it to be too sweet or else it'll get like overly sweet and also it'll get this kind of rotten character.
01:14:57.000So figuring out, dialing in, there was a farmer I worked with in El Salvador.
01:15:01.000Um, uh, who like got super focused on how ripe she was going to pick her coffee.
01:15:08.000And she wound up figuring out, this is geeky and amazing, is that if she let, um, the coffee get, half of the coffee get ripe to where it was the color of blood, uh, or I'm sorry, of wine, uh,
01:16:43.000So I was a barista in the early 90s and stuff.
01:16:46.000And in 1994, we're running this coffee shop in San Diego, and we got word that Starbucks was going to start opening stores in San Diego.
01:16:53.000And everybody freaked out, like, oh my god, we're done, we might as well, you know, they're going to drive us into the ground.
01:16:59.000The year that Starbucks showed up was the busiest year that we had, and every year after that it got busier.
01:17:10.000So the great thing that Starbucks has done, and Starbucks is, you know, they started in the 70s in Seattle, a bunch of guys that really liked coffee, and they just figured out how to grow this business.
01:17:26.000In many ways, they taught the world how to drink coffee.
01:17:29.000They taught the world to drink coffee in many ways.
01:17:31.000When I was a kid, we used to drink coffee in the morning before I would go to work.
01:19:56.000The other problem is, right now, we took the coffee out and it got it to room temperature.
01:20:03.000If you take a coffee mug that's in the freezer out and you put it on your thing, it gets all wet on the outside, then you've got that problem.
01:20:11.000In general, we generally encourage people not to put it in the freezer and just drink it fast.
01:20:38.000So you should get it and between the time that it's dried and between the time that it's roasted and then you drink it, how much time should take place?
01:20:46.000Between the time it's roasted and the time you drink it?
01:20:48.000So the drying, it's essentially, it's good for how long?
01:20:59.000And that's good because it's about once a year, you know, coffee harvest happens once in a year.
01:21:05.000They dry it all, they get it together, they stabilize it by drying, and then they ship it.
01:21:10.000To roasters in the U.S. Okay, so assuming you're in the correct window, then once you get it to a roaster, how long after it's roasted should you drink it, or should you brew it, and does it matter how it's stored then?
01:21:23.000Usually the window after roasting is about two weeks.
01:22:41.000They'll sort of collect the orders and then do a roasting day and send it all out.
01:22:45.000Lots of times you get it the day after it was My friend has a coffee company called Caveman Coffee, and when you order it from cavemancoffee.com or whatever the fuck it is, they roast it as you order it.
01:23:46.000In this particular case, it wasn't that successful.
01:23:49.000But what all the flight attendants were doing is they were taking the coffee bags and they were putting it in the bathroom to make it smell a little bit better in there.
01:23:56.000That was the best thing that they could do with this.
01:23:58.000Oh, so they just used it as coffee potpourri?
01:25:02.000Yeah, I am a fan of tastes and flavors, and I think it's sort of an unsung art form that people have figured out how to cultivate different tastes and flavors in all sorts of foods.
01:25:13.000In cooking, I became a big fan of cooking.
01:25:16.000I don't really cook very well, but I became a big fan of the art form of cooking very well when I started watching Anthony Bourdain's No Reservation show.
01:25:24.000And then becoming friends with him and getting to know him and talking to him about chefs and going to a restaurant with him, which was one of the coolest fucking experiences of all time.
01:26:21.000It's nice to hear you talking like that because guys in coffee, if we start to talk about how we think of coffee as an art form, A lot of times people are like, ah, come on.
01:26:31.000People are always looking to call bullshit, man.
01:26:35.000It's a good thing to call bullshit because there's a lot of bullshit out there.
01:26:38.000But it's not a good thing to call bullshit about people's passions.
01:26:41.000I think it's more interesting to observe those passions and try to find out what it is.
01:26:45.000And if I looked at it on a surface level and I wasn't really into flavors and I didn't have that...
01:26:54.000I probably wouldn't think about it that much either.
01:26:57.000But when I sit down and talk to a guy like you, who obviously has dedicated an incredible amount of time to this passion, then that's when it becomes infectious and you kind of understand it.
