What happens when coffee disappears? This isn’t hypothetical—it’s happened through war, blockades, tariffs, ideology, and health scares.

When coffee is gone, people turn to surrogates made from roasted plants and grains that mimic coffee—but rarely match it.

In this episode, Jonathan and James taste these substitutes (with plenty of spitting) to ask: can anything truly replace coffee?

Most coffee is grown on industrial plantations, but in Ethiopia it still grows wild in forest ecosystems rich in biodiversity.

This wild coffee is a crucial genetic reservoir for the future of coffee under climate change, yet the communities preserving it often earn too little to sustain that work.

This episode explores whether storytelling—perhaps even the idea of a single “mother tree”—can help reframe its value and support those communities.

On a walk through Hamburg, you might stumble across a giant bronze coffee bean—hinting at the city’s outsized role in coffee history.

One in every three cups of coffee drunk in Europe has passed through Hamburg, and this episode explores how coffee helped shape the city itself.

Then the story turns: once coffee changed Hamburg, Hamburg began to change coffee.

For a long time, coffee was dull and bitter—until a small group of pioneers changed everything.

In this episode, we travel back to the 1960s and ’70s to meet those who discovered coffee could be sweeter, brighter, and cleaner.

Their personal tastes became a movement, and ultimately a global definition of “quality.”

550 million years ago, Earth had perfect coffee water—and we lived in a vegetarian paradise.

Then the planet changed violently, reshaping ecosystems and permanently altering water chemistry.

This is the story of how calcium and hydrogen carbonate still shape your coffee’s flavor and your brewing equipment today.

For years, the coffee world focused on how water damages boilers and kettles—not how it shapes flavour.

In this episode, I trace how specialty coffee came to understand water chemistry, from early pioneers to the SCA’s Water Quality Handbook.

It’s best enjoyed after the previous two episodes on great coffee water and the minerals that quietly ruin it.

In this special collaboration with Lucia Solis (Making Coffee podcast), I break down the two fundamentals of great coffee water: hardness and alkalinity.

We cover why they matter, how to test your water at home, and how to fix it based on what you’re working with.

By the end, you’ll know what good water for coffee is—and how to get it.

I speak with two Colombian producers from the same region whose choices couldn’t be more different: one commits to specialty, the other steps away.

Their paths aren’t shaped by passion or work ethic, but by two starting conditions buyers rarely see.

To grow more specialty coffee, we first need to understand—and lower—the real barriers behind these decisions.

I speak with two Colombian producers from the same region whose paths couldn’t be more different: one bets on specialty, the other walks away.

Their choices aren’t about passion or work ethic, but about two starting conditions buyers rarely see.

If we want more specialty coffee, we first need to understand the real barriers shaping these decisions.

Volume. Cheap. Lame flavors. This is the traditional way of growing coffee in Brazil, and almost every farm does it this way. 

But what if you wanted to produce beautiful, distinctive flavors instead—and make a living from it?

When I started making cold brew last year, I treated it like hot brew filter coffee. But no matter how I adjusted the grind or brew time, I barely got any differences in flavor.

Then it hit me: cold brew isn’t just a slower version of hot brew—it’s a completely different game with its own rules.

In this episode, I speak with leading coffee researchers to unpack the microscopic science behind it—and reveal the key brewing variable that can shift your cup from fruit juice to nutty creaminess.

I interview world-leading coffee scientists who explain why brewing with cold water tastes so different from chilled hot coffee.

You’ll learn how certain flavors leap into your cup (and how others mysteriously vanish) when you lower the brew temperature.

You’ll also discover there are hidden “cold brew gems” in beans you thought you knew.

Deep inside your coffee grinder, tiny changes can have massive consequences. 
This episode takes you deep inside Mahlkönig’s grinders to show you how coffee is ground and the importance of particle sizes on flavour. 

This episode goes deep into how diffusion and oxidation changes a coffee’s flavours.
You’ll learn what it takes to store your coffee grounds unbelievably well. So well, that if you do it right, you will struggle to taste the difference between two month old coffee compared to those same beans freshly ground!

This is the journey of me rewiring my brain: I had to learn what good evidence looks like, what to do if I can’t find good evidence, and why it’s important to focus mostly on experimental results while resisting the allure of a compelling theory. 

Should you rinse your filter paper before making a filter coffee? Almost everybody in coffee internet says you should. But what if most of coffee internet was wrong?

This story changed my understanding of farming and is now the reason I choose organic specialty coffee whenever I can.

Come with me as I show you the organic farming tricks of Don Rufino, one of the region’s leading organic farmers.