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Are you recording?

They probably just say emoji on Snapchat.

Yeah. Probably the poop emoji on Snapchat.

Did you fax it to me on Snapchat?

Did you see um who the fuck had faxing recently? Some like OS level thing or like Dropbox or something? Scanbot does faxes now. That’s it. Oh my god, that’s so satisfying. I use Scanbot every day and I have to fax like at least once a month. Wow.

I used to use Fax Zero and now I use Scanbot and it’s it’s fine. Like Fax Zero is usually free, but it gives you like an advertisement. But I’m just assuming that because you have a Fax machine, you’re like Opening yourself up to spam, so like it’s just Tuesday if I spam you by, you know Just doing that for free by being a cheapskate. But Scanbot, every time a letter comes in from a government, it gets scanned and put on and then it auto syncs to Dropbox. And then I batch out Dropbox and then file it into a series of shared folders that go to my accountant or my lawyers, respectively. Just so they can have shit for their files. So if the IRS, like do you know that the only way to know whether the IRS actually received something There’s basically a life hack for this, where you give a very slightly different address every single time you want to correspond with the IRS. And it can be something like A V E instead of A V or A V E N U E or A V period. And those count as different addresses. And then the way that you do that is you file something and then you get back a letter that says, we just changed your we just updated your address. If this was in error, you can reach out to us, if not, take no action. And so I just have like literally 300, we just changed your address things from draft from the past like five years. Because my accountant is unbelievable at keeping a consistent paper trail. And so every time I get back a we just changed your address form, it’s because they received something and correctly filed it.

It’s one of the best life hacks. And I mean, run that by your accountant, but like. Keep that one in mind. Another thing I do, I use Scanbot to scan all of my travel documents. So when I’m traveling, I scan my credit cards. front and back in case they get stolen. Driver’s license, passport, card, passport. I even go so far as to have birth certificates to prove citizenship. So I’ve notarized birth certificates of both me and Aaron. This will matter considerably more once Italian citizenship goes through, which we are apparently three months away, which I don’t know when. That’s it’s going to be not a thing until it’s a thing. But like we made all It’s Italian months. It’s Italy time. Italy is a shockingly efficient country when it comes to the train system. And when their church is open. And fucking nothing else.

Actually, no, that’s not right. They’re extremely efficient when it comes to getting espresso into your body.

Have you been to Italy?

Italy has some of the most interesting and distinct coffee culture on earth. It is usually like burned, flavorless espresso, but you are. Drinking it at a bar, and you just lean against the bar, jawing with everybody around you in this amazing social atmosphere. And it is everywhere in the country, it is one Euro. You are paying one Euro for your espresso. You put a the ritual of showing up, putting a single Euro coin on the counter, and they just take it, and an espresso appears. And you just drink the espresso and you go on your way. And you just do this continuously over the course of your day. I’ve never been to a place where there’s anything like that. The last industrialized country that Howard Schultz decided to expand Starbucks to. was Italy for that reason, because a single espresso in a Starbucks is more than one Euro, but not in Italy. It has to be one Euro, or no one will go there.

It’s just weird because it’s not. What you think of when you think of a coffee place. It’s not third wave. They aren’t any sort of aesthetic improvement in the coffee, like the quality of the coffee. comes from not the beans like every other coffee joint ever, or not from the roasting, but from the expensiveness and overpreparation of the espresso machine. So I went someplace in Milan that made that was known as like the fucking giro of espresso lol. It was an octogenarian guy. And it was because he had built his own espresso machine, and he was the only one who did not operate it. And he spent two hours fine-tuning it at four in the morning every morning. Holy Jesus Christ. And it was among. I don’t want to say the best espresso I’ve had in my life because I’m a third wave coffee guy. You know that. Everybody knows that. And you simply get better returns from it in terms of crop yield, in terms of roasting quality, in terms of Shelf stability, all of those things, right? But that was the best Italian espresso I had on my whole honeymoon, I tell you that. And it was some of the most interesting, genuinely interesting, not like a thinking face, but like actually interesting espresso I’ve ever had. Because it was still burned beans because they don’t know how to not do that in Italy. Um but um man, he did the best with the burned beans that you possibly fucking could have. And I could easily imagine mainlining that stuff. It was really something.

