BOSS BARISTA

A few weeks ago, I asked my friends on Twitter to suggest folks I could interview about coffee and milk. I wanted to learn more about why we put milk in our coffee instead of, let’s say, orange juice, or whipped cream, or any other ingredient used to temper its bitterness.

I’m still looking for that particular answer—but along the way, I was introduced to Dr. Lori Flores, an associate professor of history at Stony Brook University. Lori studies the migration and labor history of Latinx communities in the United States. She also wrote a book called “Grounds For Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement,” which explores the labor history of Mexican Americans and immigrants in the Salinas Valley in California.

In this episode, we talk about how “unskilled” labor is categorized, whose labor is purposefully obscured from public view, and how those in power often use collective action for their own benefit while attempting to quash it among those with less power and access to resources.

We talk a lot about the Bracero Program, a government-supported initiative to bring Mexican workers over to the United States throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s to fill jobs in the agricultural sector, as well as other industries. Many of the workers brought to the United States through this program were vilified—you can probably envision critiques along the lines of “they’re taking our jobs,” or other ugly forms of discrimination. At the same time, workers who were part of the Bracero Program were barred from joining unions or having much power over their working lives due to powerful coalitions and the consolidation of power by agribusiness.

We’re talking about this now because so many of the historical lessons Lori details apply now, as more and more people are engaging in collective action. But there are still a few lessons that haven’t fully landed. Like the misconception that if folks unionize, if their wages go up, consumers will have to foot the bill. Or the belief among some that if a “low-wage” jobs pays $15 an hour, it devalues their own work.

In this episode, we discuss the existence of these false dichotomies, and how taking a moment to recognize that everything you consume—everything you eat, drink, and enjoy—was made by someone else could help us place more importance on fair wages for all. Just a quick note: My recording device died right towards the end of this episode, but I had a backup audio recording—I don’t think it’s too obvious, but you might notice it towards the very end of the episode. Here’s Lori.

Ashley: Professor Flores, I was wondering if we could start by having you introduce yourself.

Lori: Sure. I'm Lori Flores. I'm associate professor of history at Stony Brook University, part of the SUNY system here in New York. And I specialize in 20th-century U.S. history with a focus on Latinx labor, food, and immigration history.

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

Lori: I definitely remember the Folgers can always present in our home. I grew up in a little town in South Texas in a Mexican-American family. Both my mom and my dad were Folgers drinkers. And so that was a daily presence in our household in the mornings, for sure.

And then I remember them having coffee with their friends was always something that my parents enjoyed as a way to decompress from their days. So I remember my dad going and having coffee with his buddies at a Whataburger in Texas and my mom having coffee with her sisters at one of their houses.

Whenever I was lucky enough to get to tag along, I just associate coffee and all the mugs and all my tias at one of their houses, just laughing and gossiping. And even though I wasn't drinking it myself, it just always seemed like something that someone needed in their day. Not only to get it started, but also to end it.

Ashley: That's interesting that you mentioned it was part of ending the day too, because for me, I grew up in a Cuban-American household. I grew up associating coffee with nighttime because my grandmother would make it after every meal.

Lori: Hmm. Yeah. To me, it always seemed funny because I thought, “Well, if it's something that wires you during the day, why are you doing it at night?”

But I think it fueled the conversations because they could go on for hours. So, to my parents, it was no big deal to re-caffeinate at the end of the day. It was very ritualistic for them.

Ashley: Exactly. Same with my family. How did you get—I know this is a big question, but how did you get into academia? What fueled your interest in studying the migration and labor organization [history] of Latinx people?

Lori: I love talking about my path to academia because I could have had a very different life than being a professor.

Like I said, I grew up in a small town in South Texas. It was pretty common for children to stay near their parents and to stay nearby, especially if you were a Mexican-American kid.

I went to a high school in which the counselors basically encouraged us to shoot for a school in state. Or, in my case, when I went to go speak to my high school counselor about my desire to apply to schools out of state, she sort of told me, “I think you should either enlist in the military or apply to the community college down the street.”

“You're a girl. Your parents probably want you to stay close by. You're from a working-class family. It just doesn't seem in the cards for you to shoot further than that.”

But I had a history teacher who taught me from eighth grade to senior year and he really encouraged me to apply to places that were just in my imagination or schools that I had just seen on TV or something.

So I ended up applying to Yale, and got in. And once I saw that big letter in the mail, I knew that I had to take the opportunity. It just wasn't going to come around again. And my parents were not happy about this decision. They, especially my father, he just did not envision his first daughter going away from home, and it took a long time for him to come around.

But in the meantime, I had made the decision to go. And at Yale, it was during my sophomore year that I took a Mexican-American history course, and I just fell in love with the topic. It was the first time that I had ever realized that my background, the background of my parents, the background of my community in Texas, it could be something that you could study that you could read about, that you could write about, that you could teach about. And I was just hooked.

I knew that I wanted to keep on studying in that field and asked that professor of that course to be my advisor, and he encouraged me to go to graduate school. So if I hadn't made that decision that was something that would separate me from my family, both physically and emotionally in some ways, I think I would've gone into maybe teaching, but at a different level or a different group of students.

But I think my decision to pursue an education somewhere far away actually led me back to who I was. Anytime that I can do that for students who don't know much about their own background, but then that lightbulb goes off for them in the classroom, those are the moments where I just love my job because somebody did that for me back then, and I love being able to do that for people.

Ashley: I love that you were able to identify that pivotal moment, and it still seems really clear and salient to you because I feel like on the podcast, I've discussed those moments of when something feels … almost like your life is starting, in a way, if you know what I mean? Like this is the beginning of the first day of everything.

Lori: Right.

Ashley: And we get a lot of those in life, I think—hell, not a lot of those, but we get more than one. I don't wanna say that there's just one moment that that happens, but it's also critical to think about how pivotal just really great advice can be or somebody encouraging you and saying, “You can do this,” in the face of everybody telling you maybe that's not a good decision or maybe that's something you can't do.

Lori: Yeah, it just takes those little micro moments of somebody validating something about you. “You're a good writer,” or, “I like how you said that,” or, “You should really think about the East Coast, think about somewhere different,” or, “Think about envisioning yourself living a life that maybe other people are not prescribing for you. Maybe you can craft something else.”

I think those little moments are so important whether we recognize them or not right then and there. Looking back it's easy to see where you could have taken a very different turn. Not making your life better or worse, but just making it different. So, yeah, it still sticks out to me as one of the moments of bravery I had in my life.

And one of the best decisions I made, both for the people I ended up meeting and then for what I ended up doing with my career.

Ashley: Yeah, it's been really great researching all of the work that you've done and the things that you've been studying.

So let's go back a little bit to talk about your field of research. So you mentioned that you research migration, you research Latinx communities and how this all relates in terms of labor and movement.

So, the way that we got connected is that I am working on this podcast project about different coffee mysteries and trying to answer kind of big questions in coffee.

And one of the questions I was trying to answer is, why do we put milk in coffee? I got connected to you because you study the migration movements and labor of migrant workers working on dairy farms in Wisconsin.

I was wondering if you could set the scene a little bit for like some of the research that you're doing, and then we can maybe dive a little bit deeper into that.

Lori: Sure. What I'm really fascinated by in my research is, when it comes to Latinx history, I think there's still a lot of confusion out there about what “Latinx” means. Which people does that term include and who are we talking about?

Because I think there's still this problem here in the United States, a lot of people equate “Hispanic” or “Latino” or “Latinx” with immigrants, and we lose that profoundly deep and historical mixture of this is a contingent of people of Latin American descent or origin, but who are this mix of citizens, permanent residents, immigrants, guest workers, temporary migrants…

It encompasses a lot of different people with a lot of different citizenship and mobility statuses in this country. So when we say “Latinx,” we can mean people who have been in this country for generations and centuries. And we can mean people who just arrived a few weeks or months ago to live and to work in the United States.

But I think what holds the people together that I study and that I'm fascinated by is work that goes either undetected or is invisible in various ways. And we can see that both within the food industry and the drink industry, including coffee and milk.

So my current research is on the contributions and deep historical roots of Latinx food and drink labor, specifically in the U.S. Northeast, but kind of zooming out to the entire U.S. to sort of make people aware of—there are very intentional ways that these industries try to shield our eyes and our attention from labor conditions that are happening in barns, warehouses, farms, restaurants, these spaces in which labor can be tucked away and that working conditions and the realities of them can be tucked away from our view and from our minds to the point where we take a lot of things for granted in food and drink—milk, wine, these other things we enjoy and ingest on a regular basis.

And really diving deep into what did it take for that product to get on your table, in your cup, in your glass, for your enjoyment, for your leisure, for your routine, for your sociality? What did it cost other people to produce that enjoyment and ritual for us, for others?

I'm really fascinated by what is, intentionally or maybe unintentionally, invisible to us, and making visible those people and those voices and those histories that contain movement, whether they’re from another country in Latin America, in the Caribbean, or whether it's internal here in the U.S.—people move all the time for work and for their lives.

When it comes to Latinx people, it's been a deep history of contributing to economies that often do not thank the very people who helped build and maintain them, but actually villainize them as illegal threats to the nation. It's an incredibly unfair and unthinking sort of narrative to conceptualize Latinx as something perpetually foreign.

Actually, it's been a part of our food and drink industry for as long as we can remember.

Ashley: It seems like there's a duality that comes up a lot when we think about Latinx people and their contributions to labor.

Because as you mentioned, Latinx people often get villainized as immigrants or “they're taking our jobs,” but in “Grounds For Dreaming,” you talked about the Bracero Program, which brought Mexican folks to the United States specifically to do agricultural labor. Like they were specifically brought in by the U.S. government to do labor.

You also talk about the duality that kind of exists with food systems, where people are physically doing this labor. There are people who are picking your lettuce. There are people who are picking your vegetables, and yet on the other end of it, as consumers, we have been taught to expect that certain things must be cheap.

And through that, that's where I think it seems like labor gets erased. This idea that we are owed certain things like milk, which for so long in the United States has been taught to us to be a fundamental food group. Even though I think most people who are not of European descent are actually lactose intolerant in some way.

But we've been taught to believe that this is a fundamental food group or a thing that like, you wake up in the morning and have a glass of milk, or milk is part of the healthy breakfast. And yet, through that, we erase all of the people who contributed to that labor.

And that happens a lot in coffee too. We have been taught to believe that coffee is supposed to be cheap. That is supposed to be something that we can have every morning. And that ignores the countless hands—I think somebody said it's anywhere between 50 and 100 hands touch your coffee before you even get it.

Lori: Mmm. Yeah, totally. Just like you said, it's this kind of contradictory thinking that we hold in our minds that food or milk or other drinks need to be cheap. They need to be fast. They need to be available always—at the times that we want them for the occasions that we want them.

And like you mentioned, the Bracero Program that we had with Mexico from 1942 to 1964 was one of the longest-running guest worker programs in world history.

We participated in it initially because of World War II labor shortages. But the fact that it continued for almost a quarter of a century means that the U.S. got really used to conducting itself in such a way that it could import cheaper, non-unionized foreign labor and use it perpetually in farms and other sectors of the food industry, and get used to this pattern of paying workers a certain wage that employers could collude to and agree upon, a pretty low wage for these workers.

In turn, American consumers, on the other end, in grocery stores, in restaurants, and different venues where we are eating and drinking, we came to get used to a certain price point for these products, but that price point is only possible because the people at the beginning of the process are getting paid very inadequate salaries.

I think another duality, if we wanna add one more to the mix, is what I constantly get frustrated by is this rhetoric about this kind of work being “unskilled.”

That is something that's just infuriating to me because every single job requires thought and learning and training and some sort of skill and craft. Anything from picking apples in an orchard to making a good cup of coffee to producing the milk in the dairy products that get into our markets and restaurants every day, all of that requires skill.

For people to use this discourse of it being unskilled and thus deserving of low wages just keeps people suppressed into this position that they are never able to ask for more or that they're not entitled to ask for more.

I think the ways in which, in the U.S., food and drink has become so hurried in some ways that if you wanna be slow about your eating and drinking, that's actually running counter to a lot of the culture that we have around food and drink—the faster that we expect these to be in our hands and in front of us, on our plates, the less we are thinking about and the less thoughtful we are being about how much time and how much backbreaking labor it took to get that product to you.

Thus, we're not thinking about the types of wages. If anything, we are devaluing workers all the time because the price point has been kept so low for us for decades.

Ashley: Yeah, that's a really good point. The idea that we expect things to be in our hands so quickly—so we often just gloss over the work that it takes to get there. When we slow things down is when we can see, “Oh, these are the steps that it took for a thing to get here.”

But on the other end of that, for a thing to get to us faster requires more skill. I keep going back to coffee obviously, but I think like, “Oh, if I can make 20 drinks in 20 minutes, I am a good barista. That means that I am better at my job.” Versus like somebody who's maybe a little bit slower or still learning—but regardless, both jobs deserve dignity, both jobs deserve fair wages.

But the idea that the faster we go could actually really signifies a bigger skill, but that somehow still devalues the skill because we don't really have to look at it, we don't really have to focus on what's happening in front of us.

Another thing that I wrote down, as I was reading some of your work, is that we seem to vilify or devalue the labor that's required to do a lot of the the farmwork and fieldwork, or really any low-wage skill. But then oftentimes it seems a theme that comes up in your writing is that people seem to think that Mexican laborers are “better suited” for this type of work.

So it seems there's this contradiction in a way. We seem to acknowledge that Americans are not suited for this work or whatever—this is another kind of social conditioning, but we're willing to recognize that it's labor that a certain sect of people can do, but like we won't honor that that should be [paid] a higher wage.

If that makes sense.

Lori: Yeah. I've been nodding really hard at what you've been saying.

I mean, it's exactly it. Because the more that we participate in this kind of talk about, “Oh, these immigrants are just naturally more hardworking. They're faster. They'll do the work better. They're not complaining, right?” The reason that this work is being done harder and faster and with less complaint is because of people's different vulnerabilities.

So that could be, in this precarious economy, somebody banking on the fact that their employer might fire them or give them less hours, fewer hours or worse working conditions if they do complain. If you're an immigrant, and if you have undocumented status in this country, you're going to be more scared of not performing well in the job, being replaced by somebody else, being fired, being reported, deported.

All of these fears are playing into this “hard work” and “fast work” that's going on. It's because people are afraid. And they are well aware of their precarity in different sectors of our economy, but that hard work discourse erases people's attention to this fear that's going on behind this fast pace that doesn't get bathroom breaks, doesn't get shade breaks, water breaks, all these other things in the fields and barns and warehouses in which our food and drinks are getting produced—and the vineyards too, you know, talking about wine as well.

The more that we sort of buy into this binary of that they're doing jobs that Americans won't do, it's like—yes, in one way, that is true. They're in these positions, but they're not working in these positions because they are happily working fast and hard.

They're actually doing it from a very different emotional place.

Ashley: Yeah. One thing that your work has really touched upon, I think, as a theme in general is just how power works.

So at one point as I was reading “Grounds For Dreaming,” you mentioned the growers associations coming together to sort of make almost a buddy agreement between themselves of like, “We're all gonna kind of operate in the same way. We're not gonna try to undercut each other by paying people this or that,” which I thought was interesting.

It's a collective action worked together to quash collective action from the laborers’ perspective. The idea that those in power were able to collectively use their power and say, “This is how we're gonna do this thing. Because these other people do not have that power. They will never be able to stand up against us because they lack the power and the resources to do so.”

I think it's easy to kind of accept the status quo as is, and say like, “Well, this is working,” or like, “Okay, my milk comes to me at like, a dollar whatever a gallon. And that's fine.” But we don't really question how people without agency or voice often can't do much about that.

They can't just quit their job. That's another common trope, I think, that comes up a lot when people complain about their jobs, they're like, “Well just quit your job and go somewhere else.” It's like … how? Or where? With fear of deportation, oftentimes people are held against their will essentially in certain jobs because of lack of agency and power.

Lori: Yeah, exactly. And the reality is when it comes to fruits, vegetable, solid crops, milk, wine, all of these products in our food and drink systems, what's happening is that we are continuing to use different reincarnations of the Bracero Program. We have the H2 visa program.

We have a lot of temporary visa programs in which one of the conditions—or two of the conditions are actually one, that you don't unionize; and two, that you are bound to one employer for the duration of your contract. So when people say you can just quit and go somewhere else, they actually can't in terms of what their contract says that they can do.

So I think it's so smart to think about, like you said, the flip-side of collective action, which is what the associations of employers are doing with each other, and I think it's precisely them recognizing that that works between them. That's what provokes a lot of fear of that happening between workers too, because they know the power of collectivity. They know the power of people gathering in groups, talking about what they have in common and reaching a plan or agenda and a way forward.

And so I think that that is what is motivating a lot of resistance because they do know the power of people coming together. And when it comes to trying to separate or pit workers against each other, I mean, these kinds of tactics are still going on along lines of race, along lines of citizen versus immigrant, along lines of gender, along lines of generation and age.

There are just so many axes along which employers can make employees feel like they're very different from one another or that they should be working in opposition to one another, or regarding others as threats to their own employment. And I think it's precisely because they know what could happen if people didn't buy into those separations and actually came together.

Ashley: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Something that I wrote down is that oftentimes when we think about solving a problem like this; let's say we're talking about the price of milk and saying that laborers aren't paid enough. We kind of get this false binary of what the solution is—like, “Oh, we're gonna have to raise the price of milk and that's gonna put a strain on families,” or something like that.

I think at one point you even identified in in your book, if we raised wages 40% for farm workers, that would result in a $200 increase—I think that's in a different article, maybe that's not in the book—but it would result in something like a $200 increase per family throughout the whole year, which isn't a lot, but I wonder if that also masks who the real villain is in this situation, because in every industry, there’s money somewhere.

We talk about this a lot in coffee—that there's money in coffee, even though it seems like there never is because coffee shop workers don't make money, but farmers don't make money as well.

It's the people in the middle who are making money. And I was wondering, how can we start to think about these false binaries that we’re often taught? Like, we're often taught that to have a consumer good that's more equitable, we as consumers have to pay more, but I feel like that masks the actual “winners” in this situation, which is corporations and people at the top.

Lori: Yes. And employers in agribusiness make consumers scared of those rising prices in order to deflect from what they could be doing on their end to make working conditions healthier in various ways. And actually the statistic is not even $200. It's $21 that each household would have to pay more per year in order for wages to rise across the board.

So it's an even lower amount, but still this kind of talk of, “Well, you don't want your food prices to rise, do you? If you don't want that to happen, if you don't want to see elevated price points on your menus in your restaurants, then you have to accept that workers only are allowed conditions within these particular parameters. And that's why we're not going to be recognizing unions and everything that they want and all these demands.”

On the other end, when it comes to milk, producers are sort of squeezed by the government sort of setting the price points for milk, and this setting of price points by the government is actually creating a squeeze on milk producers from one end that then justifies the conditions and the salaries that they're giving workers on the other side.

And so the milk industry keeps on saying they are price takers. They're not price makers. And so that is one reason why dairy workers are not able to have particular benefits or have particular rights to unionize or something else because of the way that they're being dictated by the government that they have to keep prices at a certain level, and so their profit margins are very low.

But this again, even if that is a particularity of the dairy industry, it still allows different sectors of agribusiness to claim the same thing: that they are not able to control much. And so then it's the workers who have to get the short end of the stick, at the end of the equation.

That is simply—it's not sustainable. And we saw that during COVID, because COVID just broke open a lot of our assumptions and what we were taking for granted with our food and our drink, that it actually requires workers to sacrifice a lot of different elements of their health: physical, emotional, mental in order for our prices to stay the way that they are.

There's a lot that the government can be doing. We are saving money with these labor programs, agribusiness has enjoyed the greatest subsidy in the world because our government has participated in global labor programs that have brought us tons of people who are working every day and toiling away in these different spaces of food and drink—that's the reason why agribusiness has been able to make the profits that it does, but those just make workers’ own lives pale and comparison.

They are not able to enjoy the very food and drink that they help to make, these workers in dairy are not even able to walk into a cafe and order a cup of coffee with the very milk that they have helped produce, and that reality to me is so disturbing that a worker cannot even enjoy the very thing that they have worked so hard to make.

Ashley: That's a really common theme in coffee too, particularly when you look at farmers. Oftentimes because the best coffees will fetch the highest prices—those coffees are exported out. And a lot of farmers don't ever get the opportunity to enjoy their own coffees, especially because they live in remote areas.

They might not have a roasting facility anywhere near them. So how would they ever get to enjoy it? So that's a really interesting tie that I think both coffee and the dairy industry share. And I think you also identified that dairy is in a particularly unique situation because it is subsidized or regulated by the U.S. government.

How has that shaped the way we view milk in society? I know that we've talked, we've kind of taken for granted that in the United States milk is kind of seen as a fundamental food, but that's not inherent to milk itself.

That's something that we've shaped and created.

Lori: Yes. We have definitely shaped and created that in the United States, because there are so many places around the world that do not enjoy the availability of milk that we enjoy all the time, that they do not enjoy the different alternatives to milk that we have in the United States to drink and to market to others.

The prevalence of not just dairy, cow milk, but also these plant-based milk alternatives. Think about almond milk, for instance, where is that coming from? The almond groves in California—who is working those almond groves? The same farm workers who are working in different kinds of crops all around the country.

And so even if we go to non-cow milk, if we go to plant-based and alternative milks too, we are uncovering the same kinds of labor systems that are keeping workers from having the types of lives that they can only dream about. And I was actually thinking about the title of my book and how it can apply to coffee as well.

These workers have grounds for dreaming of something better.

Just like in any relationship when you are made to feel like you can't assert your needs, your wants, what you hope for, what you would like in your life—when your employer, when society makes you feel like you are unskilled, you do something that's so simple, you do something that's so quick. “Why do you need these particular types of benefits and conditions and wages?”

It's precisely because our interaction with those products is so easy for those of us at the end of the line who are going into a cafe and ordering a cup of coffee and getting milk with that or whether we're purchasing a carton of almond milk at the grocery store.

That is a very quick moment for us. And our sense of time really doesn't allow us to be able to see that there are lives behind those products and people are being constantly made to feel like they can't get included in conversations about what they want and need and dream about and desire.

Ashley: That wasn't lost on me either. When I looked at the cover of your book, I'm like, “There's a lot of coffee connections that could be made here.” But I think what's really interesting too is that I would say maybe barring like bakeries, who probably interact with a lot of dairy too, baristas interact with a lot of dairy.

I would say that I probably, if I had to, by volume, look at how much dairy I interact with versus coffee, I probably interact with more dairy because of lattes, of cappuccinos, of any steamed beverages or ice drinks that are milk-based.

As a barista, I can hand your drink to you, and I know stuff about coffee because that's what we're trained in. That's what we're trained to talk about. And I could maybe convince 10 people that you should consider where your coffee comes from.

Lori: Mmhmm.

Ashley: But I don't get that training for milk. Like, I get some training for milk to make sure that it looks pretty when I pour it, but I often don't know a lot about where my milk comes from.

So I can't do that same kind of advocacy work, or even just start a conversation with a customer on that. Like even as a barista, we're alienated from that value. You mentioning how quickly we can get these products and just not even think about where they come from—that’s really interesting because as baristas, I think that that's a problem we think about a lot when it comes to coffee, and we don't necessarily have the rhetoric or the knowledge to do that sort of work for milk, which is kind of sad.

Lori: Yeah, that's fascinating to me. Because I think when people think about milk, they either are thinking about it as this thing that's very much taken for granted and easily available. Or they might think of milk as coming from a bucolic setting, right? A pastoral setting.

While that is true, that milk is getting produced in these very beautiful spaces, it's actually very ironic to me. And I don't know—I mean, this is something that would be so interesting to talk about with baristas—is how do you balance capturing a customer's attention enough to communicate the beauty of milk and how it gets to us, but also this sense of workers being held and living their daily lives in these very bucolic landscapes and yet feeling so trapped in certain conditions of their living and their working.

So for instance, in these interviews that I've been looking at with Vermont dairy workers who are largely Mexican or from Central America, that they use the same Spanish word over and over again in their interviews, not planning to do so, but it just comes up as the same word, which is en ado—feeling trapped, being hemmed in and not feeling like they can move very much in the very landscapes that they work in, often because the houses that their employers provide them to live in are literally right across the road from the barns that they are going to nine-hour shifts twice a day.

The fact that they can't really move very much between home and work, that you are literally just crossing the road or the street back and forth and just eating and sleeping and going back to work and interacting with the bodies of cows, that is an interesting relationship in itself, right?

It’s this human/animal connection that a lot of these workers are extremely skilled at. That they're able to calm the cows down enough to be able to milk them, that they gain the animals' trust, that they develop this intimacy with these other living, breathing beings. How can we communicate the beauty of that in the small interactions we have with the customers who come in front of you and other baristas, who like the latte art and who appreciate the taste and the sensation and the ritual of coffee drinking with milk.

How can we get that message across that there is this darkness or this reality of feeling trapped within a very sort of beautiful landscape and story that we have around milk?

Ashley: I feel like the only insight I can provide is based on my own experiences, but I find that so much of the work that I've done as a barista often involves building trust with consumers, which we get a lot of opportunity to do, admittedly, because there's not a thing that you buy every day like coffee.

So if there's a consumer coming in and they're a regular coffee drinker, I'm probably seeing them anywhere between three to seven times a week. It may be even more if they come in more than once a day. So there is a really beautiful opportunity for baristas to engage with somebody and build that trust.

“Oh, you like lattes, maybe try this coffee,” or something like that, and build trust kind of in that way, and get people to start asking more questions. I think that's a lot of what we do, but I can't say from my own experience that I have ever done that with milk, just because it's not something that I was ever really trained to think about.

Lori: Yeah, I guess it's about curiosity at both ends, right? The curiosity of the craft, the craft person and then the curiosity of the customer.

So that gets me to think about, oh, maybe it'll take multiple interactions for that relationship to build so that you could, for instance, mention an article you read about what's going on in Vermont with dairy workers organizing or what's going on in the almond industry in California, that that's when you could approach or broach that topic and get people to actually think about milk in a different way.

Maybe that's the key is that the trust isn't something that can happen in one exchange that it needs to happen over the course enjoying the product and coming back for it again and again.

Ashley: So we have talked a little bit about this in passing, but you are currently working on a book about the dairy industry. When can folks get that book?

Lori: Well, the perpetual frustration of academia is it takes a long time to publish anything. Although I do want to make more of an effort to get things out in public, like shorter-form writing. So hopefully that will be happening over time. But my book is tentatively titled “Starved For Respect: The Many Hungers of Latinx Food Workers,” coming out with the University of North Carolina press.

We are shooting for 2024 for the entire book. But like I said, I think I want to be putting out more writing on dairy workers, wine workers, food workers, over time. So I would love if people just kept up with those pieces of writing until the big thing comes out.

Ashley: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. I really appreciate it. And just getting to spend this week reading your work and being immersed in the topics that you cover has been such a delight.

Lori: Thanks Ashley. I'm so glad I got to meet you and that we got to have this conversation.

Ashley: Me too.

This interview has been edited for clarity. You can find out more about Lori and her work at her website.

If you liked this interview, please become a paid subscriber. It really makes the difference between this work being sustainable and me sitting over my computer at 8 p.m. on a Sunday trying to get this to my editor as quickly as possible.

And if you can’t subscribe, please share this episode with someone!

