The Excuse

Jay Lijewski and Joshua came up together as young sales reps at Dillanos, and two decades of trade shows, road trips and hundreds of miles hiked later, Jay is more brother than friend. His coffee story starts in Erie, Pennsylvania, behind the bar of the cafe that had been his teenage everything, where one phone call to the roaster turned into his first roastery tour and, eventually, a one-way ticket to the Northwest to see what was behind the next door. When he got a second shot at the Dillanos interview, he walked in with his CD binders so they would know exactly who he was. That instinct for honest expression runs through the whole conversation: cities you only know once you have walked them, music found through people rather than algorithms, and why a heavily engineered co-ferment can feel more like a manufactured boy band than what nature had to say. Now head of sales at Bridging Tables, Jay has come to love the well-produced 84-point coffees that anchor someone's espresso and make up most of a producer's living.

The second half turns to Jay's stage 4 colon cancer: two weeks from stomach cramps to diagnosis, seventeen rounds of chemo, and four straight clean quarterly blood tests. He walked through it the way his generation of coffee people opened up their blend recipes, as an open book. "I happened to be close to the front of the pack and I hit a patch of glass," he says, so he raised his hand for everyone riding behind him: get checked, and if it hits you, be loud about it. They close on what it changed, from his wife's care to how much more he values his friends, and on a hope for the industry: that it meets what isn't right with love, not rage, because "I yearn for a day where love is cool again."

No guest this week. On his way to the airport for a beverage event he had spent months planning, Joshua ended up in an ambulance instead, and then spent a few days in a shared hospital room with a curtain down the middle. In this solo episode he tells what happened on both sides of that curtain: a first roommate, a longshoreman of thirty years with a joyful story nothing like his own, and a second who quietly missed the birth of his first grandchild and found a stranger in the next bed glad to celebrate it with him. It wasn't coffee and it wasn't a cafe, but as Joshua puts it, "there was an excuse to be together."

That room widened the lens of the show. Joshua talks about the common ground that lowers the threshold for vulnerability, why AI and social media can't stand in for the growth that only comes from real relationship, and what it means to make the most of a place you didn't choose to be. He closes with a challenge for the next room you walk into: are you thinking about what you need to get done, or about the people around you? He also shares that The Excuse will soon welcome guests from beyond the coffee world. "Whatever you're doing, whoever you're talking to, make it intentional."

Deaton Pigot pulled his first shots at fifteen in Orange, a country town four hours west of Sydney, and coffee has been the one constant ever since. Through a rough stretch in his late teens, a chef's apprenticeship, a run at accounting and years fronting a band, there was always a coffee job holding the line. As he puts it, "coffee was the anchor," and everything else was balloons in the wind. At 23, walking to an early shift at a clifftop cafe in Wollongong with the sun coming up over the Pacific, he asked himself whether coffee could be a career. Then he kept asking the roaster's founders the same question every Friday until they made him their first full-time barista trainer.

From there the conversation follows the stepping stones: a band that moved to Dublin after one unforgettable concert, learning to roast in Ireland, Intelligentsia in Los Angeles, Toby's Estate in Brooklyn, and in 2016 the founding of Tectonic Coffee in LA, a business he says was always a matter of when, not if. Joshua and Deaton talk about explaining the hard things in public, from his early coffee blog to the posts that walked customers through the recent green-coffee price spike, and about time: quarter-to-five mornings with a quiet cup, the big clock that runs his five-year-old's school routine, and why ordering your hours lets you settle into them instead of fighting them. They close on an open question for the industry as some roasters begin moving production to origin: what it means for the people and the craft here, and whether it's a canary worth watching.

Trevor Corlett opened Madcap Coffee in Grand Rapids eighteen years ago, after two earlier shops that didn't make it, and for ten straight seasons he was one of the most recognizable competitors in American coffee. He and Joshua go back to writing the Barista Guild's Level 2 certification together. Trevor only ever competed with what was on Madcap's menu, and he kept going for one reason: as long as he had something to say. His last year was 2016. He won his regional, finished fifth at the U.S. Barista Championship, and walked off that stage asking himself why he was still doing it.

This conversation is about what came after. Trevor stepped back from every board, committee and volunteer role and set out to become a better owner rather than the person who knew the most about coffee. That meant reading, an operating system that finally put Madcap's vision and roles on paper, and a CEO roundtable where he runs the smallest company at the table and has the same problems as everyone else. Joshua brings his own conviction that life has more to do with direction than momentum, and that a business clear on what it won't do never has to be the loudest voice in the room. Along the way there are competition bloopers, a coach's view of people moving on, and the advice Trevor now gives early-stage owners as a Coffee Futures Fund mentor: get clear on where you're going and what each person brings to the team before passion runs you out of road. In his words, "We don't grow through things that are comfortable."

