BOSS BARISTA

The owner of Café con Jiribilla talks about Mexico's unique coffee scene and why you should discover its roasters. You can find a full transcript of this episode at bossbarista.substack.com

Neichelle Guidry of Black Girl Black Coffee gives the single-best piece of advice I've heard in years.

A full transcript of this episode can be found at bossbarista.substack.com

Hi friends. For the rest of the year, I’m sharing a selection of my favorite podcast episodes as part of the Boss Barista December Rewind. Partly, that’s because the community of Boss Barista listeners has grown so much in just a few years, and these conversations will likely be new to many. But I also wanted to highlight the episodes that have made a great impact on me—I still carry lessons and ideas from these conversations with me today.

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Since it’s the end of the year, I wanted to look back and figure out what were the most popular episodes of the show. Surprisingly, an episode I did in 2020 with James Hoffmann is still my most downloaded episode, but in a close second place was my episode with Morgan Eckroth, the 2022 United States Barista Champion. At the time we recorded, Morgan was getting ready to compete in the World Barista Championships; we now know they placed second in the world, but the ideas Morgan lays out in this episode are still surprisingly refreshing and a kind reminder that even barista champions like Morgan want you to be a little less serious with your coffee. Here’s Morgan:

You’ve probably seen a movie or a television show that depicts baristas in a … not so flattering light. Think familiar tropes, maybe a dude with a man bun and facial hair ready to make you feel bad or confused about your coffee order. I can even hear this character in my head: A customer might walk in, order a macchiato, and then receive a 10-minute lecture that begins with, “Well, actually, a traditional macchiato…”

Morgan Eckroth is the opposite of all that. On social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where their handle is @MorganDrinksCoffee, they both explain coffee concepts and make light of the silliness of coffee culture. In their short videos, they play the role of the customer and the barista, interacting in a coffee shop space.

Unlike that movie barista, what Morgan achieves in their videos is validating the experience of both actors: It can be frustrating to be a barista and work a service job, but it can also be confusing and weird to be a customer in a coffee shop with complex menus and hard-to-discern tasting notes. In a way, all of it is kind of ridiculous—and Morgan’s videos cut right through this inherent tension.

Morgan is also the 2022 United States Barista Champion, and brought their hundreds of thousands of followers along for the ride as they prepped and competed. When the organizing board who runs the competition announced they would not be livestreaming the event shortly before it was held—effectively making it impossible for those not at the competition to watch what was happening—Morgan decided to do so on their own.

As the winner, Morgan will go on to compete at the World Barista Championships later this year, and will continue to bring the positivity and lightness that pours through their videos in service of making coffee information more accessible to others. Here’s Morgan:

Ashley: So let me have you start by introducing yourself.

Morgan: My name is Morgan Eckroth. I am most often found online under the moniker of MorganDrinksCoffee. I do YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and I've also been working as a barista for the past five years.

Ashley: I always start these interviews in the same place: I was wondering if you could tell me if you grew up with coffee in your life? Do you have any childhood memories of coffee?

Morgan: I actually, funnily, I don't. I grew up in a family that doesn't drink or didn't drink any coffee. And to this day they don't drink any coffee. I frequently say that it was kind of my act of teenage rebellion to be a coffee drinker.

At the age of 16, when I got my driver's license, the first thing I did, I think, was drive to a coffee shop for the first time.

Ashley: Oh, God, I'm trying to think of the first thing I did when I got my license—I don't think it was driving to a coffee shop.

Morgan: My act of teenage rebellion was pretty mild when it comes down to it.

Ashley: It's funny when you set certain expectations within a household, or even just within your life. And then you break out of those expectations and then you're like, “Oh wow. My act of rebellion was pretty mild.”

Morgan: I was like, “That wasn't nearly as dramatic as I meant it to be, I don't think.”

Ashley: But you must've felt like it was at that moment!

Morgan: Yeah, it was definitely one of those things that I kind of wanted to be my own. Part of it was the convenience of like, I was a student and needed a place to study and wanted to be out of the house because I was a teenager.

Also, there was this kind of world of coffee where I was looking at these baristas and I'm like, “They're so cool. I want to be like them.” And so I just kind of stumbled my way into a specialty coffee cafe, and very awkwardly started ordering very, very sugary and delicious drinks. And it's kind of all history from there.

Ashley: Do you remember the moment where you decided, beyond this teenage rebellion moment, that like, “Oh, this is something that I want to do,” or, “This is something I want to learn about or be part of?”

Morgan: I can't remember a very, very specific moment. I do, however, remember the time period of, I think about two years from when I started drinking coffee to when I got my first barista job, that I knew that I wanted to be a barista. That was my, that was my end goal.

I was like, “I'm going to go to college. I want to work as a barista,” and do that sort of thing. I started applying to this coffee shop that I was—it was actually called Tried and True, and was my very first coffee job ever. I remember being 16 and having this inkling that I wanted to do what the people behind the bar were doing.

So I showed up with my resume and like a really awkward cover letter. And I was like, “Please hire me!” And of course, I'm a high school student, zero qualifications, zero availability, anything. And they were like, “Yeah, no, but keep trying because maybe eventually.” Throughout those two years, I think I applied multiple times.

And it wasn't even with the intention of getting a job, I really was just trying to be like, “I want to work here really, really badly. And I want you all to know that.”

Then finally they said yes. I think it was that very first shift when I got behind the bar, and they started teaching me things that I was like, “Oh yeah, this is as cool as I thought it was going to be.”

Ashley: I love that the moment met your expectations.

Morgan: 100%. I remember grabbing the portafilter for the first time, and them being like, “Okay, like put it here in the grinder, and then the coffee comes out,” and I felt like a superhero. I was like, “I'm in heaven right now doing what I want to do forever,” and somehow that has lasted for the past five years.

Ashley: It's funny that you tell the story this way too, because I feel like so many people, when they come on the show and we have the conversation about, “How did you get into coffee,” it's almost always, “I fell into it,” or “I had nothing else to do,” or “I was a student on campus and like, the coffee shop was kind of cool so I just sort of did it for a while.”

And it's so cool to see—I'm going to sound ancient as I say this—but it's so cool to see a generation of people who see baristas and they're like, “Yes, that's what I want to do.”

Morgan: I definitely annoyed my way into my first coffee job and still to this day, I don't know exactly why it clicked as early as it did or what kind of drove me to it, but it was just kind of like that gut instinct of being like, “I think I want to do this.”

Once I got there, “I was like, okay, yeah, I definitely want to do this.” I think I really lucked out with those two things syncing up as early in my life as they did.

Ashley: So, as you mentioned earlier, you make content on TikTok, on YouTube, on Instagram—let's give people a little bit of a backstory about how you got to that point.

So at what point did you start filming yourself—I guess that’s like the proto-version of all of this.

Morgan: Totally. So I started my content journey at the very, very baseline before I even knew it was something I wanted to do as a career—I started making TikTok videos in June of 2019. So TikTok, as an app, was still very, very fresh. It had nowhere near the mainstream adoption it has now. It was an app that I'd like, just kind of spend time on. I enjoyed it as a consumer.

It was about to be summer. And I went, “I am bored and I want a project or like a hobby to do.”

I was like, “You know what? I'll try making some videos.” At the time I was finishing up my marketing degree and it was my goal at that time to go into some aspect of either digital marketing or social media marketing in the coffee, food, and beverage space.

That was my end goal. So I was kinda like, “Well, if I can start to get a handle on some new emerging platforms, if I can get a little bit of the hard skills of video under my belt, that would probably be pretty helpful in the future.” I kind of stumbled upon making videos about coffee just naturally.

I worked quite a bit when I was in college and so I was at my job most of the time. I really loved my job and I was like, “Oh, I'll just make videos about coffee.” And then they started to do well, and that was a true shock. It was very surprising to me. So I just kind of leaned into it.