Hey folks—I’m back in your feed this week with a bonus podcast episode. Recently, I got to spend time with Ravani Grace, one of the baristas behind the Intelligentsia Coffee Workers Union in Chicago. Ravani and the baristas at five Chicago-based Intelligentsia stores announced their intent to unionize on May 27, 2022.

The baristas will be voting now—this week—so please show your support. Share this episode, and if you’re in Chicago, go to Intelligentsia and tell the baristas that you support them. This has the potential to be one of the most pivotal unions in the specialty coffee industry, so please keep your attention on this group. Here’s Ravani.

Photo by Kevin Loesch

Ashley: I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself for listeners.

Ravani: Yeah. Hi, my name is Ravani Grace. I use she/her pronouns. I have been a barista with Intelligentsia for a while now, and am a career barista. I have been doing this since I was 20 years old—and don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

Ashley: I love that you started with “you’re a career barista” because something that comes up a lot in union rhetoric is that these are transient jobs, or these are jobs with lots of turnover.

I think it's important to highlight that folks like you—and a lot of the folks that are organizing unions within coffee shops—are people who love coffee and wanna stay with it for a time.

Ravani: Obviously I think about like switching careers because of all of that rhetoric around, like, “This is a temporary gig, this isn't something that is sustainable.” But honestly, I think about doing something else and I cringe. I like making coffee. I like talking to customers all day.

Ashley: How did you start working at Intelligentsia?

Ravani: I was bouncing around shops a lot in the summer of 2018. I went through three different coffee shops in three months, just because I kept running into really horrible working conditions. You know, the kinds of working conditions that really are like the norm in service, and I was like, “I need a new job, Intelli is hiring. This is as good as it gets in terms as coffee jobs go, I'm gonna apply,” and I managed to get it.

Then I’ve been with the company on and off since then. I've left Chicago a couple of times. Whenever I left Chicago, obviously I stopped working at Intelli, and whenever I came back to the city, I was like, “Let me get this job again.”

Ashley: So let's walk through the timeline of union organizing. Obviously, we're here because Intelligentsia announced about a month and a half ago that its five Chicago-based locations are intending to unionize. They had a press release [stating] they're organizing with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which we're gonna refer to as the IBEW throughout this conversation.

So, if you announced about, let's say a month and a half ago, how long had you folks been talking and planning or even thinking about unionizing?

Ravani: We've been thinking about unionizing since 2018. I think things got really serious in 2021, like the back end of 2021, the start of 2022. People really started doing the work of getting organized. There were always whisperings of a union for as long as I've been at Intelli, but we took the step from like talking about it, getting drinks together and saying, “Man, we should organize,” to actually being organized and getting organized—I would say like a year-ish ago.

It's definitely been a long process. I think like the thing that really changed the game for us was getting in touch with the IBEW and having people who really know how to organize workers, who know how to do all of the legal work, who can teach you how to have the kinds of conversations that are necessary to create real worker solidarity, which is like the foundation of any union, right?

Ashley: I think what's really crucial in the answer that you just gave is that talking to the IBEW was almost like a switch for you folks. And it wasn't necessarily that you folks needed to do anything special, or that getting in touch with the IBEW was jumping through any hoops or anything like that.

It seems like it was simply reaching out to an organization that's a really well-established union and saying, “Hey, we're interested in this. Can you help us?”

And them saying yes.

Ravani: It really was that simple. It was Jordan who sent a couple of emails. They started organizing meetings. And then we did the work of having the conversations on the shop floor, of visiting the shops, being like, “Hey, do you wanna come to this Monday meeting the IBEW is hosting?”

They organized a couple of really big in-person meetings for us at various union halls, and those were really successful events that helped get my fellow workers on board with the idea of a union and really demystified the process for [them].

Ashley: Right. Yeah—“demystifies” is a really good word there, because I have to imagine for a lot of people who see you folks organizing, or see other coffee shops organizing, some of the hesitation to maybe take that step for themselves is that they don't know what the next step is. But I love that you were able to draw like a direct line between “we reached out to the IBEW” and “they started helping us.”

Ravani: Yeah. It really is that simple. I think doing a fair amount of research on like, what are the local unions that are really active in your area, right? The unions that like, align with your values, because not every union is made equal. We're really lucky to have had the IBEW here in Chicago.

They are really in line with, I think, Intelligentsia—like the Intelli workers’ values. And they're a really proactive union that are willing to give us a lot of support.

Ashley: What was it about the IBEW—just to extrapolate a little bit on that answer—that made you folks decide, “Yes, these are the people that we wanna work with.” What were some of those shared values?

Ravani: One of the really big ones was a history of anti-capitalism, right? As workers at Intelligentsia, we're organizing for ourselves, we're organizing to get a better paycheck, we're organizing to get more vacation days, to get better healthcare for all of the basic things for ourselves, but also we're organizing because food service needs to be organized in a broader sense.

And I think the IBEW really connected our struggle to a broader struggle. What really drew us to them was their work in the Colectivo unionization campaign. We really liked what we saw them do with Colectivo and reached out to them largely because of that.

Ashley: Was it ever a decision in your mind to not organize as all five stores together? Or was it always like, “We're all organizing together. We're all in this together.”

Ravani: I think certain models of unionization really are shop by shop.

Ashley: Right, right.

Ravani: That's what we've seen from Starbucks. And I think there was a point at which we were like, “Well, this is how it's done. This is what we should do.”

But we realized that it wasn't gonna work for us in our particular situation. We needed everyone or it was gonna fall apart, because our shops are really small. It's like, four or five workers per shop, and you don't really have that solidarity, that strength in numbers when you're organizing four or five workers at a time. Because we're a smaller outfit, it was easier to get everyone from every store involved.

Ashley: Those meetings that the IBEW held—what were those like? What did you folks learn in those meetings?

Ravani: They were just like little Zoom meetings. Frequently they'd be really small because a lot of us were working during them, or like half of the staff would be working during them, or we'd just be getting off work and we'd be tired.

They were really intimate meetings in which we just sort of talked strategy for the most part, or people would come and they would have questions about the union. Like, “What is the bargaining process gonna look like? What is the next step? What is our timeline?”

And the IBEW was able to give that information and say, “This is what we're looking at. This is what to look out for from management. This is what the bargaining process might turn out to be.”

Ashley: So it seems like they did a lot of work to make sure that you folks felt very informed?

Ravani: Yeah, absolutely. It was a situation where really, if you wanted to learn about the union, it was really easy and accessible. You hop on the email list and you're getting an email once every couple of weeks keeping you updated on where exactly we are in the process. Yeah, that was one of their main roles.

Ashley: It seems like information is so powerful in these situations because, from what I've gathered interviewing people who have unionized or thinking about unionizing, it seems like a lack of information and a lack of clarity on what laws protect you, what laws don't protect you, is a big hindrance to moving forward.

But it seems, from what I've gleaned from the outside looking in, you folks are highly informed and highly organized. I remember when you folks dropped the press release that you were unionizing, I was like, “Whoa, this came out of nowhere, but this is highly organized. This is something that these folks are ready for.”

Ravani: Yeah, absolutely. I have been a part of various attempts at worker organization at, frankly, every coffee shop that I've ever worked at, because of the type of person I am, you know: If there wasn't union chatter before I showed up, there definitely was after.

But coming back to Intelli at this time, and I remember within the first hour of my first shift back, Jordan was like, “So we're starting a union.”

My first reaction was like, “Okay, that's cute. But, let's be real here. Are you actually gonna start a union?” And it very quickly was apparent to me that, no, actually this was real and this was gonna happen.

And it still feels kind of dreamlike to some extent. It feels like a really big moment, both in the lives of everyone who's working for Intelligentsia right now, but also in the coffee industry more broadly. It's a little surreal to be in the moment.

Ashley: Speaking of this moment, it seems like a lot of things are currently just coming together. So there's the current labor movement that we're just in, in general—with so many Starbucks branches unionizing, with other coffee shops unionizing, the Colectivo union was a huge win for this movement, but it also seems like the pandemic really accelerated the need for a union.

I think we've talked a lot about how you started a union, but I think we wanna talk a little bit about why—and it seems like the pandemic had a big role in that for you folks.

Ravani: There are a lot of reasons why we want to unionize, right? And those reasons vary from person to person. But as someone who was there before the pandemic—there was no clarity over why people got fired. It was really a situation in which we were just completely at the mercy of Intelligentsia as a company and had no power and no way to fight back.

Ashley: Something I wrote down as you were talking was that there was no clarity on how or why people were being fired. I think that that speaks to a bigger theme when we talk about unionization—and it's something you mentioned before we started recording—was the idea of accountability. Being able to answer questions, being able to say, “Why is this happening in this way? And why aren't you giving me more information?”

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the idea of accountability in terms of this union and what you're hoping to achieve.

Ravani: Yeah. So the truth is we have a pretty sweet deal at Intelli, right? And the fact that we have a pretty sweet deal is like kind of the core of the anti-unionization campaign. For me, accountability is about making sure that when something like the pandemic happens again, like some sort of big financial crash, something that is really disruptive…

When something like that happens, I think it's really important to be organized and to have power, and to be able to say, “You can't treat us this way, this is not how you said you want to treat us.”

A union isn't gonna solve that issue singlehandedly, but it will provide a way for—if an employee is say, having an issue with management, right? Management is for whatever reason treating them a certain way, the union will be there to back that person up. If management makes the decision to fire someone over offenses that another person wouldn't get fired over, the union is there to say, “Okay, this is not actually a fireable offense. This does not violate the terms of our contract. You can't do this.”

That idea of having something that is kind of set in stone to say, “This is how we are going to be treated as employees. This is how we want to be seen as a collective union, unit, union—whatever—that deserves respect.” I think organization is how we get from point A to point B in terms of questions of respect and accountability.

Ashley: Something you said during that answer was that one of the lines of thought that is being used as like an anti-union rhetoric is that this is a pretty sweet job, which is a false, I think, claim—not necessarily that this is not a sweet job, but the idea that because it's a sweet job, you shouldn't need these protections.

But I think as you're rightly pointed out, workers in non-unionized places often don't know when the rug's gonna be pulled out from under their feet. You could be promised X, Y, and Z one day, and then suddenly those things don't happen to you anymore. And you're real people—you make life decisions based on these promises of what you're going to receive.

Like, “I'm gonna stay in Chicago for an extra couple of years because I've been told by my manager that I'm gonna get a three- and six-month raise,” and then that's just not there anymore. And I think that it's interesting that the idea that your job is good is a line of rhetoric that people use to fight against the union.

The idea that your job would be bad if the union wasn't there or that the company doesn't deserve this type of accountability claim because they already do an okay job, which I think is just like a false dichotomy.

Ravani: Absolutely. I 100% agree. At the end of the day, we are still workers and we are still, no matter how sweet the deal is, there's still that sort of baseline level of control that the company has over our lives.

Ashley: But they get to dictate the terms of how good your job is versus letting you—

Ravani: Exactly.

Ashley: Have any ownership over it.

Ravani: Exactly. I 100% agree. It is the fact that at the end of the day, Intelligentsia has all of the power and we have none of it. And a union is a really effective tool for balancing that situation.

Ashley: Power is a big thing I love talking about, because I think a lot of people think that anti-union efforts are fueled by money. They are not—they are fueled by power. They are fueled by the idea that somebody has power and they do not want to relinquish it.

But I think Intelligentsia is a really interesting situation because you were talking about accountability to workers and because Intelligentsia is owned by JAB.

They have this accountability to these stakeholders that are just like … not you. They're not you, they're not the people who are actually working every day.

I think it's just an interesting thing to think about because it's like, who are you accountable to? And it seems like in so many workplace situations, we're never accountable down. We're never accountable to the people who actually make the business go every day. And that's literally true in coffee shops.

Coffee does not happen if you do not show up and unlock the door and dial in espresso and welcome customers. But oftentimes companies where there is a stakeholder, where there is a board of directors, when there's somebody to answer to, because there's an influx of money happening from the top, a lot of who we answer to are those people.

It's interesting that we don't question that that often. And when it comes to things like this union effort, it's portrayed as this struggle, but it's like, we're just trying to get a seat at the table. We're just trying to assert the fact that we're here and we make this company happen.

Ravani: There are two things in what you said that I really wanna respond to.

One of the things I think is really exciting about both all the food service unions, but also all of the hotel unions and the hospitality union waves that have been happening—like room-keeping service being unionized—is how immediately, like, imagine a coffee strike, right? [If] it gets to the point where Intelligentsia is being super intractable, it takes like two days of us not opening for the shops to like, fall apart, right? It's not like a factory where they're able to have a bunch of back-stock cars that they're selling.

Ashley: But even then, like the union shut or the factory shutdowns of like Detroit-based car companies…

Ravani: Yeah! As I was saying that, I was thinking about a conversation I had with a friend that just-in-time production has really changed the game in terms of unions.

The ways in which we have these incredibly complicated supply chains has really given us a lot of power as workers. It has given us the ability to really affect change in our workplaces and also beyond our workplaces.

I think one of the things that really excites me about us unionizing is—I remember in various versions of the union chatter we've had, a lot of what we wanted to organize around wasn't necessarily improving our lot as workers, because we all were like, “Yeah, there's not that much more we want to ask for.” I mean, we always want more money. We always want more vacation days.

But also we wanna be organized, not just for really immediate concerns in our workplace, but so that way we can respond as a collective to these broader things that are happening. And your mention of the Detroit strikes just really brought that to mind because of the ways in which the Detroit strikes were so intimately woven into the Civil Rights Movement in a broader sense.

Ashley: Right, and then tying that back to another thing you said where maybe one person got fired for something, another person commits that same offense and they don't get fired—like, where is the accountability in that situation?

It seems like unions can really help almost litigate biases, make sure that there's accountability for like, “Hey, like if you're reacting this way to this person, not to this person, what is that saying?” We have a system in place to counteract this.

That's why we have this.

Ravani: Yeah, 100%.

Ashley: Something else that you mentioned too—which I think gets often ignored—is that you said that the union is good for both you folks as workers and for Intelli as a whole. And I think that is absolutely true, but like nobody else would say it. You know what I mean?

Like obviously Intelligentsia is not gonna say it, but as you were mentioning, unionized workers are probably more likely to stay at their jobs, they're probably more likely to feel like they have a seat at the table, so they're able to contribute positively to the work environment.

In a way, the union is almost saying, “We love this place and we wanna make it better.” It’s kind of in a convoluted way, an ultimate love letter to this place that you wanna make better. And you wanna invest your time in making it better.

Ravani: Yeah, 100%. I really love Intelligentsia. I think there are a lot of things that we do as a company that are really exciting and really exceptional, and I don't want that necessarily to be lost in this conversation. Like I keep coming back to this place whenever I'm living in the city of Chicago, because it's a great workplace in a lot of ways.

I think the ways in which we work with coffee farmers are really important and the ways in which we like set that model, that like pretty much all of specialty coffee at this point is following, of working directly with farmers, of paying more than fair trade prices, of helping them improve their farms—and I'm not necessarily trying to buy into the hype. There are a lot of problems with that. Fundamentally, the coffee industry has like a serious problem in that it is based on the exploitation of the Global South. That is the core dynamic that makes coffee, coffee, but in a lot of ways, Intelligentsia improved that situation over say a Starbucks, right?

I think the union is like an avenue in which, like you said, we can improve this company from the ground up. Workers can have more of a say in their situation. We can be more invested in our work. We can feel like we have the support that we need in order to be really good at our jobs.

Ashley: When I think about Intelligentsia five or 10 years ago, I think of people who are there forever.

Ravani: Yeah.

Ashley: And the fact that I'm talking to you now, I don't know that I know anybody who works there anymore. And I feel like I used to—that's maybe more of a personal thing, but there is something to be said about, what do we want for the future of coffee?

What do we want on a broad scale? And we do often talk about the future of coffee, as it pertains to coffee itself. We talk about sustainability. We talk about climate change and things like that. And not to say that those things are solved by any means. They're not, there are huge problems in the way that we source coffee.

And as you mentioned, it's built on the colonization of the Global South, but it seems like we have failed to recognize how important the sustainability of the people who work in coffee shops is—and why can't we have baristas who stay in their jobs for 10, 15, 20 years? Why can't that be a sustainable job?

Why can't it?

Ravani: Yeah!

Ashley: Like why? Why?

Ravani: Right. There's no good reason. [Making] good coffee is a really well-honed skill—I was not nearly as good at my job when I was doing this a year ago, even. I've been at this for five, six years now and I'm constantly growing and I'm constantly learning new things.

We should be able to look at a barista and say, “This is a career, right? This is something you can do for as long as you want to do it, and not something you're gonna get forced out of when you turn 35.” And as it stands now, it's something that you kind of get forced out of at a certain age, right?

Ashley: Right, because you can’t afford it.

Ravani: Or at least that's how it feels, yeah.

Ashley: And just to kind of extrapolate outward a little bit, all jobs deserve dignity. All jobs deserve the dignity of being able to go to work and say, “I can live my life based on the things that are happening in this situation. I can live my life based on the amount I'm getting paid here,” because every job … exists.

There's no less dignified, more dignified jobs. I hate stuff like that, but it's just saying that like, if we want people to work in these jobs, if we want our futures, just in general, to be better, we have to recognize the dignity of every single job and make space for people to say, “I demand more because I'm a human being and I want to be safe and secure at work.”

Ravani: Absolutely. I couldn't have said it better myself. You know, I think the question is then, how do we get from point A to point B? And I really think unions are like a big, big part of the answer, and is why I'm so excited to be in this stage in our unionization process, where it really feels like it's about to happen.

Ashley: Can you give me a timeline about what's next for you folks?

Ravani: Yeah. So our union ballots are currently in the mail. We all start voting right about now. Our last ballots have to be turned in by August 4th. And we find out three or four days later. I wanna say it's the 7th or the 8th—I can't remember which.

Ashley: So what happens? So you have the ballots, they're out to all of the employees. Is that correct?

Ravani: Yeah. So it's 27 workers. Anyone whose job title is barista or shift lead.

Ashley: And then you need a plurality, right? So you need more than 50%?

Ravani: Of people who vote. So if only 10 people vote and six of them vote “yes,” then we still have the union.

Ashley: Then once the union is recognized, that's a big step, obviously an important step, but that's not the end.

Ravani: No. Then we have to negotiate a contract. And this is what we have seen at Colectivo—is that the company tends to drag their feet. They negotiate in bad faith. They don't wanna give us a contract that is fair and on our terms, or they don't wanna give us a contract in a speedy manner because they don't want us to have a union.

So that is sort of gonna be the next big fight is if the vote goes our way, which based on the conversations I've been having, I feel really, really confident about—I would be genuinely shocked at this point to find out that this vote is not successful for us.

Ashley: Is there anything you want people to know about this stage of your union fight that maybe isn't obvious or maybe that people just wouldn't know—like, what are the best ways that folks can support you right now?

Ravani: I think one of the most effective ways that you can support is, if you come into the coffee shops, talk to us about the union. Let us know when you order your coffee. Like, “Hey, I heard about this. I'm super excited for you. That sounds awesome.” If you say that in front of management, it probably wouldn't hurt, but what, at this stage, really the big question is like, did Intelli successfully scare us out of a union vote?

We know that the majority of Intels want a union and the question—or at least they did before Intelli started their anti-union campaign. If the vote doesn't go our way, it means that Intelli ran a really successful anti-union campaign. I think one way to counteract that is to have folks from the outside say like, “Yeah, I think it's dope that you have a union or that you're trying to unionize. I think this is exciting.”

Yeah, I guess that's sort of the answer for me.

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

Ravani: Of course. This was really fun. Thank you for giving us some coverage.

You might have noticed a new logo and design accents on this page—I’m really pleased with my new logo marks, and I hope you like them, too. (But don’t worry—the old logo isn’t going anywhere.) I’d love to know what you think of Boss Barista’s updated look and feel!

If you want an episode that comes full circle, you’re gonna love this conversation.

My guest today is Niki Tolch, a coffee professional and creator of the Not Caffeinated Enough Instagram (as well as a YouTube channel and video podcast).

Niki built her platform to talk about coffee, and to connect with other people of color in the industry. Her content is deeply inquisitive, yet open and welcoming—you don’t need to be an expert to talk shop with Niki, and curiosity is encouraged. In this episode, we talk about building community online, how to rally against the sameness of coffee, and why coffee reminds Niki of “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.”

There’s a lot of really compelling twists and turns in this episode, but it eventually comes around to finish, unexpectedly, in the same place it starts. You know that the conversations that get reflective and crunchy are my favorites, and I feel like this chat is pure nourishment. If you’ve ever felt like you’ve looked out into the world and didn’t see the people or the spaces that you needed, please listen—and then get out a pen and paper and take notes. Here’s Niki:

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

Niki: Yes, my name is Niki Tolch. I have an online platform, primarily on Instagram, called Not Caffeinated Enough where I really like to play around with coffee, experiment with brew techniques, and other coffee-related things, as well as connect with and talk to other people of color in coffee.

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

Niki: Not really, no. My main connection with coffee growing up was when I would visit my grandmother. Nana, I always like to say, would make the mornings itself smell like coffee.

Morning, noon, or night—whenever you’re reading this note (or sipping on your coffee), please consider becoming a paid supporter of this show. Your contributions help keep as much of the content free for all subscribers.

And so I would always look forward to that whenever I stayed over, waking up to the smell of coffee.

Ashley: I love that. I love that sense memory.

Niki: Yeah.

Ashley: How did you start working in coffee? What was your first coffee job?

Niki: My first coffee job was at a Starbucks in the suburbs of Houston. I had actually just come back home because of a family emergency. And so I was looking for a really quick and close-by job to start making money again.

It was not meant to be a long-term thing. I was just drawn to the idea of working in coffee, because again of the smell reminding me of my grandmother.

But the first thing I really noticed, or the first thing that drew me to the industry, was this was the first job in which I was working with people who seemed to be more themselves.

Coming more from the corporate side of work, I had never really experienced that, or worked with people who just seemed free to be themselves. So that was really interesting to me.

Ashley: What were you doing before coffee?

Niki: Before coffee, I was in the nonprofit world, mostly marketing and communications. I was helping kind of a lot of different nonprofits, but mostly, I was with this philanthropic foundation that was creating videos for hundreds—which became thousands—of nonprofits as a way for donors to get to know those nonprofits better before giving.

Ashley: I think that's such a salient thing to notice about working in a coffee shop, that people seem more like themselves. That's something that's come up on the podcast before. And I think for myself, a really transformative moment in the industry for me—I would say that I wasn't pulled into coffee because of coffee itself.

Not to say that I don't care about coffee, but I think I was pulled into the industry because working behind the bar felt like the most true and authentic expression of my personality in a way that I had never experienced before.

Niki: Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny, it didn't happen right away where I felt like I could be myself behind the bar. I just saw these other people around me just having fun, acting like themselves. And they were all just so different, but worked well together, and it really excited me about my potential for bringing more of myself out.

Even though it took a while, because I tend to be more guarded in public.

Ashley: Right, that makes sense. Do you think that working in coffee started to change that aspect of yourself? When did you start feeling like you could be more yourself or more outwardly yourself?

Niki: I think it really wasn't until I started my podcast or the online platform. I just started talking more about what I was feeling while working in coffee. I feel like just that act of talking about it, recording it, and putting it out there is what made me feel more comfortable, like, “Oh, I can talk about this in real life, like outside of my home in front of the camera.”

Ashley: When did you pick up the camera and start recording—or the phone? I don't know.

Niki: It was near the start of the pandemic. That's when I first got the idea. It took me, I wanna say, a handful of months of picking up my phone, putting it back down, changing my mind … because I have this real stage fright, or at least I did. I would start getting this sick feeling every time I started to record and my brain would tell me, like, “Why are you doing this? Like, this is pointless. It's dumb. No one wants to hear this.” And I would just like shut myself down.

So it took a long time for me to actually, from the idea to press record and get rid of those fears that were stopping me.

Ashley: What was the first video about? What was the first thing that you were like, “All right. I’m hitting record. I'm getting over the stage fright, or at least I'm coping with the stage fright and I'm gonna press record. I'm gonna put it out there.”

Niki: The topic was essentially, “Is specialty coffee white?” And I was kind of going over some points that I had thought about that indicated that it was kind of a white man's game.

Ashley: What were some of those things that you wanted to highlight or you wanted to at least put out there so that other people could discuss, and at least have some breathing room for this idea to exist and have people discuss it out loud?

Niki: My thoughts on it were one: I, in my quick little online research, had told me that other people don't really see Black folks behind the bar much. And in a lot of areas, at least all of the Chicago area that I visited coffee shops in, I didn't really see Black people within the shops as well, at least not many, not as many as I saw just like walking outside.

So that indicated to me that one was potentially a cause of the other, because coffee shops either didn't or were struggling to hire people of color, so it didn't really make customers of color feel very comfortable to be there.

The other kind of subtopic under that was in advertisements. I didn't really see people of color being advertised to in coffee, which is very strategic. I don't know, I can’t blame the coffee industry exactly for that. It’s just kind of marketing in general has specific target audiences that they gear toward. And it's not always for the benefit of that community that's being targeted.

So I kind of talked about that a little bit and I also just, for my own personal experience, felt like as a woman of color I sometimes was talked down to, or it was assumed that I didn't know much about coffee even. When I was at like the, I don't know, seventh coffee shop that I worked at, and I'd gotten to kind of learn the best pieces from all these other coffee shops. I was still met with a lot of surprise when people saw that I could like, work an espresso machine.

Ashley: Going on that same theme of not seeing people of color in coffee shops or behind the bar, even though that didn't reflect what you were seeing just out in the world, out on the street, it also seems like you carried that idea to the video content that you were making.

I can point to a handful of content creators about coffee online, and the people with the biggest platforms are white people, white men. And I wonder for you if that was part of the reason that you wanted to start making this kind of content?

Niki: It was. When working behind the bar, I was starting to get really lonely, feeling like I had to code-switch while at work, because I just didn't, there were no other people of color there.

And then on the other side of that, as I started getting more and more interested in just learning about coffee and looking up coffee videos, all I would see were white folks, primarily white men making these coffee videos. And to me, they just all kind of had the same feel.

I wanna say like—what is that word where something's really clean? It was just all these videos had like a very clean look to it and very professional.

So I was really, really looking for something that felt more like me. Not to say I'm not clean and professional, but I wanted something that was more relatable. Something with a little color to it, a little spice, something that showed that I didn't have to know exactly all the verbiage or all of the language, know all of the things in order to learn from this person.

So that kind of just added to this loneliness I was already feeling in real life and just made me think I maybe should create this thing that I wanna see.

Ashley: I love that spurred you to create something for yourself and create the thing that you were not seeing because that's really hard. It's hard to create something totally new or to even synthesize all the ideas that you have and say, “These are the things that I'm not seeing. How do I take what I'm not seeing and what I'm craving—the content that I need to keep going and keep moving—and make it?”

That sounds like an intuitive step, just because I'm saying them together, but it's not.

Niki: Right. Yeah.

Ashley: Something that I wrote down as you were talking was that you wanted to see video content that felt more like you, or felt more like the things that you were looking for and made room for you to maybe not necessarily know every single word in coffee, or know every single brewing process.

What I'm struck by in your videos is you essentially take an aspect of brewing, maybe it's bypass brewing, which is just to add water towards the end of brewing, that's a big topic and you have almost hour-long video on it, so I'd encourage people to go look at that if they wanna learn more about it.