Alexandra LittleJohn — ALJ to nearly everyone in specialty coffee — runs U.S. marketing for Eversys out of Denver, after years at Portola Coffee Lab, Verve, Equator and OZO and a long stretch of volunteer leadership with the Barista Guild of America. Joshua first met her at a Coffee Fest latte art competition, where she showed up in a lab coat, goggles and rubber gloves. Her love of live music came out of loss. Her mother died when she was eleven, and her mother's best friend's family carried her and her brothers to shows through those years. A concert is still one of the few places she can turn her head off and just be present.

Instagram took its time letting ALJ into the room, so Trevor Corlett jumped on to hold it, and Joshua ended up saying out loud how much of his identity he has tied to getting things right. The conversation that follows is a quiet answer to that. ALJ and Joshua talk about concerts as a rare place where strangers become a community for two hours, learning from people by watching what they have and asking how they got it, meeting people on their level, and remembering that most people are too busy thinking about themselves to judge you. Then Joshua describes the table he wants to set, one where everybody eats, and she turns it around: "I'm the table," and whoever shows up for dinner is meant to be there. She can't feed anyone if she hasn't fed herself first. It ends with the titanium rods in her back, two years of Pilates and weight training, and a show last weekend she stood through from start to finish. Her verdict on all that work: "It's totally worth it."

Tony Konecny — Tonx to most of this industry — got into coffee by accident. He left New York after 9/11 carrying credit card debt and no intention of ever putting on a tie again, landed in Seattle, and took a barista job because it felt like winning the race to the bottom. The shop happened to be Victrola. The owners handed him the keys to the roaster, he taught himself the work, and twenty-six years later he has opened coffee bars for Intelligentsia in Los Angeles, built Tonx Coffee out of the trunk of a car and sold it to Blue Bottle, run a coffee program for Roy Choi that put real coffee on the counter for a dollar a cup, and landed at Yes Plz, where he and Sumi Ali release a new blend every week.

What Tony and Joshua are really talking about is access. For two decades specialty coffee got better at coffee and worse at letting people in — the equipment grew more serious, the expertise grew deeper, and the quiet message to everyone drinking at home was that this was not meant for them. Tony's version of it is blunter: "we were pulling up the ladder behind us." He has spent his whole career arguing the other side of that, and he is candid about what it has cost him and how uncertain the business looks from where he stands today. They get into the Los Angeles coffee bars he helped invent, what the subscription model was actually built to do, and why he believes the next few years belong to the operators who are realistic rather than ambitious. It ends somewhere Joshua wasn't expecting, with Tony naming the thing he has sidestepped his entire career — not delegation, leadership — and the line he has come around to: "no one's coming to save me."

Doug Meils roasts for Nice Coffee Roasters in Los Angeles, and he describes his personal style as "under the sea Trapper Keeper." Behind the loud shirts and easy laugh is a man who came into specialty coffee in 2007 carrying a hard childhood and a false bravado. The punk scene, the coffee community, and years of therapy slowly wore that down. About five years ago he watched friends a little further down the drinking road than he was, saw where it led, and quit. What's left is someone who lives out loud on purpose: honest, accountable, and unapologetically Doug.

Doug and Joshua talk about roasting for the 99.5% of drinkers who own a blade grinder rather than for the champions at the counter, why stark white cafés full of science equipment keep people out, and why the best drinks come from baristas who aren't even talking about the drink. From there: music and books as little pieces of yourself you hand to a friend, the long chain of hands a coffee passes through before it reaches your cup, paying for the future of coffee so farmers have a savings account when the hard years come, and the line Doug keeps coming back to: be nice to other people, and be nice to yourself.

Douglas Stanley Kuehn III — Doug to anyone who has watched him work a trade show floor — grew up in El Salvador during the civil war, with a father who survived a tiger shark attack at eighteen and went on to pioneer the country's first organic coffee. The near-death experiences kept stacking up: encephalitis at twenty, then an earthquake felt from the sixteenth floor. What came out the other side is a man who starts every day on one line: head up, heart in.

Doug and Joshua trace the road from a barista job inside a Corpus Christi bookstore to twenty years building a distribution business in Austin, the pivot that made it work ("let's get good at everything but the coffee"), the sale to Odeko, and the phone call to Kurt and Alden that brought him to Hollander. Along the way: the $30,000 a coffee community raised for a little boy named Milo, why the bricks of a career matter less than the mortar between them, the long-fork picture of heaven and hell, and the question men don't ask each other nearly enough — how are you really doing?

Michael Phillips — World Barista Champion, Blue Bottle veteran, educator — sits down with Joshua to talk about what specialty coffee's rise was really about. The competitions, the Cup of Excellence, the relentless push for quality: none of it was primarily about price. It was a fight for respect. A fight for credibility. And the money followed the credibility — not the other way around.

Antoine Franklin gave Joshua the sharpest articulation of hospitality he's ever encountered: not just feeling welcome, but feeling anticipated. There's a difference between tolerance and preparation — between a seat that's available and a seat that was kept for you. This conversation is about what it looks like to build spaces, businesses, and communities where people feel like they were expected all along.