I was having a lot of fun making videos about latte art, and then I kind of stumbled upon it like, “Oh, I can make kind of funny videos about barista experiences.” And it just kind of escalated from there. They started to take off and I started to take it more seriously.

Ashley: Do you remember the first video where it felt like a sea change—like something clicked or something really changed for you?

Morgan: Yeah. So my first couple of—for lack of a better word—viral videos were very silly. I have this party trick where I can do a pretty impressive backbend and that went viral. That was non-coffee, and then I remember the first coffee video I posted that did really well.

It was literally just me. It was just no sound—or pardon me, no music, just me standing at the bar, pouring a latte, stuff you see on Instagram all the time. I just had the videos and I was like, “I'll just post it.”

I remember posting it as I got off my shift and then I went and ate dinner. Didn't think about it. And I came back a couple hours later to just scroll through TikTok like usual. I remember opening it up and being like, “This video has 400,000 views.” Out of nowhere, I was like, “This is completely out of the realm of possibility of what I expected.” And that was a truly shocking moment because it really was over the course of like two hours that this video grew like that.

And people were excited by it! I mean, in my world latte art is like something you kind of do every day, so it wasn't that special to me, but it was really, really cool to see that it was special to other people. And I was like, “What else can I show them that I do every day that they might be interested in?”

Ashley: It's funny to reflect on those moments where you're like, “I do something like this every day, and this is so fascinating to people.”

I was on a podcast recently, and I think we talked about the stuff that I write about and labor organizations and unions, and at the very end of the conversation, I gave a tip about how to pour a heart into a latte. Just a heart, because I was like, “Everyone likes a heart. Like, don't even mess with it.”

Morgan: It’s classic.

Ashley: It’s classic. And I could tell that was one of the most interesting parts of the conversation. And I'm like, “I've poured at least a hundred thousand hearts in my life. It's something that I could like live and breathe.”

So it's really fascinating to reflect on those moments and figure out like, “Wow, things that I find so normal and regular are really fascinating to people,” especially because, as baristas, there is some alchemy in a way to what we do.

We have these raw ingredients and then suddenly you have a delicious drink. How does this happen?

Morgan: It’s like you're making, like, a potion behind the bar.

Ashley: Right. At what point did you feel like you were refining your message in your videos? Because what I find so fascinating about your videos, and we have emailed about this, is that—so Morgan has these videos and she plays both parts. There's the customer and there's the barista.

Sometimes there is more than one character, which I love. I love when you're two different customers, that makes me really happy. But I think what you do really well is that you validate both experiences. You're never really mad at the customer, but you're also not mad at the barista.

I think there's a really easy tendency in coffee to juxtapose customers and baristas as opposing forces. But you seem to validate the frustrations that both characters have while making both totally valid. When did that start becoming clear to you?

Morgan: Yeah, it was something that was pretty important to me from day one. I mean, honestly, it kind of just leads into how I approach my job as a barista. You know this from your experiences: Being a barista can be really hard. You can deal with some of the weirdest, most awful things happening to you just over the course of your job.

With that context, I've come into my job and through all the stuff that I've experienced looking at everything through the lens of humor. At least for me personally, whenever you have a customer that's being particularly difficult or perhaps angry at you, I think it's really easy to take that personally, as in like, “They are angry at me as a person,” when very rarely I think that is true. I think it's often they're already having a bad day and you just happened to be the person in front of them.

But I also find sometimes I think we get very serious with the sort of interactions we have, when I think, more often than not, they're just kind of funny. We're just a little part of people's everyday lives and it is at the kind of cafe level—like, it's a cup of coffee. I think often there are so many, like, theatrical and dramatics involved in it that is very, very funny for the level of seriousness that it actually is.

When I was making my videos, I really wanted to touch on the ridiculousness of like, you know, how dramatic these cafes scenarios happen.

But at the same time, I did very much want to respect both the customer and the barista experience, because I think more often than not, any sort of friction and stuff that happens between barista and customer is mostly born out of just a lack of knowledge and/or context as to what the barista is doing, and that's not necessarily at the fault of the customer.

You can't expect them to know every single core value that we have in specialty coffee. But that being said, it can still be very funny. So I was like, “I'd like to kind of poke fun at these things that happen.” But at the same time I wanted to have this angle of like, “While it is silly, we don't want to be driving people away.”

The goal is to bring them to specialty coffee and to value coffee at the same level that I do. So how do we get from point A to point B? And I think a lot of that is just acknowledging that there is a knowledge gap and then kind of working through it with something that is relatable, and I think frequently that's humor.

So that's kind of where I came from.

Ashley: I love that so much because I think that you identified so many, perhaps hurdles we face in the coffee industry. And as I was looking at your profile and reading some of the interviews that you've done recently, I was struck by the fact that you said that you make coffee content for everybody, you don't make coffee content for coffee people.

Not to say that they're excluded by any means, but that they're part of the conversation. And I think for a long time, I mean, I struggle with this. I make a podcast that I don't think anybody outside of the coffee industry listens to—

Morgan: They should though!

Ashley: You know, one day, fingers crossed, but I think that we've done a lot of that in the past where we're speaking to the choir, we're kind of speaking to the same people over and over.

And I think coffee has kind of struggled with this hurdle of getting to consumers in a way that feels safe and accessible and doesn't feel like this barista is going to be mad at me. I'm sure you've seen the hipster barista meme—which I'm obsessed with right now. I have an article coming out in Standart about the hipster barista meme because it's so fascinating to me

Morgan: It’s a classic.

Ashley: It's classic, but it's like, that is the perception that a lot of people have of what being a barista is.

And I would posit if we had like a scale of hipster barista—like if we had a scale of how we feel about baristas—hipster barista would be on one end. And I would say that you're on the other.

Morgan: Cool. Thank you. That's a huge compliment. I always kind of hope that is the case, but I could never be sure. You never know how other people are perceiving what you're making.

Ashley: But it seems like you get a lot of positive feedback from people. I mean, you can't equate likes necessarily with positivity all the time, but I imagine when you're engaging with people through your videos, or you see comments, or you're engaging with people on other platforms, there is a moment where you're like, “Oh, this is landing with people. This is sharing an experience.”

Morgan: I’ve been really grateful to kind of cultivate the following that I currently have. I think what you said is exactly true. I have somehow ended up with a pretty healthy community as far as online communities go. I think it's very easy to cultivate a community that is comfortable with dog-piling on people or, or punching down on people.

We have these discussions a lot about whether it is a creator's responsibility to maintain control over their audience, or whether it is—you know, you can't control an audience, they'll do what they want regardless of the creator.

I have always been very much of the opinion that a creative is, to some extent, responsible for their audience's actions, because I do very much believe that what you put out there as a creator, the tone you use, the kind of, for lack of a better word, kind of energy you put out there will be reflected in how your audience both reacts and what they do with the information you're presenting them.

I came into making content with that opinion. I've always tried to do my best, to varying levels of success, but I've always tried to do my best to kind of cultivate an audience who is accepting of all things coffee.

I come to my platform with a lot of love and just passion for coffee, and I want that to be replicated in my audience. I don't want to have an audience that is going to go out to other creators and blast my opinions at them as something that is fact, because very frequently it is not. I just wanted it to be a very fun place full of people who want to have fun with coffee.

I've finally reached that point with my audience. We have a good time together online, which is a really, really cool thing to say.

Ashley: You said that you finally reached that point. So I imagine that there was some learning and figuring it out as you went along.

Morgan: Absolutely. I can pinpoint one kind of direct experience when I started on YouTube. I had started on TikTok, because, as I mentioned before, I was very, very comfortable with short-form content, and with short-form content there tends to be a slightly younger audience.

