Boss Barista

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.

Sebastián Diácono is a country manager for Latorre & Dutch, an international coffee-trading and -exporting company. He’s based in Colombia, and his job is to act as a liaison between people who want to buy coffee and people who grow it, understanding and synthesizing the needs of both in the process. When I first mentioned this project on Twitter, he messaged me almost immediately, saying he’d like to help me tell stories of coffee producers in Colombia. 

A full transcript of this episode is available here. 

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.

Today’s episode comes from Linn Tsang, who is kicking off her podcast called Pressure Profiles. Pressure Profiles is a Berlin-based interview-style show where Linn chats with baristas and other hospitality professionals about representation and community.

A full transcript of this episode is available here.

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 first in our series of guest creators.

Today we’re airing the first episode of the Updose Podcast, a show that chronicles American coffee in the 20th and 21st centuries. This project is near and dear to my heart because there are so many strange, incredible, and pivotal stories in recent coffee history—and there aren’t a lot of places where those stories are set down and recorded for future coffee consumers.

The Updose Podcast comes from Amanda Whitt, a barista and historian who explores in-depth questions about the way we view and drink coffee. In their first episode, they investigate the drive-thru coffee shop—a phenomenon that seems commonplace today, but was invented and first proliferated in the Pacific Northwest. Why the Pacific Northwest? Whose idea was it to serve coffee from a lonely kiosk off a two-lane highway? Amanda digs in and finds out.

A full transcript of this episode is available here. 

We’re taking a quick break from our Boss Barista takeover this week—folks are busy working on their projects, and will have lots to share with you soon—to revisit an episode from April 2020. 

Sahra Nguyen is the founder of Nguyen Coffee Supply, a coffee brand based in New York that’s dedicated to promoting specialty Vietnamese coffee.

In this episode, we talk about why Vietnam, which is the world’s second-largest producer of coffee beans, goes largely ignored in the specialty coffee industry. Then we take the question one step further, and ask: What makes a thing special in the first place?

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 first in our series of guest creators.

Today’s episode spotlights Cafetera Intelectual, hosted by Doris Garrido and Sandra Loofbourow. Their show explores the connection between coffee-producing and coffee-consuming countries and is bilingual, sharing insights in both English and Spanish. 

You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts, and new episodes come out every Friday. This is Cafetera Intelectual’s very first English-language episode, and Doris and Sandra are chatting with Rosalba Cifuentes, an international coffee exporter based in Mexico.

A full transcript of this episode is available here. 

When a refugee—someone who has fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and has crossed an international border to find safety in another country—comes to the United States, they’re typically given very little help when resettling their lives. 1951 Coffee Company hopes to change that, using the coffee industry as a tool for empowerment and self-determination.

In this episode, I talk to Doug Hewitt, co-founder of 1951 Coffee Company, which is based in Berkeley, California. 1951 created a barista training program specifically aimed at refugees, and helps trainees find placements at its own cafes or at other partner cafes in the Bay Area.

The goal isn’t simply to train new baristas, but to give people control over their lives—without expectation. Plenty of folks go through 1951’s training program and ultimately decide to move on to other fields, or to go back to school.

Ultimately, the goal is to help people feel safe making their own decisions, and to give them the tools to figure out what their goals are, instead of forcing them to make choices out of necessity or scarcity. Doug believes that coffee can be a tool to give power and control back to displaced people—one that extends far beyond the Bay Area. 

A few weeks ago, the folks at Amor Perfecto, a coffee roaster based in Bogotá, Colombia, reached out to me. They offered to send some coffees from a new project they were launching: a collaboration with the Frida Kahlo Corporation, which highlights women producers and innovators within the country’s specialty coffee scene.

After I tried the two coffees they sent, they asked if I’d be interested in talking to the women who had grown them. One coffee was from the Tolima region in southern Colombia, and was grown by Astrid Medina—who won Colombia’s Cup of Excellence—a national competition that awards the country’s best coffees—in 2015. The other coffee came from northern Colombia, in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range, and was grown by Luísa de Salazar. Both growers were kind enough to share their triumphs and hardships with me on this podcast.

A note on this episode: I highly recommend following along with the transcript, because there will be sudden shifts from English to Spanish. I ask all the questions in English and Astrid and Luísa respond in Spanish, while the Amor Perfecto team joins in and shares translation duties.