Yeah, yeah, you’re calibrating machine. And I’ve heard stories of like if this machine breaks, they’re closed for the day. They don’t get to sell their espresso, and everyone is sad, and he’s sad. So he has a strong incentivization to not only repair the machine, but also dial it in to his specification. And I don’t really think you have to do that when you’re doing pours, right? You only sort of have to do that when you’re doing espresso because you kind of get to diminishing returns. And it becomes more about the technique and the quality of the water that you’re using, and also the quality of the beans and the roasting time. Those are the things that matter more. And it strikes me as spending so much time focusing on not the wrong thing, but like the third or fourth priority thing. You know, is that dumb? I don’t know. It’s it’s weird. And also, just get espresso, never get a latte. Like, you are drinking straight espresso in Italy the entire time. Like, don’t No, no, you’re clearly a foreigner if you’re no so

Okay, so first wave is your can of Stewart’s coffee that you had burned that was miserable, right? And Canonical like diner coffee, not coffee. Starbucks is second wave. Okay. So effectively, there are three grades of Bean and um, God, I forget one of them. It’s Robusta and Arabicar are the two that you should know about. Robusta is basically canned shitty coffee. And this was from the like eighties and nineties when you could get tins of coffee for for Unbelievably low amounts of money. And you could still, like, if you go to a Bodega and you get like Cafe Bustello or something like that. That’s a first wave Coffee. And then second wave coffee is basically they found out that Arabica was a higher quality bean that had more delicate flavors. And then they continued to burn the beans because all we knew about coffee in the eighties and nineties was bitterness and darkness, right? And so we were doing the wrong thing to the right beans. And that was Starbucks came up on that. And became insanely famous as a result and is like, you know, world beating, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Fine, great on Starbucks. Congratulations on your success. Whatever. Third wave is essentially asking the question: what if we treated coffee like it was a fine dining product and like a barista was a chef? What would coffee look like in that situation? And the answer is essentially You have pour overs and high quality espresso, and you have nerds who care about like variations in minerality content in the water. and you have a roaster in the back room, right? It was rare that you would have roasters on site in coffee places. So I mean, once you scale up, eventually the roaster kind of goes off site because it’s too expensive and too large and also a giant industrial operation that generates a lot of smoke. So you have a way to get rid of that and fume hood it off. But if you go to a place in Chicago like Gaslight, for example, they have a roaster in the back, and they just roast their coffee every week and then they put it out. And it is expected that you make that coffee within about two weeks. You should treat it as if it is bananas. Like it’s about that long to spoil. And so you get diminishing returns later on. If you have particularly old coffee that’s nudging the two week mark, you could still use it. What do you do with bananas that are old? You make banana bread, you know, you make you cook with them. So, what we do in our house is we buy like multiple pounds of Two-week old coffee or like 13-day old coffee, and we make cold brew out of it because all you need to do is steep it for two weeks or whatever. Overnight, I think Aaron does it for, and you just get time travel juice out of it. But you’re basically looking at you have been presented with beans, okay? There are beans in front of you. How old are they? Well, great. The date is now printed on it. So you know that they’re three or four days old. What brew method should you use with them? Well, I don’t know. Ask your barista. Because there are many different brew methods. There’s espresso, there’s Hario, there’s ArrowPress, there’s Chemex, there’s Solo, there’s Kalita, there’s Clever Dripper. If you are inside of a Starbucks, there’s also Clover, which they purchased the patented rights to about ten years ago. And so there are a lot of different ways to skin the proverbial cat, right? And you can brew something that is recommended for V60 on a Chemex. Nobody’s going to put a gun against your head, but like There’s just as you would say, okay, well, I just got early season asparagus and it’s particularly thin, there’s one way to cook thin asparagus and one way to cook thick purple asparagus. And you’re probably, if you know what you’re doing in the kitchen, not going to fuck around and do the wrong thing, right? The same with coffee. That is essentially what third wave coffee is. And so that’s the trappings of it that you see as a consumer. You see basically you’re coming in. And you see a bunch of people with weird pour over kettles, and they have a bunch of different brewing apparatuses, and it looks like a mad science laboratory. And then you have a bunch of questions. There’s usually a bunch of bags of beans on the side, and they all have dates printed on them. That’s because that is the roast date. The roast date matters more than the pick date, but that also matters, and they should be able to answer those questions. If you go to a place and they know their salt, you should be able to know where it came from, what the process was for getting the bean out of the coffee cherry. Was it what’s called a natural process where it’s dried and sloughed off? Or is it what’s called a washed process where they use water to get rid of the husk? They should be able to answer that question for you. I ask that question often. They should be able to tell you basically the flavor profile and what brew method it’s especially good for. They should also be able to tell you Any place worth their salt should have so much passion that you should be like, if I buy this bag, will you be sad that it’s gone because you were planning on using your employee discount to get it later? I ask that question often, and then they like freeze up and they’re like, I have to answer truthfully. I’m like, yes, you do. Yes, you do. We’re not bluffing on this one. But then they know they’re talking to a nerd, right? Like, you want. There is so, even within this whole fucked up ritual. The great thing about being in the coffee is broadly, you never have to care about that, and as a result, most people don’t. So, when you walk in and start asking about Ethiopia Yerkoshev washed processes, they’re like, Come in, my wayward son. And you walk out traveling through time because they do a cupping for you. Like, they. They take care of their own because they know you’ve been converted. And also, if you’ve been converted, you probably have enough money to afford really nice coffee. Coffee is a it’s an affordable luxury, and you can like trade off in your life and appreciate it on its own terms. It’s cheaper than, say, getting into wine or even in many ways craft beer at this point. Does that answer the question about third wave? I feel like I went In a lot of different directions with it.

