Boss Barista

Before we start this episode, a quick warning - this episode will be dealing with the bush fires in Australia, as I mentioned at the top of the episode. We’ll be talking a lot about trauma associated with natural disasters and loss, so if that’s a topic that you don’t want to listen to for whatever reason, feel free to skip this episode.

The bushfires in Australia started in June of 2019. Fires are not uncommon during warmer months in Australia, but this season’s fires were especially devastating. The fires have burned through 46 million acres of land, heavily affecting densely populated regions, in particular New South Wales, destroying thousands of buildings and killing 34 people. The fires have killed over a billion animals and it's estimated to have done over $4.4 billion dollars in damages. Just now, as I type this on February 7th, 2020, there are finally news reports of rain which are starting to put out some of the fires, extinguishing about a third of the fires and potentially more in the coming days.

The bushfires have brought up questions of politics, disaster relief, and climate change—and one of the bright spots in all of this I saw, through my social networks, was a small, but powerful one. Demezla Jones, a coffee professional who’s the founder of Same Cup Coffee, told folks in Canberra, which is the capital of Australia, that if they were displaced or just needed a place to regroup and have a cup of coffee, that they could stop by a certain coffeeshop and have a drink on her. Just mention her name, no questions asked. I wanted to talk to Demezla more about what’s happening from her perspective, and how moments of turmoil affect folks specifically in the coffee industry, who often have to serve others in times of distress.

Photo by Ondrej Machart on Unsplash

Some of you might know I belong to a group called the Matchbook Coffee Project. Every month, we work with a roaster to release a once-in-a-lifetime coffee, and then we give them total control over how the coffee will be presented. Instead of roasting for the companies they work for or a specific audience, this is their chance to do something fun and weird and find touch points to connect the coffee they’ve chosen to, essentially themselves. We do these releases every month, and I don’t think we ever predicted just how personal they’d be.

We’ve been at this game for three years, and recently, we started interviewing our guests on a podcast, because, duh, I like podcasts, but also because roasters are the perfect audience for a podcast. They sit at a machine for hours a day—their ears are waiting for this! I host the Matchbook podcast as well, and until now, I kept both of these podcasts kind of separate. They felt like two totally different things to me, but I recently interviewed our February roaster, Candice Madison, who is the Director of Roasting for Royal Coffee in Oakland, and her stories and journey through coffee felt important to share. Hearing her tell her story, from being a person with a “respectable” job to yoga to roasting, it made me hopeful, especially in an age where it’s easy to feel like everything kind of sucks. Photo by Lindsey Shea. 

A few weeks ago, I asked listeners to send me voice memos—and you did. Lots of them. Some were happy, some were sad, some were about a specific topic - at the time, I really wanted to learn about tips and how they affect your life as service workers. And one of the voice memos I got was from a barista in Memphis named Laurel Moreland. She joins us, along with Courtney Paige Harrough, to share their experiences about being fat behind the bar. 

Please send me more voice memos! If there's anything you think we should cover, record a voice memo and send it to [email protected]! 

One time, in the midst of a sorrow-filled rant about my bosses and work, one of my friends told me I was unemployable. So I asked him—Brandon Epting—to come on the show and explain the weirdest compliment I’ve ever received.

We're working on some big episodes dropping around the holidays, but in the meantime, here's one of my all-time favorite episodes. 

Right now, as of December 2019, coffee is being traded at $1.05 per pound. And yet, when you go into a coffee shop, it can feel like prices are way higher—and sometimes vary wildly depending on the coffee shop you go to or the bag you pick up. How does coffee's journey from farm to retail shelf affect the cost it incurs along the way? We decided to dive deep into the world of coffee prices. Featuring Joe Marrocco of List & Beisler. 

How do you tell a customer about what's really going in your life? Today we talk to Camila Coddou of Barista Behind the Bar about what it means to have a meaningful conversation with patrons—the folks who keep the service industry alive, but often don't know much about the issues affecting workers. Learn more about her project, in partnership with Coffee at Large, about patron engagement and encouraging direct conversations with the folks who patron our workspaces—here! 

Hey friends, we're taking a break this week BUT we have a special treat for you!

I've been lucky enough to know Lucia Solis for a few years. She consults coffee farmers all around the globe, helping them improve their processing methods and think critically about fermentation. All coffee goes through some sort of fermentation, and not in the way you think.

Lucia is a fountain of knowledge, so she started her own podcast called, Making Coffee, where she talks about big topics like, "how do we determine quality in coffee," or "what happens when a coffee is over fermented?" (have you ever had a coffee that tastes more like kombucha or has some funk to it? it might be over fermented). We're sharing one episode in particular that I love.

You can subscribe to Lucia's podcast, Making Coffee, just like you would mine: you can go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts, and you can learn more about Lucia at www.luxia.com.

In the U.S., the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. 29 states have set a higher minimum wage than that, HOWEVER all by 6 states have a tipped minimum, or an amount that’s lower than minimum wage that you can pay your staff if they also receive tips. Rules vary on how little an employer can pay state by state, but in general, when we think of minimum wage, we think of lowly paying jobs, and for many, minimum wage isn’t enough to support themselves or their families or make their lives work without picking up more work or sacrificing basic needs.

But what happens when we start to think about minimum wage differently? What if we could guarantee that people left work every day with MORE than what they need just to meet their basic human needs? And what sort of power structures would have to be reassessed, and flat out knocked down, for that to happen?

In this episode, we talk to Michael Schroeder of Oddly Correct in Kansas City, who, on November 4th, 2019, announced an incredibly ambitious new pay structure for the business. On Instagram, they announced that all employees would make at least $18 an hour—if they made that in tips plus their base wage, that was great, but if their tips didn’t get them up to that hourly wage, they would subsidize it, and ensure that every employee took home a guaranteed amount of money everyday. And Michael says it's because they wanted to flip the idea of minimum wage on its head. 

SEND ME A VOICE MEMO—use your phone to record any of your thoughts, stories, or ideas and send them to me at [email protected]