Boss Barista

Before coffee, Nigel Price of Drip Coffee Makers had a career in finance, working for a firm in Downtown Manhattan. But eventually, he decided he’d had enough—and he turned to cafes as a way to break away from the life he’d built and the trajectory he no longer wanted to be on. Over a decade later, Nigel credits coffee as the beginning of his second life, giving him a chance to create connections and bond with people in a way that his prior life in finance hadn’t.

This episode is brought to you by Urnex. 

We’re re-airing an episode form June of 2020 with Erica Chadé (you may hear them referred to as Erica Jackson in the episode). Erica talks all about intention, getting to know yourself and offers some wonderful tidbits about slowing down and how working in service can offer moments of presence.

We have "We Are Not A Family" tees available now—Erica is modeling one in the photo for this episode. Order them here! 

This episode is brought to you by Urnex. 

From the moment Suneal Pabari got into coffee, he wanted to know why others didn’t share his excitement, and he came to a pretty simple conclusion: Coffee is hard! Baristas are busy slinging drinks, and it’s not like the coffee roaster is sitting and waiting to answer your queries about why Coffee A tastes like strawberries and Coffee B tastes like milk chocolate.

Suneal wanted to learn more, and he decided to start a game. Leaderboard Coffee is a seasonal coffee experiment where participants receive 10 unlabeled bags of coffee alongside a set of guiding questions to help them deduce where each coffee is from and what makes it unique. Leaderboard doesn’t just offer the opportunity to become an at-home sleuth, but also to learn about coffee in a way that a cafe environment can’t replicate.

This episode is brought to you by Urnex. 

Baylee Engberg is a roaster who wants you to embrace past crop coffees.

That’s still a pretty novel position—coffee is an industry that touts freshness, which means “past crop” can feel taboo. But there's an opportunity to change the narrative. Just because past crop coffees are older doesn’t mean they can’t be roasted well and still drink deliciously. Does green coffee really have to be at the peak of freshness to be enjoyed? Is it sustainable to ignore past crop coffees? And don’t roasters have the power to highlight different flavors that maximize the full potential of a past crop coffee?

This episode is brought to you by Urnex.

Brittany Sims is a barista and coffee writer who runs the Non-Binary Barista blog. Brittany uses their blog to talk about gender in the workplace, but also to discuss accessibility issues, neurodivergency, how to deal with trauma, and big feelings at work. Essentially, Brittany’s blog humanizes service workers, and shines a light on the real experiences people go through on the job.

This episode is brought to you by Urnex.

My guest today is Vera Espíndola Rafael, a development economist working within coffee-producing countries. Recently, she wrote a paper called, “A Business Case to Increase Specialty Coffee Consumption in Producing Countries.” 

Coffee is a good that’s grown in one country, and then is traditionally—thanks to centuries of colonialism—exported somewhere else. Globally, coffee is a $200 billion industry. Vera was struck when she found out that only 10% of that value actually goes into the economies of the countries that grew the coffee, while 90% of that $200 billion stays in consuming countries. Vera hopes to change that. 

This episode is brought to you by Urnex.

The Boss Barista takeover is brought to you by Chobani.

A few weeks ago, I put a call out to coffee folks, fans, and drinkers across the globe to pitch ideas about the podcast they’ve been dreaming of making—and today we’re turning the mic over to the last in our series of guest creators.

Ana Sofía Narvaez takes over hosting this episode and interviews Sara Corrales of Finca Los Pinos in Nicaragua. Sara is part of the new face of the specialty coffee industry—one that’s dedicated to promoting internal coffee consumption, a topic that’s not often covered or promoted.

A full transcript is available here. 

Partnerships can have the power to clarify and sharpen traits, skills, and ideas, and that’s true of Kaleena Teoh and ChiSum Ngai—who goes by Sum—who are the co-founders of Coffee Project New York. 

Originally started as a small shop in the East Village in 2015, Coffee Project has expanded to a number of retail stores, a roastery, and a Specialty Coffee Association-certified training lab. Sum is a Q grader, which means she’s passed rigorous tests to evaluate and tastes coffees, and both Sum and Kaleena take their role as leaders seriously.

In this episode, we learn more about how their relationship to coffee, each other, and themselves has changed over time. Both Sum and Kaleena believe in the power of education, using Coffee Project as a space to bring customers into the coffee world. 

They also strive to build meaningful careers for their staff—which is why they’ve grown their business. But they still know the value of leading by example and are always looking to learn and expand their knowledge base. Here are Sum and Kaleena.

I first met Brian Gaffney while working at an unobtrusive coffee shop in Brooklyn called Daily Press. This wasn’t the kind of place you’d go out of your way to visit—it was located right on a busy street in the southeast corner of Bed-Stuy—and mostly, it attracted folks who lived locally.

Instead, the fact that it was a neighborhood spot made Daily Press what it was. Almost every customer was a regular, someone who at least one of the baristas had built a relationship with. I remember Brian distinctly—he was friendly with everyone. He worked out of the shop pretty often, and was always curious about the types of coffee we were pouring.

Although Brian doesn’t work in the coffee industry as we traditionally think of it—he even describes his relationship to the industry as being “coffee-adjacent”—he’s continued to pursue his interest, writing about coffee for publications like Standart and serving on the board of the Coffee Coalition for Racial Equity (CCRE).

In this conversation, we revisit our nine-year-long friendship and discuss how to find ways to connect with customers. I continue to come back to this phrase that I think James Hoffmann, owner of Square Mile Coffee and former podcast guest, said once—one you’ll hear in this episode—that coffee is bad at telling its own story. Brian’s background is in marketing and brand strategy, so we talk about what it means for coffee people to take ownership of their own narratives.

But we’re not just talking about coffee shop owners when we say “coffee people.” When it comes to coffee’s narratives, Black and Brown people are all too often left out of the equation, even though their labor, both historically and today, continues to be the backbone of our entire industry—and yet the stories and ways we talk about coffee center affluent, white consumers. Brian and I discuss what a coffee industry led by Black and Brown people could look like, and how centering the perspective of the laborers in coffee has the potential to completely rewrite the industry’s future—and reverse the descent into sameness we seem to be experiencing now. Here’s Brian.

The Boss Barista takeover is brought to you by Chobani.

A few weeks ago, I put a call out to coffee folks, fans, and drinkers across the globe to pitch ideas about the podcast they’ve been dreaming of making—and today we’re turning the mic over to the third in our series of guest creators.

This episode is a little different than what you’ve heard so far. This is the second of a two-part episode—in these episodes, we talk to Colombian coffee farmers about risk, white saviorism, and the future of coffee.

A full transcript of this episode is available here.