But you take this one aspect of brewing and you leave all this room for experimentation. You talk about different ways that one can try this brewing method. You talk about different ways that people can play with it.

And I think zooming outward on the coffee industry: this is a really important way to approach coffee, because coffee is so often seen as inaccessible and pretentious and hard to do and if you don't nail your brew that first time, then you failed.

It seems like you're just kind of like, upturning that—you're saying, “No, you can experiment and have fun.” That to me seems so much more of the way that we should be speaking to customers.

Niki: Yes. Yeah. One thing I was struck by, in all the coffee shops that I worked at, and then just when I meet new coffee folks, often I get the sense of, “There is only one right way to do things,” or “I'm a huge believer in doing it this way. And I think the other ways are evil.” And that's what I was seeing in all the videos I was looking up. “This is the best way to do this thing.”

And then in the new coffee folks that I meet, if they have some sense that I have experience in coffee, it seems like there's always this assumption that I myself have really strong opinions on like, what exactly a cappuccino is for instance, or the right way to make it. And my thought is, “No, there's clearly a lot of ways to do things.”

There's almost as many ways, appropriate ways to make coffee as there are people who drink coffee. That's an exaggeration probably, but I don't really have these strong ideas that there's one way to do something when it comes to coffee. I might have preferences, but I really encourage people to feel comfortable, at least in exploring how they like their coffee.

Ashley: Right. And it seems like that space for exploration really gives people ownership over the cup of coffee they're brewing.

Niki: Yeah. Yeah.

Ashley: I think something that we do in coffee, and I don't know why we do it this way, is that we really limit the scope of experimentation, even though coffee is so easy to experiment with.

You can brew a cup of coffee and four minutes later you can brew another cup of coffee. Like, like how easy is that? If it's espresso, it's even shorter. So it's like, why do we shoot ourselves in the foot by saying these things have to be done this one way? I think that that translates to how customers feel about coffee.

Niki: Yeah. It seems like a huge roadblock when customers come in, actually wanting to learn something about coffee, or even just talk about what they know about coffee to the person on the other side of the counter. And often that person on the other side of the counter is telling them they’re wrong about something, for instance, or using all this language that a customer doesn't know.

And it just kind of shuts a lot of people down from either learning, thinking that they have to be bougie maybe, or it keeps them from making that conversation with baristas, which for a lot of people in coffee, I, at least from what I hear, they really like making connections with people.

So learning to open yourself up to more that you may not know about coffee, because I highly doubt there's anyone who knows everything about it, I think could be really beneficial.

Ashley: In one of the podcast episodes that you did, you talk about the flavor wheel, which is something I've been thinking a lot about. I just released an episode with a scholar named David Tortolini and we talked a lot about different flavors in coffee that we taste that are very Americanized, very Western flavors, and how maybe they don't translate globally.

But even going further than that, it's like the flavor wheel—which is, just for people who maybe don't know it, it's this wheel literally of all of these different flavors that one might taste in coffee, like berries or melon, moldy or whatever. Some of them are good, some of them are maybe not as desirable.

A lot of people base what they taste in coffee on that flavor wheel. I know that a lot of people, when they do coffee tastings, they'll even have the flavor wheel somewhere and refer to that as like a reference point. But the scope of the flavor wheel feels very narrow and that's something that you've discussed before.

Niki: Yeah. I know that, on the one hand for a lot of people, especially people who are familiar with most, if not all of the flavors on the flavor wheel, it can be a helpful reference point, and I assume that's what it's meant for. So, you know, that's cool for them.

I know for a lot of other people, it's very intimidating, to look at all those slices, or all those spokes on the wheel. And you're tasting coffee, especially if you are either new to coffee or you do not know those flavors. And you're like, “Oh my god, which one of these is the right one? That matches with this coffee…”

I think it's limiting both for people who are not familiar with all of those flavors and how to identify them and alienating for people who are just starting out in coffee and really want to be able to connect coffee with their own experiences.

Ashley: Even in that description of your podcast episode, you even mentioned that it doesn't necessarily need to be a specific tasting note as a way to describe coffee. It can be a sonnet or a sentence or a feeling. And I think that that's super powerful too, because as a new taster, if you're someone who's maybe just getting into coffee—I don't know that [even] now I can always articulate a specific note. Sometimes I'm like, “This is sweeter than the last cup I had,” or, “This reminds me of the color purple.”

It's just interesting that we don't make space for that, even though, like you said, being able to connect a customer where they're at with the coffee that they're tasting is a really powerful way to bring more consumers in.

Niki: Yeah. That's something that trips me up a lot too. Still I taste a cup of coffee and it, sometimes it just reminds me of a song. I've even gotten reminded of like TV shows, drinking coffee.

Sometimes I'm with people who are very technical about coffee, which I have nothing against—until you try to make that be everyone's way to appreciate coffee. But it might be they'll taste a coffee and list six different flavors on the flavor wheel. I'm like, “It tastes kind of sour.”

So I think that getting rid of the expectation that everyone must follow the color wheel or the flavor wheel would do wonders for people wanting to get into coffee.

Ashley: What coffee did you taste that reminded you of a TV show, and which TV show was it?

Niki: Good question. I believe it was my BlackNerd Coffee, and it reminded me of the show “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” because, it was—now I gotta be honest: The name, I think, probably influenced the show that it reminded me of a little bit, but when I tasted it, I was just instantly reminding me of kind of like … jolly.

It reminded me of kind of like, of a sense of community. It reminded me of a lighthearted Blackness that is just present, but not like, announced, if that makes sense?

Ashley: Yeah, that makes sense.

Niki: Okay. So yeah, the show was, you know, obviously it was a family of Black folks, but it's not like, “This is a show about Black people.” And that's kind of what the coffee reminded me of. I just thought of scenes in the show when I drank it.

Ashley: That's a really, I think salient point to make though, because, like, we make memories based on past experiences.

We connect taste and smell to memories, and we also are influenced by the world around us. So like picking up, like you mentioned, picking up that bag of coffee and you're like, '“Maybe I was influenced by the name of the coffee.” Like the name of the coffee is going to influence people too.

It's just like, I don't know. It just feels like a really fun way to approach coffee. And it's like, why would we ever wanna limit ourselves when we can have this fun spectrum of experience?

Niki: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I do—like don't get me wrong. I love numbers and data and technical stuff. I completely understand its place when you're trying to work in a professional setting and calibrate with other coffee people. But otherwise, I mean, it could open a little bit more up in the professional setting around the cupping table, but especially, it could be more open when you're talking to someone who makes coffee at home or whose career doesn't depend on calibrating with everyone else.

Ashley: Right. I was wondering if we could also talk about the second part of what your podcast does. So you do these experiments with people, but you also use that space as almost like a connector.

You mentioned earlier that one of the reasons that you started your platform, that you started Not Caffeinated Enough, was because you were feeling lonely and it seems like you were looking for community that you weren't seeing in other places. And you were like, “Well, let me go out there and like find other people that I wanna talk to and connect with.”

I was wondering—how did you start building this community for yourself?

Niki: Oh, good question. It started before I even picked up the phone to hit record.

I was looking for that online. So I didn't find it behind the bar in coffee shops. I didn't find it in the YouTube videos I was looking through. And so I started Googling “Black people and coffee,” because I didn't know what else to look for. Essentially for a while all I could find were just Google images of Black people drinking.

I think I was able to find one person. It was Michelle Johnson, the, I think in a lot of people's minds, the OG Black barista, and she had this blog about being Black in coffee and it was the only thing I could find.

And I was so excited to find it. And then I read to the last post and it was a while ago. I was like, “Well, what now?”

So I started the platform. And Instagram really like, as ornery as Instagram can be, it really became my primary [outlet] for a while. My only source of finding people of color in coffee, I just started putting these videos out on Instagram and kind of one by one, a few people started messaging me—and it wouldn’t even be like about being Black in coffee, but they were Black and they're like, “Hey, I like coffee too,” or, “Have you tried this thing with the AeroPress?” And just like started randomly giving me tips about coffee and it was really exciting.

I was chatting with a few people that way for a while, and, from what I'm told, there were people that shared my account with other people of color in coffee. And so it was surprisingly for me anyway, cause I didn't expect it, organic that I just started quote unquote “meeting” other Black people in coffee, really just through Instagram and through people sharing.

I started inviting a lot of these people onto my podcast and it just kinda grew from there. Other Black coffee people would introduce me to some other Black coffee people. And before you know it, I suddenly feel like I'm in a community.

Ashley: I think that that's really powerful that the community that you were seeking kind of came about from you putting yourself out there, in a way—but that's scary. Like that's hard.

Niki: Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was really hard because that fear I talked about—of recording myself—it didn't go away.

After the first time I recorded myself, it was … oh man, maybe the first, like, the whole first year I kept almost like giving up. I would have the same fear every time I picked up the phone.

Probably the platform wouldn't exist if not for my boyfriend who kept saying, “Yes, you do have a voice. Yes, you do have something to say that other people want to hear.” And so it's really thanks to him that I kept picking it up—after putting it down—but yeah, it was scary, and still sometimes is.

Because now I've almost gone in the opposite direction. Sometimes like, I now go kind of back and forth in a more extreme way from, “Okay. You now see,”—like I'm telling myself—“you now see a lot of Black people in coffee doing videos.”

And I don't know if I just missed it before starting up, but I had this sense of, “Okay, your work is done. You're seeing more of what you wanted to see. You don't need to do these videos anymore. So stop.”

And then on the other hand, I sometimes—I don't know, something triggers me and I wanna make a video about it. And so I start rambling on a video and then I'm like, “Is this too much? Are you putting too much of yourself out here now when it's not necessary?”

Ashley: This speaks a lot to me because I think about this a lot with Boss Barista. Sometimes I think, “When is this over? When does this end?” It's like both a personal question and a community question, I think. And I think that what your answer kind of spoke to was that like, how do you have a platform that is about crafting community or looking for something that you didn't see before?

And then once you start to see it, you're like, well, what do I do now? Or like, do I keep doing this thing? I found that the more personal I got with Boss Barista, like the more that I made it about the things that I cared about, the more universal it became and the more it felt like it evolved because I feel like I evolved. So [the podcast] is going to be a reflection of the way that I change.

Everybody's opinions will evolve too, or everybody's ideas will evolve. So I don't know. I think you should keep doing it. Even if you start to see the things that, like you said, you were seeing what you wanted to see, this is still a personal project, this is still about you.

And people will always wanna hear what you have to say.

Niki: Well, that's really nice. Thank you for saying that.

Ashley: How do you think about this as a personal project?

Niki: Well, you know what? I don't think I have thought about it as a personal project.

And maybe I should. That's a very good question. I'm glad you put that outta my mind. I think that's why I've been struggling for kind of a while now as to like, should I keep doing this? Because I just saw it as a way to bring more people of color out in the coffee industry.

So I saw it as like, I guess more of a community thing, not for myself. But as a personal project, yeah. You know what, I think I have to think about that. I'm not sure.

Ashley: Maybe we come back to this on another recording or something like that.

I feel like, I don't know. When you reflect back on some of the conversations that you've had in the past, do you find the more personal ones are the ones that really stick with you, or maybe the ones that are more personal or feel like they went in a direction that maybe you didn't expect?

Niki: Yeah. that holds true. And then along that same vein, I guess kind of brings me back to the personal projectness of my platform. I did actually use it as a way to, at least in my mind, to be selfish so that I could just talk to these people that I wanted to meet. But through the guise of just, “Will you be on my podcast where I have one viewer?” just because I wanted to talk to them. And yeah, when the—it was the conversations where, really where I could be myself and not filter myself or what I was saying. Those always result in, I think, better conversations when at least both parties feel that way and feel comfortable.

I think that those emerged more with people that I was communicating with in some way already, mostly through Instagram. Like one of us would like a video that the other put out or whatever and, you know, start talking about it.

Marvin Duncan, for instance, in that video you referenced where we talk for almost an hour—well, in reality, more than an hour—about the bypass method. That started because I was just going through his posts, which is what I was doing with every single Black person who had an account that I could find who posted about coffee. I saw that one of his posts was some notes [about] the bypass method.

That was kind of the first time I had heard about it and it really interested me. And so we just started—I asked him a question about it on Instagram, and a lot of my good connections started that way, where either I or the other person would ask a question about a coffee post.

I guess it was different for me than like from other coffee conversations, because what I was used to before was someone telling me what was best. Or telling me a tip or like, something I should try instead of asking, and then asking a question, and/or me asking and them being really transparent about not knowing everything, just what they know.

It did wonders in helping me to feel more comfortable about being myself because neither of us, it seemed, were putting on airs. That was, I think, probably the start of all of my deeper, more interesting conversations with folks.

Ashley: It's almost like full-circle, in a way.

Niki: Yeah.

Ashley: Coming back to that first experience at the Starbucks where you observed that people were being more authentically themselves.

Niki: #Deep

Ashley: This is my favorite thing in the whole world is to do this kind of connect it all, make it a circle.

As we're starting to wrap up our conversation, I was wondering—what are some things that you're thinking about right now?

Niki: You mean like where I wanna take my platform kind of thing?

Ashley: Yeah, let's start there, and then maybe extrapolate outward.

Niki: Mmm, okay. So there is this thing I've been thinking about for a while, and I haven't really told anyone about it because it's like, one: really scary for me to think about actually doing, and two: it feels really out there, feels like a stretch for someone like me to be able to do, but it also feels like a really good idea.

I wanna keep it close to the vest, but I really wanna get more into consulting for cafes. So I had this idea where I use my show to do that. Like maybe I find a team of some really good trustworthy coffee folks. And we just reach out to cafes or allow cafes to submit their shop and we go out and we consult with them on their community needs.

We find out more about their community and how they can best serve their community, train their staff, and just really customize the consultation or training for them, but we video it and we use it to help other shops and people learn more as well, sort of like “Kitchen Nightmares” kind of thing, but maybe not as yelly.

Ashley: Yeah. Like, not mean.

Niki: Yeah. A not-mean version.

I guess the main idea or the main point, besides taking off the bells and whistles, is really helping coffee shops to meet the needs of their community and not just the community that they see in their shops already, because chances are, it's just a certain—at least for a lot of shops that I've been in—it's just a certain kind of person that goes into or frequents that shop.

Opening your shop up even more to the other people that live in your area, I think, is really what is drawing me.

Ashley: Yeah. That's something that I wanted to talk a little bit about too: this idea of coffee shops as community spaces, which I don't think you can avoid if you're a coffee shop. It seems like a lot of spaces insert themselves in communities and kind of assume that's all. That's needed to be part of a community, but there's a lot more that's involved.

There's a lot more about knowing who you're serving, who actually lives in your neighborhood, are you employing people in your neighborhood versus, like you said, kind of selecting a sample cut of some people and the people behind the bar don't reflect the community.

It seems like a lot of that conversation starts at a very top level of just like, we need to be more community-invested, but there's not a lot of conversations about how to do that. So it would be really cool to see you and other baristas go in and kind of tackle that problem head-on.

Niki: Yeah, it's a really exciting idea to me, especially if I get to work with more people I respect.

Ashley: I would love to see that—I'd watch that.

Niki: Well, cool, good. One viewer down. We got one.

Ashley: That's the starting place. So we talked a little bit about what you'd like to do with the platform in the future. What would you like to see in the coffee industry as a whole in the future?

Niki: I'd really like to see, honestly: more events that were run by people of color. I just think that there's so much potential in how we can open up education in coffee if we just hear from different people.

I know not all white people in coffee are the same or give the same information, but we are kind of, at least from what I'm seeing, ignoring large groups of people that could have totally different perspectives and things to bring to the table.

I haven't been to a lot of coffee events, but the ones that I have been to, I feel like I hear a lot of the same information, or I'll go to a breakout panel or something where the topic really interests me. But when I actually attend, I'm hearing things that I've heard before. I know from personal conversations, from other people of color that there are totally different perspectives out there.

And so bringing people who maybe haven't been quote unquote “sullied” by attending a lot of the existing coffee events, I feel like they could just bring something totally new. And I'm really looking forward to seeing more of that.

Ashley: What would you want people listening to this to know about you?

Niki: Mm—as little as possible.

Ashley: That’s fair. I get that. I totally understand that. Do you feel like you ever have to balance that, as a person who's online? Because I feel like I do.

Niki: Yeah, I do. I'm never really sure how much of myself to give. I generally err on the side of not really giving much of myself, but honestly it's not because I'm so opposed to it. It just—it doesn't come naturally to talk much about myself or what's going on in my life or anything like that.

If I thought that all of my followers were really interested in—I don't know, that kind of thing, then maybe I would work on it, on presenting more of me, but really, I feel like it's enough to be authentic as long as I'm not trying to be someone else. I am being the real me on videos.

I’m just not talking about myself much.

Ashley: I see what you're saying. Well, Niki, thank you so much for taking time to chat with me. This has been so lovely, and I'm thrilled and honored that I got to spend time with you.

Niki: Yeah. Thank you, Ashley, for asking such thoughtful questions.

We learn so much about the world from the internet that it’s easy to forget that this sort of communication is still new—and take for granted everything we have at our fingertips. Fifteen years ago, if you wanted to learn more about a new coffee shop, you couldn’t just go on its Instagram page and see what sort of content it was posting. But now, a scroll through someone’s feed can tell you about everything from their menu offerings and hours of operation to their events, workers, and political stances.

David Tortolini is an incoming graduate student at Purdue University who studies food and digital spaces. Last year, he gave a talk about how coffee brands used their Instagram pages following the murder of George Floyd to galvanize their communities, whether by participating in fundraisers or attending protests. David’s work exposes the importance of digital platforms: They are both the fuel that connects communities and the levers that enforce existing power dynamics and create disparities in access to resources.

In other words, social media and other shared digital spaces can be powerful tools. Used well, they have the potential to harness collective action, uplift voices, and help folks find people who care about the same things as they do. Used poorly, they can cause enormous harm. If you use social media to make decisions about the world around you—which, at this point, we all do to some extent—then this is a must-listen episode. Here’s David:

Ashley: David, I was hoping you could start by introducing yourself to everybody.

David: Sure. My name is David Tortolini. I'm an incoming graduate student at Purdue University in the American Studies department.

Ashley: David, did you grow up with coffee in your life?

David: Kinda sort of? My parents drink coffee. They drink maybe two or three cups a day. But for me, I always grew up drinking yerba mate. My mom is Argentinian and my dad is BIPOC from the United States. But growing up for me, it was always mate, mate, mate with the bombilla—I grew up on all that.

Hey! This is a digital space! So wild! Please support and help sustain this digital space by making a financial contribution:

But I didn't start drinking coffee until I was about 25 when I needed a pick-me-up one day—and I don't drink energy drinks—and my friends gave me a blonde roast from Starbucks and it was like an aha moment.

Ashley: Tell me about that aha moment.

David: I always knew coffee to be like, something off-putting for me. But when I had it that time, I just tasted a complexity of flavors and I was like, “Okay, this is why people love coffee. I can see why people love coffee black.”

And I just jumped head first into finding out about specialty coffees, finding flavor profiles, trying to understand where coffee regions are, like the different regions, the varietals, the seasons, how even the amount of rain can change the way a coffee's gonna be roasted the following year.

And then the big, almost music-in-the-background kind of moment was when I had Tandem Coffee’s—they had this coffee with a blueberry note and I tasted blueberries and I was like, “Wow, this is so complex, more than I could ever even have imagined.”

Ashley: It's funny you mentioned the tasting note of blueberries, because I feel like if you took a poll of different coffee folks and their aha moment or their, “Wow, this is something totally different that I didn't expect” [moment], I bet you at least half of them would say that blueberries are part of that journey.

I know for me it is. I had a coffee from, I think it was from Irving Farm.

It was a natural Ethiopia called—oh, I'm gonna get this wrong, but it was a natural Ethiopia. And I remember tasting blueberries in that, and I was like, “This is so different from anything I've ever had.”

But blueberries kind of come up a lot in these tasting notes. I think Veronica Grimm of Glitter Cat actually just did an episode of Soleil Ho's podcast. Soleil is a food writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, and she has a podcast called Extra Spicy, and I think Veronica mentioned saying the word blueberry like, 23 times [in a barista competition].

David: Yeah, I wonder what it is that why we have such a connection with blueberries and coffee. This isn't part of my research, but I think it could just be maybe the acidity. It could be a similar acidity profile or the tannins of the coffee. Just something about coffee and blueberries—they just mesh so well together.

Ashley: I know you said that this is probably not part of your studies. And I wonder if this is a question that maybe you might know somebody who would know the answer to this, but do you think that blueberries specifically have a distinct flavor that's not replicable by other things?

David: I think so, because when you think of artificial blueberry flavoring, right? It's a manmade attempt trying to make what a blueberry can be synthesized as. And it's totally different than when you're trying to eat or even drinking something with wild blueberries in it, or even farmers’ blueberries.

And I think blueberries are one of those things—at least in the West—because when you look at how flavor is inherently part of a colonial process, blueberries are just like, I don't wanna say a ubiquitous term, but it's just like a flavor term. When you think of a blueberry automatically, you think of the flavors on your tongue.

Ashley: Yeah, that's a good point. And also thinking about this reference point as being specific to maybe Western countries, I wonder what would be the analogous flavor call for maybe somebody living in a different part of the world? What's the thing that like this region of the world all associates as this powerful moment together?

Or is there another flavor that so many people have tasted in coffee in a different region of the world that has really opened up their eyes? I wonder if that experience translates.

David: Exactly. This is when I'm thinking instantly of—I hope I'm saying this right—Ārāmse Coffee out of India where they're doing some of the craziest, like most powerful decolonial process work in food in general. That’s something I think is right up their alley because I'm thinking of the James Hoffmann video where they were talking about the de-colonial practices of strawberries.

Ashley: Tell me a little bit about that because I think that I watched that a while ago, but just for people who haven't seen that, can you describe it a little?

David: Yeah! If anybody gets a chance to watch the video, it's riveting, but when we think of flavors and coffee—and it doesn't necessarily have to be coffee, it can be wine, because wine is a big thing that people and academics talk about when it comes to flavors—we look at this using almost a Western lens.

We look at it, thinking like everybody around the world knows what a strawberry is, but not really. Not a lot of people have access to fruits like strawberries. Or they'll say something [tastes] like stone fruit. But not a lot of people know what a stone fruit necessarily is. Like I still get mixed up when I see the word “stone fruit” on a coffee bag.

But when we have collectives and groups like Jen Apodaca with Mother Tongue who says things like gummy bears or peach rings, we all know what peach rings are because peach rings is just—it’s candy. We know, “Hey, it tastes sour like a piece of candy,” or it's gonna taste kind of gummy bear-like. We know that experience globally more so than saying it's gonna taste like Northwestern summer sage.

Ashley: That's a really good point. Like there are certain things that—I'm thinking about this in two ways. Number one: There are certain things that are global, that are international.

Number two, describing things with like really—to be specific so that people can recall them. Like, stone fruit is not specific. Like, is that a nectarine? Is that a plum? Is that a this, is that a that?

But why can't we get more specific? Or, can we identify the thing in that flavor? So, saying sour candies, maybe someone hasn't had a sour candy, but they know what sour is. Like, there are ways to be more specific and intentional with the language that you use to bring more people to the table so they can at least have a reference point to understand what you're talking about.

David: Exactly. It's 100% that, and I think this is one of the reasons why I love the coffee industry so well, is that so many people have been so receptive to trying to change the way that they described flavor and contextualized flavor.

People don't realize that it makes me—I like to say I'm a budding scholar, and it makes people like me who do research on how we discuss flavor and food and food cultures and digital spaces specifically, how are we talking about flavor in these spaces, and when I'm looking at the coffee industry, I'm seeing people talking about experience as a flavor, and then it makes me look at the world a little differently.

It's like, “Hey, how do I experience wine as a flavor? How do I experience something?” When somebody says this tastes very bitter, very bitter could be a good flavor or a bad flavor.

Ashley: Speaking of that, you’re a scholar, you study food and digital spaces. What brought you specifically into the specialty coffee fold, like what drew you to this industry beyond just being an avid fan of coffee?

David: I have so many friends in the specialty coffee industry in Virginia. I have friends who are baristas—and still are baristas‚ friends who are coffee managers, roasting managers, even coffee shop owners.

Seeing and being immersed in their world because—I consider myself an at-home barista. I have the whole setup, I now just got a W60 from Hario. I have the kettle. I have the good grinders. I have access to [all] that. And it was just an interest in the industry. When I had my aha moment, I didn't jump in feet-first. I like, reverse-one-and-a-half-competitive-diving-maneuvered into the coffee cup essentially.

And I’m still swimming in it. I'm still loving it.

Ashley: Yeah, but like, you're not just a person who makes a lot of coffee at home and is really interested in specialty coffee. Like you're part of the discourse.

Recently—not recently, maybe this was like a year and a half ago—but both you and I gave talks at a thing called The Barista League.

And I remember seeing your name. I was like, I don't know who this person is, but you gave this really cool talk about how digital spaces can convey values and how you show true solidarity and commitment to community through Instagram and other social media platforms. And I was like, this is a person who's in it, like this isn't a casual observer.

Do you know what I mean?

David: Yeah, definitely. I think what brought about my interest in that discussion I gave was I'm a minority. I'm a proud minority. There's no way that I hide it. Every day where I walk, I'm a proud minority. And when the murder of George Floyd happened, it hit me just like it hit everybody else.

It hit me hard, and I was fortunate enough to have amazing friends around the world who were posting these powerful messages. And like I said, my friends are coffee shop managers, and they actually own shops and roasteries now. And I saw how they were engaging with it and then I saw how the coffee industry was engaging with the discourse happening.

As a scholar—because I was still doing my master's research then—it just piqued my interest. Like, “Hey, how are my friends creating discourse and change in our com—” I don't wanna say “little community” because the Tidewater region and Richmond are massive communities, but how are their posts changing our communities?

I actually got to see it happen. Like my friends organized fundraisers, they organized protests. My friends even organized essentially like a rallying point at their coffee shop where people were given free cups of coffee as donations for helping out.

Ashley: Right, that makes sense. Let’s backtrack a little bit because I wanna talk about your research and what you're studying to give people a framework for how you've been able to use that lens to kind of look at the coffee industry. So can you talk a little bit about what you're studying and what your background is?

David: I was at Old Dominion University. I graduated from the Institute for the Humanities, and my focus of research is looking at how we discuss food items and flavor in digital spaces and how it affects minority populations. How can we say something like—my mom is Argentinian and culturally raised Argentinian—how can somebody say somebody like, “All Argentinians eat rice and beans” online, and it becomes almost canonical in some of these online spaces?

But … we don't really eat rice and beans in Argentina like that. Or you could say something like, “All chorizos taste the same” when all chorizos don't taste the same.

I'm a chorizo aficionado, I love chorizo, give me a choripán [and I’m the] happiest person in the world. And I can tell you all chorizos don't taste the same, but when you go on these online spaces, they're like, “Yeah, they all taste the same.” Or stuff like, “Dulce de leche tastes the same” when it doesn't, there are variances. There are different ingredients. There are different complexities.

And another example is empanadas, not all empanadas are cooked the same. Every country has its own different version or variation of the empanada. So don't say, “Hey, my mom fries empanadas,” when we don’t fry empanadas in my house, we bake 'em.