You tend to be hitting more of the 18-to-24-year-olds. But when you move to YouTube, especially when talking about coffee, you start to get a little bit of a different demographic. At least to my knowledge, a majority of the YouTube audience who watches a lot of specialty coffee long-form content tends to skew a little bit more towards the male demographic, and it also tends to skew a little bit older in age, which makes sense because the cost of being invested into doing coffee things and buying coffee equipment is a lot higher than what most young people can have.

So when I came onto YouTube, I was suddenly faced with this very, very different audience who I think was just expecting something different from me. They were looking for a certain level of information and dissection of topics that I just didn't want to give because I think that kind of initial higher-level [content] can make it a little bit hard for people to jump into specialty coffee. I very much viewed myself as kind of a stepping stone to those sorts of higher-level creators.

It was very much a back-and-forth with my new audience of, “Hey guys, I know what you want for me. That is not what I'm going to be giving you, at least not all the time,” and so there was a little bit of friction there, of dealing with frustration from audience members.

But ultimately I just held strong to my guns. Eventually, there was this mutual understanding of people who didn't want to consume my content just finally being like, “Okay, I can leave.” And I was like, “No worries. There are other people who make the kind of content you want.”

The people who enjoyed my content found their way to me. And now we're in a very happy place together.

Ashley: I like that you were able to create some boundaries around what you wanted to create. I did an interview with [YouTube creator] James Hoffmann and he mentioned, “There are things I'm going to create and there are things I'm not going to create,” and being pretty comfortable with that. I think that took him some time too, and it's really encouraging to hear you say that same thing of like, “I don't have to give people everything. It's okay for me to say, ‘This is what I want to do. And if you want to be part of this ride, that's awesome.’ If you don't, you're always welcome back, but you don't have to consume this.”

Morgan: Exactly. It sometimes can be a little bit painful because you want to give people what they're asking for. But at the same time, I also knew, from my own level of knowledge, that I wasn't qualified to talk about a lot of topics that people were asking for. It was a lot of people being like, “Do this, do this!”

And I'm like, “Look, if I try to cover this topic, I'm going to do a disservice to it.” I would always try to do my best to point them in the right direction and frequently that is like James, or other established content creators. I'm like, “Hey, I don't want to talk about this, but the good news is there are a ton of amazing resources about it already. So go over there and enjoy those. And then come back for the things I am going to talk about.”

Ashley: Did you find it ever difficult to separate the personal from, like, Morgan Drinks Coffee the character—and not to say that this is a character you're playing. I mean, you kind of are in some aspects—

Morgan: But it is curated.

Ashley: Yeah, do you ever have to draw a line for yourself like, “I need to put down my phone,” or, “I need to not respond to this message,” or, “I need to cultivate a safe place for myself that maybe doesn't exist to consume for others?”

Morgan: No, completely. That is the ongoing struggle. I think I'm a lot better about creating that separation nowadays than I used to be. But it is tricky when you're a content creator, but also someone who enjoys spending time online.

I remember like two years ago, I think when I was like starting to really get into it, going online to just consume content for my own enjoyment became very, very difficult because I would open up TikTok and I wouldn't think, “I'm going to just have a nice 30 minutes where I can enjoy videos.” It was immediately like I am being faced with my job. It got really hard to kind of plug out of my job and just be like, I'm just me on my time off.

I think when you're a content creator and especially any sort of person who's self-employed or freelance, you become your own boss, and that's kind of dangerous because you're not always that good at setting boundaries for yourself. So nowadays, I have a lot of good systems and supports in place to know when to get myself offline.

I've also cultivated for myself a lot of hobbies that are not monetized and un-online. Sometimes I think in the creator space, it's really easy to be like, “Oh, I have this hobby. But I could monetize it!” and then it becomes a job, it's no longer a hobby. I've found things for me, reading and writing are my true hobbies.

Those do not exist really on the internet in any way. That's something that I've kept special to me. And that's been super helpful as well. And creating that sort of division.

Ashley: So let’s talk about this very big thing that happened to you.

Morgan: [Laughs] No biggie.

Ashley: What could we be talking about? No big deal, whatever.

So you won the 2022 United States Barista Competition. Woohoo! Let's take a moment to celebrate that. I have my jazz hands up, which doesn't make any sense because we can't see each other.

I kind of want to work backward from that moment. What was it like when—

Morgan: Oh my gosh. It was shocking, truly. I've been thinking back to that moment a lot. I have a lot of footage and videos and photos from those 30 seconds between the announcement and walking up on stage.

I think it was an overwhelming feeling of just joy and relief. For the past year—I've competed now for a couple of years with varying levels of success—but in 2020, when I competed in qualifiers, I did not do as well as I wanted to. I didn't do as well as I thought I was going to do. And so I left competition that year feeling really bad about myself, honestly.

Competition has always been something that’s kind of pushed me, I think, in my career path. And I've always really valued that. So to leave feeling like I had failed myself was something that took a long time to come to terms with. Coming into this year, it was very much about proving myself wrong, that I wasn't stuck at this level that I thought I was at.

To be in the finals, even just finding out that I was in the finals, was shocking and amazing. I remember they were counting down all the names, and it came to the last two of us and we were standing back there just hugging—I think both of us were probably on the verge of like a panic attack just waiting for the announcement, and then it came and I think I just kind of … let go of all that self-resentment and frustration from my past failures. It all just kind of like came out in that final.

Ashley: I would have never guessed that you were carrying those moments of self-resentment. That was a really interesting way to put it, because I think that like—I don't know!

I've competed a couple of times and I've thought about those moments too, of like what I could have done better. I still feel resentful towards myself of making mistakes that I feel like I shouldn't have, but at the same time—

Morgan: You probably had no control over it.

Ashley: Did you realize that you were holding onto this feeling of self-resentment?

Morgan: I don't think I did really until afterward. I had a little inkling of it when I found out that I was competing. I kind of had this minute where I sat back and I was like, “I need to get into a healthy headspace.” Not that I wasn't at the time, but I was like, it is going to be really, really important that I am really steadfast in what I'm doing this year.

Especially with the inherent audience I was bringing with me, no matter whether I chose to publicize that I was competing or not, my audience would have kind of figured it out at some point. It was tricky to come to terms with the fact that I needed to kind of prove something to myself, but additionally, I was bringing a really strong audience with me, that if I felt like I did poorly, or if I legitimately did poorly, I would not hear the end of it for a very long time. Not necessarily a bad way, but it would stick with me. Much more so than in previous years.

So it was, it was a lot of personal pressure that I applied to myself this year, and I'm very glad it all worked out. I do not want to think about the process I would have had to do to decompress hadn't it worked out.

Ashley: Yeah, that must've been a huge decision that you had to make. It wasn't just competing for yourself or the company that you worked for. You were competing almost on behalf of your audience.

Morgan: No matter what, I do everything I do, in coffee and online, nowadays with the context that I have a lot of people watching, which is really fun and definitely an honor, but at the same time, very scary. I had to make the decision very early on with my routine of, “Am I going to involve my audience, or am I just going to kind of let them vicariously view when I want them to?” I think the best possible outcome for everyone was to have them involved along the way.

So they could at least kind of understand the magnitude of preparation that goes into it. And for them to like, have a fun time with barista competitions because they're very strange. They're very weird, as you said before yourself, and I fully agree. And so I was like, “Well, if I can like explain this weird thing, maybe we can all come away with some knowledge more so than just the results of the competition.”

Ashley: There are so many layers to your competition win. There's the fact that you had this decision before you even applied, to think, “Are these folks going to come with me? Am I going to put this on my channel? Am I going to just do it in stealth mode and then be like, ‘Surprise! Here's all the stuff I did!’”

But then there's that second level of, “Okay, if they're coming with me, how do I cultivate content for them so they can understand what's happening for people who probably have no idea what this weird thing is?”