What were you gonna say?

How do you find the question that’s going to get me screaming? Um, every time. Every time. So, um tea. I got into tea before I got into coffee, just to be abundantly clear. And I, um There is one coffee sitting over there that’s a really nice Panamanian coffee that Aaron got from Half Wit in Chicago. If you guys if you’re all Chicagoan coffee nerds, then you’re probably applauding. But next to it is a cabinet that has I believe no fewer than 25 kinds of tea. I’m I’m into tea. So, um God, where to begin? The care is there. Um I’m going to step back a bit and talk a little bit about a lady named Sally Fallon. Sally Fallon wrote a cookbook that was insanely influential in California School of Cooking called Nourishing Traditions in I believe the 80s, and she’s a total fucking hippie. And it basically says like, you know, eat animals and use every part of them and ferment your milk and eat raw milk or drink raw milk and kombucha is really your friend and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But one thing that she says is basically, we’ve already been doing food right for 2,000 years, and so we don’t have to particularly innovate on it. I believe that is the case for most kinds of tea. There are very small exceptions within tea, but it is also a deeply It’s still very deeply provincial and traditional as a result of it hooking into those traditions. So if you have e. g. Essentia There’s 2,000 years of Japanese tradition on harvesting sensha, and frankly, I don’t know how you can improve upon it, right? The same with Darjeelings. Single-estate Darjeelings have existed for several hundred years minimum. And I’m sure there are some listeners that might be extreme nerds about this. But in Pu’er, it is simultaneously, insanely traditional. You cannot get anything but like ultra-traditional gong fu Pu’er if you go to China. And then there’s one motherfucker in Wisconsin who decided to innovate on it. Right? Wisconsin. You know why? Wisconsin, because he grew up eating smoked sausages and gouda for his entire life and thought that Poer was similarly smoky. And so he has a life’s mission to get Wisconsinites into Poer. And I forget the name of his thing. If you just Google Wisconsin Poer, it’s probably the only thing that’s going to pop up.

Well, if you like Scotch, you’re going to love Pu’er. That’s basically for Lapsang Sushong. It is a. It’s provided in a cake, but not like an actual pastry cake. I mean like a slab that looks about the size of a small potato pancake. It’s maybe about. A centimeter and a half thick and probably about six inches in diameter. And they are aged for Decades or years. And so you can have poo air cakes. I encountered some in Hong Kong that were, I believe, like $30,000 USD. Whatever 200,000 Hong Kong is, something like that. Divide by 8, I believe, is the rule. A lot. A car. You’re buying a car of tea. Okay? So there’s that. The consequence is very funky and smoky, and you are supposed to steep it like up to a dozen times. And it is a Like in a lot of Chinese food traditions, you just sit there and talk for hours about the issues of the day. It’s like going out to dim sum, and you have Pu’er. um which is more of like a it’s the the ceremony by which you make pu’er is called gong foo. And it’s very elaborate, very over the top. And there are names for everything that you’re doing within it. But the consequence is that you’re drinking warmed, liquefied dirt, and it’s fantastic. It tastes funky and wonderful, and it is not for everyone. So that’s what Pooh Air is. So to go back to your original question about tea, people are simultaneously woke to tea and simultaneously fucking up tea. Like, and in the United States, tea adoption, I know that everyone is going to hate on me for this. I think it’s dismal. I think it’s horrible. And you can be like, well, I have a tea shop in my town. Have you gone inside that tea shop and seen what it is they’re selling? If it’s tea with rose petals in it, they are fucking up. Okay? If it’s tea that steeps up purple, they are fucking up. When I mean tea, I mean camellia sinensis the plant. And what you are doing with it. And there is a lot of things that you can do with Camellia sinensis, the plant. Okay, that means you get white, green, oolong, black. And then weird variants like Pu’er or Sushong or whatever have you, like smoked teas. And that’s it. That is it. End of list. Red tea is a different plant. It comes from South Africa. It’s great. It’s fine. It’s fine. But the traditions around tea ninety five percent of them minus red tea They involve the plant, Camellia sinensis, and occasional extremely controlled adulterations of that plant, such as Earl Gray or Jasmine. Which are a separate discussion. If you have a David’s T in your town, congratulations. They sell a couple single estate Darjeelings and they’re collecting dust in the back. Ask them questions about it. If you’ve been to an Argo tea, congratulations, they’re fucking up their tea. If you’ve been to a Tea Vana, God help you. Which is funny because my sister-in-law used to work at one. But, like, Americans’ perception of tea is like putting a salad in it and thinking that it’s okay to pour hot water on top of it. And you may like love the small things you love. I’m not going to hate on you for loving that thing, but it is not tea, and you might be missing out on believing that you have expanded your frontiers on it. And I would encourage you to maybe give the traditional stuff a try. And the problem is that those are way harder to find, and there’s probably not something that is actually providing that thing in your town. And that sucks. Like, if you live in a big city like New York or San Francisco, you can get on a train and go and get some tea. So there’s Iputo is the tea, the Sencha and Jiokuro shop that. has served the Imperial family of Japan for five hundred years. There’s one in Midtown Manhattan, thank me later. You know. But that’s never guaranteed. You are not always going to encounter an Aputo. That’s the only one outside of Kyoto and Tokyo. So, good luck on that. So, it is possible to find tea, obviously, because my cabinet is full of tea. But you have to hunt it and you have to know what to look for. And it is. The adoption is just horrendously immature and uneven in the United States and Canada right now, and I wish that were different.