Ashley: So it seems like you—let me see if I can try to summarize it: So it seems like you look at how essentially we create ideas of like, what is true and what is not about food via digital spaces. Like, are you specifically looking at how that happens online?

David: For my main research, yes. I also think it's part of the continuation of the historical discourse we've seen in cookbooks, we've seen in food television shows, we've seen in reality television.

I'm thinking of reality shows popping into my mind where a cook from overseas cooks a dish from where they're from, and they're being told, “Oh, well, people aren't gonna like it because it's too weird. It's too different.” One show that I'm thinking of in particular is from the U.K. They were like, “You have to kind of like, Anglicize it a little bit, kind of like gussy it up for the British audience.”

And in a way it's like, it can also be seen almost as a form of violence as a way to say, “Hey, your food's not good enough to be eaten in this country unless you do X, Y, and Z. And then we'll say it's good, but we're gonna wait for hipsters to start eating it, for them to start liking it before the general population will want to.”

Ashley: That's so interesting. It seems so wild how much we look for validation of a thing to be good or not based on very specific populations, and we just write off the taste and the interest of other countries, like other huge populations of people where this is a very standard food, or this is a very accepted way for someone to eat.

And it's also like, not even testing the thing to see if it's like—I don't know. Like that just seems, that seems so complex and layered, and I imagine this must be frustrating, but rewarding research in a way.

David: It is, it really is. I feel like there are moments where you just want to scream in frustration when you see some of the television shows or apps, or even Instagram or TikTok, the way they describe minority food cultures and or minority cooking.

But then you see moments where in the coffee industry where we see Ārāmse and other—I don't wanna call 'em “barista activists,” I just wanna call them the straight-up, general activists who are trying to fight this discourse and trying to make things more equitable and fair. So at the same time, it's like, I see both sides and it’s just—I love it. I'm always excited by it. And I'm just so passionate about this.

Ashley: Let's shift back to the conversation that you had, or the talk that you gave for The Barista League. So you gave this talk about digital spaces and you looked at Instagram to kind of parse out different ways that coffee companies—from the small level, like maybe a shop manager or a small coffee shop, to the bigger level, to businesses and media companies.

And you talked about how they essentially share community and share their values via social media. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the premise of that talk and what some of maybe the findings were of that?

David: Yeah, definitely. So like I said, the premise of that talk was I was spurred by my friends in the specialty coffee industry and their reaction to the murder of George Floyd. I was spurred on by looking at how—because I've taken digital media classes, I was spurred on by looking at how scholars like Dr. Christian Fuchs and Dr. Safiya Noble talk about how places like Instagram TikTok, and even Google are always gonna be inherently zones of power struggles.

How can community be built, destroyed, and rebuilt essentially in these digital places where power isn't equally shared? We always want power to be equally shared online, but power isn't.

There are so many different theories and ideas and schools of thought about it. But I was looking at how power is created and shared in terms of helping out social activism movements, or giving reverence and credence to minority bodies during a turbulent—and it still is a turbulent—time in the United States.

And I looked at, for example, with the local roaster: How did somebody who's a coffee shop manager, how did he create discourse mainly with his customers and friends and family groups? How did he create discourse to help shed light on the plight of minority baristas or how minorities are mistreated? How did he create space?

And when I looked at the local coffee shop, they did a fundraiser. So I looked at how they created a discourse by creating a fundraiser at a shop level. Then I did a roaster that's nationally known, but essentially regionalized.

And then I looked at the media because the media is always gonna be a key point, of course in just life in general. So I looked at—how did the coffee media react? How did the coffee media give space and credence and change their ways to help marginalize and minority bodies create and build community?

Ashley: Why was this important for you to look at? Or what did you want people to take away from this conversation?

David: I think it was important to look at because it showed how community is created.

Ashley: Mmhmm.

David: I also want people to know that these digital spaces online are always gonna be unequal. That people who have 1.5 million followers are gonna have way more voice, credence, and power than somebody who has 879.

Ashley: That's a good point.

Can you talk a little bit about that idea of digital spaces and power? Because I don't know that those two things—I think when you say it like that, that makes sense. Like, of course, somebody with 1.2 million followers is gonna have more power than somebody with like 837. But I don't know that that tie is necessarily intuitive.

David: No, definitely. I use this analogy of the high school cafeteria. I like to think of some of these apps, it reminds me of high school and I think of fashion. When the really cool, really popular kid in the school wears this avant-garde shirt from a band that they discovered from a friend of a friend, but the band is something like, I wanna say LCD Soundsystem, my favorite band.

But then you have this skater punk or this indie kid who’s been wearing that same LCD Soundsystem shirt for the last two years every other day. But everybody's like, “Oh yeah. Now you're copying the cool kid.” And this kid's like, “No, this is the shirt I've been wearing for the last two years.”

But everybody's like, “No, no, no, the cool person's wearing it. So you're following them.” And that's the kind of power struggle I think of is like—you have these big brands, these influencers, these people with a ton of power, or it doesn't have to be people. We even noticed that even nations have power in these digital spaces that they're using their voices and the whole entire world is listening.

But then you have people who are activists, scholars, even community members who have been like, “We've been saying that for the last 15, 20, 50, 100+ years, and now y'all want to listen to this.”

Ashley: That's really interesting. I think that analogy, number one, was incredibly powerful, but two, how do you rectify something like that? I don't know that there's an answer to it. But is it that cool—like going back to the analogy—is it that cool kid saying, “Oh, I wasn't wearing this shirt first. Like that guy over there was wearing it first.”

But what if that kid didn't even like—I'm just trying to think of, how do we distribute power in digital spaces in a way that does feel more equitable? Again, I don't know if there's an answer to that, but...

David: I don't think there's a real answer just yet, because I've seen, we will see some things where somebody will tag somebody, will tag the person they got the outfit from.

I'm thinking of somebody like Kim Kardashian who might tag or mention saying, “Hey, this is a person's brand I got this from,” it could be a small shop owner, and then next thing you know, they're gaining power and their shop is blowing up, but we're not seeing it enough with everything else just yet. I think it could slowly start happening, but this is not getting enough traction.

Ashley: Right. I think earlier you also said something about community-building. And I think that that's an important term because I think it's really easy for people in the coffee industry to talk about the word “community” as a given, as opposed to a thing that you build and your digital space is part of that too.

David: Yeah. Oh yeah. I think having a digital space that represents the shop, the idea, the values is very important in the coffee industry and in the food industry. Pretty much almost every business in general.

For example, I'm thinking of, when I look up a shop, I look up new shops to go to when I'm traveling to a different city for conferences or for fun, I immediately look at their Instagram page to say, “Hey, is this the vibe that I'm looking for? Is this the kind of drink that I like?”

Because somebody can say, try this shop. Somebody could say, try Shop Oli—I'm just using Oli because my dog is right next to me. They say, “Try Shop Oil,” but they may have a ton of drinks that I may not necessarily find appealing, but somebody else could say, “Go to Chester's Place,” and Chester's Place could have the wildest drinks imaginable that are mind-blowing, pushing the coffee industry, but they only have like 15 followers cuz they're brand-new.

Ashley: How would you make a decision in that situation? And I guess that goes back to the essential question: How do you know a coffee shop is quote-unquote “good”?

David: Yeah. Of course, it's a little bit about trying, but it's also like, is this a community that I wanna be a part of?

Ashley: Do you think that people are conscious of how much decision-making they make based on a person or a brand or a place's digital presence?

David: I think we are now.

I think this pandemic has definitely shown how much credence we've given to digital spaces and digital trends and digital footprints, because I'm thinking of—look at all the dance trends we saw in the early days of the pandemic, like how people were like, “Hey, I'm basing what I'm doing, I'm basing how am I having fun based on what I'm seeing on digital spaces.”

I'm actually working on a really cool project with another scholar. We're looking at like feta-baked pasta on TikTok. How is this influencing the way we look at Mediterranean [cooking], especially Italian dishes?

Ashley: Something that I think I lament about a lot in coffee—I was just reading a book about the history of brunch from one of the colleagues that you actually recommended I talk to, and we'll probably have a conversation with her in the upcoming weeks.

But I was reading this book about brunch and I realized that coffee is not as good at talking about its own history, but with this digital footprint that we're leaving we will have a history that's recorded in just a very different way.

David: Yeah. Yeah. I think we're seeing better, especially in terms of minority voices, we're seeing more, I'm seeing more and more minority voices in marginalized communities speaking in the coffee industry than before.

I'm thinking of people like getchusomegear who have created a community for marginalized and minority coffee and baristas and that's a community being built. That’s people who have connections and are building friendships based on that.

Ashley: Right. And it's completely outside of any physical space or any need for, let's say, capital to buy a building or rent a space for a coffee shop or something like that. Like it's allowing more people into the conversation because the barrier to entry is so much lower.

David: Exactly. I think of cosplay when it comes to these community-building spaces that—I don't wanna say niche, but are a little bit smaller than what we typically would consider. Because look at how cosplay—this is so dating myself…

Ashley: I’m ready.

David: When we're looking at like Xanga, Livejournal, and even early MySpace, where we would see cosplay communities build these fan pages for either their community or just for individuals and how people were able to build friendships and relationships.

People have been married based on them meeting through cosplay groups online!

Ashley: Right. I think I just saw a chart recently that was tracking how people met their spouses over like the last hundred years. And like, I was so surprised—this is maybe silly for me to be surprised by this, but I was so surprised by how many people in like the 50s, 60s, 70s were married to their neighbors.

I can't even imagine that now because we grew up in a digital era, but I think about being online, growing up in the digital era, getting on Facebook for the first time in like the early 2000s and so much of the connections that I've made since then, as an adult, have been through digital spaces.

That chart showed that now, like almost, I think half of people meet their spouses online.

David: Yeah. These digital spaces are integral in our life.

Companies, all companies, have realized it now, but I remember when these digital spaces were being created, like early Instagram and stuff, and people were like, “Oh, it's just a trend. It's not gonna really happen. It's not gonna go down like that.”

And it's totally has. Think about how much of our everyday lives we can do online. Now we can do groceries. We can do our doctor's appointments online now.

Ashley: Right.

David: For me, that's mind-blowing. Cause I, I would never have done a virtual doctor's appointment 15+ years ago, but now I'm like, “Oh, okay.”

Ashley: I was watching an old episode of “30 Rock,” like maybe season one or season two. And that's a show that I would consider pretty modern, but they had flip phones in the first two seasons and I was like, “Oh, like this was not that long ago that we wouldn't have had access to Instagram on our phones.”

We wouldn't have had our emails on our phones. Maybe some people had Blackberries, but now I'm like, you know, after this phone call, I'll probably check my email on my phone, even though my computer's in front of me. But it's just interesting to see how much of—not just how our connection to digital spaces has changed over time, but how influential it's been to our everyday lives.

I'm wondering, as we're kind of thinking of last thoughts in this conversation, what are ways that coffee shops can—or any coffee brand really—think about their digital footprint? Like, do you think that people are taking them seriously enough? Or do you think that there needs to be more investment and…I don't know, that's kind of like a loose question there.

So take it in whatever direction you want.

David: I think it's 50-50, to be honest, I see some shops that are very proactive with their digital footprints. They're honest and talking to their targeted audience. They’re honest when it comes to saying, “Hey, this is what we're doing.” They're essentially showing their everyday lives, their everyday shop-to-shop running—online.

And then other shops are just using [social media] to post a picture, just to hope that somebody's gonna cruise through the shop.

I think it's a little bit of 50-50, where we see some shops still have this mentality that [social media] is kinda like putting a picture in the newspaper, like back in the day we just did newspaper advertisements—they’re using it as that, but other shops are like, “Hey, we can actually build a community and engage with our favorite customers and engage with people who want to ask us questions.”

Ashley: Yeah, it seems like—maybe I'm wrong in this, but it seems like people seem to know that they need to have, like, let's say an Instagram account, or they need to have some sort of digital platform, but it doesn't necessarily seem like everybody has taken that next step mentally to say like, “Oh, but this means something. What I put on here means something beyond just like, ‘Here's a latte, please come in,’ or ‘Our hours are seven to six.’”

David: Yeah, definitely. It's I think—it's just changing the way shops are being run. Now look, shops have changed so much within the last five years that it's almost mind-blowing.

While the way we see stuff, like how point-of-sale is happening, how small, independent shops are doing essentially drive-through services or pickup counters. We're seeing that happening, but I think it is a lot of change happening in these shops. Some people are kind of putting the digital spaces as an afterthought when they need to put them into the forefront.

Ashley: Yeah, I would agree with that because so much can be conveyed through what you see online, but also like it helps identify your—not necessarily your mission. I don't wanna get too preachy, but like what you're about, like what you want people to know about you.

I don't even think we talked about it in this conversation, but something I think about a lot is how we differentiate ourselves in the market. Sometimes I think people are like, “Specialty coffee is oversaturated,” and I would disagree with that. I would say that it's not that we're oversaturated, it's that we're all the same. And there are ways to differentiate who you are versus like who your neighbor is—as long as you think about it, as long as you really say, “This is who I am,” or, “This is what the shop is about. And I need to find ways to communicate that.” And I think having a really strong digital footprint is part of that.

David: Yeah, that’s exactly it. You just have to be you. People are trying to keep up with the Joneses, but I come from the punk DIY scene where people love to express themselves. Self-expression is tantamount in the scenes.

And I think I'm seeing more and more coffee shops having that kind of ethos. So like, yeah, this is us. This is our community. We're a part of this neighborhood. These are some of the community members that are walking through. So let's be part of the community. Let's talk more about a community versus let's trying to act and look like everybody else.

Ashley: David. Is there anything you want people to know about you or listening to you that you'd like people to take away from this conversation?

David: That digital spaces—of course, we all know they're here. That power is always gonna be a little different in them, but like Dr. Safiya Noble talks about in Algorithms of Oppression—the book—is that they're always gonna be almost unequal. But what we're noticing now, especially in the specialty coffee industry, is that people are by being themselves, by having a voice, to give them voices to the marginalized, to minority communities…

And we're starting to see that it's not even a trend. I essentially call it almost like a mini-revolution of change that I'm super excited for. And I can't wait to see what happens in 10 to 15 years when I reflect on today's conversation.

Ashley: David. Thank you so much for taking time to chat with me. I really appreciate it.

David: Of course.

My guest today is Gefen Skolnick, founder of Couplet Coffee. Gefen has been an avid coffee fan for years, and she worked in the tech world before starting her brand. In her previous role, she was tasked with assessing users’ experiences and insights, calling people to learn what they liked and didn’t like about the products they interacted with.

Gefen used this consumer-focused lens to start Couplet. Couplet is a fun, colorful, and, most importantly, approachable brand. On its website, it reminds folks that coffee is “for f*****g everyone.”

It’s no secret that coffee can feel inscrutable or exclusionary. Many assume that, to make it well, you need a certain amount of knowledge, or access to tools and gear that might be expensive or out of reach. Gefen turns those assumptions around, presenting consumers with fun ways to enjoy coffee, and removing the pressure of making a perfect brew.

For me, what pops out of this conversation is how diverse the coffee market really is. Though the industry can feel oversaturated, Gefen reminds us that worrying about a crowded market might not be the result of actual competition, but rather a sign that we’re all pursuing the same target. Couplet is a fresh reminder that we can create fun, interesting, and novel approaches to coffee, and in turn, invite a whole new group of drinkers in who might have otherwise felt too intimidated or unwelcome to participate. Here’s Gefen.

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

Gefen: Yeah, of course. My name is Gefen. My pronouns are she/her. I'm the founder of Couplet Coffee. And for the past few years, I've been thinking and dreaming up what it would be like to start a coffee company. So I'm super excited to chat.

Ashley: What were your first interactions with coffee? Did you grow up with coffee as a child?

Gefen: We could talk about this for like 20 minutes, so I'll try to condense it. But, yes, there was a lot of coffee culture just in my family. And so a lot of our culture is surrounded by having a nighttime coffee, like a Turkish or Armenian coffee.

And it always felt super communal—like by a fire, with a bunch of friends, and I kind of felt that was missing in a lot of the other different cultures that I'd have [coffee]. It's kinda like a grab-and-go situation typically. And so once I graduated from high school, went into college, and I was in this 300-square-foot apartment, and I just wanted to get out at any time that I could.

So I would just go to these different coffee shops. And in high school, I thought Starbucks was the peak of coffee. Like on my birthday, people would just have a bunch of these coffee cups on all the little—you know how everyone brings like the little gifts for your birthday? I just had coffee cups everywhere, all over desks in homeroom, because I thought that that was the best coffee.

Once I was in college and kind of exploring a little bit more of my surroundings—I was at Santa Monica College, I went to community college for a few years—I realized there were other shops, other places to go.

I first found Groundwork Coffee, which I am forever indebted to them because I was so in shock that coffee could taste that way and that people were making cashew milk from scratch. I thought that was insane in the best way, and I was just obsessed and taking everybody there and working from there and studying from there.

Then I discovered on my little walks near the beach that there are other coffee shops around. And then I very much realized that there is a whole ecosystem here that I had no idea about.

Ashley: Are you the type of person who like, gets really into things?

Gefen: (Laughs)

Coffee should be fun! In this newsletter, we do our best to celebrate our favorite morning beverage. To support the work, consider becoming a paid subscriber:

Ashley: Because that to me seems like—I love trying to pick apart like these facets of people's personalities. Like I wonder, are you someone who really passionately pursues interests?

Gefen: Yes. (Laughs) That's exactly what happens. In high school, my first love was basketball and I was extremely obsessed with it. It was probably excessive. That was kind of like the first thing that I fell in love with. And so I was watching YouTube videos during class, after class, of new moves that I wanted to try, new ways to train. I was constantly in the loop on the NBA, WNBA, NCAA—just like obsessed. Before school at like 5:30 a.m., I would try to get to school really early so that the basketball courts were empty and I would just play in the freezing cold and just keep trying to get better. And I was just super obsessed with it.

And after school, obviously, that was what I was doing, too. On the weekends—that's what I was doing. And eventually, I got really good and it became kind of like a really big part of my life, but I was virtually obsessed. My fingers were really messed up constantly from playing outside in the cold and having these little, like little injuries on my fingers constantly—either I had a splint on or some sort of cast, because I just messed up my body from doing it excessively as a kid.

That was the first way that I got obsessed with something. And then coffee! That's why there were seven to 10 coffee cups every birthday, because everybody and their mother knew that I was obsessed with Starbucks at the time.

Side note, we can talk about this later, but I applied to Starbucks to be a barista over a hundred times. That is my villain origin story for sure in coffee.

Ashley: Over a hundred times?

Gefen: I actually wanna go back to my old email from middle school and high school to see how many times—it was 100% more than a hundred times. Because every time I submitted it, it was to like 45+ locations, because I was in the Valley in LA so there was a ton of options for me. Never once heard back. (Laughs)

Ashley: Ugh, that’s a bummer!

Gefen: Yeah, but maybe that's why I became obsessed with one day doing something in coffee. This is probably a very positive thing that happened.

Ashley: It's like the mountain that you could never overcome. So you're like, okay, F this, I’m going to do my own thing.

Gefen: I'm gonna do it myself.

Ashley: I'm trying to even do the math on that. Like, how many times a year you would have to apply to…

Gefen: You have no idea. I'm gonna get you that number because I am now very curious as to what it was.

Ashley: I love math. I love numbers. So you're speaking my language here.

Gefen: Fantastic!

Ashley: At what point, when you were exploring these coffee shops in the Santa Monica area, what kind of switched it for you? When you were like, “Oh, I'm a casual fan,” or someone who is really into coffee, to, “This is something I maybe wanna work in or explore as a business, or maybe even just enmesh myself in more than just a person who goes to the coffee shop every day”?

Gefen: Yeah, that's a great question, because there was absolutely a transition from a person who's just drinking an absurd amount of coffee every day to, “Oh, I wanna know what's happening behind the scenes here.”

I will say it took a very long time for me to get to the point where I was comfortable in even asking certain questions, because I just kind of felt like I—I never really felt that I was supposed to be in those places. And that's historically how I felt, both in tech and other places as well, where I just kind of went into places where I don't necessarily look or act or seem like I belong there.

But, I went to these different shops, and like I said, because I lived in such a small apartment that was not insulated—so it was just either hot or cold all the time, and [there were] not really a lot of places to kind of work from—I just became friends with so many baristas. It was funny, they just like knew that I was just gonna be there all day, most days.

You talk to someone enough that you just start to get curious about their job and what they're doing. It’s not even me going to look into, “This is a business that I wanna start one day.” I never thought that this was something that I'd be doing, especially not right now.

I really did think that tech was my biggest passion in life and that I would be doing it forever and I would start multiple tech businesses and we'll get into that after, but really, I just started looking at the beans.

I was getting bored, you know, taking breaks in between studying. I studied linguistics and computer science in college. I’m not sure how much you know about either of those, but it's just super technical and tough. And you don't wanna think about that for four hours straight. So just like, I'm gonna let my mind wander. And so I picked up some bags and was reading things about elevations and origins.

I was just like, so curious. There's a lot of information on this bag. What does any of this mean? I slowly kind of built up the confidence to ask the baristas, “Like, okay, what does this mean? Why is this bag of beans for espresso specifically?”

And most of my friends and consumers are still like, “Oh my god, I accidentally used my espresso beans in my French press! Oh my god, is it gonna break down?”

I'm like, “Oh my god, no, it's totally fine.” I didn't realize how many people also had those same thoughts. And so I just asked a lot of questions like that. Like, “Okay, why is this bag of Brazilian beans different from this bag of Peruvian beans?” Every kind of time that I'd be there during my breaks, I would be doing that.

They [the baristas] became super friendly with me. It wasn't an annoying thing. I just ended up actually hanging out with some of these people outside of the coffee shop too, which was funny, but yeah, it was just out of complete, sheer curiosity.

I will say it took me a very long time to upgrade my own setup at home because all of the things being sold at the different coffee shops were so much more expensive than I could afford. I was working at AMC Theatres, cleaning bathrooms for 40 hours a week during college. For the first few years in college, until I started teaching computer science to kids to kinda switch it up a little bit.

Even though I might have been able to afford some sort of new grinder, which like, who even knows? It was just so hard to even know, “What do I need to make a cup at home?”

It was just so [a] very big question mark. I just always had assumed that I would never be able to make that same cup at home until one of my best friends, Zach—he's the founder of Gnarwhal Coffee, he is the co-founder of it. We met in 2017 and I used to go to his house and he had a Breville espresso machine and a Breville grinder.

And somehow he just made the best coffee. Sometimes I would just be like, “I don't need to go to a coffee shop today. I'd rather drink your coffee.”

Ashley: I'm just going to your house!

Gefen: I've loitered at his house a lot cause he had a nice apartment and he's a little bit older than me, so I was just so excited to go to his house and hang out and loiter and just like be drinking his coffee all day.

That's when I first discovered, “Oh my god, like, wait—people can make this same taste at home, if not better? And make it tailored to their taste? That's wild.” I had absolutely no idea.

He's the one who pushed me to get that same setup at home. I had that setup for years up until very recently. That's what led me to kind of also push a lot, like dozens of my friends also started getting the same setup at home, because I was just so passionate about the fact that you can do so much with that same setup at home.

Ashley: I feel like you identified so much in that answer. Going back to the very beginning, you mentioned being curious about just looking around and seeing—

Gefen: Just looking around.

Ashley: That there's these Brazilian beans here and there are these Colombian beans here. What's the difference?

And I think what you said that was really fascinating was about how you still have customers to this day who are like, “Oh my gosh, I put my espresso beans into my French press. Like, will it break?” That sounds silly as we say it out loud, but that's a binary that we draw pretty hard in coffee shops. Espresso looks so different than filter coffee, but we don't explain very well why that difference is drawn.

So when people go home and we don't explain it on the bag, or we don't make that information accessible, people might have that freakout moment of like, “Oh no, did I break my equipment by putting my light-roasted Colombian coffee into my grinder and making espresso?”

Because we don't explain that stuff well. The fact that you picked up a bag of beans and you're like, the elevation is on here, but I don't know what that means. Then what's the point of putting it on there?

Gefen: That's why our bags are the way that they are. We don't put a ton of information. We kind of make it obvious that you can reach out and ask us about things. And then we're gonna also continue building out the coffee program, of course. We'll highlight a lot of producers that we work with and farms and things like that, and a lot of that's gonna be super accessible.

But it's like, [consumers] don't need to know the elevation and sometimes even tasting notes. I mean, when I was picking up these bags and seeing tasting notes, like molasses and stone fruit, and just words that I'd never seen before, honestly, that's why it took me probably an extra six months to a year to ask the next questions, because it's just like—if I don't know this basic terminology of just tasting notes, I'm gonna sound super stupid asking any other question, in my opinion.

That's basically the biggest thing for me was the tasting notes, to be honest with you.

Ashley: Right. And then even if you do know what those words mean, if you go home and you taste the coffee and you don't taste those notes, then you're like, “I'm a failure. Like I messed this up.”

Gefen: God. I know.

Ashley: I had this experience and you know, I've been making coffee for a long time, and I was a trainer for a coffee shop in San Francisco when this happened.

And my job was to go to different coffee shops and taste coffee. And I remember going to this one coffee shop and one of the tasting notes was orange wine. And I remember thinking like, “I know what this is only because this is my job, but that is the only reason why I know what this is and what the f**k? This is a tasting note that nobody else is gonna know!”

So it's really interesting that you thought really specifically about what tasting notes convey, because it's another way that we set up folks essentially to fail. And it seems like a lot of what Couplet is founded on were these very personal experiences that you were having, but seemed to mimic a lot of what almost every consumer of coffee is feeling.

Gefen: That's the best way—I couldn't have put it better, honestly. That's exactly what I'm doing. So first it started with my own personal inklings, but then my friends were making fun of me for being obsessed with coffee. They were just calling me bougie and they're like, “Oh my god, like you take so long to make us coffee and blah, blah, blah…”

They just were just making fun of me for having this whole setup at home and having—what's it called? Like a certain grinder that costs a little bit more all of a sudden. And I went from having my Mr. Espresso one-group little guy—it was like $30 at Bed Bath and Beyond—to having this Breville at home and people were just making fun of it.

But then they would try the coffee. And it was the same thing, like when I went to my friend Zach’s house: It was comparable to that $5, $6, $7 latte. And that's when they changed too.

My only argument really with Couplet is that we just need to stop judging people for how they consume coffee and just educate a little bit more in a non-pretentious way. That's literally all I'm about.

Ashley: Right. The reactions that I get from people when I talk to them about coffee, especially non-coffee people, it tells me a lot about the perceptions that we have as a society about coffee.

So people will be like, “Don't judge me, but I'm doing this.”

And I'm like, “Why would you think that I would judge you?”

And then I have to remember that it's not about me. It's about what society has imbued in us about how coffee is consumed. That we have these very difficult-to-access coffee shops, where we treat coffee like it’s this precious thing in certain spaces. But then in other spaces, you can go to a bodega or you can go to a diner and get coffee without any pretension or fuss.

That has to be really confusing for people. I realized that as people were reflecting this onto me like, “Oh, don't judge my coffee.”

And I'm like, “I'm drinking coffee that I brewed—not even I brewed—brewed five hours ago because my boyfriend was up much earlier than I am. And if he's not home, I will make instant coffee because I'm the laziest person alive.”