Morgan: For sure.

Ashley: And then on a third level, you made your routine about your audience, about sharing with people. You made your drink specifically in a way that people could make it at home. You made a video that was like, “Here's my drink, and here is how you make it.” I have to imagine that that took so much planning.

Morgan: It was an interesting challenge, logistically it was good and bad. I wouldn't have changed a thing about it, but I will say it added a little bit extra stress to the prep, because we were releasing these videos, and going into deep dives about the different components of my presentation while we were actively preparing.

We released a full video about how to freeze-distill milk and why we nowadays do that a lot in competition and what it tastes like and what drinks I was doing. The minute that video is uploaded, you check the box and you're like, “Well, we're using freeze-distilled milk. Like we can't change it now.”

It posed a very interesting challenge for us, especially at the end. We actually changed my signature beverage, the ingredients pretty significantly. We had a different version of it. We'd been working with it for a couple of weeks, and then two or three days before we left for Boston, we were like, “We need to change it. This—we need to improve this.”

I filmed my video about my signature drink, I think it was less than 24 hours before we got on the plane for Boston. I was frantically sending it off to my editor, and then we were frantically trying to upload it on really bad Wi-Fi. It was a really interesting challenge in that sense.

But at the same time, there was a little bit of relief in checking those boxes and being like, “We're using freeze-distilled milk. We literally can't change it now.” So at least we could like move past that step of prep.

Ashley: Yeah, there is some relief in being able to make a decision and just stick with it.

Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. Very much so.

Ashley: Have you reflected much—I know that I've asked you about this—but have you reflected much about what your win means? Like, I don't know that anybody else winning with an audience like yours would, and I don't want to say [past wins] don’t mean anything, that's not true, but it just means something different because you brought a whole audience with you.

Morgan: I talked very briefly with one of the head judges, after all the announcements, as we were leaving the venue the final night, and they said something that meant a lot to me and was—yeah, I was crying a lot that night—but hearing what they said kind of tipped me over the edge a little bit more.

Because it was really, it was the goal of the entire thing: They said that they don't think they'll know kind of the impact of like my routine for another couple of years. Hopefully, we start to see the competitor landscape shift and change. I started off this year when I found out I was competing, not with the intention of winning—like I'm competitive, obviously I wanted to do well, like all of that stuff—but more so I wanted to create something that could kind of act as a resource for potential new competitors.

It's my process. Everyone's process is different, but I at least wanted to lay a little bit of a foundation for people who might want to compete but have nowhere to start.

To hear that someone else had thought that I had maybe created something similar to that was really emotional to me because that, more so than doing well or even winning or anything, was the overarching goal of the season. I'm really excited frankly, to see future seasons and to hopefully see a shakeup in the type of competitors we see. I'm really excited that in the past couple of years, there's been a really, really great push to open it up to more people. And I'm just grateful to kind of be a part of that.

Ashley: Is the way that you talked about barista competitions being inaccessible, and wanting to create information and give people a resource to turn to—was that informed by your past experiences?

Morgan: It was a little bit. When I competed for the very first time, I was lucky enough that my bosses had both competed in barista competitions in previous years. I had a little bit of help from them as kind of like, guidelines.

But a lot of it, because they're busy, they have lives, and I'm the competitor, a lot of it falls on my shoulders to figure out. It was a lot of me, as like a very fresh, 19-year-old barista, throwing stuff at the walls and just hoping I was doing the right thing.

I studied tons and tons of other competitors’ routines, but beyond that, and looking over the rulebook, there wasn't really any information about what I should be doing or shouldn't be doing. So my hope was to create a little capsule of videos that could at least act as a starting point for someone like me, back when I was competing for the first time.

Ashley: And the idea behind barista competitions, ideally, is that we're pushing coffee to a new place. So we should be borrowing from people who did something that worked. We should be borrowing from people who did something really interesting, and we should be able to access that, be like, “Oh, they did this thing. This is how they did it. Let me try it. Hopefully that will serve the coffee.” That's the whole point.

Morgan: Yep.

Ashley: What are you looking forward to as you prepare for the world competition—which luckily you have a little bit of a breather here. It doesn't happen until September, and we're recording this in April.

What are you looking forward to maybe thinking about or retooling as you prepare for that?

Morgan: Honestly, I'm really excited to sit down with my routine and really dissect it. I think the bones of my routine are probably gonna stay roughly the same, things like the overarching theme, probably where we're getting our coffees from—stuff like that. But this past season prepping for USBC went by so quickly.

We had barely two months, which is kind of nothing in the scale of competition, especially for like, a full, national-level of routine. And so everything that we did, while very intentional, had to happen rapidly. And we had to kind of stick to our guns on all of them.

I'm really excited to take the next four months and really go back on all the decisions we made and also look at my scoresheets and kind of decide, “Were we happy with that? Can we make it better?” Or [look at] the things that didn't do as well. I kind of had some shortcomings and it's like, okay, how do we take these shortcomings and bring them up to the level they need to be at? And then take them that much further.

So I think it's going to be honestly, a lot of really, really structured, thoughtful time. Beyond that, there's just a lot of practice I need to do. I would like to be better at tasting, myself personally, there were some technical things I need to be better at. So I'm excited to dive into those topics separately as well, because they're going to also elevate my routine for the world stage.

Ashley: I think I've asked you a version of this question before, and I kind of want to end on it again because … I don't know, there's something so precisely of this moment of where we're at in coffee and what the future of coffee can represent about you winning this competition. And that's a lot—I know that I just told you a lot of things and that's probably—

Morgan: It’s scary and exciting at the same time.

Ashley: It's all of the feelings at the same time, but there's something about us wanting to be a more accessible industry that I think you represent.

I think there's something about the fact that we're not great at talking about coffee as an industry, but some people are starting to claw out of that, are starting to find ways to communicate that—you being one of them.

When we think about who wins the USBC—obviously there's a scoresheet, there's points that you get and it's a point system, but at the same time, one of the things I think the judges are asked to do, especially when you get to that top level, is to really evaluate, “Is this person going to represent us? Because that's ultimately what the U.S. Barista Champion is. They are a representative of the United States that will be going to the world competition and representing our country.”

They have to think about that. Who's going to encompass that role. And in a way, there must be something so like, mind-boggling and almost—I don't want to say self-reflective because that's not the right word, but like, how do you process all that?

Or like, what do you think of it? When someone looks at you and they're like, “That's the U.S. Barista Champion,” what do you want them to kind of take away from that?

Morgan: When we flew home from Boston, that was kind of like, a very grounding moment, because you get back at home, I did all my COVID tests, and then I went back to work—and it was this weird moment of coming back to what used to be very normal and routine and feeling like there is now this extra layer on top of it, of this title that I hold in great respect. And I know a lot of other people do.

I'm still trying to figure out what that means. I had to have a pretty, pretty lengthy talk with my coach because I was sitting here, four or five days after competition, being like, the idea of making a normal, kind of like funny video seems so like, it just seemed silly.

I hit a weird creative wall where I was like, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do now. And he kind of talked me through some really helpful stuff and what it came down to, he was like, “Don't look at what other champions have done. Don't try to put an expectation upon yourself of what you're supposed to do now because you are your own unique person and you do Morgan Drinks Coffee. Whatever your future looks like with this title is also through the lens of doing Morgan Drinks Coffee.”

That was something that was really helpful for me, because it kind of drew me out of my own head and I was like, “Okay, there is this added level and title and all this stuff, but at the end of the day, I want to continue pushing forward with talking about coffee and having a lot of fun with it.”

I am really excited that there are potentially some new people who are coming to it and coming to me from this win, and that's really, really exciting. So that kind of got me over my creative hump and I'm really excited to continue pursuing forward with what I've been doing in the past. And I'm sure it will continue to evolve as we continue forward into worlds and then after that.