01:27:18.000And so for me, I kind of mentioned this before, when you're a coffee person, when you're a barista, you're interacting with people at this really delicate point in their day.
01:32:42.000Are there spots like that in Los Angeles?
01:32:46.000Are there really exceptionally good coffee spots?
01:32:48.000Yeah, so the place I actually bought that for you here locally in a shop in Culver City called Cognoscenti, C-O-G-N-O-S-C-E-N-T-I. Cognoscenti.
01:33:24.000Yeah, and he had them designed based on—he hired these engineers to figure out what was the exact perfect taper and the right combinations of woods.
01:35:58.000It turns a normal artifact into something really special.
01:36:01.000Yeah, it's functional and you also get a feeling from using that thing.
01:36:06.000Whether it is a handmade knife that you're chopping up food with in your kitchen, you know that somewhere in Brooklyn a guy works in a shop and cuts that metal and polishes it down and sharpens it up and then sends it to you and you're receiving a labor of love.
01:36:23.000Yeah, you're receiving the fruits of someone's creativity.
01:36:26.000There's something about handmade stuff like that.
01:36:29.000Well, something about us, human beings, that we really appreciate other people's effort and work.
01:36:34.000That's why you want to have someone's artwork on your wall.
01:36:36.000You know, what's why you want to, like, a piece of furniture that someone made is, like, something uniquely satisfying instead of, like, something at Ikea that's just, like, some form...
01:36:46.000Block thing that's made in a factory and spit out.
01:36:50.000But if you could buy a couch that some guy actually carved the wood and put the cushions in place and embroidered it all, oh my god, that couch would be amazing.
01:37:02.000You're excited about it when you sit in it.
01:38:18.000The coffee competitions that we do, and there's a barista thing where they're making espresso.
01:38:25.000There's a brewer's thing where they're brewing coffee.
01:38:28.000There's a taster's thing where they're competing on how well they can taste coffee and discern the differences between coffee and stuff like that.
01:38:35.000So there is a coffee version of the sommelier.
01:39:09.000Well, in Central America, they get really...
01:39:11.000Because, I mean, think about that Central American isthmus there, you know, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, they're all right next to each other.
01:40:17.000In general, we don't have very many examples of that because only recently have people started to move coffee around.
01:40:24.000But I tasted once a coffee from a farm in El Salvador that had Kenyan coffees from this place in Neri planted on it.
01:40:36.000And at the time, I didn't know anything, but I was tasting this coffee, and I accused the guy that was working in my lab with me of making a mistake.
01:40:47.000So it's the varieties that have grown to these places that in many ways determine these flavors.
01:40:55.000There's also a farm in Panama that was kind of accidentally planted with some coffees from Ethiopia, and the coffee tastes like Ethiopian coffee.
01:41:06.000So is there a similarity in the climate?
01:41:10.000Yeah, if the climate's the same and the coffee variety is the same, because remember all these thousands of varieties that exist in the world, you know, in Yergeshev, they grow three different varieties there.
01:41:22.000If you go to Yergeshef and ask a farmer what varieties of coffee he's growing, he's got a choice of three.
01:41:28.000And they're different from anywhere else in the world.
01:42:54.000Yeah, one of the issues with coffee is you take all this coffee out from a farm in wherever, Kenya, and you bring the coffee here, but you've got to be bringing stuff back to the soil all the time, and otherwise the soil will be depleted.
01:43:09.000So getting nutrients back in the soil is really important.
01:45:49.000It's one of the things that we face and we talk about a lot in coffee.
01:45:52.000Is there a variation in the flavor of a plant that's been fertilized with a chemical fertilizer or a synthetic or whatever you call it as opposed to compost?
01:46:19.000And then there's a lot of middle ground, too.
01:46:23.000I mean, I would say most good farmers, or many good farmers, use a little bit of synthetic fertilizer and a little bit of compost as well, and they kind of try to find a middle ground.
01:46:33.000Sort of like multivitamins with a good diet.
01:46:42.000He's a doctor who wrote a book called Dead Doctors Don't Lie and it's all about minerally insufficient soils and about a real epidemic we have with minerally deficient diets.