And I have to tell this story to people to get them into a safe place where they feel not judged by their coffee consumption. It's just funny to see you talk about your evolution, but still getting like this reaction from your friends, because that just reflects on a lot of the things that you were talking about earlier—about not necessarily feeling comfortable asking questions about coffee, not feeling comfortable being like, “Okay, I'm gonna pick up this bag, but what does this all mean?”

Gefen: Yeah. I think, especially when we talk about literally just coffee grinders—let’s just isolate coffee grinders in this argument.

We are gonna introduce a $30 price point for a coffee grinder and yes, it's gonna be a hand grinder. And it's because my friends, when they go to these coffee shops with me, the only thing that they're selling in terms of a way to grind your beans at home is like a $140 grinder.

Some of my friends come—as of more recently—come from more privilege and money, but most of my friends don't, especially my friends from college and community college and growing up. I'm a first-gen immigrant, a lot of my friends were first-gen immigrants. They would think this is hilarious.

There are a couple of little things that people notice when they go into shops and sometimes it's the tasting notes. Other times it's like, “I can't believe y'all are paying $140 for a coffee grinder. Like, are you joking? That’s not even like making the coffee yet.”

Those things, I think, have led to so many people—I wish we could do a study on this—to just not even go into it, not even ask the questions, because they're like, “I can't even afford this. I would never buy that. Why would anyone buy this?”

That's gonna be the attitude of so many people. I've seen it in the dozens—probably, if I think about it, at least a hundred people I've come in contact with, in my life, in the past 10 years, have gone into coffee shops with me and been like, “Oh, that's hilarious. This is a joke right?”

It was my choice to go on my journey, to put a lot of money and effort into it, because I find a lot of joy in the process of making coffee, but I think that a lot of people don't recognize that not everyone needs to be like you, but they should also have access to good coffee, or they should at least try it, or we should make it a little bit more accessible for other people, and we just don't all need to act the same.

And not everyone wants to make little swirlies in a pour-over. I love it. I think it's so fun. And so meditative. A lot of my other friends, when I make them pour-overs, they're laughing out loud. They think it's hilarious.

I just think we need to recognize that there are so many different types of coffee drinkers, but again, just my only argument is that they should all enjoy coffee, not depending on how much money they can spend on the setup.

Ashley: For me as a person who's worked in coffee for years who has spent so much time almost idolizing this hoity-toity pretentiousness that coffee was like in 2010, 2011, 2012, where I remember going to a coffee shop once in New York and there was like four things on the menu.

It was like espresso, espresso with milk, and maybe espresso with chocolate, and I thought that that was like the f*****g coolest thing in the world.

And as I reflect on that, now I'm like, “What?!?! How could anybody read that menu and be like, ‘I just want a latte. I don't know what any of this is.’”

It's really interesting to hear you reflect that idea back too, of like, people can think whatever they want about your setup, but that doesn't mean that they can't have good coffee.

“Tell me what your budget is, and I can get you a delicious setup no matter where you're at.” We should be doing more of this work—and I do think coffee is getting to that point. I think more and more people, as I go to different coffee shops, as I talk to more people thinking about what hospitality and customer service look like, I'm starting to see that sea change.

But I wonder with your background in tech, how did that inform the way that you approached coffee, and maybe we can get a little bit into your background before you started Couplet?

Gefen: I—and this was kind of my next obsession in life—when I quit basketball, I discovered computer science. I got really into computer science because it was like the one thing that really humbled me to my core in high school.

I was kind of like a little jock, not in the worst way, but just kind of a little jock, like chillin’ it in class, making jokes, always got the little “talks too much in class” and still getting good grades, even though I was not really studying much so really needed to be humbled.

I took AP computer science in my senior year of high school, which was when I quit basketball. And then I just completely reinvented myself and found my new obsession and my new passion. I started off doing software engineering. That was kind of what initially piqued my interest. And I went to community college because I couldn't afford to go directly into college.

So I knew, junior year, I was gonna go to community college for sure. Spend about three years in community college. And that was really crucial. Those three years—I took an extra year to finish up classes—but those three years were really crucial because I got a lot of time to explore what I really wanted to do, a lot of extra time to do some research on like, “What are things that I can do with computer science? Does it have to be software engineering? Probably not.“

You only discover that typically later, but I was just barging into doors that community college students were not welcome in. I would go to these professional women developer conferences and all of these different things, and get scholarships to go on trips, and do these little hackathons where you create products in 48 hours and compete for prizes from big tech companies.

I learned a significant amount, just doing a whole lot of that and very quickly realized, “Okay, I actually don't really care to do non-consumer-facing stuff,” which is super relevant because it was kind of another thing where this was just replicating high school: I had a passion, I was pursuing the passion, and the classes didn't matter. I worked at a bunch of different consumer companies like Hulu and Tesla, and like super small five-person apps for consumers.

That's when I started studying a lot of human behavior and understanding consumers or people, and that I’m a person and not everything is about marketing—it's about connecting. And there's community, and literally, all of that was because of those roles in tech. I otherwise would probably kind of build for me and my needs and what I think.

At Tesla and at Hulu specifically, we would work with user research—if there is a user research team, we usually kind of tell them who we need and get the information. But at Tesla, even though it was a huge company, I had to get on calls with people who own Teslas and ask them about certain issues and have just conversations, human to human, to like understand what we could build on the tech side.

I apply that same philosophy now as a product manager when I had to do a bunch of user research so that I could tell developers and engineers what to build next. It's kind of the same thing, right?

I'm like: One, remembering that every consumer is a person with needs and problems, and my goal is to build alongside them and take their advice and their needs very seriously. And that's just my philosophy with Couplet is, “Cool. I had a lot of these personal experiences. I saw a lot of my friends have these experiences,” and the reason why people have been really receptive to Couplet, in my opinion, is that I have been building it alongside people.

Being like, “Hey, I am very new to coffee. I am gonna ask a lot of questions.” And I don't even think that a lot of people in coffee have answers to these questions. How about we talk to the consumers and how about I have conversations multiple times a week with people who I've never met before, who found Couplet somehow on the internet and asked them why they like it, what they hated about it, what could be better? What is it about the packaging that really spoke to you? Is there something you wish you saw in there? Is there information we're missing?

I mean, I just asked a bunch of questions. I'm still really new to coffee and I still ask a bunch of stupid questions, but it's just like, that's my building philosophy, right? I took a lot of those learnings from the tech world.

Ashley: I was listening to an interview that you did with Modern Retail with Cale Weissman, who I used to work with. In the interview, you mentioned that you interviewed a couple hundred people. I kind of wrote it down as a hundred, but you said a couple hundred, and I'm gonna even extrapolate outward that you've probably interviewed, at this point…

Gefen: Yeah, hundreds, yeah.

Ashley: Hundreds, maybe in the thousands at this point, because based on all of what you've talked about, working in a way to figure out what people want or what people are looking for. And I think that that's something that's often missing in coffee. I think we often do things without considering—who is this for?

Gefen: That's literally exactly what I've been telling everybody.

I will say I am a big fan of a lot of the brands that have been like, “Okay, so what's next?” Like, are they gonna do something more interesting? Like, are we gonna go funky? Are we gonna learn from other DTC brands or streetwear brands—how are we gonna expand on what it means to a coffee brand?

I just kind of waited for someone to do something like that. And a lot of them do coffee, so, so well, and I was waiting for that. But I also kind of felt like a lot of these different coffee brand owners were building for them and their friends and their fellow roasters.

I just felt like a lot of me and my friends and coffee consumers, that was my original thought was I just don't think that they care. I just think they're building for each other. I agree with you. That's just kind of been what I've seen, but again, I still have a lot of respect for what has been done—significant amount of respect.

Ashley: Right, right. It's not to say that anybody's doing anything bad, but it seems like—and maybe you can speak a little bit to this, because I have to imagine that this maybe is informed a little bit by your background, maybe this is just something you've observed—but it seems like we're pursuing this single exit in coffee where quality is the only target. And how we measure quality is also very narrow.

So not only are we pursuing a very narrow target, but we've even narrowed that even further by being, “Quality looks like a Gesha quality, looks like a 90+ coffee from the Cup of Excellence” versus, oh, maybe quality can look like we bought a past-crop coffee and we were able to roast it excellently.

Maybe we were able to buy all of the coffee from this one producer and sell it all for premium. There are other things that are valuable in coffee that we sometimes, I think forget, but could really benefit us.

Like people care about their coffee being fun and approachable. People care that they can pick up a bag of beans and feel successful. Going back to that idea of tasting notes can kind of set us up to fail—people wanna go home and have that feeling of like, “I made this coffee and look how cool my stuff looks and I made this and I'm gonna drink it and it's gonna taste f*****g awesome because I made it and I feel great.”

Gefen: Yeah, there's that, but another part to that, which I think is really funny, is when people—so when I looked up videos, when I was first starting out and I still look at the same videos today of what's kind of the best way to brew like this or that, I think that one thing that we also forget as coffee people is that not everyone wants to weigh things.

I think none of my friends will ever weigh things. It'll make them feel way too bougie and they think it's unnecessary. I drink Couplet every day, and multiple times I have just completely messed up the recipe or it was just extracted so poorly, but it still tasted good.

And I think that's the thing that really deters a lot of other people as well that I've noticed. They're gonna get another expensive thing, like a scale, and not only do they not want that as an extra step, but I will argue—and we've had this in our copy. Michelle [Johnson] actually wrote this copy for us when we made our how-to guides for the Moka pots and French presses, Michelle from Ghost Town Oats—basically I was like, “Hey, let's add something in there that’s like, ‘By the way, if you mess any part of this up it's okay. And also it still might taste great.’” Like that's just it, you know?

Ashley: Right. Setting people up to not fail. How can we make people feel like they won every time they brew?

Gefen: Yeah, that's the thing is like I've made many a sour coffee, many a coffee that was just, nah, just extracted poorly, but it was still actually really good. And so when I mess up things to the gram on a scale, I think that that's okay. And I think a lot of the times it might not be super relevant for everybody in the way that they wanna make coffee at home.

Ashley: Something else that you mentioned in that interview was that you've used social media to test different thesis—thesis? The—I'm not sure how the plural of that is, but that you've used social media to test different ideas that you've had about coffee and to see if they're viable at all, or if people are interested in them, which I think really speaks a lot to like the scientific method of just trying new things and seeing if things work.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. What are some of the things that you tested on social media and what have you learned from putting stuff out on TikTok or on Instagram or just out for the world, for people to consume?

Gefen: Every single thing that I've done has been a test so far. Like every single thing, it just seems like weird, and for a reason. I think we are trying to be the weird brand, weird, but in a fun and approachable way.

I would say one of the tests that I had—so like, I was looking for ways to source coffee equipment that was just more affordable and also just fun.

I just didn't wanna put out some sort of—I didn't even know if I was gonna do equipment, that wasn't even the plan. I did this test and ran with it and it did really well. And I was super surprised, but also not super surprised, because I just had this intuition that people would be down for funkier-looking coffee equipment.

So I went and searched for a couple months for what that was. I got our cow-print Moka pot, and I was just like, “Listen, we have a queer audience and people who like our bags, I think that they would like something that looks different, even if they're not queer.” Also Urban Outfitters has noticed that people like cow print. I just went there the other day and saw a bunch of cow print stuff, so it's definitely reaching a wider target audience than that.

But that was my first thing was like, “Okay, I think people would be down to have like a non-stainless-steel Moka pot.” That was just my only intuition. I made a video with both the cow-print Moka pot and our lover's French press, which is just this red French press with a heart in it. And I literally just took the samples that I got and made a video. Like, “Would you guys like this?” Made a video about it and then the video went pretty viral.

I had, I think it was 800 comments that were super aggressive, like really funny aggressive, like “Drop the link now or I'll kill your mother.” Crazy s**t like that. Super funny. Then they were like, “Oh, we'll rob you if you don't do this.” Or like, just, if you go through that video, I'll link you after if you want.

But it was just really funny, like really funny how passionate people were about having these things. I just like, don't get why nobody else has done this before. This feels like low-hanging fruit to have something that looks just like more fun. I'm not innovating here.

I'm just offering something a little bit different and it's like, I didn't do any real innovation. I just saw something that I thought would be cool and oh, people are obsessed with it. And then every time someone buys or we gift it to somebody and they make videos with it on TikTok—even the other day, there's a pretty big creator who made a video with our cow-print Moka pot. And then we like made a couple thousand dollars that day just because that video.

People haven't seen it before. That's kinda like one of the ways that I tested and then I immediately bought a ton of them, and I was in a big rush and there were supply chain issues, but anyways. Now it's part of our offerings and we're in a bunch of different retail locations with it. And we're selling out of them because people just haven't seen something like that before.

They're used to the same run-of-the-mill, either matte black or stainless steel equipment, and it's usually priced pretty high. But I thought that a Moka pot and a French press would be a really good entry point for people. So, yeah, that was the one major test that I ran that was super successful, and I was excited about.

Ashley: What I'm taking from this conversation is two main things:

One of them is that you're not afraid to observe people. You're not afraid to notice what they're looking at, or even just notice what's popular around you. The fact that you went to an Urban Outfitters and it's like, “Oh, there's cow print here,” or, “Oh, I saw this somewhere else. Let me just try this out and see if this works in this arena.”

Two: It seems like you're able to put a lot of things together and notice where there's gaps and you've talked a little bit about that—that there are definitely gaps in the coffee industry.

I think this whole conversation is kind of an ode to all the gaps in the coffee industry. But I was wondering like, as you were collecting interviews, as you were talking to people, what stood out to you and what do you think Couplet is responding to?

Gefen: I mean, even if we just hone in on the bag: We are now doing pretty, pretty damn well in retail. Like I'm focusing on like, a couple loca—well, that's not a couple, we're like at 20 now, but, we're in a couple retail locations. And it's funny when I went to New York, I think we had like seven accounts there that I went to and went and took some pictures.

Every time you see Couplet on a shelf, it stands out because of the holographic nature of the bag, but it's also super maximalist and a lot of super fun elements on it. But it's funny, when you walk past it—this was by design—but when you walk into a store, you walk into any store or if you're in a different aisle, the light reflects off the bag. You're gonna, it's gonna catch your eye whether you like it or not. That is the first thing that people, they look at it, they pick it up, they're like, “Oh, that's cool.”

I think the funny thing about Couplet is that there's an element of surprise. If something looks really, really pretty, you don't think it's gonna taste good. So it's funny because then people end up really liking it. We get a lot of people posting about Couplet all the time. They're like, for some reason, super passionate about it.

And this is the gap. Why are people so passionate about Couplet as a brand? Like why are people posting about it constantly? And we're small—we launched two months ago—posting about it constantly like DMing me.

And we're gonna post this on Instagram today, but DMing me hilarious paragraphs about how much Couplet has brightened their day just by having really good-tasting beans, but also something to like really show off on their counter. It's always something that they like to put on their counters, almost decor.

For some reason, they’re just obsessed with the cow-print Moka pot, the French press. For some reason, a lot of the people that are into cow-print end up interacting with each other and share tips and stuff and recipes, and it's because that audience is not the typical specialty coffee audience.

And I will say a lot of specialty coffee people are also still impressed with the quality of Couplet. Because of the nature of who is a part of Couplet, whether it's a lot of the people in the queer community who they've just never seen a really very queer brand for coffee—and like so many people drink coffee. So it's been super easy to connect with that, but it's the offerings that are queer. It's the offerings that are fun and it just feels a little bit more inclusive.

We're tweeting funny stuff about making fun of people who make fun of others for how they drink coffee at home. And they haven't seen a coffee brand do that, especially when they're positioned as a specialty brand.

So I think there's multiple elements where I just felt a lot of people were maybe fans of brands, but were they posting about it all the time, were they really excited about it? Are they telling their friends about it? Are they buying every new thing that we're putting out? Are they reaching out to us to say how excited they are? I just didn't see that happening with other brands. And I'm sure that it absolutely exists and it will continue to exist. But I just wanted to create a brand that felt more like you're a part of something. That was the gap.

Ashley: Yeah, that's a really good point. It's something that I've heard only talked about when people are talking about former employees. Maybe this is a jump, but go with me here. We're gonna take a journey.

Gefen: Let's do it.

Ashley: I feel like when people leave a job in a really amicable way, those are the people that are gonna talk about that place well.

Those are the people who are gonna be, they're like your alumni, almost. “You should apply for this job here. I had a great time working there,” or, “You should buy coffee from this place because I used to work there like, and it's so much fun,” versus when you leave a job and it's not amicable or not even memorable, then you never really mention it.

It seems like a lot of that rhetoric is kind of being applied to the way that you think about Couplet with like—you want people talking about this, your best marketing is other people sharing their passion for your brand. And we don't think about that in coffee. You're absolutely right.

There are very few coffee bags that I would pick up and be like, “I'm gonna tell everybody about this,” or “I'm gonna take a photo and put it on my social media,” or "I'm gonna message you directly and be like, ‘I loved this,’” like that, that doesn't happen. We don't think about that.

Gefen: Yeah, I just haven't seen it. And like I said, I'm sure there's things that have existed that I have just not seen, but I wanted to create sheer excitement and joy from my brand that embodies my values and principles.

And obviously these things—I have a lot more to learn and do in this world, but just core stuff, I feel like people honestly just connect with others on a human level or with brands on that level if they just feel heard.

I always like to DM everybody who's posted and like, “Hey, how do you feel about this? If you didn't like this bag, or if it wasn't as fresh as you expected, I will personally send it myself, from my apartment, not from our fulfillment center. I will go to a roastery and grab a bag for you.”

That's another element that I had also not seen is Instagram and all that—all of the ads just felt like the same thing over and over again, like this is just a bag. Someone is showing me the same visual of someone like pouring, just making a pour over. I could not decipher the multiple ads that I see from coffee brands. Could not decipher which brand was. I wanted us to be like, “Oh, that's Couplet. Oh, that's so Couplet.”

And even before we launched and we were just doing the limited-edition drops and things like that, and people were like, “Oh, that's so Couplet.” And we didn't even have our brand identity done. But we had a voice though. And I think the voice is what stuck with people.

It's just something recognizable, but just different in that people connect with it. That's it really.

Ashley: Is there anything that you'd want people to know about either you or Couplet that maybe wouldn't be obvious from reading about you or even listening to this? What would you want people to take away from this?

Gefen: That's a good question. I would say one takeaway is that I am not self-made and I know absolutely nothing. And the only reason I accomplished anything that I've ever accomplished in my life is because I just ask a ton of questions. I don't think Couplet is perfect and I think we could do better and be better.

And I think that's the same for me, but I always welcome opinions, rebuttals, feedback, negative feedback, criticism … all of those things. I'm very open to hearing different people's opinions. Whether it's something that I said on this podcast or tweeted or whatever, I'm just happy to collaborate and chat in positive ways with other people.

So I hope that's clear, uh, and also, yeah, nobody, nobody is self-made. So I think that we should just acknowledge that, that like me going to UCLA to study computer science and then going and working at Tesla and raising money to like start a coffee brand. You know, there's a lot of privilege that went into that.

And I just like want to be clear about the fact that there's privilege in everything that I've done, and I'm trying to give back in the best ways that I can. If anyone who ever wants to reach out and ask how to start a business, or has coffee questions and things like that, I'm very open to chatting.

Ashley: Gefen, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

Gefen: Thank you so much. This was fun.

This week, I wanted to release some bonus content just for Boss Barista paid subscribers—thank you so much for your support!

Following last week’s podcast interview with Julien Langevin, the 2022 United States Cup Tasters Champion, we recorded a few extra, off-the-cuff questions. In this short audio extra, Julien breaks down how he tastes and assesses coffee, how his diet has changed to prepare for the World Cup Tasters Competition in June, and how anyone at home can get better at tasting coffee.

Read on for his tips, and get tasting!

Ashley: So Julien, for people listening, how can they taste coffee better?

Julien: Oh my gosh. Taste a lot of different coffee: Taste dark roasts, taste light roasts, taste under-developed roasted coffee, taste over-developed—I don't even know if that's the thing for us to…

Ashley: That could be, that could be!

Julien: Taste other people’s coffee, taste coffee spiked with different acids, taste coffee with milk in it. Taste coffee with no milk, but sugar—just taste all different kinds of coffee.

Ashley: For people at home who maybe don’t work in coffee shops every day, or maybe just brew one pour-over at home, is there a way for them to unlock maybe another level of being able to taste their coffee? I agree with you. I think tasting side-by-side is the single most important thing you can do to build your palate.

Especially when you’re starting out. The thing I always tell people: I used to host a weekly cupping for a general crowd. Like anybody off the street could come in and I would tell people, “I don’t want you to say a flavor. I just want you to tell me that this tastes different than this, because this is X or this is Y,” and, “This is sweeter. This is heavier. This is that.” Just being able to contrast the flavors is what I want you to start [with].

Julien: Oh yeah. I don’t even think, especially when I’m doing triangulations, I do not think about flavor. Flavor is like, the last thing that comes to my mind.

Actually, it’s funny, because when I first started tasting, I was really good at calling out flavor descriptors, but now as I’ve tasted more, it’s actually like one of the more challenging things for me to do, because I immediately A) assess roast quality and B) I will go to mouthfeel, acidity, bitterness, sweetness—like any of those qualities before I’ll even be like, “Oh, that tastes like strawberries.” You know?

Ashley: Yeah, that makes sense. I think when people look at coffee bags, there’s so much pressure to like, “Okay, this tastes like molasses and gingerbread and chocolate. Okay. I need to get those flavors.” But I think what you’re saying is that you can taste a coffee and just look for balance. Like, does this taste sweet?

Julien: Oh, yeah.

You can also just feel like, “Oh, I like that,” or, “Oh, I don’t like that.” It doesn’t have to be this super intellectual process. You can literally just be like, “Oh, that feels good on my mouth or it doesn’t.”

Ashley: When you’re looking at those three cups of coffee in front of you, do you have a protocol for yourself internally where you’re like, “Okay, this is how I’m going to taste these three, and this is how I’m going to make a decision about which one is the odd one out?”

Julien: Yeah. I always taste the middle cup last, so I’ll go like left, right, and middle. It’s kind of funny, cause triangulations are like a logic problem. So obviously two are the same; one is different. So if you can determine the two that are the same, then you automatically have the different one.

I haven’t taken my Q [grader exam] but they’ll apparently teach you in the Q to solve it like that—or I call it in my head fact-checking, like I’ll fact-check what I think I’m tasting against the other ones. And yeah.

Ashley: Is there anything you’re looking for in each cup? Are you trying to be like, “This tastes heavy in my mouth, or this tastes … I’m getting a lot on the back of my tongue,” and then you get to the next one, and you’re like, “I’m not getting that in this one.” How are you trying to do that fact-check?

Julien: It’s interesting. A lot of people I’ve talked to, they’re like, “Oh, I only look for this,” or, “Oh, I only look for that.”

I mentioned it before, it’s kind of like a synesthesia thing where I do a color association, or a lot of times it’s almost like a—I don’t want to say a sonnet, like in my mouth where like the journey—the flavor, or the coffee—takes in my mouth.

It lasts like a few seconds, but it’s like a tingling. It’s really hard to describe, but it’s like the rhythm of the mouthfeel is like the only way I can describe it, where it’s how, in what order, in what way does the coffee affect, physically, your sensors in your mouth.

And that’s what I look for when I do a triangulation. It’s weird because as simple as you can make it, the better off you’ll be. But also you want to assess everything about the coffee—you don’t want to, in my opinion, only be looking for one quality, because that might not be present in any of the coffees you’re tasting.

Ashley: It seems like you’ve really tailored your way that you taste to the way that you just experience flavor in general, because everything that you said about the sonnet that performs, essentially, on your tongue, I was like, “Yeah, I get that.” Because if you watch any cooking competitions, they talk about that too.

About how they discover new flavors with every bite, or they talk about building flavor. And I feel like we don’t really talk about that a lot in coffee, the idea of building flavor or what complex flavors look like on top of each other—it seems like we actually have a very one-dimensional way we experienced flavor, which is like, we look for balance and we look for these tasting notes.

Everything you said reminded me of watching a cooking competition and being like, “That’s how they talk about flavor.” And it seems like you’ve identified that as a strategy that works for you.

Julien: Yeah, which is funny because I don’t really—people ask me a lot, they’re like, “Oh, are you really into food and tasting food?” Actually, I have a very—and especially now that I’m prepping for worlds—I have a very limited diet. So it’s like funny, but I guess makes sense.

And it’s funny that you mentioned that we have such a one-dimensional view because coffee is so multi-dimensional in its flavor, just like chemically. So yeah, that’s really funny.

Ashley: Tell me about your competition diet. I can guess because I’m like, oh yeah, you’re eliminating things that are over-powering to like, make sure that your palate stays really sharp so that things pop out to you more. But can you talk a little bit about that?

Julien: Yeah. Going into the U.S. [competition], I cut out anything that was super acidic or—I haven’t eaten spicy food in a long time, anything super acidic I feel like I cut out, but going into worlds, I’m also cutting out salt and pepper, basically any seasoning, and then I’m doing some water calibration, so yeah.

I dunno, maybe it might be overkill, but I’m pulling out all the stuff.

Ashley: I’ve heard of roasters who cut out sugar ahead of the Q to see if they can perceive sweetness more acutely. So like, that’s something I’ve heard.

Julien: Yeah, I have a sweet tooth, so I don’t know if I’ll do that, but I’ve heard a lot of stuff about the Q. One person told me that people eat only oatmeal going into the Q. So when I went to qualifiers two years ago, I only ate oatmeal, but I was so miserable. I was so hungry and just sad.

So something I learned from that was it’s more important to feel normal, I think, than it is to have that kind of sensitivity, I guess. It’s more important when you, for Cup Tasters specifically, to feel as normal as possible in such an abnormal situation like tasting coffee on a stage.

I talked to some people at nationals and they were like, “Yeah, I didn’t even eat this morning,” but they were like competing at 1 p.m. and I was like, what? Like, what is—no! Like, just eat food and then get coffee back on your palate. All that matters is you have coffee on your palate before you taste and, in my opinion, you’ll be fine, but whatever, it’s whatever.

Ashley: You talked a little bit about how those triangulations can kind of be structured. It can be coffees from a different country, or it can be coffees from the same country, but different regions. Do you know anything about some of the cups that you tasted?

Julien: I honestly don’t know. It was funny—I was talking to one person and they were like, “Oh those were like super dark,” but it’s so weird. I’ve heard this before I even went to qualifiers: You always want to practice with a range of roast levels because you never know what’s going to be up there.

I was talking to one guy who went to nationals before and he was like, “Yeah, the coffees were super light and fruity and it was so easy to tell the differences in flavor,” but I mean, the coffee [that] is up there, they give an Agtron rating, it’s like 55 to 70 on an Agtron is the range.

So you’re not going to have too much variance. I don’t think they were dark, in my opinion, they were probably solid medium roast. But the company I work at, we do a lot of medium roasts, so the coffee I was practicing with was probably similar roast levels.

My advice is to always just practice with a range of coffee because you never know who the sponsored roaster is going to be. You never know how they’re going to—in my opinion, I couldn’t tell you where the coffee was from; I’m not that well-calibrated to that specific thing, but I will say they were all roasted very well. Like there was no underdeveloped or spotty coffees. They were just well-roasted, medium-roasted coffees, from my perspective.

Ashley: Well, I hope people listening to this will feel more confident tasting coffee.

Julien: Cool, me too.