But that being said, the core of what I want to do online still exists and I'm just gonna push forward with it. Title be darned.

Hey friends. For the rest of the year, we're bringing back old episodes of Boss Barista. Part of the reason we’re doing this is because the community of listeners who are part of Boss Barista is so different than it was just a few years ago. But also, many of these episodes carry lessons and ideas that I still carry with me and are worth revisiting.

Some of you might know that before I worked in the service industry, I was a teacher, and I was on a very narrowly-drawn path for myself. I thought I’d teach for a few years, go to law school, and felt like I had things all figured out. But then I started working as a barista, and it felt like a completely different version of my life began.

Nigel Price has a similar story: the owner Drip Coffee Roasters in New York started in finance before discovering coffee, and it led him down a completely different, unscripted plan for his life. Yes, this episode is about coffee (we talk a lot about pourovers) but it’s also about how we end up where expect—and don’t expect—in life.

A full transcript of this episode can be found at bossbarista.substack.com

What do words like "ethical" and "sustainable" really mean in coffee? In this audio extra, Jim Ngokwey discusses the ambiguity of common buzzwords.

A managing partner at Mighty Peace Coffee, Jim Ngokwey is creating pathways for Congolese coffee growers and posing difficult questions about the future of the industry.

The coffee pro-turned-coach talks about the gentleness of service work.

A full transcript of this episode can be found at bossbarista.substack.com. Listen to past episodes of Camila on the Boss Barista Podcast in 2019 and 2020. 

In my last newsletter piece, I talked about how customers and community aren’t the same thing. My inspiration for that article was a tweet from the team at Cxffeeblack, regarding their IRL café space, The Anti-Gentrification Cxffee Club. With that fresh in my mind, I decided to pull this episode from July 2020 so you could learn more about Cxffeeblack and its founders, Renata Henderson and Bartholomew Jones.

This re-air is quite a bit longer than most recent Boss Barista episodes, so I want to jump right in—but I also want to promote two projects from Cxffeeblack first. One is a limited-edition sneaker they’ve released to fund a cross-global coffee exchange, and the other is a documentary the team made, released in March 2022. Check out the trailer here, watch the documentary by joining Patreon, and keep an eye on their Instagram account for tour dates to watch.

Wine and coffee are a lot alike—up to a point.

In coffee, we frequently refer to wine to explain concepts like terroir (or the idea that crops like coffee taste different depending on where they’re grown). But for years, I’ve wondered if this comparison—what I’ve lovingly called “the wine analogy”—has hindered our understanding of coffee. Maybe it’s just that we’ve focused on the wrong similarities.

Marie Cheslik is the founder of Slik Wines, and we first connected through Slik Wines’ Instagram account. Marie focuses on making wine accessible and fun through short videos that break down common wine questions, and in this conversation, we dig into how to make things that feel esoteric and hard—like wine and coffee—more joyful and approachable. And there’s a lot of joy in this episode—Marie is really, really fun to chat with. We cover everything from Chicago-specific references to attempts to figure out who is the better group of tasters: wine folks or coffee people.

Here’s Marie:

Ashley: Marie, I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself.

Marie: Sure. My name is Marie Cheslik. I am the founder and sommelier for my business, Slik Wines.

Ashley: Did you grow up with coffee in your life?

Marie: Well yes. I went to nursing school in the city of Chicago, at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Right when I turned 18, I moved to the city from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

They don’t tell you how much you need to study when you're in nursing school. So I ended up going to the cafe a lot—for any of you Chicago stans out there, it's Wormhole Coffee in the Wicker Park neighborhood. And I just remember going there all the time, just feeling like the vibes were very cool and I felt comfortable and I started getting to know the baristas more and they were turning into my friends.

I would go there and study and they were open super early and super late. So I would be there, like, 10 hours a day hanging out with these people, getting the most outta my $5 coffee. I'm sorry, but I was that person sitting in the coffee shop for way too long, but I talked to these people and know these people, I feel like that's okay.

They kind of showed me this really fun and great world of coffee. That was, yeah, a little bespoke, but definitely very accessible and professional. We got a lot of different kinds of people going in there and I just an overall great coffee experience while studying for nursing school in Chicago.

Ashley: I love a career changer just because I am also a career changer. And that's something that I've talked a lot about on the show. There's this interview with Nigel Price—if you folks are listening and haven't listened to that episode, please go back and listen to it.

He also talks about having this completely different career path for himself, and then having this moment where it's like, “Oh, this is actually not what I want at all. I want this completely other different thing.” And it seems like that's an experience that you had as well. So I was wondering if you could talk about the moment that things kind of switched for you?

Marie: When I went to nursing school, I felt like it was a very pragmatic thing to do. It's not like my parents shoved it down my throat or anything. I really just wanted a career where I get to talk to people, I had flexibility, and that I could make a decent amount of money and live comfortably.

When I was studying for my nursing boards exam, I worked in restaurants and that was just a way to sort of get by. I worked as a host in a restaurant called Hub 51. And again, for all the Chicago fans out there, it's pretty much a bro bar in the River North neighborhood. So it wasn't necessarily the clientele I would normally interact with, but I really loved the job.

I love just talking to people. I love, even for that brief moment, having an experience with a person and especially being a host at a restaurant, being the first person that you meet and that first person being really nice and just like there to help you. I felt like it was a powerful thing, and something I see in a lot of parallels in nursing.

When I started working as a nurse, it wasn't as pretty and shiny as I thought it was gonna be—it ended up being very okay. I was at Northwestern Memorial in Streeterville in Chicago, and it was a great job. I really liked it, but I felt myself thinking about working in restaurants again.

I remember working the night shift—usually where you start when you're a new grad in the hospital—and I remember just Googling Eater articles and seeing what the hot new restaurant was and Googling about places and Anthony Bourdain and different wines and things like that. And I just kept sort of daydreaming at night about these sort of things.

Eventually I worked at Northwestern for two years and I said, “You know, this is something I haven’t stopped thinking about, and I owe it to myself just to see what this is like. So let's pursue restaurants in whatever capacity that may be and let's just go for it.” So I started working in a Michelin-starred restaurant called Elske in the West Loop, and that's sort of where my restaurant and wine career began.

Ashley: When you said Elske—I also lived in Chicago; a lot of people who listened to the show might know that—you say Elske I'm like, “Oh, that's some real-deal s**t there.”

How did you end up at Elske? Or did you work at other restaurants in between? How'd you end up there and how did you start developing your wine career?

Marie: Yeah, I had worked at some restaurants in between. In full transparency, you have to pass this nursing boards exam and I notoriously suck at taking exams. So it took me four times in a year and a half to pass. So I kind of was twiddling my thumbs after I finished nursing school but before I finished my boards exam, so I ended up working a few different restaurant jobs.

When I got to Elske, it's like, yes, I had restaurant experience, but then I also had this nursing experience. Then the man I interviewed with, Kyle Davidson, who is a gem and really someone who I consider a mentor and someone who really let me be in that space and be myself and try things, he was just very open about what he needed and I was very open about what I needed.

I could be honest with him of being like, “Hey, I don't mind starting as a server here, but I really wanna learn about wine.”

I had sort of decided on wine because I guess it's this pragmatic part of my brain again, the same thing that kind of led me to being a nurse was like—I really liked being a server. I really didn't see anything wrong with being a server. I really enjoyed it, but I felt like that I needed something else. I needed another edge to give myself more value and make myself more hirable.

And I didn't grow up with wine. I grew up in Milwaukee, definitely blue-collar beer town, but wine seemed like the easiest way to sort of beef up my resume. When I started learning more about it, I ended up just really enjoying it.

