Aaron Fender is the co-founder of Portrait Coffee in Atlanta, Georiga, and the featured roaster here at Matchbook for the month of February. Aaron is the type of person you want to sit and have a beer with. In fact, we probably spent more time just sitting on Zoom talking and chatting than we did actually recording. 

Aaron started Portrait Coffee less than two years ago, and their motto is "pouring a new narrative," which they do by shining a light on Black people in the coffee industry. Aaron is interested in coffee as a conduit, a way to connect with people and build shared experiences, which you hear in this episode. Our conversation is more casual than most you've probably heard on the podcast because Aaron is incredibly easy to talk to. He's the type of person who asks questions, wants to know more about others, and can break the ice easily.  

  We talk a lot about Aaron as a person in sometimes funny and abstract ways in this episode. We immediately get into a discussion about the HBO show Succession and we also talk about how his Matchbook release, which he's called "Soul Food" reflects his personality both as a roaster and as a person. Aaron likes to feel things out and on the lessons he's learned in the past to inform the decisions he's making today. We hope you're just as excited as we are to drink his coffee and enjoy something that's truly born out of his passion to connect with others and use coffee as a bridge to do exactly what we did in this episode, which was pretty much hang out and swap stories. Here's Aaron.