Photo by Matthew Temple

Hi, hello! If you’re here for the first time, welcome! Your contributions make the show possible, so if you can, please consider supporting the show financially by subscribing below and picking one of the paid subscription options:

Today, I’m sharing an interview with Julien Langevin, a production worker for Coffee by Design and the 2022 United States Cup Tasters Champion. If you’re a longtime listener of the show, you’ve probably heard us talk about barista competitions, but maybe you didn’t know that there are contests designed to test and celebrate pretty much every aspect of how coffee gets to your cup. From brewing and roasting to latte art, coffee cocktails, and tasting, these competitions occur annually in conjunction with the World Barista Championship.

The World Cup Tasters Competition asks competitors to taste a set of three cups of coffee: Two are the same, and one is different. Though that may sound simple enough, this is an extremely challenging task. Competitors are also timed and perform in front of a screaming crowd, so Julien’s accomplishment is no mean feat.

When you win a competition like this, there’s an idea that you have to capitalize on it—that you have to take the opportunity to move your career to the next level. But as we explore in this episode, linear career trajectories often fail workers, particularly those of marginalized identities. To compete in the U.S. Cup Tasters Competition, Julien had to qualify at a regional event, which took place before COVID; for a long time, it was unclear whether they would even get to compete on a national stage. During that period, while waiting to hear about the fate of the competition, Julien actually left coffee because they were forced to step behind the bar again and work as a barista, a job they didn’t want to do and which didn’t line up with their interests or personal needs.

Julien’s interview will make you question why we often fall into very typical, very linear modes of upward mobility, and how we view the dignity of work. For example, most people in coffee start off as baristas, but there’s truly no reason for that. Now that Julien is a national champion, there are expectations that he’ll do something “big” next—but he’s quite content to learn and grow in his current position. As Julien says in the interview, “There is a place for everyone in coffee who wants to be here,” and this requires thinking critically about how we view work, what career progression actually means, and how we can find space for everyone to express their skills and be happy at work—whatever industry they’re in.

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

Julien: Hi, thank you so much for having me on the show, Ashley. My name is Julien Langevin. I am a production worker and roaster and I live in Portland, Maine.

Ashley: I like that you giggled to yourself a little bit there. It's just funny, because we've been talking for like the last 20 minutes before we even started recording. And then the minute recording starts, it's like a totally different game, but I feel like I don't help it because I put on, like, my podcasting voice, and it just feels different.

So I apologize for setting that scene in a funny way, but here we are.

Julien: I also always feel weird, like, introducing myself. I'm like, how much information should I give right now? Because they're going to know a lot by the end of this. So how much do I really need to say right now? But I guess just name, job description, location. Probably? Yeah.

Ashley: I do a fair amount of freelance writing. And at this point, I feel like the longer I've been writing, the shorter my bio has gotten—to a point, I'm sure at one point it's gonna be like, “Ashley is a person who wrote this article,” and that's it. That's all I'm going to have on there.

Julien: That would be such a power move. You're just like, “Yep. This is just me. And I just wrote this.”

Ashley: Yeah. You don't need to know anything else about me.

Julien: Yep.

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

Julien: I did. My dad actually just quit drinking coffee, but I grew up drinking coffee—I didn't grow up drinking coffee, but I grew up watching him drink coffee, and he was in the Navy and he always would tell me, it was like a quintessential phrase: “The best cup of coffee tastes like the bottom of a dirty ashtray.”

And I was like, okay. Obviously, following that, I was a dark roast drinker for most of my life up until 2018. In high school, I would go to Tim Hortons all the time in the morning and get like, a hazelnut hot coffee with like cream in it. That was just like my comfort drink before school sometimes.

Ashley: When did you start working in coffee?

Julien: I was 18 and I was in college and I got my first apartment and I needed a job. So I applied at the Starbucks down the street and I started at nine bucks an hour, 40 hours a week, and I worked at Starbucks for three-and-a-half months.

It was great. I mean, the job was wild and so overstimulating and me, just like a little 18-year-old who had really only worked at a movie theater before that, it was like, “Whoa, okay, this is a real job.”

I think I went to work at a soup shop after that, but—

Ashley: I think it's interesting that you mentioned it's overstimulating, because I imagine—I think about myself as like an 18-year-old—I also worked at a movie theater when I was 18. And I was an usher, so I didn't have to talk to anybody. I didn't sell tickets. I didn't sell concessions, but even that I would look at the menu and I'd be like, “Okay, there are like nine things on this menu. That's a lot of things.”

And then going to Starbucks where there are 8,000 things on the menu and you can make any custom ridiculous drink you want. I have to imagine at 18 that must've been such a cognitive overload.

Julien: It was, but I feel like it was good for me in a way, because I feel like I learned bar flow real quick, kind of out of necessity. There was no real training. They just kinda throw you on the floor and were like, “Sink or swim bud.” And I was like, okay.

After that, after Starbucks, everything else, every other coffee job kind of seemed manageable, you know?

Ashley: Fair. My first coffee shop job was in Times Square in New York.

Julien: Oh my.

Ashley: And nothing holds a candle to it in terms of difficulty. I'm like, if I could work at this place, I can work anywhere. Like try me, give me 20 drinks to do, and I'll do it.

Julien: Line them up all the way down the counter. I don't care.

Ashley: I got this. This is fine. This is like, an easy Thursday.

At what point did you realize like, “Oh, this is a thing that I kind of like. Maybe I can do this in a different job, or maybe I could do this as like, a career for a little.”

Julien: It was probably after I graduated school, college. I had worked at a couple shops, like on and off through school. And then I started working full-time as a barista after I graduated in 2018.

The shop I worked at, they were sending us to SCA [Specialty Coffee Association] events, so I started witnessing the national coffee community and I was like, “Oh, okay. This is actually something people do for their whole lives.” And I was like, “This is kinda cool.” I started like tasting more, I started cupping for the first time, and I was like, “Whoa, wait, okay. This is actually a really cool thing that I can nerd out on.” I think then I was hooked.

Ashley: So you mentioned cupping, you mentioned tasting, which I love.

It's fun that you were thinking about, like, how do I introduce myself? Because I'm going to do an intro where I introduce you, and I'll introduce you before we start this episode as the current United States Cup Tasters Champion.

So I was wondering, for listeners who maybe don't know what that competition is—it's kinda like the Wild West, I think—but can you describe what it's like, what this competition is?

Julien: It's the only U.S. comp—and I guess, global competition, without judges. So it's pretty sudden-death of the results [coming in] immediately, which is kind of terrifying, but also pretty exhilarating.

So basically—at qualifiers and nationals this year, there were six sets, but at worlds there will be eight sets—but six sets of what they call triangulations, which is pulled from a test, it's part of the Q grader certification. It's one of the many tests that you have to take to become a Q grader.

So basically a triangulation is three bowls of coffee. One is different and two are the same. And you have to pick out the different coffee in the shortest amount of time. And there are two factors that can help you succeed or fail you: You have to be fast and you have to be accurate.

Ashley: I feel like you say that, and I feel like people will listen to it and be like, “Oh, okay. So three coffees in front of me, one of these things is not like the other,” is essentially the game you're playing. And I feel like people will listen to this and be like, “Oh, that's easy.” It is not f*****g easy.

Especially cause you can really vary it, like maybe you can speak to this from your experiences, but maybe you can tell the difference between a Sumatran coffee and an Ethiopian coffee. Those have very different flavor profiles. But as you get deeper and deeper into the competition, they're giving you like, “This was roasted two days ago, this was roasted six days ago.” The differences can be that subtle, right?

Julien: Yeah. I've been talking to a few people who have competed at the world level and it only gets more wild there, but they do the difficulty, it does increase per round.

The sets we were tasting in round one were significantly less—not, I wouldn't say they're still challenging, but less challenging than the ones we faced at finals.

I mean, they'll pull coffees from the same country of origin sometime. I don't know what they throw at you at nationals, but I've heard things about worlds. Well, it'd be, it may be the same region, with the same processing method—they'll throw like natural coffees against each other, which, I've been working on it, but those are what kind of stumped me. At least in one round in nationals was a natural coffee against another natural coffee, because the fermentation flavor kind of clouds a lot of what you would taste from the terroir. And so it's really interesting.

It's also interesting contextually—a set of naturals on a table of all washed will be considerably more difficult than a full table of naturals, because you kind of calibrate to the similarities in the coffee. There's a lot of factors that make it a really—not to mention you have to do it on a stage.

Ashley: Oh yeah, you're doing it in front of people.

Julien: In front of a bunch of people. Yeah!

Ashley: If you go to these coffee competitions—so we've talked a lot about coffee competitions on the podcast, so people listening are likely familiar with them. We've mostly talked about barista competitions, where they have a person on a stage with a routine and they're talking and they're making coffee and there are these judges and it's all very quiet.

You're essentially doing a one-person show for 15 minutes. When you go to the Cup Tasters Competition, it is loud. People are cheering. It is a raucous affair. And then when you're, like you said, you find out the results kind of in real-time.

So you finish your set, you finish all your sets of cups and then there's an emcee who's pulling up the cups and yelling really loud. Like, “You got it!” or “Oh no!” Like I said, it's like the Wild West of coffee competitions, just because it's like—it's fun and it's raucous.

But I have to imagine when you're on the other side of it doing the actual competition, it's like, “Oh s**t. There are a lot of people just yelling at me and it's wild.” What made you want to compete?

Julien: I started tasting coffees and cupping and I was like, “Okay. Maybe I do have a good palate,” and the company I was working for at the time had sent me to judge— sensory judge—barista [competitions] before. And they were like, “Do you want to compete in Cup Tasters?” And I had a friend who had competed in Brewers Cup and Barista before. I was like, “Sure, why not?”

It was wild because we didn't even know if we would get a spot at a qualifier, like let alone qualify to go to nationals. That qualifier was in 2020, and I was like, terrified. I competed, and then I got four out of six [sets right] in two minutes and 30 seconds. And I had no idea if I was going to move on.

I was so terrified. I just stayed in the Airbnb the whole time, but I ended up placing 11th and like the top 16 or 17 moved on and I was like, psyched. I was so happy that I had just moved on and accomplished my goal of just getting to nationals.

[Nationals] was scheduled for Portland, Oregon, and then obviously that didn't happen [because of COVID-19]. They kept rescheduling it and I was like, I had left coffee and then obviously came back and got the email that it was happening. And then I was—I just knew instantly, as soon as I got the email, I was standing in my kitchen and I just like … you know, when you say yes and you clench your fist and you like, pull it into yourself.

I just reacted. I knew that I had to finish it to compete.

Ashley: It sounds like if this was a movie, that moment, the Rocky theme would have started right then.

Julien: Yeah, totally.

Ashley: Something that you said before we started recording was that you had to compete to close this chapter of your life. And I wrote that down ’cause I was like, “I'm going to ask Julien about that, what that means.” I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.

Julien: I played sports in high school. I did a little bit of ski racing, so I did some individual sports, but it's strange when you’re a competitor and you have a team of people around, cheering you on, that you really don't want to disappoint, but you also know that you can't put too much pressure on yourself or throw yourself off.

There was a lot of pressure for me, I feel like, be it internal or external, to qualify and to compete. I put a lot of weight on that training, on going in off the clock, doing sets at night—like we were setting up sets at night and it was just a lot of mental weight in this tasting competition. I would tell people, “Oh yeah, I'm competing in a tasting competition.” They're like, whoa, that's wild.

It was a lot of just buildup, and then to have that taken away by COVID … like I found my passion through tasting. I'm passionate about tasting coffee.

And I felt like that chance to prove myself on a national stage was taken away forever because no one knew what was going to happen. I went on unemployment for two months, and then I was being set up to work in the QC [quality control] lab and that kind of got taken away too.

I was just put back to being a barista and it was just really troubling. So to get that email in the fall that Coffee Champs is happening at [SCA] Expo, I was like, this is my chance. This is my chance to finish it and no matter what happens, just get up there and see that stage that I never thought I would.

I was talking to a lot of the other competitors that showed up and they all had the same—it was the same vibe. It was like, “We didn't think this was going to happen, so why not do it?” And you know, not all of us showed up. If everyone would have showed up, there would have been at least 35 people, but there were like 21, 22 people in round one.

Ashley: Just to go with the movie theme—I feel like every movie has a beginning and it's really exciting. And then there's a dip, like a low point, that's where the tension comes. And I'm imagining that COVID delaying the original competition date is like that dip.

And then of course there's the moment it all changes. And that's when you get the email and that's when the movie picks back up again, and then the ending—I guess, I don't know? I guess this movie is still happening, because you're going to go to the World Competition and compete pretty soon.

Julien: Yeah, very soon.

I feel like even with worlds, I feel like this is a beginning, still. It was like a chapter closed and now I just got a new chapter.

Ashley: So it's like we're watching “Star Wars.”

Julien: Yeah. It's like a sequel, I guess.

Ashley: We'll see if there's a trilogy. Maybe you come back in 20 years and then we are, I don't know—we go back in time and then you add movies at the beginning. I don't know.

Julien: Yeah, definitely.

Ashley: So you talked about how you left coffee and then you came back to coffee. Why did you leave?

Julien: I'd been a barista for like four years. I started as a barista as a cisgender girl when I was 18, I came out as nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns after I left Starbucks.

This was like, 2015, so this was kind of before people really knew what gender nonconforming people were like, popular? I don't even know how to—

Ashley: By and large?

Julien: Yeah, by and large. It was kind of the culture at the shop I worked at where—there were a few trans people working there, and the culture was like, if someone misgendered your co-worker and they didn't correct themselves, if you were at the end of the bar, you would correct the customer.

So I had people telling me, “‘They’ isn’t a pronoun. Like you're not—what is that?” Basically saying that how I identified wasn't a thing, and that was constant. That was just like all the time. I hadn't had top surgery yet, so I was binding my chest. I bound my chest for four years. There was a period of time when I was like only wearing button-up black polos because it was the only thing that I felt okay in. And, um, it was just like really hard being nonbinary as a barista.

I came out as male in the spring of 2019, started hormone replacement therapy and still hadn't had top surgery at that point. You know, the conversation around transness in the U.S. was definitely changing, and people started to know what it was, but that didn't really change much for me. I still had people gendering me as she, even though I was wearing men's clothing, banding my chest, shaving my head. It was really hard.

And you know, every time you correct someone and they look at you weird or they apologize too much, or they make you feel, sometimes unintentionally, just weird about it, you're like, “Wow, I hate this.” And it was just like every day, like it was every single day I would go to work and it was because I was front-facing, public, and my body was changing. I'd also been working there for like a year and a half. So people knew me as this, and then I was that, so it was just like a whole thing.

And also like watching my friends. One of my friends, close friends, was a trans girl, and just watching her get misgendered even more than me … It's like going to cry. It was really hard.

That coupled with COVID, I was just like, “Yeah, I'm done. Like I can't,” and that's what I thought—I was like, “Oh, okay. So I am like damned to being a barista or I leave,” and I just left. It's not worth it. I was done.

Ashley: It seems like we don't really build in the idea of respect and dignity, especially in front-facing positions like this. And it feels like you've touched on it in a multitude of ways: That you are front-facing and people would constantly misgender you or misgender people around you.

And it's an everyday thing. Like you said, it never stopped. But then there's also the dignity of like, just being able to go to work and do your job.

Julien: Yeah.

Ashley: And it seems like a lot of that was taken away from you.

Julien: Yeah, that's why I think I latched on to roasting and production. I can just show up and do my job and go home. I see the same 10 people every day and I know that those people aren't going to disrespect me.

But you know, when you have hundreds of people—and a lot of the times it was with regulars who would just continually disrespect me and the people around me, but then still be allowed to come into the space. But a lot of the time it's tourists or people from out of town and they don't even know you, so they're just banking on what their first impression is. So it's like, you can't—unless, say, they act aggressively when you correct them—you can't really blame them, I guess.

I'm a big believer in that there is a place for everyone in coffee who wants to be here.

I think that being a barista was one of the most challenging jobs I've had for many, many reasons, but I think any kind of front-facing job where you have to not only defend yourself but also coffee, I think it carries a lot of weight that many people don't give a second thought to. They're like, “Oh like, you’re a barista.”

It's like, well actually, being a barista is sometimes very hard. And I feel like that's something that a lot of people don't really realize.

Ashley: Especially when you have to be a person in a place where people feel entitled to consume you, essentially.

Julien: Yeah.

Ashley: So much of barista work and so much of why we love coffee shops in general as a culture is when we go into a space and we feel a certain way. And I think that kind of muddles the idea of being a consumer and going to a place and consuming the physical items there versus going to a place and consuming the identity of the people who've made that place.

And that's a very scary line because there are moments where I'm sure you've probably had, like, an awesome customer service interaction and you're like, “Yeah, I did that. Like I made that f*****g s**t happen.”

I don't know why I'm cursing so much—

Julien: I don’t mind.

Ashley: But you know what I mean? There's like this real beautiful sense of pride and ownership in certain ways.

But then in other ways, it's like, “I just want to do my job. All I want is to do my job. And you are not letting me do that. You are making me have to do so much more because you feel entitled to myself and my person.”

Julien: Oh, yeah. Like people—the thing about customer service is that you can’t have an off day. You can't shut it off. You can't like, tell your boss that you want to go do something else for the day. Like you have to be on bar. You have to be on register. You have to be like, expediting.

I have a lot of mental health issues. I have borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder, and I get triggered—like very real, seriously triggered a lot of the time at things.

I feel like this is also a conversation—like the toll that emotional labor takes on people's mental health is, I mean, obviously known—I feel like I've joked with my friends about putting on the customer service persona—but it's like, the difference between doing like a 3,000-pound production day or doing a $3,000 retail day is pretty massive, but in one where I'd be physically exhausted and maybe another where I'd be emotionally and physically [exhausted]…

But it is something to talk about where every single person in this supply chain, every single person in this industry, faces challenges in the position that they're in and that no position should be looked down upon or discounted because—I mean, I'll bring up what I just accomplished, but I'm a production worker. I don't taste coffee every day. I go to work, I put beans in bags.

Sometimes I get to roast coffee, but ultimately I am doing manual labor every day, 40 hours a week. And I just won a national tasting competition. So I feel like we have to open our eyes to that: Everyone in this industry is capable, I think, of more than they give themselves credit for. And a lot of that comes from the discourse we have around each other's positionality within this industry.

Ashley: Absolutely.

Julien: If that makes sense.

Ashley: No, that totally makes sense. I think there's this idea that … I don't know, even thinking about your career, just what you said right now, you mentioned being a barista then moving into production. And that was, it seems like that was the right move for you. And I would think most people would read that as like a promotion, or you're working on your career, but like, it shouldn't have to be that way.

Like there's dignity in every position within the coffee industry, there's dignity in being a barista and being a service worker. There's dignity in bagging coffee, like you mentioned—there are people whose sole jobs is to do that, is just bag coffee. And they've never worked as a barista, but like, we still seem to put almost like a stink upon certain positions in the industry, and expect there to be a certain level of upward mobility in this very linear, very boxed-in way.

I was wondering, since you're thinking about it, what has that felt like, thinking about, “Where I belong in the industry,” or like, “What am I supposed to do next? Are there these expectations of me to do a thing because now I've won a thing?”

Julien: Yeah, definitely. I've had a lot of people talk to me about what to do next. Or like, what do I want—now that I have this, what do I want? It's interesting because I had a career before I won. I was learning how to roast coffee and I was doing my job.

I think now I just get to have a lot more options in terms of geographically where I could see myself, or who I get to have access to now. I was happy before I won, which was not something I've ever felt in my life. I very recently started to feel like I was content.

We were talking a bit before we started recording about the timeline or the celebrity of winning a coffee competition. I definitely felt that pressure. I think in the weeks after I won where I was like, “My whole life has to change and it has to change now and I have to make moves now.”

But then I took a deep breath. Then I realized I was like, “Julien, you're turning 26 at the end of June. You have been in coffee for under five years. You have time. And just because you achieved this title and are working very hard to like, do well at worlds, I still have time.” Even if I wasn’t young, and even if like, I had been in coffee for 20 years and I won, I'd still have time.

I found a national community and a global community through these competitions and I feel very grateful. I think we need to think about, what does it mean to be an ambassador for the industry? What does it mean to be a champion? How does achieving that title actually affect a person? Because I was just a person, I am just a person. I'm just a guy living in Portland, Maine who loves coffee, and I just happened to win a national tasting competition.

There's this one person who's been competing in Cup Tasters every single year it's existed. It's like, how am I to say that I am better than that person that's literally been working every year to try to achieve this title? Like, I’m not.

Everyone who got up on that stage is a champion in my eyes, because the amount of mental stamina it takes to even walk up there is something a lot of people can't do.

Ashley: Yeah. And there's something, too, to the idea that if you didn't win, you would still be just a guy.

I have a lot of conflicting feelings, just in general, about the idea of competition. Maybe this is like putting me in an unsolvable problem, because I love competition. I live for competition. I love game shows. I'm that type of person, so I love seeing people win things and seeing people win a lot of money and them talking about that changing their life always makes me very emotional.

But at the same time, when I look at coffee competitions, I'm like, nobody worked more than anybody else, nobody is better than anybody else up here.

Julien: Yeah.

Ashley: And with all these competitions too, like, it could have been anybody. If the competition had happened tomorrow, would the same thing happen again? If the competition happened an hour later, would there have been a different winner?

So it's interesting to think, going back to this idea of the dignity of work and who deserves what, it's like, we all deserve everything! This seems a little Pollyanna in a way, but we do, because we just deserve to like, go to work and be happy and feel safe.

Julien: Yeah. I always think it's interesting, because I feel like the people that really like Cup Tasters really like Cup Tasters, and the people that really like Roasting [Competition] really like Roasters, and people that really like Barista [Competition] really like Barista, and I think it's funny.

One time, someone told me that they were like, “Oh yeah, someone told me that Barista Competition is the only one that matters.” I just think that's so funny, because every single one of the competitions like CIGS [Coffee in Good Spirits] Latte Art, Cup Tasters, Roasters, Barista, Brewers—every single one of those competitions is so challenging in its own way.

I could never get up on that Barista stage. I would never. And maybe some Barista competitors would never get up on the Cup Tasters stage. I just think that they're all so interesting and what every person, every champion, and every person that even qualifies, like gets to a qualifier or competes in a prelim—

Like, I always love to learn, I'm a big nerd about anything that I can learn [about] constantly. That's why I love coffee so much, is because I could spend my whole life in this industry and not know everything.

I think that competing is a great learning experience. I love watching people compete for years and years, and then finally get the title, or watching people compete for years and years that don't get the title. As long as you're getting something out of it, I think it's a valuable experience.

I know a lot of people just want to win and that's great, and I'm like, “I hope you do if that's really what you want.” But everyone who puts time into these competitions, the volunteers, the committees, the judges, we all make this community what it is. And it's a very special and a very, very weird little community.

Ashley: For folks listening to this, as we wrap up our conversation, what would you want them to take away from listening to you? What would you want people to know about you?

Julien: I don’t know! I'd like to just let people know that I'm just a person and probably, and definitely, every coffee champion is just a person. We all have different career timelines and we all have different life timelines. If there's a champion or a person in this industry that you really identify with, or you idolized, or you really want to meet or talk to, even be someday, I think that's really cool.

One of my mentors, when I was preparing for this and I was freaking out because a certain someone was in my first seat and he was a past champion and [my mentor] was like, “They're just people.” And I think that sentiment has really stuck with me, is that we're all just coffee people. So yeah.

Ashley: I was going to close it out—I was about to do like the whole, “Thank you for being here,” but something I thought was worth mentioning before we close out was that you reached out to me to be on the show, and thinking about what you were just saying, that people are people and if you admire somebody that's really cool.

I also wonder, how can we make things feel more like everything is accessible too, because I was thrilled when you reached out to me. Number one, because I wanted to talk to you. But two, I was like, “Somebody feels comfortable saying, ‘I want to talk to you. I want to be on your show.’”

We even talked a little bit, as we were going back and forth about the things that you thought were open and accessible to you. And I hope that people listening to this feel like more is open and accessible to them. I hope that they listened to your story and feel empowered to say, “I want to do this thing. And I'm going to ask the people that I want to ask about it.”

Julien: Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. That's helped me even with prepping for worlds. I reached out to a past world champion. I've reached out to past U.S. champions. That's the thing with competing—and I feel like just life and building a career in coffee in general, it's like, you are not alone and it's almost impossible to do it alone.

If there's someone you want to talk to, just shoot them a DM or an email. If they don't respond it may not be because they don't want to talk to you. A lot of people have a lot going on. Yeah, we're just people, and it's about community.

We are a community of coffee people and it's easier to say that we should all feel like we have access to each other—and especially if you want to compete, if you want to be part of this community, do it, just try it out.

And if you don't do it all your first year and you want to go again, do it. Just try and put yourself out there, I guess. Yeah.

Ashley: Julien, thank you so much for taking time to talk with me. I really appreciate it.

Julien: Thank you so much, Ashley. This was really great. Thank you so much.

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In April 2020, I had Adam JacksonBey on the show. He came on to talk about tipping, and about his new organization called GoFundBean—a play on the crowdfunding website GoFundMe. At the time, early in the pandemic, GoFundBean served as a central hub that pooled virtual tip jars that coffee shop and restaurant workers started to offset some of their losses. It was a simple and straightforward idea.

Fast-forward two years—which barely feels like a fast-forward at all—and GoFundBean is doing so much more. As an official 501c3 nonprofit, it advocates for hourly coffee workers through grant programs, mentorship matching, and professional development courses.

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Today, I’m speaking with Valorie Clark, a historian, member of GoFundBean’s leadership team, and a catalyst for many of the programs GoFundBean now offers. Over the last two years, Valorie has personally witnessed how necessary it is to advocate for hourly workers: Back when COVID-19 was supposed to be controlled by a “two-week quarantine,” many employers still laid off their workers without notice. Today, many still don’t pay a living wage. And all too many see their employees as disposable.

Going back to the tip jars, one of the key observations that Valorie and the team at GoFundBean noticed is that people didn’t make their own, individual tip funds, but worked together with their colleagues and co-workers to pool resources. I think that follows the themes we’ve witnessed over the last two years: folks recognizing the power of collective action yet again, and working together to secure better outcomes for all. It’s in this spirit that GoFundBean continues its advocacy work. Here’s Valorie:

Ashley: Valorie, I was hoping you could start by introducing yourself.

Valorie: Hey guys, I’m Valorie Clark. I'm the director of marketing for GoFundBean.

Ashley: Valorie, did you grow up with coffee in your life?

Valorie: A little bit. My parents drink coffee. I was given my first cup of coffee when I was like five, but of course, it was more like a cup of milk with like a splash of coffee in it.

Ashley: Were you ever intrigued by it? Like, did you see adults in your life drinking coffee and think, “I want that.”

Valorie: No, I loved the smell of it though.

Ashley: So then when did you start getting into coffee?

Valorie: I think when I was in college and was having to stay up really late to write essays because I'm a terrible procrastinator. I wouldn't start writing a paper until like 11 p.m. or something. And that was when I started drinking coffee.

Ashley: At what point for you did it become something more than just a thing you were drinking?

Valorie: I think probably when I was a junior in college. Somehow most of my friends had become the baristas at the coffee shop where I was a regular at. And I think that was when the first inkling that coffee is more than a drink, coffee is a community. That's kind of when those first inklings started for me.

Ashley: And then when did you start working in coffee?