It's almost like being a bartender where you're kind of mixing with the back-of-house and the chef’s side and the front-of-house, which is the people side, right? So this was sort of my way of doing that. And I was just lucky that I had Kyle who let me taste things all the time and let me attend tastings. But I also was very vocal about, again, what I wanted, which I also feel like made his job easier to be like, “Okay, here's Marie, this is who she is, awesome. This is where she wants to go. Let me take her there.” So I think it was just a very good symbiotic relationship.

Ashley: Yeah, it seems very serendipitous. It seems like a lot of things lined up together, which is awesome because that obviously led you kind of down the pathway that you're on now, but at the same time, I love that you were able to say, “I know what I want—or at least I have an idea of what I want—and I'm gonna say these things out loud to you.”

Luckily you said them to a person who is safe and you could say those things too. I can see that kind of like going in a different direction for some other people. But I do wanna really highlight the idea that, like you said, of saying the things out loud. I'm a big believer in saying the need out loud, because you kind of never know who can respond to it.

Marie: 100%. There have been times in my life where I've said what I needed and yes, I get a negative response from it. It’s even sort of shocking when you tell people what you wanna do, and they say like, “How dare you,” or, “How stupid,” which is absurd.

But at the end of the day, I need to just follow my heart and trust my gut. I know that's cheesy, but it's just true. And it’s part luck too, right? It's like, yes, I knew what I wanted. It’s not that I always knew what I wanted, but I had an idea and I just needed to roll with it and just see where that took me as opposed to being unsure about something.

So I agree. It's a couple of factors there where I did get lucky, but I also knew.

Ashley: Did you have any transformative wine moments early in your career? That kind of affirmed, “This is what I wanna do,” or, “This is the path that I'm at meant to be on for right now”?

Marie: I can't say there's a singular moment. People call that the “aha moment” for wine. I don't know if there's like a similar thing with coffee.

Ashley: There's an aha moment. There's—I don't love this as as a term, but there's the God-shot moment where you have a shot of espresso that's so good that you're like, “How did it get so good?” Then you kind of like fall down whatever rabbit holes you need to fall down. But God-shot is a pretty common term.

Marie: Hilarious. Okay. So it's not called a God-shot, but it's called an aha moment, which it gives me a similar feeling of—I almost cringe where you're like, okay, is something like that really gonna change my life?

But it was the joy of the combination of what I was doing—where I was really proud to work where I was working, I felt like I had a goal and it was an achievable goal, but a challenging goal. And I loved that. I loved that I got to educate people and meet people and then shift my career from talking about diabetes and heart failure to talking about food and wine and culture, which just felt so right when I was working there.

And it was a really special time for me.

People need to experience joy as much as they need someone to be there during a hard time. I feel like they're an equal amount of power even though people don't always see it that way. After working both, I get enjoyment out of doing both. But I get more enjoyment out of working and wine and sharing that experience with people.

Ashley: I had a very similar experience when I was a teacher. I think I got into teaching with this altruistic idea in my mind that I was making a difference. And perhaps I was a little more myopic about that when I was in it, because I don't think that I had like the emotional wherewithal to actually say, “What do my students need from me?”

It was very much like, “I'm 22 years old and I'm gonna change these kids' lives.” I wasn’t like, “Oh, I need to respond to the situation and actually do some assessment about what's happening around me,” and that's one of the reasons that I left teaching, because I just didn't think I had the emotional wherewithal to do that kind of work at that time, at that age, because I was 22.

But I think you're echoing a lot of those similarities that I started to see as my career in coffee evolved and shifted—is that the way that we impart meaning into people's lives happens all the time. There's no more important job than another, and it happens in different ways.

So I love that you mentioned that—I just wanted to highlight it.

Marie: Oh yeah. I mean, real recognizes real. I feel like nurses and teachers are like, we are in this together. That's some real in-the-trenches kind of work. So I feel that.

Ashley: I often reflect on the lessons I learned as a teacher. I probably think about the things I learned as a teacher every single day, which is surprising for the fact that I only did it for a year and that was 12 years ago.

I was wondering: Are there lessons in nursing that you take with you to the restaurant or to a virtual class, or just even like your everyday work, the content creation that you're making on Instagram and TikTok and all the other apps—every app!

Marie: All of them!

You know, it really tells me that life isn't fair, for better or for worse, however you want to view that.

It's just like, what are we supposed to do? How do you possibly navigate that when you know that life is dramatically unfair? And I view that from now a business perspective in the most interesting way where it's like—I do post a lot of content. I do create a lot of things. I do think I work hard, but sometimes people work hard and they don't get the results they want.

Is that fair? No. There are people on TikTok for half the time that I am and they see more success than I do. Is that fair? No, but it just is, right? So it shouldn't stop you, you shouldn't look at other people's cup—it's sort of one of those idioms where you just need to set these goals for yourself and then not look at other people all the time. It's okay to do it sometimes, but it really just teaches me that none of this is really fair, but you should just do exactly what you wanna do and if it helps people, awesome. If it doesn't, that's also okay.

It's a little bit nihilist, I suppose, but I find it very freeing in a way.

Ashley: I do too. I think you're not wrong. And I agree—I think that you're right, in a way, like the nihilism is a little bit freeing.

The idea that like, you can really only focus on you. I certainly feel that too, as somebody who makes stuff and puts it out there and hopes, fingers crossed, that it'll land with somebody. And if it lands with one or two people, that's fine. It did its job.

Marie: Right. Or even just being like, “I'm gonna put this out because I think it's good. I put out this great video. I thought it was awesome. Only seven people liked it. Okay. Who cares?” I'm just gonna do the exact same thing tomorrow. It doesn't matter.

Ashley: What inspired you to start Slik Wines?

Marie: I was working this great restaurant job and then of course, COVID totally ruined it. I found myself jobless—only briefly because I have this nursing plan as a backup, which is a pretty supreme backup plan.

I worked as a COVID nurse for a little bit, and during that time I was like, “I can't be a nurse again forever. I don't want this future for myself, so I need to do wine in a way that feels right, and it feels like that I can interact with people, but it needs to be not associated with restaurants. It needs to be in a different capacity.”

So I started Slik as fun and approachable wine education and mostly virtual events, because that was the thing that made the most sense in August of 2020. Then it sort of drifted from virtual to in-person. Once things started clearing up a little bit. Now, most recently it's been turning into content creation and marketing, which I totally did not expect to happen, but has sort of just worked out that way.

Ashley: Let's talk about the education part of it, because I think that that's probably the most lvisible—you go to your TikTok or your Instagram, or you look at Reels, and it's a lot of you talking about like how to taste a wine, how to pick a wine, how to pair it with this, how to do that…

What were some of the goals that you set for yourself when you were thinking about the educational aspect of this?

Because, like coffee, wine is hard. It's hard to understand. [Laughs]

Marie: 100%, totally.

I think it was maybe much like coffee, fighting against this pretension that's always been there. I think of the hipster barista memes, there's just like stereotypes that exist both in coffee and in wine, and very much like the sommelier stereotype—it's even a hard word to say for people.

It's like all these French words and it's very easy for it to feel not relatable, because it feels like there are so many barriers up. I have been lucky with my career that I have been accepted with open arms and even Kyle Davidson over at Elske, he was a bartender. He worked at The Violet Hour, which is a great cocktail bar in the city, and so he approached this with this cocktail sort of mindset.

I always had this alternative path, which I think is fabulous and I think was what made wine so approachable for me and so easy to get into for me. If I can do that for other people, I feel like that'd be a very powerful thing. And wine is a place where people need to be educated to explore new avenues with it.

Like you don’t need to be educated to drink it. You can, of course, just buy a bottle of wine and drink it. And of course, people do that all the time and I'm totally there for that, but there's a whole other world and there's a whole other level of enjoyment and, I think similar in coffee, a level of like hobbyism to it as well, where people either want to just explore something new or they wanna be proficient or they wanna impress their date or their boss or whatever.