I’m married to someone whose email address is literally hooraycoffee at gmail. com. She wakes up every morning. And the first thing she does is flops out of bed, walks downstairs and puts on some water for coffee. And I wake up every morning to a flawlessly executed single estate pour over next to my bed. She does not wake me up. Sometimes I wake up to it and she’s gone. Sometimes I’m already up and I’m farting around on my phone or reading a book, and Basil comes over and I pet him, and then Aaron comes over and I have the coffee. And I’ve done that basically every day for 10 years. I am the most spoiled human ever on coffee. Also, I just expose myself to a lot of friends who are into coffee, and I live in a city. Chicago’s top five cities for coffee in the United States. If you live in Portland or Seattle or San Francisco and you’re like, well, I never. How about you fly here and spend a few days drinking our coffee? Cause I’ve flown to Europe spots, you know, like I know. I know.

Intelligentsia, yeah.

God, I didn’t even talk about bag tea. Why would you I don’t have any bag tea.

You have this is a friend of yours? I think I’ve bought their shit before. Oh my goodness. Okay, cool.

So there’s the place I go in Chicago, if you’re wondering, is it an unfortunate and unpronounceable name because they’re originally from, I believe, Austria. And it is Austrian for tea merchant, so you get tea geschwender. And they’re pretty unapologetic about their fucking tea. You can get the the dumb blends there, but like You turn around from the blends, and there’s a wall of drawers that each have excellent world-class single-estate teas that are flawlessly preserved. Go there. Walk in and be like, I want a Darjeeling that is what’s called first flush, which is the first harvest that you get from Darjeeling. And I want maybe something that’s like a little woodsy or floral or something like that. Or just sit and listen. Be like, lecture me about tea. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. And I want to go in on the weird traditional stuff. They’ll talk your ear off about it. It’s great. They really do.

Yeah, so Tiger Schneider’s on Diversity and Orchard, I think something. It’s like east of Clark, wherever. Just go east of Clark and you’ll see it. And yeah, so if you’re bored after a Cubs game, you can just take Clark South and lined up there. I recommend it very highly, but then that’s not what I would do if I wanted like Sencha or Puer. I would go to the Wisconsin guy for Pu’era and I would go to either Uputo if I wanted to blow a lot of money on shipping or Maida N if I didn’t. For like Sencha and Geokuro. Similarly, I’d probably go to JT if I wanted like an oolong or something like that. I am lucky enough that a lot of people know that I’m into tea and that I’ve been into tea for 15 years. And so I have people that like come back from London and go to the good tea shops there. And I don’t just mean like, Nick D, I got you some smoky Assam Earl Gray because London. No, I mean like I got really good like like Formosa oolongs or something like that. And they find me. Like, you get a reputation for being a nerd for a thing, and then the good stuff finds you. You know, like, I don’t. It’s like beer. I mean, even I can’t tell you how many parties I’ve been to where it’s a bunch of other beer nerds, some of whom I’ve helped become beer nerds, and then it comes back to you because they go to Dark Lord Day and you get something really nice. Or they pull out something from their cellar and then you have a nice treat and you’re continuing to explore it. Like there’s this knock-on effect where you start to geek out on something, and then like good people that are interested in the same thing that you like. Find you because you live in a city with 3 million people and that’s going to happen. The same with coffee. Coffee people find me. I end up at coffee people’s parties a lot. Rarely drink coffee at them. Just drinking. Because they’re parties. Um I don’t know. Is that it on T if we just talk for half an hour on T?

Okay. We were supposed to talk about info products.

Okay.