Valorie: About six months after I graduated from college. I had been working in politics in DC and hated it and was like, “I have to—I just quit.” Like one day I was like, I just have to get out of this. A coffee shop in DC, for some reason, hired me to be their morning barista.

Ashley: I like that, for some reason—

Valorie: Truly, like looking back, I'm like, “Who made this choice? Who decided this was a good idea?”

Ashley: Why do you think that?

Valorie: I think because I just had absolutely zero experience and it was a busy shop in Chinatown. There were tons of politicians that came into that shop and I was like, “Whose idea was it to put this like, completely green person here at 6 a.m. giving politicians coffee? Like whose idea was that?”

Ashley: I hope that you can trace back some really important political decisions to specifically your service of these politicians in that coffee shop.

Valorie: I can't off the top of my head. But Dennis Kucinich came in a lot and he always got a dark chocolate sorbet to go with his coffee. And I will never forget that as long as I live.

Ashley: I love that. So at what point did it go from, “Okay, this is a job I have. I'm serving people—important politicians—coffee at six in the morning,” to, “Oh, this is a job I like. What does it look like to maybe take this more seriously?”

Valorie: Pretty quickly actually, because—so I started working there in like, early summer of 2012, and by winter I was training to become a trainer at that location.

It was by fall that I was already like, “Oh, this could be a future for me.” And I think a lot of that—like a large part of that realization—was that that shop was a Counter Culture Coffee account, and so we had access to all the Counter Culture classes.

The owners were huge perfectionists. They really wanted us to be serving the best possible coffee. And so we got paid to go to every single Counter Culture class if we wanted to go.

Just as I learned more and more about coffee from the guys at Counter Culture, I was like, “Oh, this—this isn't just a thing that I'm doing for now. Like this could be a career.”

Ashley: I love that. I love the investment in your education and being like, “Oh, we're going to pay you to go to these classes,” almost turns that light switch on for you—that this can be something more, and it seems to be as simple as the people above you saying, “Hey, we take this seriously. This is the avenue in which you can take this seriously as well.”

Valorie: Adam and I, who founded GoFundBean—Adam and I met at that coffee shop. And we always talk about how it wasn't the healthiest work environment. It was super toxic in a lot of ways, but they were really, really invested in us knowing everything we could, which was cool, looking back.

Ashley: Yeah, I love looking back on those moments and I think you can rectify—not necessarily rectify, but both can exist. It can be toxic, but at the same time, you could recognize where this contributed to the future of your career.

Valorie: Absolutely.

Ashley: So you've mentioned GoFundBean a couple of times, but for people who maybe don't know what that is, can you explain a little bit about that organization?

Valorie: We are a nonprofit that supports, uplifts, and defends hourly coffee workers in the U.S.

So what that means is that—we were founded during the pandemic to give grants to hourly coffee workers who had been laid off from their jobs because of COVID and ever since then have grown into doing other things.

Like we gave grants after Hurricane Ida to kind of help people in New Orleans who had been put out of work by having to evacuate. But the core of our mission has always been making sure that hourly coffee workers are taken care of and have a way to like, move forward in their careers if that's what they want to do.

Ashley: Tell me about how GoFundBean was founded, because you mentioned that it was born out of the pandemic, which I don’t think is a big stretch for people to realize that when the pandemic hit, coffee shops were severely affected. So what was that first conversation like between—I imagine between you and Adam JacksonBey, who's the co-founder of this organization.

Valorie: Everything started shutting down in mid-March 2020, right. And I think by about May, it was something like 80% of coffee employees in the U.S. had been laid off—like it was some crazy, huge percentage.

In mid-March, whenever places started to shut down and then eventually quickly lay off their employees, Adam and I were talking—and also Jenn Chen was a part of the conversation, and she's now on the board, and then Bailey Arnold was also helping us out back then—but we started talking, being like, “We should have a central location for all of these tip jars that are going up.”

Because what was really fascinating that was happening was that the entire cafe staff was making tip jars together. Sometimes it was the boss making it and putting it up on the website and sometimes it was [the employees] coming together and using their social media to say, “Hey, we're raising money for all of us,” which was cool because I think it could have so easily gone a different way of people being very individualistic about it, but it was a very collective moment of, “We're all in trouble. We're all hurting, we're all raising money.”

So Adam had this idea to have a centralized location for all of those tip jars, instead of everyone trying to fight the algorithm and get their tip jars out there, we wanted to kind of centralize it. So we created an Instagram and Twitter first, and we were just posting and reposting people's tip jars so that they could get a little bit more attention, and kind of have become a centralized place.

We [then] started the website GoFundBean.org, and same thing. We were posting the tip jars there with links and information and it just grew from there.

Ashley: I never thought of the tip jars that way!

So taking a step backward: The pandemic happens, an uncountable amount of baristas lost their jobs because places shut down, and people had nowhere to go. And as you mentioned, instead of approaching things in an individualistic way, like one person saying, “Hey, I lost my job. Here's my Venmo, or my GoFund—GoFundMe.”

I'm realizing now that GoFundMe and GoFundBean are very similar, which I know, but in my brain, I'm like, “I have to choose one.”

But individuals [could have] started GoFundMes for themselves—but instead what you folks were observing, and it seems like you were very conscious of, is that people were coming together as collectives, as like, “We are the staff of X, Y, Z coffee shop. Let's all pull our resources together.”

And it seems like that idea of collectivity inspired you to even go a step further and say, “Hey, maybe somebody who lives in, let's say New Orleans—” I'll pick a city. “Maybe someone in New Orleans wants to support their local coffee community, but they don't know where the tip jars are.”

GoFundBean’s Instagram account almost served as a platform for them to just go to one place and say, “What's in my community?” Or, “What's the tip jar I'd like to support? Oh, here it is.”

Valorie: Absolutely. And you know, when we had all the tip jars on the website, you could sort by city, actually. So we actually had a lot of people go onto our website and use the sort button to say, “I want to give money to baristas in Philadelphia or New Orleans and donate money that way,” and like, just click through to every tip jar in Philly.

Ashley: Were you surprised by how people responded to GoFundBean when you first started? Did you see a lot of people going to the website and, like you said, using those sorting resources, or saying, “Oh, this is a resource that I can use to support my community. I didn't know about this. This is great.”

What was the response initially when you started the website and the Instagram account?

Valorie: Yeah. I mean, it was so funny because—I think you probably have dealt with this—is that a lot of people don't give feedback.

Ashley: Yep, yep.

Valorie: So it was like, we only knew that people were doing it because we could see spikes in website traffic. No one was messaging us being like, “This is so cool. I just donated to every barista in New Orleans.” Like no one was saying that.

We did get specific coffee people coming to us and being like, “Oh, this is really cool. Thank you for doing this. It's really amazing that you're doing this.” But we only knew because people would post on their own individual Instagram and be like, “Oh my god, someone donated like a hundred dollars to our tip jar today. Thank you guys so much.” And then we would be able to look on our website and be like, “Oh, I think that traffic came from us because of this spike in our website traffic the same day.”

Ashley: That's funny. I 100% know what you mean by not getting feedback on things, but then seeing somebody talk about someone you're like, oh, okay. I guess, I guess that was impactful for you.

Valorie: I guess this worked.

Ashley: I guess this worked?

So then how would you measure things? You said that you looked at spikes in website traffic, but like, how did you know that your impact was, I guess, making an impact?

Valorie: We would get messages from the people whose tip jars we posted. And they would sometimes thank us and be like, “Thank you, thank you for posting this. We saw a lot more tips come in this week,” or something. But also it was a lot of like—I was locked inside my house, as was everybody else—and I was just going through baristas’ Instagram [accounts] and watching their stories and seeing them either reposting our tip jar. Or people who I knew worked in coffee, but weren't baristas, who were posting about GoFundBean and telling their followers to check us out.

That was kind of how we were measuring impact back then.

Ashley: At what point did you folks decide that you wanted to do more? Because initially, it seems like this was a temporary measure, right? Like, okay: The pandemic is happening. We had no idea at that time how long it was going to last. I think there was still talk at that time of, oh we’ll shut down for two weeks and we'll be back up and running, which obviously hasn't happened.

We're two years in. We're still here. At what point did you realize that this could be something more permanent, or that you wanted to do more?

Valorie: It was when actually Melitta came to us and was like, “Hey, we want to partner with you guys to sell—” because like, Melitta, Chemex, all these companies that sell home coffee brewing equipment at retail, they were making money hand over fist early in the pandemic because people were learning to make coffee at home.

They were like, “We want to use some of these extra profits that we're making, that we're making directly because baristas are not making money because coffee shops are closed.” They came to us and they were like, “We want to partner with you guys to sell like a certain brewer,” or something, “and the profits from that will go toward tip jars. We'll give you guys the money and you guys can decide which tip jars to put them in,” or something. And that was the beginning of the grant program.

What ended up happening was, for three months, we were promoting this with Melitta and working with them and then kind of in the middle of the process, they were like, “Oh, we really need you guys to be a 501c3 nonprofit for us to give you a bunch of money,” which was like, “Yeah, that totally makes sense.”

I think that was probably in May of that year. So we got a board together—Adam mostly got a board together. I started applying for 501c3 status, which we got later on in 2020, and just kind of like through that process, we're realizing that there was so much more we could do with the brain trust that Adam had assembled.

The people on our board are all people who care very deeply about hourly coffee workers. They've all been baristas and worked in the industry for like, I think we together combined, we have like 80 years of experience in coffee or something. It's a lot of time that we've all been in this industry.

We all love it so much. As we were talking and assembling this and like becoming a 501c3, and realizing we could do this whole grant program with this money that Melitta was giving us—and then JNP got on board too. And then just donations started kind of pouring in, as we started saying like, “Hey, this is kind of our next step.”

I think that’s when we realized, “Oh, we have something cool on our hands here that we could do a lot with.”

Ashley: So you've talked about hourly coffee workers a fair amount, and you've talked—like, you say it as a phrase: “hourly coffee workers.” I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the struggles that hourly coffee workers face, which we saw very clearly illustrated in the pandemic, right?

They were the first people laid off. They're the people who can't do their jobs at home. What other issues were you seeing hourly coffee workers facing that you thought, “Oh, okay. We at GoFundBean can tackle this,” or, “We at GoFundBean can at least offer support in a way that's meaningful and impactful.”

Valorie: When I say hourly coffee workers, we're referring mostly to baristas, but there are plenty of people who work in coffee who are paid by the hour who are not baristas, or who were baristas but aren't anymore. That's kind of the inception of that phrase.

And it's been really cool to start seeing people start using it, because I remember when we came up with it—and not to say that no one had ever put those three words together—but when we consciously decided that we weren't going to say that we were an organization for baristas, we were an organization for hourly coffee workers, since then, I've seen a spike of people using that phrase, which has been really fun.

I think it's also important because it's much more inclusive and I think addresses more of the industry as a whole.

Ashley: What I love about the phrase “hourly coffee workers” is, like you said, it includes people who aren't just baristas—who are delivery drivers, a lot of roasters are hourly coffee workers, anybody who works in production, so the people who maybe aren't roasting your coffee, but are putting it in bags and making sure that it gets to you—almost all of those people are hourly coffee workers.

It seems like as GoFundBean evolved, you were able to start identifying specific struggles that hourly coffee workers face. So I was wondering if you could talk about some of those struggles. Because I also imagine that maybe people in the restaurant industry are listening to this, or people in the service industry at large, they probably face a lot of the same issues as well.

How did GoFundBean bring light to some of the issues that hourly coffee workers face?

Valorie: Hourly coffee workers are some of the most vulnerable employees, and that's true of hourly wage earners sort of across the United States. They are some of the most vulnerable people in the U.S. economy or in U.S. society writ large.

A lot of states have at-will employment. It can be very precarious to try to speak up, especially when you are working a minimum-wage job or just above minimum wage and you don't have the ability to save money. You don't have a safety net. And our government doesn't have a safety net for U.S.-based workers really.

I think we saw a lot of that in the pandemic. There was the extra $600, but there was no safety net for the people who lost their health insurance because they lost their jobs. Just the vulnerability of workers has been kind of made more and more clear to us every day.

I think, just in conversation with hourly coffee workers, just the things that they—and I say they, but really, I mean we, because I was a barista up until like last March—the issues that they face, it's like they compound on one another. It's one thing after the next.

Like, they don't have money, they don't earn enough money to save, so then when things like they get a flat tire or something like that has to go on a credit card, which then incurs a bunch of fees and interest. That's stressful, and they don't have a safety net for dealing with that stress because probably they don't get good healthcare insurance or good health insurance through their job, and so they don't get mental health care probably.

It's just like every problem that coffee workers face, it seems like compounds on one another. That has been something that, as we address one issue, we find ourselves being like, “Okay, but there are five other issues tying into this and how do we address that?”

Ashley: I think what really caught me during the pandemic, during the early days of the pandemic, was how quickly so many employers let go of baristas. I was wondering if you were at all struck by this? Because I know that some baristas, they were considered essential workers. So some people had to go to work regardless of how safe they felt or not.

But I also know baristas who—I think I was in Chicago when the pandemic started. I think Chicago went into lockdown on March 13th. I know people lost their jobs March 14th.

Valorie: Yup. The speed at which people were happy to lay off their employees, it was like—I mean, you have that shirt that says, “We're not a family.” I was like, “Oh, that has never been more clear to me than in this moment when you were so quick to abandon your staff.”

And like, I understand. I tried to open a coffee shop, I understand that margins are really tight, you probably don't have a month’s worth of pay in the bank that you can just give to your workers. That is a very big reality and coffee. And that's something that we, as an industry, need to start dealing with and addressing, because if nothing else, if coffee shop owners get nothing else out of this whole pandemic, or at least the early part of the pandemic, the idea that businesses should also have three months of savings in the bank should have been occurring to people at some point during this, and I don't think it was.

I definitely knew people who got laid off, truly, the next day, which was crazy to me because it was like, we don't even know how long this is gonna last. Like, can't you just furlough people? Can’t you just keep people on staff for like a week or two, just to see what happens next?

I was very fortunate at the beginning of the pandemic because I was actually working in a museum. And so that museum kept us on staff until almost May. Um, and then when it finally became clear that this was not going away and that they weren't reopening the museum anytime soon, that's when they laid us off.

I was personally offended, I think, to see how quickly some hourly coffee workers were laid off.

Ashley: I mean, so was I. I'd see people posting left and right about being let go from their jobs. And there's a certain cadence to the way that people talked about these layoffs, where I'm like, “Your employer did not have a nice conversation with you. Your employer did not say to you, ‘I am so sorry. This is just where we're at.’”

Because you're right: A lot of coffee shops just don't make money. That's like also a fact of life too. Don't open a coffee shop if you think you're going to make money because it's not going to work.

Valorie: It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. We're here, the hot, hot take here.

Ashley: It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. Hot take here.

But hearing people talk about how they were let go from their jobs so quickly into the pandemic, without any sort of promise of, “We're going to do everything we can to keep you, we're going to do our best to give you what you need to bring you back. Please don't go anywhere, what can we do to support you? Can we start a tip jar for you?”

I was surprised. I don't know if you've noticed this too, a lot of the tip jars were started by baristas. Not necessarily by employers—some were, with respect to the people who did start them for their employees—but it seems like the pandemic gave people a lot of excuses to just say, we don't have to care about you anymore.

Valorie: Yeah, which was really astounding and infuriating, because it was like, “Oh, you guys are the same people who've been saying we're a family and that's why we don't pay as well, but we take care of each other.” Where's that attitude now?

Ashley: Right. We're seeing that now play out in the Starbucks union as well. Starbucks wants to retain control and not have people unionize because they want this freedom to say, “Look at us, we can solve our problems all together.”

But on the flip side, we've seen people say, “Oh cool, we don't have any money to pay you, see you later. Never mind, goodbye.” I think this speaks to the bigger issue of what GoFundBean represents, is that nobody is speaking for low-wage workers, not our government, not the people that are supposed to be taking care of these low-wage baristas or low-wage coffee workers—excuse me, we've learned this term, we're going to use it—but nobody is speaking up or advocating for them. And it seems like GoFundBean has really found its voice as it has recognized that nobody is speaking up for low-wage workers. Nobody is speaking up for hourly coffee workers who don't have a lot of recourse when their boss does something crappy or they get laid off from a job.

When do you think that that moment really crystallized for you that this is so necessary? I have to imagine that, as you've been doing this work—like maybe some of this has always been intuitive for you—but I have to imagine the last two years have also like fundamentally changed you.

Valorie: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I always was sort of aware of kind of the inherent crappiness in the way that a lot of service workers, in general, are treated, and like the way that we're treated as disposable specifically—a lot of people walk into a coffee shop and treat the baristas as just as disposable as the cups in there.

It's really upsetting, but it was seeing that come from bosses as well. Like, I knew it because I'd had bad bosses who treated me that way. But seeing that it was industry-wide, and not that I had just had bad luck with bosses, I was like, “Oh, no one cares about us actually.”

Ashley: I think what you're saying, and what I really want people to understand, is that I think before the pandemic—and I think you're speaking to this a little bit—it would have been easy to say, “That's a bad employer,” or, “That's a shitty boss,” or. “That person is so-and-so,” and just kind of leave it at that, and just say, “This is a bad employer. We're not going to work for them,” or, “We're going to let other people know that this person's a shady boss.”

It's the one-bad-apple argument. But I think what GoFundBean is doing on the positive end is acknowledging that there are systems in place that actively hurt hourly coffee workers, and we are here to say that these things are not okay. We are going to give [hourly coffee workers] as many resources as we can.

Valorie: Yeah, absolutely. A big part of our whole thing has been uncovering just how almost systemic it is in the industry to assume—I think that a large part of it comes from assuming that it's a low-skill job. A lot of it is coffee shops are often owned by people who were never baristas.

Not always, there are some shining examples. And those were also the shops that were doing kind of the most for their workers during the early days of the pandemic. I'm thinking of places like Mammoth Espresso in New Orleans, where Jonathan Riethmaier, he was a barista for a long time, and then opened his own shop.

He treated his employees really well during the pandemic. I was seeing that being, “This is like an example of what this industry could be if people just tried and cared.” There was definitely this moment, though, of realizing that, “Oh, but that's not the standard.”

That's the exception. What he's doing is not the rule, and there needs to be someone—someone needs to be in place to advocate for baristas and for other hourly coffee workers in a way that has not existed before.

Ashley: I want to pivot a little bit and talk about GoFundBean as an organization itself. This—I love getting meta in these conversations, so this is the part where we get really meta.

But thinking about how much you folks have accomplished in the last two years, you went from essentially starting an Instagram account and being like, let's collect all of these tip jars, to a 501c3 that has multiple programming options, gives out grants to coffee workers, has mentor pairing programs, works with multiple coffee organizations to distribute funds…

I mean, the big question I want to ask is like, how'd you get it all done in two years, but can you even answer that question? Because I think it's a really hopeful story for baristas or for hourly coffee workers in general, who are like, “How do I start something?” And it's like, look to GoFundBean, even if you don't want to start a nonprofit exactly—look how much they've built in two years.

Valorie: Yeah. We have done so much in two years and it's actually crazy because a lot of us had never met in real life before this. Adam knew everybody personally, but to think that we've done so much in two years, coming together as strangers, is so insane to me.

I kind of want to point out that that was also part of this: We were all getting to know each other and just trusting each person on the board wanted the best for each other, for GoFundBean, for hourly coffee workers. It's kind of amazing to consider that.

In terms of how we got so much done in two years, I think it was a lot of trusting each other, trusting the process, but also like, we are a working board. Adam and I work the most, but Morgan, who was our accountant, and they did a ton of work to make sure that people were getting their grants on time … every single person on the board has stepped up and given a lot of time and a lot of hours to GoFundBean over the years.

I mean, in a literal sense, that's how we got so much done. But I also think when Adam picked the people he picked for the board, I think the best thing he did was pick people that both inspired him, but also that he trusted. A) It's really hard to do stuff alone, and B) When you do something with other people, you’ve got to do it with people who you both are inspired by and also trust, because otherwise, it is so hard to start something new, which sounds like the biggest “no s**t” kind of statement in the world, but it's hard to start a new thing and doing it with people that you trust and respect and are inspired by is going to be a huge help for you along the way.

Ashley: I think that people listening to this—I hope people listening to this—feel like it's possible for them. Do you know what I mean? That people feel like, “I don't know if I want to start that coffee shop,” or “I don't know if I want to start that roasting business. I don't know if it's possible,” but I hope that they look to GoFundBean and think, “Oh, it is possible. I can do this and maybe it doesn't look exactly the way that I thought it would.”

I imagine that you guys didn't think that GoFundBean would ever look the way it does now.

Valorie: Nope.

Ashley: But it can happen. What would you say to people who maybe are struggling with that first step of making something real and actualized?

Valorie: I would say don't be afraid to pivot. The phrase GoFundBean occurred to Adam in like 2018 or 2019. And when he first started the idea—if I remember correctly, and maybe Adam is somewhere tearing his hair out hearing this—I believe the idea was actually originally to do fundraising specifically for competitors to compete individually, like independently, so that they didn't have to rely on sponsorship because that can be a very stressful kind of added pressure to what is already difficult about USBC, right?

Ashley: Right. So we're talking about barista competitions, right? Just for people who don’t know.

Valorie: Sorry, yeah, for barista competition. So I believe the phrase came from that, but then Adam didn't do anything with it. And then a year later this pandemic hit and he was like, “Oh, what if—like I already owned the Instagram [handle], what if I pivot that idea into doing this?”

So he was like texting me and Jenn Chen about it. And we were both like, “Yeah, that's a great idea. That's a great use of that phrase. We should all do this. We'll help you.” Then when we were at Expo, we were talking to the people at Oatly and they asked a similar question.

They were like, just at every turn, you have found ways to meet needs that you didn't even know were there. I kind of jokingly told them, “Yeah, we're just pivoting our way to the top.” And I said it as a joke and I was like, oh, but that's really true.

You can't be afraid to pivot to what is working and pivot away from what is not working.

A big pivot we made was we really wanted to offer free mental healthcare. We did it through Talkspace. At first, it didn't work, it just didn't work. And so we took six months off of that program so that we could figure out a better way to retool it.

And then we pivoted and now, it's much more stressful for us, but it works so much better for the hourly coffee workers that are benefiting from it that it's completely worth it. So I would say pivoting is key probably in any business, but don't be afraid—it probably won't look the way that you think it will today five years from now, whatever it is that you want to do won't look the same, but I think you'll find what works for you and your business or you and your idea by following your intuition and pivoting to where you’re needed.

Ashley: I had Adam on the show maybe a couple of months after the pandemic. We talked a little bit about tipping culture and a little bit about GoFundBean. And one of the things that was kind of a somber topic was creating an organization whose ultimate end goal, in a perfect world where all problems are solved, is that the organization no longer exists or is no longer needed.

As a person who is now kind of shifting to GoFundBean being your main job, how do you kind of think about your role in pushing an organization forward with that ultimate goal in mind?

Valorie: We look a lot at other organizations, other nonprofits that have been around for decades, and actively hope that that isn't us. I really hope GoFundBean doesn't exist five years from now. And I say that knowing that I love this organization. I love the work that we do, but I hope that five years from now, or 10 years from now, or whatever it is, I hope that there's a living wage in place in America where people don't need to rely on emergency relief grants so that they can get through something like a car problem, or I don't know, being robbed or something—we actively don't want to exist anymore, which is crazy to say.

I think the way we keep working forward is knowing that, until the moment that everything is perfect, we still have a role. And we still have almost a responsibility to take care of people in any way that we can. So, yeah, I dunno. It's hard to want to push it forward and create new programs and also at the same time, be like, it's insane that we—and it's something that we talk about—it's insane that we have to do this.

It's insane that certain things don't already exist, that we feel like we're inventing the wheel sometimes. It can be frustrating, but it can be really rewarding to watch people around us see what GoFundBean is doing and be like, “Oh yeah, that should have already existed,” or like, “Oh yeah, you're right. That is a thing that we need to change.”

That's very rewarding, but yeah, it is weird trying to push an organization forward when you also kind of hope that you work it out. Like, we hope that we work toward a world where we're not needed.

Ashley: For folks who are listening, who think, “Oh, I want to support my hourly coffee workers,” what steps can they take right now, listening to this, they closed their podcast app or whatever, or they're reading the transcript of this episode and they put down their phone or their computer, what can they do?

Valorie: If you have disposable income, you can donate to GoFundBean on our website. All of our donations go toward our programs like disaster relief or emergency relief grants or our mentorship program. Early in, we established an 80/20 rule. So 80% of your donation automatically is applied to programming and 20% goes to overhead. That's one thing you can do if you have disposable income.

If you are employing coffee workers, you could maybe look into getting better health insurance for them. If you employ hourly coffee workers, you could look at what a living wage is in your city and determine what it would take for you to actually pay your employees a living wage.

Every person that makes a living wage is one less person that has to rely on outside help. And if you are neither of those people, if you're not a shop owner, and if you don't have a disposable income, you can just follow us on Instagram and share our message. That helps too.

Ashley: Valorie, thank you for taking the time to talk with me.

Valorie: Oh my gosh. Yeah, this was so fun. Thank you.

Hey, you like Valorie, right? Tell her so by sharing this episode with a friend!

Hi! Welcome to Boss Barista, a newsletter and podcast about coffee, service work, and empowerment. If you’re new here, consider subscribing!

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.

I’ve long been interested in partnerships. The way two people interact is a pleasure to observe, and I think we learn the most about ourselves when there’s a person close by to reflect on and share our experiences with.

Bianka Alloyn and Sabreen Naimah are the co-founders of Cute Coffee, a small and decidedly joyful roasting company based in Northern California. The story of how Bianka and Sabreen met is nothing short of kismet—they lived parallel lives for years, finally crossing paths at a coffee shop in Venice Beach, California.

Since then, they’ve found delightful ways to express their love of coffee and art together, pulling the best out of one another as their partnership deepens. They’re always looking for the fun and excitement that sharing coffee brings—that value is expressed so effusively it literally jumps out of this conversation. An audio editor I sometimes work with, Jordan, said he was smiling ear-to-ear as he listened to Bianka and Sabreen speak.

Right at the top, this episode starts with some silliness and laughs. Bianka and Sabreen just moved to a farm in the country, so you might hear a few feathered friends in the background. We also talk a lot about snacks, secret singers, and how Boss Barista can incorporate Nickelodeon-style slime into our interviews. Here are Bianka and Sabreen.

Ashley: So Bianka and Sabreen, I was wondering if you could paint a picture for our listeners—paint a mental picture for them about where you are right now.

Bianka: Imagine thousands of really big trees, some sunlight peeping through those trees. And there's also some dirt roads. Lots of just vegetation everywhere.

And everybody seems to have animals. And I mean, farm animals. People have roosters, chickens, cats, dogs, cows, lambs, turkeys … you name it. They got all the things, horses…

Sabreen: And just lots of species of birds are here.

Bianka: Oh my god. There's so many birds.

Sabreen: So many birds.

Ashley: How long have you folks lived in the country?

Bianka: It's only been about … last summer?

Sabreen: July of last year.

Ashley: So if our listeners hear a friend or two in the background, who might they hear?

Bianka: They're going to hear some roosters, chickens.

Sabreen: Sam, the rooster.

Bianka: Sam's in the back.

Ashley: I'm glad that we have a name for the rooster that we're going to hear. That makes me feel more connected to him.