If I can make that as easy as possible for people, I love doing that within Slik. I think about situations that I always thought about when I was first learning and I try not to lose that perspective—things that I think to my colleagues seem really basic and really 101 are the things that people need to hear and need to hear over and over again. It's worth saying more than once.

Ashley: What do you think some of those things are?

Marie: Just even how to pick a bottle of wine off the shelf.

I really like to push labels for people because it's usually the first thing people see and usually what people make their buying decisions off of, right? Whether it's a cute label or it gives you information—and of course, a cute label is cute, but doesn't really tell you anything about the wine, unless when you look on the back label and you see the importer and you go, “okay.” But you have to know what an importer is.

So then there's another video, right? And it's like, what kind of importers? If I like natural wine, what kind of importers would I like? If I'm going to my in-laws’ house, what am I picking? I think a lot about situations for people where I felt like it was very intimidating. So whether it's a restaurant, whether it's in a wine shop, or gift giving—I find that's very popular too, where people are like, “I need to give something to my boss” or whatever—I try to just re-remember what it felt like to know nothing and help my past self with that.

Ashley: I love that. I love that you mentioned that we need to remember those moments of being a learner ourselves or that we're all still learners. We're all constantly learning, but going back to those moments where it's like, “Oh, I didn't know anything about this. What questions would I have had at that moment? What questions did I find frustrating that I didn't know the answers to? What questions did I find it really hard to find information on?”

I even had one of those questions come up recently. I was looking up information about what to do with really old coffee. Let's say you find—we've all been there—you find a bag of coffee that you're like, “Oh, I forgot I had this. This is eight months old. How do I brew this?”

And I found so many conflicting narratives online and I was like, “How do we not know this?” And I think that there's this idea of knowledge that's assumed that you just kind of pick up or it's passed through experience or passed through, I dunno, sommelier to sommelier, barista to barista, but we don't really codify it.

Not to say that there's an end-all-be-all way to do things, but we often don't think about how the information that we're seeking out is going to be information that others are seeking out too. So that's what I love about accounts like yours.

It's almost like record-keeping in a way, like putting things down and having a record so that people can say, “I have a question about this. Oh, there's an answer somewhere.” And maybe this isn't, again, the end-all-be-all. Maybe this opens up more questions, but at least somebody is addressing this question that I have in my head.

Marie: I think you made a good point about it being a catalog, because yeah, I even go back to look at the content I've made because I am human and I forget these things all the time. What did I post a month ago—because I try to post every day. So it's just a lot of stuff that's coming out.

People don't always know what they wanna learn, either. You can tell me if this is something that happens in coffee too, but like, I will ask my audience, “What do you want to learn?” And that's kind of the worst question to ask people sometimes, because people freeze. People are like, “Oh, well, uh, I don't know, whatever you want.”

So it's like, I'm creating a lesson plan and teaching it at the same time.

Ashley: You're really hitting all the notes for me.

Marie: Yeah, it's hard. I mean, it took some getting used to, and usually these things just come to mind. I still do events and I find that those are the most helpful for—like the Q&A at the end, the common questions that people ask.

Like, “I don't have a wine fridge. How do I store my wine?” Things like that, doing these classes again and meeting these people again and having this time at the end of each class to just hang out with them after I teach about whatever they wanted to learn about. Then that's when all the real questions come out, when people have been drinking a little bit, people are a little more comfortable with you and they go, “Oh yeah, by the way, what's your favorite glassware?”

I kind of get the same 20 questions, so I'll definitely make content based on that.

Ashley: There's something to be said about being in front of people and having at least a little bit of time to get familiar with your surroundings, get comfortable with the person leading the conversation. I imagine conversations look very different at minute one to minute 60, if you're doing an hour-long presentation.

I used to lead, we call them cuppings. So we'll do tastings of just different cups of coffee. And I used to lead one every single Friday and I think the most powerful thing for me to witness other people do is just taste different coffees side by side, which we don't do a lot of.

It’s kind of the same thing in wine too—it's not like you're ordering three glasses of wine to have next to each other. The only time you're really tasting comparatively is in this kind of setting. I wonder if that's been powerful for you as well?

Marie: 100%, and I love that's the connection that you've made with that too, because I see that all the time and consumers also recognize that.

I've taught classes where we've tasted three Sauvignon Blancs, three of the same grapes right next to each other, being like, “What is this one? What is this one? What is this one?”

People are interesting in that they think they know what they want, but they probably don't. And I'm exactly the same way, right? This is a very human attribute, where you think you like a Chardonnay, or you think you don't like a Chardonnay—more likely—and then you try one, you don't know what this is, but we just pour it in a glass and we assess it together.

It's a really powerful thing. I think people find that, like you said, to be a very powerful thing. I think it's a lot of fun.

Ashley: I worked in a wine store for like, 20 minutes, if that. I only worked there like on shifts where they called me in and they were like, “We need someone to help us put bottles on shelves,” and I was like, “Cool, great. I'm very grateful for this opportunity.”

Marie: You were like, “I can do that.”

Ashley: One of the games that we would play at the wine store when it was kind of slow is that I would pick a bottle of wine for one of the owners, and I wouldn't tell him what the bottle was. He had to ask questions to try to figure out what the bottle is, and he got it right every single time, but it took hours—hours!

And it was great though. We'd be at kind of like our regular work day, we'd pour it. He'd look at the color and kind of make an assessment. He's like, “I think it's from this region of the world,” and then he'd stop. Then he'd come back to it and he'd be like, “Okay, I think it's from this region of the world. And I also think it's from this country specifically,” and then stop and then keep tasting the wine as the day went on.

It was really interesting for me to witness him ask questions and be like, “This is how you are making assessments.” I think just like the process of—it sounds intimidating to say—testing ourselves, but it is! It’s like doing an experiment, changing a variable…

I will die on this hill: Coffee is like the coolest science experiment I think you can do because you can change a variable and with that, have a totally new set of things to try. But wine seems to invite that too. Maybe not in the same way where you can brew a cup of coffee and then brew another one a little bit differently right next to you, but the idea that it’s one big experiment that you can just play with and see where different variables kind of lead you…

Marie: Have you ever thought about getting into wine? Like as a barista?

Ashley: I think that I'm just—okay, so this is my PSA right now. I'm gonna say it for everybody.

I think baristas are the best tasters that exist.

Marie: Ooh, those are fighting words!

Ashley: I know, I know I'm inciting something. But I think—okay, so if you go to a new city, for example, I would not ask a restaurant person where to go eat. I would ask a barista. Just because baristas—yeah, I'm going there.

Number one: We spend so much time tasting and manipulating variables to taste. So if I get to the cafe in the morning, I'm tasting espresso. I'm making changes. I'm constantly tasting over and over and over. And I have absolute control over what's actually happening in front of me—not absolute control. I don't control the beans or whatever. I'm getting a roasted product delivered to me.

But two: I think baristas are also seeking out those experiences at other places. I lived in Oakland, California for a while and I worked at a coffee shop in my neighborhood. And there's this wine store that's like very well-known, it's called Ordinaire, and you've probably heard of it. The only people I would see there are baristas. I would see all my barista friends there.

I wouldn't see them at other coffee shops. I would see them at Ordinaire. I would see them at breweries that had really great and interesting beers—not IPAs, mostly Lagers, just also putting that out there, more fighting words.

But I think that baristas often get underestimated by how powerful their palates are.

Marie: I wanna test this. How do we test this?

Ashley: I don't know. I don't know. What's neutral ground between a sommelier and—our equivalent would be maybe a Q grader, but even that's much more specific to green coffee quality, but those are pretty powerful tasters, too.

Marie: I mean, could we even do a whole different medium, like, can we do like cocktails or something?