The result is warm and rough-and-tumble episode—there are multiple voices and moments where people talk over one another—and in places the sound quality dips (for Astrid in particular, who was recording outside on her farm). Regardless of the audio hiccups, I believe hearing people tell stories in their own words is deeply valuable, and I hope you enjoy hearing from the folks who make your daily coffee possible. Here are Astrid Medina and Luísa de Salazar.

In these interviews, I connect with people in different ways. Sometimes it’s immediate, sometimes it’s helped by a previous encounter or even a longtime friendship, and sometimes it never comes. I had never met Jiyoon Han before I asked her to be on the show, but her clarity and deep intentionality clicked for me instantly.

Jiyoon is the co-owner of Bean & Bean Coffee in New York City. Her parents opened Bean & Bean’s first location in 2008, a few years after immigrating to the United States from South Korea, amidst the year’s financial crisis. Since then, Jiyoon’s life has been wrapped up in coffee—it comes naturally to her, it’s embedded in her senses.

Jiyoon has a background in UX, or user experience, design, and uses that knowledge to help run aspects of Bean & Bean alongside her mother. On their website, Bean & Bean has a detailed and clear commitment laid out to promote gender equity—almost all the coffees they buy are from women-led farms and cooperatives, and they aim to have all their coffees powered by women by 2022. Their stores are reflective of their communities, including a flagship in the Little Neck neighborhood of Queens where Jiyoon grew up.

In this conversation, Jiyoon articulates so much of the potential in coffee—what responsibly run shops can look like, what being value-driven means, and how to actually grow. Growth for Jiyoon isn’t about expansion, but about depth and learning: honing your craft and getting better at what you do.

I can’t recommend this interview enough. Here’s Jiyoon.

This episode is brought to you by The Barista League. Register for High Density today!

Tax season is almost upon us, and if you’re like many service workers, you’ve probably been juggling a number of different jobs and gigs. Feel your blood pressure rising already? Take a breath: To help soften this always-stressful time of year, we’re re-airing an episode with Tiani Wright of Coffee and Tax. Listen along, and she’ll help you figure out how to file correctly—and how to stay on top of your money for the rest of the year, too.

Most coffee workers—not to mention others in the hospitality and service industries—have probably been told a number of conflicting things about taxes over the years. Declare your cash tips. Don’t declare your cash tips. Your tips cannot be taxed. You owe a tax liability at the end of the year. The varying narratives we’re given about how to manage our income can be confusing at best, and financially harmful at worst.

My guest today is Tiani Wright, a tax professional and founder of the group Coffee and Tax, and she wants to help coffee folks get financially literate. As she explains, a lot of that has to do with being open to talking about money in the first place. Tiani encourages people to get to know their pay stubs, to ask questions about their W2s, and to make sure their bosses are deducting the right amount of money from their paychecks.

Being financially literate means being in control of your future, and knowing where your money is going. And Tiani has the advice to help you get there.

To walk into Everybody’s Busy is to walk into a precisely curated space—like a gallery, but without pretension. The coffee, supplied by Onyx Coffee Lab, is spot-on; the menu design changes monthly and reflects a deep love of music; the speakers are always playing something fun, selected by the shop’s owner, Melissa Stinson.

This is the second time I’ve sat down and recorded with Melissa, and we’re revisiting a few of the themes we covered in the first episode, including our local coffee scene—we’re based in Chicago—and what it means to make something totally unique to you. In that conversation, we lamented that, for such a big city, there’s not as many coffee shops as you might expect. There are definitely folks opening interesting and fun shops, but Chicago is the third largest city in the nation—and there’s room for more. Way more.

But recently, we were spurred to record again after we noticed something promising happening: Despite the fact that COVID-19 has devastated the local dining scene, a number of new coffee shops have been opening across the city, many of which are run by people of color.

Along with a commentary on Chicago’s current coffee landscape, Melissa and I talk about being value-driven, and what it means to have a vision for your business. I reiterate a theme that came up in our first recording: No one else but Melissa could have made Everybody’s Busy, and her vision shows through in every detail and decision.

Our conversation is more a swapping of thoughts than a traditional interview, so if you want to hear two coffee folks try to dig into the reasons why their city and its coffee culture are so peculiar and idiosyncratic, you’ve picked the right time to tune in.