Sabreen: Good.

Ashley: I always like to start these conversations by asking people about their first memories of coffee. So I'm going to start with Sabreen. If you don't mind, could you tell me about any early experiences you had with coffee?

Sabreen: Yeah, I grew up with coffee. I would say my love for coffee started around 13, 14. It was mainly my best friend and I going to Coffee Bean at night. Oh—that's interesting. I drink coffee just at night.

But we would go to Coffee Bean and then take our drinks to—I usually got like, let's see, like a vanilla latte or a Frappuccino-type drink—and we would head over to Barnes & Noble and just spend hours in there looking at magazines, books, just until they closed. We were just in there. So I always associated coffee with just communing and good conversation and books and magazines and sharing and just getting creative juices flowing.

Ashley: There's something very teenager-y about drinking coffee at night. I don't know why that spoke to me as a 16-year-old.

Sabreen: Yeah. I felt like I was doing something like, adult, and just like yeah, drinking coffee and just, “I'm so grown-up. I'm so mature.”

Ashley: What about you?

Bianka: Let's see.

In the kitchen with my mom. My mom would be baking or cooking, and she's drinking coffee. And every now and then I walk up to the mug on the counter and sneak in a sip and she would always say, “Don't drink that coffee, it’ll stunt your growth!”

And I didn't drink it for a long time, but then I was allowed to have it every now and then in ice cream as a kid—because I have a big love for ice cream.

Every now and then I’d get that bite or two of coffee ice cream, and I was like, “This stuff is interesting. Hmm. Hmm.” And then it really started off me really drinking it in high school.

Like maybe towards the end of high school though? I think my, I think my sister worked at Barnes & Noble—no, no. Borders. My sister worked there first, and at first, it was hot chocolates. And then next thing you know, my brother worked there and his partner at the time, she worked there too.

The next thing you know, I'm there every day at Borders and I'm just drinking coffee, doing my homework, eating all the snacks, whatever I could get because they all worked there. So I was like, “Oh, what you got?” And then I would venture into the aisles, just listening to the music and looking at all the magazines and just having a good time.

Ashley: I'm sort of imagining you two almost living parallel lives.

Like, there's a movie and there's like a divider in the middle and you both are teenagers traveling through bookstores with your Frappuccinos or vanilla lattes, almost living the same life, but not together, like, in different places.

Sabreen: That's very accurate because I also have envisioned our lives like that. After we met and shared stories, I realized there are so many parallels between us. In college, we both played sports: Bianka was a Division I basketball player, I was on a Division I volleyball team.

You know, it was a good experience, but ultimately not for us, and just our frustrations and challenges with that and then eventually quitting. We didn't stay on the teams that we played for the whole time.

And then just having creative interests and endeavors and projects and auditioning and acting. And then, even when we lived in New York, we discovered that we lived there at the same time and knew—I dunno if we knew some of the same people, but some of the same circles. You [Bianka] worked at a cafe that I had wanted to go to, but I think I tried going twice and it was closed. And then later I learned that you worked there.

Then learning that we auditioned for some of the same roles and neither of us getting the job and just kind of—just laughing at life in New York.

Bianka: [Laughs] Life in New York.

Ashley: It's funny to me that you both have these almost parallel lives happening in tandem, because you didn’t meet in New York. Did you meet in New York?

Bianka: No, we did not.

Ashley: Tell me about how you met.

Bianka: We met in LA.

Sabreen: How many years after we lived in New York?

Bianka: Oh my gosh. It was probably 10, 12 years?

Sabreen: Maybe like six or seven years.

Bianka: I didn't meet you ’til 2015!

Sabreen: 2014.

Bianka: Correction.

Sabreen: And then I left.

(Pause)

You're right. It is more like 10 years.

Bianka: And we met at a cafe!

Sabreen: At a cafe.

Bianka: In Venice Beach, like on the beach.

Yeah, Sabreen, you came by because you were dropping off headbands and your friend was part of making the cafe actually come alive.

Sabreen: Yeah, so I was working in the production of headbands and jewelry and I was selling them at a boutique next door to the coffee shop that Bianka worked at.

And that's how we got acquainted. I was just getting into specialty coffee and I also had a friend that did help open the coffee shop and I ran into her and she said, “Hey, you should come by and check us out.”

Bianka: Novena!

Sabreen: Yeah. That's how it began.

Bianka: Yeah. And that shop, in particular, was like, the shop that everybody wanted to come to because Nicely [Abel], the three-time world champion latte artist, he was the main feature there.

He was the main feature there. He was the manager, running the shop and people from all over the world would come and have drinks made by us. I learned a lot with him. That was, that was a blessing.

Sabreen: Yeah. And it was the only shop in that area [that served] specialty coffee. I mean, there was Intelligentsia as well.

Bianka: Yeah, but the vibe was different.

Sabreen: Yeah.

Bianka: We got to do what we wanted to do, and create a more creative atmosphere. Like everyone involved was a musician, you know—Novena, Derek, myself, other people that work there, everybody was creative, even Nicely’s a singer. People don't know that. That man can sing! Oh my gosh.

Sabreen: Yeah. It's pretty—it was awesome. It was, it was like the golden era of this space.

Bianka: It was the golden era. Yes, it was. We played records the whole time. I used to host the cuppings and also do all these flower arrangements for the space because I had a little flower company that I started because I started buying all these flowers from a friend of mine who had a farm of pork and flowers.

I didn't buy the pork, but I bought the flowers and just started making arrangements for businesses in the Venice Beach area. And yeah, the cafe I worked at was one of them.

Sabreen: The coffee shop had this very strong, magnetic pull.

I would find myself just like, “Oh, what should I do today? I'm trying to get my day organized.” And I just knew that I had to go to Menotti's at some point. It was just like great energy to be around.

Bianka: You said “before I get organized” you’d have to go get a coffee?

Sabreen: I did! It was just like great energy to be around. I would invite a friend or see who's around to meet up—and if I could go by myself, with friends, it just was come one, come all. It was very low-key and inviting.

Bianka: Mmhmm.

Ashley: What solidified your connection with one another? Because I can see, like, you go to coffee shops all the time and you meet people, but what moment were you folks like, “We have something and we're going to do something together?”

Bianka: I feel like it was the day you came by the shop and you had a suitcase of your flower crowns. And I was like, “Oh, you—you need photographs of these?”

And I happened to have a degree in photography and that's another thing I'm blessed to be able to know how to capture and make people's things look beautiful or whatever it may be.

And Sabreen was like, “Yeah, I need some photographs.”

I was like, “All right, I'm going to get a new camera soon and a new computer. And I'll photograph your work.”

Then I didn't see you for weeks! I'm like, “Where is this girl? I'm trying to help her out, get her work done.”

I saw her walking past the cafe one day and I was in the middle of making a drink. I stopped making that drink. I said, “Hey, customer, I'll be right back.” I ran outside, ran down almost to the boardwalk in Venice was like, “Sabreen! Sabreen! I got my new computer!”

Sabreen: And that was something that struck me as like very unusual, because I had been an entrepreneur at this point for a few years and there's a lot of challenges and people say something and mean another, and you're not sure like, who really wants to help you.

It was like, “I'm not sure how I can pay you. So I don't know what you really mean by taking photographs.” And it just felt really genuine and she really wants to help me. I don't really know what I can do in exchange, but that doesn't really matter at this moment. For the first time in a while, [this interaction] just felt very sincere.

I was like, “Okay, let's do this, let’s make this happen. You told me your computer was getting fixed, and you're now following up with me.” A lot of people in LA don't really do that. So when it happens, it's special and I knew, I was like, “Okay, we were going to be friends.”

Bianka: And then we had an eight-hour photoshoot.

Sabreen: I learned immediately that day that we work very well together.

Bianka: It was a really smooth photoshoot, scene by scene. Just bam, everything about it lined up: the computer, the camera gear … I had a friend from Philly who was living in LA—I didn't even know, and they had all this gear, all this lighting gear in particular that I needed to be able to photograph Sabreen’s work.

So it was just like, “All right Sabreen, I have the new computer, I got my new camera. I got the lighting. If we're doing this, we need to do this and I'm ready to do it.”

I actually have a background in photographing a lot of work for artists when I lived on the East Coast. I really enjoy, you know, being able to provide that for people because sometimes that's really all it comes down to, is being able to showcase your work through a photograph in a way that really allows people to come into your work and enjoy it.

Because if you have photographs and they're like too dark or they're grainy or whatever it is, it will really dictate how someone feels about what you're presenting. So if you can make it really beautiful and make it pop, like bam, you're golden. Yeah.

Ashley: I feel like that's kind of the ethos of Cute Coffee in a way, not the ethos necessarily, but maybe the aesthetic?

Sabreen: Yep.

Ashley: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how—I guess let's go backward before we get into the branding. Let's talk a little bit about how you folks decided to start a coffee business in general, because that's a big step.

Bianka and Sabreen: Yes, it is.

Sabreen: Especially for someone that didn't have experience in coffee. I was just learning from a customer's point of view. Like, “Hey, I'm really drawn to specialty coffee—” that was another reason why I connected with Bianka. I felt comfortable asking her questions that I wouldn't have asked any other barista or coffee shop worker. I just felt comfortable.

My education just started very organically. Just started with an interest.

Bianka: And I feel like, yeah, coffee is the vessel, essentially, to bring all the things together and bring people together. So I was just like, “Yeah, let's do some coffee. And you're an artist, I'm an artist. Let's do all our things and drink this cup of coffee. And instead of just having these separate businesses of all these creative things, let's just have the coffee because it's the backbone.”

I think it's the thing that, for me, in particular, I had been traveling all around the country, working in different spaces—in particular coffee spaces—where I was like, “All right, how do I meet all the artists, musicians, producers, directors, photographers, anybody, all these artists, how do I meet all them? I become their barista.”

Ashley: I love that idea, of a coffee-roasting business almost being like a nexus for all these other creative endeavors, because you folks—I think probably more so than a lot of people, or I don't want to qualify that, like who knows—but it does seem like you really approach Cute Coffee as this really dynamic art project in a way.

There's so many different, like, aspects to the things that you create, and visually what they look like. And I've never really heard anybody articulate that coffee kind of brings all of those parts of them together.

Bianka: Yeah, that's totally what Cute Coffee is. It is just an art project and it's an art project that is the umbrella for all the creative things we do—and other people do too.

We love bringing in different friends and family who make amazing things and then [we] say, “All right, where can we put your art piece?” It's almost like it's a gallery.

Sabreen: A platform.

Ashley: When you first were thinking of starting this coffee business, how did you start thinking about like, what you wanted it to look like? Because I think, for me, when I see Cute Coffee, it's like immediately a smile comes to my face. Did you start with that as the idea—we want to make people happy—or how did you find inspiration for what you wanted the brand to look like?

Bianka: Well, first it was Sunny Side Up.

Sabreen: Yeah. First, it was Sunny Side Up and we had this warehouse space in Long Beach and that's the space where we were attempting to have a co-roasting facility along with people renting out space for their art projects or whatever they wanted to work on.

We—I don't want to say a rule or how would you phrase it?

Bianka: We pretty much let people know, “Hey, anybody can use this space, but whatever you create, please let it be something that brings joy to people.”

Sabreen: Yes, positive.

Bianka: Yeah, just make it so it's positive, so people can feel uplifted. There's enough negativity in the world. We don't want to contribute to that.

Sabreen: So that was kind of like the early-on inspiration of like, “Keep it cute or put it on mute,” and…

Bianka: Then that space, we had to close it. So we decided when we closed it, that was Sunny Side Up. That was that place. It didn't work out. The landlord, we discovered, was illegally leasing this building to us. So we were like, “Ooh, close the doors. This is not, it's not going to work.”

Sabreen: Time to move on and let's just focus on the coffee component.

Bianka: Because that's the one thing we do have now, that we don't have a space. And just to give you an idea, this space had an outdoor patio. We had a storefront. We had another loft in there where we had actually created an artist residency where people could stay in the loft there.

There was a whole other space for doing music. There was a huge space where people could dance, or a whole other space you could do woodworking or any kind of crafting. It was just kind of an everything space.

So since we didn't have that everything space, like Sabreen said, the only thing we still had was coffee. You know, we could still do something with coffee

Ashley: So that's kind of Round Two: The Evolution of Cute Coffee, in a way.

Bianka and Sabreen: Yes.

Bianka: Because after we left that space, we moved into an apartment that was 600 square feet. We definitely didn't have space to geek out in the same way. And we just would sit around and do a lot of drawing and just be like, “All right, what do we want this to look like? What are we thinking about?”

One of the concepts, actually, when I first met Sabreen that I had in my mind was doing something with a cup, with a mug. When you look at a mug and you look at it from the top, it looks like two C's put together or when you look at the handle, it looks like a C. All right. Let's play off of the idea of maybe some branding with some C’s.

I was actually going to do a coffee and conversations [idea] because I had this space that I set up, kind of like a “Tonight Show” where I was like, “All right, I'm going to sit over here in my living room and people are going to come in and I'm gonna sit over there and I'm gonna play a record and we're just gonna chat it up and drink coffee.”

That didn't happen either, but we came back to it and was like, “That was a good idea. Let's play with it.” And next thing you know, it turned into: “You know, what? We love cute things. Who doesn't like cute things? Cute things make everybody feel good. It’s gotta be Cute Coffee. Okay. Let's do that.”

Ashley: I love that it's alliterative.

Sabreen: Yeah! Very easy to remember.

Ashley: I, as a person who named their podcast mostly based on alliteration, really appreciate it.

Sabreen: Yeah, that's right.

Bianka: That's right.

Ashley: Boss Barista, Cute Coffee. They have the same kind of cadence, in a way.

Sabreen: Yes, exactly.

Bianka: We knew what we were doing.

Ashley: We thought about this.

Bianka: That's right.

(Everyone laughs)

Ashley: Something that strikes me as I'm talking to you is that it seems like something that you folks really embrace is having ideas and just going with it, or seeing where it takes you and being okay with it not working.

Bianka: I mean, that's the only way to learn.

Sabreen: Yeah.

Bianka: You just gotta test it out, test out the waters. You don't know if you don't try.

Ashley: Do you think that's because of your artistic background?

Bianka: Definitely. That's definitely an artist's mindset, you pick something up, you start making something and you might not finish that project, and then you move on to another one or you started a project and it's like, “Oh, I thought this was for this, but actually it's for this.”

Sabreen: Yeah, that happens a lot. Something else happens and you're like, “Oh yeah, I'm going to get back to you now. There's a place for you.”

Bianka: Totally. I mean, that's what happened with all the designing for Cute Coffee. We didn't know what we were going to use all these different illustrations for.

And next thing you know, it's like, “Oh, that's the whole background.” And it's like three years later!

Sabreen: Right. If you're feeling inspired by it, there's a reason for it. And it might not present itself at that moment, but it's coming soon.

Ashley: How would you describe the way that you folks approach coffee?

Bianka: We feel it's kinda like, “Yo, is this my friend? Are you my family?” first—

Sabreen: Before we even get to the coffee, who's the person behind it.

Bianka: Yeah. Who's the person behind it? I want to get to know you. I want to have this relationship with you, but if I'm having this relationship, do I want to be in it?

It's kind of like, we’ve got to go on some dates and see if we like each other.

Sabreen: Right.

Bianka: It's like you're dating someone…

Sabreen: …and you're going to want to be ordering regularly….

Bianka: …and I want to build, I want to have a lasting relationship.

Ashley: How do you facilitate that?

Bianka: We actually initially started it just by looking at maps and being like, “All right, let's look at this map and see what farms are in this area. Let's just start cold-calling some people.”

There's even different resources that we found, just doing some research online. And from being in coffee so long, just conversing with different people, new people. So it was like, “Oh, I'll talk to that person because you know that person, that knows that person and they seem like a cool person.”

I just want to work with cool, sweet people and people who want to really truly exchange with us and not just have a transaction, because I dunno, it just feels empty when it's just about a transaction.

Sabreen: Yeah. So learning about their background, hearing their stories—helps us go from there.

Bianka: Lots of phone conversations. Lots of emails with people and yes, lots of storytelling. I think that that's really, what did it is just storytelling with people…

Sabreen: Emails, on the phone….

Bianka: It's been great.

Sabreen: Instagram…

Ashley: Are you in pretty regular communication with all the people that you source coffee from?

Bianka: I would say there's like, a select few who are like, “Yo, these are the homies. This is the bread and butter.”

Sabreen: We're on the same page [of] understanding.

Bianka: Yeah. There's definitely an understanding of like, “Oh, you love God just as much as I do. That's my girl. Like, that's my other mom. Like I can talk to you and your son.” And it just feels like that is just straight-up family.

Sabreen: And then hearing how they appreciate how we’re sharing their coffee. Like they really see us and appreciate like, “Oh, you girls are really trying to sell some coffee.” Yes we are.

Bianka: Yeah. But we're also trying to give you shine. Like we try to tell your story the way that you want your story to be told, because at the end of the day, we wouldn't have this story to tell or this coffee to share with anyone if it wasn't for you. We got to put you on blast.

Sabreen: Absolutely. And they appreciate that the most.

Ashley: I feel like that's so special because for so many coffees that we consume, or so many of the coffees that we see in coffee shops, there is storytelling used, but it can be really confusing about whose story is actually being told. Is it the person who produced that coffee’s story, or is that story told through the lens of somebody else?

Like, you're part of that story, but I think it could be really easy to tell a story that serves a purpose that maybe is transactional. So it's really, really special to hear you talk about why storytelling is important to you.

Sabreen: We always like to run the story by them first, before we share it on our website or any of the social media platforms. We just like to say, “Hey, is this accurate? Is this all the details? All the facts?”

Bianka: “Is this what you want to say?” Yeah because you wrote this—a lot of times, some of the farmers’ stories that we have on our site, that's not written by us.

We just copied and pasted what they wanted us to say.

Ashley: I told you this before we started recording, but one of the big reasons that I really wanted to talk to you is that I know that I've gone on record saying this a lot recently, but Boss Barista can sometimes be a little bit of a bummer and—which is okay. A lot of people have really important things to say and there are a lot of big issues we should be thinking about in the coffee industry.

But there's something about the way that both of you approach coffee that seems so unapologetically joyful. And I wonder if that's something that you guys have to like, remind yourselves of daily—like this is a joyous occasion. This is a joyous moment for us. How do you incorporate joy daily, and in your coffee experience?

Bianka: Man, how do we incorporate joy…

Bianka and Sabreen: Daily?!?

Bianka: Well, the first thing I do before I even get out of my bed is I just thank God for another day. I feel like opening my eyes every day is a joy, and the fact that I can move my body and actually put my feet on the floor and then go downstairs and make myself a cup of coffee.

I'm like, “Yo, life is good.”

Sabreen: It's a gift.

Bianka: It's a gift! So it just, it just seems like we really appreciate—or no, doesn't seem like—but we do really appreciate the little things. And so when it comes to Cute Coffee, it just, it's just easy. I don't even feel like we have to think about it.

And, you know, we definitely just wanted to make people feel good. We don't want to raise anybody's ire and make them feel agitated. And, you know, we don't want to get political and take sides with anyone because we want this to really truly be for everybody. I don't care what you choose to call yourself or what your political background is. I don't care where you come from. Let's just enjoy this cup of coffee together.

Sabreen: We’re probably not going to agree on those things. So like let's not even go there. Let's just enjoy this cup of coffee.

Bianka: Isn't it delicious?

Ashley: Does that ever get difficult?

Bianka: I don't feel like it's difficult?

I mean, for me, it's just easy. That's just easy for me to do. I feel like my purpose in life is just to spread love. Like literally that's it. And when that doesn't happen in my life, and I feel like someone's rubbing me the wrong way, or they're feeling some type of way about me being sweet.

I'm like, you know, that don't have nothing to do with me. That's your stuff. I'm just gonna keep on keeping it cute and keep on giving you love, so…

Sabreen: I will say it is very easy for Bianka to be love and joy. It's just who she is. I will say for myself, it's now easy for me, but maybe it wasn't super easy a year or two ago. I had to grow into it, but it's definitely, I see the benefits of it.

Ashley: What I get from you, in this conversation, in everything that I consume that's about Cute Coffee, is that everything feels very genuinely reflective of you.

Bianka and Sabreen: Totally.

Ashley: And that doesn't require effort. I mean—maybe it requires effort sometimes.

Sabreen: No, it doesn't require effort when you've built—you've committed yourself to just living in full transparency and…

Bianka: Just living.

Sabreen: …and just living.

Bianka: I just want to live. So in order to just be living and not be like I just said, cleaning up all the time, let's just keep it real. Let's just be incredibly transparent.

Let's always tell the truth. Let's always move forward. Even when it's hard to hear the truth, at least you know the truth. And you can move forward from there.

You know, you can't ever hide the truth. We had a woman say to us recently: You know, you can go through the truth and like shove it down, but think of it like grass.

You can go cut all that grass and cut all these flowers and whatnot. And next thing you know, the truth is going to pop up like a bunch of weeds and you can't stop it. So it's just easier to keep it real.

Ashley: I feel like that's a secondary, like, “Keep it cute or put it on mute.” Like, “Keep it true …. true ….” I dunno, I need a rhyming dictionary for this. I used to have one as a kid.

Bianka: That's totally what it is. That's funny you say that because we were kind of explaining that to someone recently about Cute [Coffee], because they thought that “Keep it cute” was like, “Oh, you gotta be cute and pretty all the time.”

And it's like, no, it's not about anything like that.

Sabreen: It’s about your energy, your spirit. It's just put out goodness, just that.

Bianka: Exactly. Or like my mom would say to me as a kid, and I'm sure a lot of people's parents have said this to them. You know, if you ain't got nothing nice to say, don't say nothing at all.

Sabreen: It’s exactly that.

Bianka: And I really believe in the power of words. So the words that you put out, that's what it's going to be.

So if I'm going to speak something into existence, I better get ready for what's coming back to me for what I just said.

Sabreen: You’re narrating. So narrate a good story.

Ashley: A lot of the work that it seems like Cute Coffee is doing is very self-reflective. It is very much this almost pouring out of your—of your souls, in a way. That feels a little cheesy to say, but I'm going to go with that.

Sabreen: That's accurate.

Bianka: Pretty accurate.

Sabreen: I mean, we both have put our everything into this.

Bianka: Yeah. I mean, even every dollar. I'm like, “I ain't got no more money, but guess what? Look at Cute Coffee. Look at Cute Coffee! You’re so cute!”

Sabreen: We both just believe in it so much. So we're just in it to win it.

Bianka: Yup. And even when we're ordering coffee sometimes, I'm like, “We have to order coffee and we don't have the money, but we're going to figure it out.”

Sabreen: It's going to come.

Bianka: It's going to come.

Sabreen: It has to keep going.

Bianka: Yes. And we've actually had so much going on in this past year with having to move a lot and it's just been wild trying to balance Cute Coffee! Oh, look, I gotta move again! I gotta pack up all this stuff! Now I got to figure this out! Oh, snap. Oh my god. This landlord—you're out of line!

Sabreen: It’s constant.

Bianka: I’m going to have to actually get official. I need official help.

Sabreen: Yeah. And during all these jumps and crossovers and ducking and bobbing and weaving like, Cute Coffee has sustained, and it keeps going and people are still loving it.

And I'm like, “Oh, this is amazing.” Like just more ammo to keep pushing, keep doing no matter what life is throwing at you, like keep doing this love project. It's really incredible to see how far it's come.

Bianka: And it doesn't feel like work. My mom just said something to us the other day, about how you—

Sabreen: When you enjoy doing what you do…

Bianka: You've never worked a day in your life.

Sabreen: Yeah. We may have messed that up, but it's like that.

Ashley: Tell me about your television show.

Bianka: Ooh. Cute TV!

Sabreen: Cute TV was very inspired by a lot of things from the ’90s.

Bianka: ’80s, too!

Sabreen: ’80s too.

Bianka: And then our everyday life. We have a whole skit coming up soon that we cannot wait to tell the story about. I can't wait.

Sabreen: Stay tuned.

Bianka: Stay tuned. Okay. It has to do with a thousand-pound roaster that I'm looking for. I'm really looking for it because supposedly it's in my house.

Sabreen: Supposedly we’re hiding it in our house.

Bianka: We were hiding it in our house. According to these accusations…

Sabreen: Somebody saw us sneaking it in through the back. I'm like, what? Like, please tell me where it is. What about carrying a thousand-pound roaster?

Bianka: [crosstalk] I would love to know.

Ashley: Now I wish that I had the video on so I can inspect and be like, “Where is it?”

(Everyone laughs)

Bianka: Coming soon on Cute TV.

Ashley: Where can folks check out Cute TV?

Bianka: I think we're going to post it on our website, ilovecutecoffee.com. So coming soon.

Sabreen: And what about Instagram?

Bianka: Oh, Instagram! Yeah, we'll put some skits on Instagram and then maybe it'll be like short skits on Instagram and then maybe some kind of full episodes or something—I don't know yet, but something's coming.

Cute TV actually just dropped yesterday, unexpectedly. We said, “Yo, for this Suenos Coffee subscription, let's do a little episode of Cute TV.”

Sabreen: And so it was the debut.

Bianka: The debut of Cute TV.

Ashley: As a person whose nails are like, slime-green-colored right now, I really appreciate anything related to the ’90s. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about Boss Barista [as a brand], and I think I just want it to be like, Nickelodeon orange.

Bianka and Sabreen: Yes! Yes.

Bianka: You know, you've got to have slime. Slime everywhere.

Ashley: What if I started doing live shows and I just slimed the guests? Like, would that be insulting or would that be like, an honor?

Bianka: No, it’s an honor.

Sabreen: An honor. You can slime us anytime.

Bianka: If you didn’t get slimed, you didn’t come right. You have to come back—if you get to come back.

Ashley: That’s true. There has to be like, I think, the original slime would be if you said, “I don't know.” So there has to be something similar for Boss Barista. If you say like a certain phrase. I have to think…

Sabreen: Like a punishment. So we wouldn't have.

Ashley: Or maybe it's like the other way around where it's like, if you admonish yourself, like if you say something negative about yourself, then you get—you have to keep it, maybe I'm stealing from you a little bit. You have to keep it cute.

Sabreen: Yeah, that's a good one. I like that.

Bianka: It's not stealing. No, you can have it. That's why we put it out there.

Ashley: What would you want people listening to this to take away from hearing you folks speak?

Bianka: (bird noises) Listen to that bird. That bird is telling you exactly what we wanted to say.

Sabreen: That you are cute.

Bianka: I mean, to take away from this? Man, there’s so much…

Sabreen: There’s so much.

Bianka: Just keep on being true to you and know that what's for you is for you and keep it cute. Make life easy, just live.

Sabreen: Yeah.

Bianka: And don't worry. Don't worry about nothing.

Sabreen: Don’t feed into anything that's not serving you or making you feel good.

Just let it go.

Ashley: Sabreen, Bianka, it's such a delight to talk to you. Thank you for joining me.

Bianka: Thank you for having us.

Sabreen: Thank you so much for having us.

Bianka: Oh, my gosh. It's an honor to talk to you every time.

Sabreen: It really is.

Ashley: Oh, shucks.

That was Bianka Alloyn And Sabreen Naimah. You can learn more about Cute Coffee on Instagram and at their website. Also, here’s one more cute photo for you:

Keep it cute and share this episode with your friends!