Ashley: Maybe?

Marie: Or like—or like a liquor or something, but sometimes the alcohol can be like too much…

Ashley: Yeah, that might be. That could be, huh? Anyway, if someone's listening to this and they have a challenge that they could set up for coffee people versus wine folks, please.

Marie: I would love that.

Ashley: Send it my way.

Marie: Maybe I could do a coffee and you could do a wine?

Ashley: That might be the challenge, but I do think that baristas are actually, secretly some of the best tasters that get underutilized.

That's kind of a hurdle that a lot of baristas face, I think. A lot of baristas have this romanticized idea of being bartenders—or at least that was a very hot thing in like 2014, and maybe I'm thinking of a very particular time in my barista life, but I would see a lot of my friends not even get considered for these jobs because people didn't really understand how taxing it is to be a barista.

Marie: I think about some restaurants have dedicated baristas, especially the upper echelon of the Michelin world, because I think they understand that. But I think much like, especially right now, in many restaurants, everything is just being consolidated. The DM is now the wine director, it's just like people are wearing so many hats just for the sake of survival.

I don't think an in-house barista for restaurants will probably be relegated—I mean, I was making coffee drinks, being the server and the wine director, and I'm also pulling espresso shots and making hearts and cups of coffee and people love that. People never get sick of that.

Ashley: People never get sick of hearts. Everyone just make hearts.

Marie: Don't make anything else.

Ashley: That's another hill I'll die on. But no, you're right. There's this idea of like servers having to do everything, or like your server is the one that's supposed to have this extensive wine knowledge too, which can be really taxing and overwhelming, I have to imagine.

Marie: I mean, yes. You bring up a really great point where you're like, yes, you’re more equivalent to a bartender or a chef than you are a server because you can dial in all these things. [But as a server] I have to be a treasure trove of knowledge and sometimes you get people coming in who will just know more than you, especially for some regions like Burgundy.

I can't afford to drink Burgundy all the time. I'm a wine director for a Michelin-starred restaurant, and I don't even drink Burgundy all the time. Some people are just gonna know more cause they have the resources and the particular time to spend on that. So I'm not always gonna know everything: much like healthcare, much like [anything], there's there's specialties, right?

There's fabulous Italian restaurants in Chicago. And if I signed up in an Italian restaurant to be a sommelier there, I would need a big learning curve. It's not necessarily my strong point. So I think it totally just depends on where you work too. You're not always gonna know everything and that's okay too.

And this is not a time where you fake it ‘til you make it, because people can smell that a mile away and you just end up losing trust in people.

Ashley: Something that you mentioned in some of the Reels and the videos that you make is climate change, and how that's affecting different wine regions. And that's something that we talk a lot about in coffee too. Climate change is absolutely changing where you can grow coffee and how that coffee's being grown in particular regions.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about like what climate change is doing to wine-growing regions.

Marie: Oh, can I.

Ashley: Did I open a can of worms? Perhaps I did, but maybe we can give people just a little bit of a taste because something that does happen—just to give you another kind of wine/coffee comparison that a lot of coffee people make—is that we do talk about elevation and temperature changes in coffee growing.

So we talk a lot about—so, coffee grows between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. It wants to grow in hot, humid places, but it wants to grow at high elevation so that it can experience that shift in temperature. It almost stresses the beans out. I think that that's something we borrowed pretty much directly from wine as a way to talk about this.

Marie: Just saying that there's certainly parallels.

Yes, we can briefly touch on this. I won't dive in too deep, but I'm just gonna take a point for my most recent experience. I did a couple weeks of wine harvest in Napa, California. And I've never been—I kind of felt like a poser talking about Napa, but never actually being there.

So I felt like this was a good time to not only see Napa, but to try making wine in the cellar, which, spoiler alert: is really hard. You're pretty much a farmer. You work consecutive 12-13-hour shifts. I was just like shocked. I underestimated how much work it was gonna be. And of course me I'm like, “Well, I was a nurse, well, I worked in restaurants. I can handle this,” but I just … these people work weeks at a time, months at a time, without a day off. Because the grapes don't take a day off.

But in California, [climate change] is a big problem. And there's two major factors happening with wine growing around there, which is water conservation and wildfires.

I was asking people, “What are you gonna do?” California is on fire every other year. 2020 was a horrendous fire year and it affects the wine.

And people do clever things where if they're growing red grapes, you can make rose to reduce the amount of smoke taint in the wine. But you're kind of just putting a Bandaid on a gash, right? It's not actually helping. So I’d ask people and every single person I talk to, they’d go, “Yeah, it's fucked up.”

And I was like, okay—there's no real solution. There's things like water conservation where people recycle water within wineries. I was also shocked to find out how much water it takes to make a bottle of wine. I'm sure coffee is a very similar thing, but, at the end of the day, it seems like you're just not gonna be able to make wine in California anymore.

It's just too inclement. There's too many droughts. There's too many fires. There's not enough water. So we're just gonna have to move or make crops that are more resistant to heat, which some people are doing. But in places like California, where it's getting exponentially worse every year, it seems like there's not really gonna be enough time for it.

Ashley: Is there anything that you want people to know about you listening to this, or to think about when they're purchasing their next bottle of wine?

Marie: I'm just gonna take this opportunity to bump my stuff. My name is Marie Cheslik. I am the founder of Slik Wines. So if you are interested in fun, approachable wine education in tiny digestible video format, give us a follow on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and even on Twitter, I'm on all of it, just seeing what's up, so I'd love to meet you, interact with you.

When you are out buying a bottle of wine, I would say the most important thing would be buying from small wineries, buying from people who don't make a ton of wine, spending a little bit more on a bottle of wine—probably much like coffee—really goes a long way.

I mean, on average as a wine professional who doesn't drink fancy Burgundy every day, I probably spend on average $25-35 on a bottle of wine. So just that little bit can really go a long way for farmers, but I know people don't have the resources for it, and there's a lot of good reasons for that.

But if you have the resources and you like buying organic produce or things from farmer’s markets, or nice coffees, then buying nice wine is another way to expand that way of being sort of environmentally conscious and labor conscious, which I feel is very important. And I think you do too, Ashley.

Ashley: I went to an event, it was a coffee event, and we brought in Martha Stoumen to talk about wine and she's this amazing wine producer. And one of the things that she was telling us was that for her to be profitable, the cheapest she can sell her wine is $27-28, which I thought was super interesting.

As you were saying, that $25-35 range feels like, even when you said it, I was like, “Ugh!”

Marie: I know!

Ashley: But then I was like, “Wait a minute. I feel the same way for coffee,” and I can make a whole argument for coffee that you get more cups of coffee, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

But regardless, the thinking is still the same: that the prices don't come from us trying to market this as a luxury item. The prices come from, this is the bare minimum. We can sell this for—this is a steal, actually. And it's hard to convey that.

Marie: It is. Because food is underpriced right now

.

Ashley: Just in general, just always.

Marie: 100%. The people you hear from the most are restaurant owners saying food costs are growing up, but we go to the grocery store and we think now that $6 is too much for a dozen eggs, but it's like—maybe it should have been $6 10 years ago, right?

For it to be livable for farmers or livable for somebody. That's a whole different conversation about like subsidies and who deserves good food and why. Governments will either do the thing that will benefit the economy the most, like subsidizing corn, or benefits the culture the most, which they do in the EU.

There you'll see more bespoke cheese dairy products, or whatever their country is proud of. But here in, the U S of A, we love corn, we love soy.

And people need to have cheap options! That needs to be a possibility for people. But if you have the resources to spend a little more money, I encourage it. I would like you to consider it, at least.

Ashley: Thank you for taking time to chat with me. I appreciate it.

Marie: Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

In this episode from November of 2019, we ask, "What if the minimum wage actually reflected the minimum you need to live?"