01:46:54.000I don't know how much of what he said is fuckery.
01:46:56.000I need to really probably talk to someone.
01:46:58.000I'll talk to Dr. Rhonda Patrick about it.
01:47:00.000She's one of the guests that we have on the podcast.
01:47:59.000And we're discovering these things all the time.
01:48:01.000It's like, what is the magic sort of mixture of the right variety, the right climate, the right kind of soil composition, the right kind of husbandry?
01:48:13.000I don't think it makes sense to isolate one thing.
01:48:17.000Another thing that people always ask me is, if they're growing pine trees on the farm where they're growing coffee, can you taste the pine trees in the...
01:50:09.000He said, okay, so that wine had this chemical in it, and he named the chemical, I don't remember what it was, but it was the green bell pepper chemical.
01:50:17.000And then when he gave me the green bell pepper, it overwhelmed my senses with that same smell.
01:50:24.000And so you know how if you use Windex in your house, you smell it for a while and you're overwhelmed by it, and then in a few minutes you can't smell it anymore?
01:50:32.000It's not that it's gone away, it's just that your brain has sort of screened it out.
01:50:36.000Well, olfactory senses depend on change in the smells.
01:50:44.000And so the same thing happens with coffee.
01:50:46.000If you're drinking coffee and there's an overwhelming element, then your olfactory will screen it out and then you start tasting different things.
01:54:52.000Because I had heard that Starbucks has a particularly high caffeine content of their regular coffee, and that there might be a little bit left to that when you have decaf.
01:57:11.000I've tasted a great coffee that becomes decaffeinated.
01:57:17.000And certainly the flavor is impacted by the removal of caffeine, by the process it goes through, but it's still delicious coffee.
01:57:25.000Okay, give us an example of a delicious decaffeinated coffee that we should look for.
01:57:30.000Well, any coffee company that's putting extraordinary care into their regular coffee, it's very likely that they will be putting extraordinary care into their decaf, too.
02:01:13.000Sometimes, and this always happened to me when I'd get a special coffee, I'd give it to my parents.
02:01:18.000And they'd throw it in the freezer and they'd save it for a special occasion because they're like, well, no, no, this is special coffee, you know?
02:02:20.000Yeah, and it eats the beans, and then shits them out, and then they take it out of its poop, and when it goes through its digestive tract, it imparts a very mellow taste to the coffee.
02:02:29.000Right, and so it got in this movie, you know, The Bucket List.
02:02:39.000It was about some old guys, and they had a bucket list of things to do before they died, and one of the things was they drink the cat shit coffee.
02:02:45.000And so that, of course, it started a rash of people asking...
02:04:34.000But the amount of pleasure that you can get from a coffee like the one I brought you or some of these other ones that you've mentioned, it's not totally necessary to go to that.
02:04:48.000The other thing I noticed on the Twitter feed, somebody mentioned coffee going extinct.
02:04:52.000About a year ago, there was a news thing that was talking about coffee going extinct.
02:08:56.000Do you think that the Tea Party movement, that had an effect on the way the United States took off just by simply the fact that they went from tea to coffee?
02:09:19.000I wonder if they could show gross domestic product post-Starbucks and Whether or not Starbucks impacted people's productivity.
02:09:27.000But still, if you go to meet somebody at a coffee shop, you're going to talk about something that's different than going to drink with somebody at a bar or have dinner with somebody or something like that.
02:10:58.000So this whole extinction thing is about how where 98% of the origin of coffee is, because of climate change, this scientist...
02:11:10.000Who does this work has done the projections, and if the weather there, as predicted, increases by a few degrees, then the coffee won't be able to survive.
02:11:21.000And it could be 80% wiped out in these natural coffee forests in 50 years.
02:11:38.000And then can there be steps done to safeguard that?
02:11:41.000Well, we're trying to do that in the industry.
02:11:42.000So we actually had a conference about a year ago on this very question where we talked about preservation of the genetic diversity of coffee, which means taking coffee out of Ethiopia, planting it elsewhere to make sure that we've got other examples of the genetic diversity in other parts of the world.