YouSaid · the spoken record

James Hoffmann

lines on the record: 118
first: 2023-11-20
most recent: 2023-11-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That is right, yeah. The first one was kind of written as a guidebook is Coffee Got Big and Weird and Confusing and there was just a lot of information suddenly. I kind of wrote the first one as a guidebook to this new wave of coffee. And the second one really is people have embraced coffee at home. I just want to make it as easy as possible by focusing on the stuff that matters and not all the kind of voodoo or weird sort of odd traditions around that and just the stuff that really makes a difference.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did you just have Brian Johnson on here? Is that from Brian Johnson? I don't know, Brian. The little device was sold out by the time I saw it.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Come and have coffee with me somewhere. We'll go and get a bunch of stuff. We'll do a little coffee tasting for you and see what you really like.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you want it to be, coffee's really great fun. If you are willing to put in a little tiny bit, I guarantee you will get way more out however you enjoy your coffee, whatever you enjoy about coffee, it's got more to give, and I promise a ton of fun.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not just asking you that, but do you want a conversation? Do you want to know about the coffee or do you want me to just shut up and make it as fast as I can? That empathy piece, that reading of people is so important and such a great skill that you can take out of hospitality into whatever else you want to do. And I don't think hospitality really kind of advertises that aspect of it enough”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think it's also realizing whether you did it consciously or not, that skill's rooted in empathy. That skill's rooted in not in a script, but seeing who you've got on the other end and building something, building a conversation around who they are, the kind of customization of communication that comes with empathy. And that's kind of why I love the service industry and encourage people to spend time working in cafes or restaurants because it's a great place to have to read people all the time. What do they need right now? Because that's what a coffee shop should be. It should be a reliable vendor of happiness. You should walk in that building and walk out happier in a better mood, happier. That's the kind of key thing. But that's someone on the other side looking at you and being like, what do you need today?”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a totally cold audience who did not care or really be that interested, can you win them over? Can you communicate? Can you teach them? That was an incredible two years of my life of doing that every week. What age? Oh, that was 25 26. And I was a terrible public speaker beforehand, and now I love it. I love being on stage. I love that kind of communication. And it helps to make videos and it helps to talk to people and it helps to kind of chew your thoughts before you spit them out again.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had dual practice. One, as I said, I wrote this blog, which was about digesting information well enough to explain it back to someone else. And so that was a great process for me. Secondly, I had a weird job where I was a training, as kind of national training manager for an espresso machine company. And in the back of my card, a commercial machine projector screen, like I was a mobile cafe and I would travel the whole UK, build out a kind of travel the whole UK, build out a lecture room lecture to thirty random people for three hours, pack it down and go to the next city or next town or whatever else. And so it was public speaking of his sort.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what culture was then you've got to work every hour, and if you're not sleeping under your desk, what are you even doing? Is a lie and stupid and deeply unhealthy, in my opinion. But that was when my career really took off. And yeah, I'd won this Wilburtha Championship thing in my 20s, but nobody cared. In the UK, nobody cared. There was no, no one was impressed by that. If I was the world's best sandwich maker, that was a career. But coffee, whatever. Different now, but, you know, I feel like I think people know that now. There's more time to just kind of work out what you want to do. And that's okay to not be getting stuck into the perfect thing right away. Like it's, I'm going to mess around and find out what you like or what you don't like. I did a bunch of terrible jobs too. I worked in casinos. I sold gas and electric door to door. I worked in music publishing and I hated all of them. And that was great because now I know what I don't want to do.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do it. Do it really well. Don't do it stupidly like I did. I fell for the whole hustled grind nonsense and I worked too many hours and I nearly hated the thing that I love.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Genuinely passionate about it, then there's opportunity there. Coffee was not a growth industry. No one was proud that their kid worked in coffee in the early 2000s. They're doing that before they get the next job in the thing, or they're doing that to pay themselves through here. To work in coffee was not like a career. That was a weird thing to think then. I loved it and I was encouraged in it and given opportunity in it and I flourished in it. And so for me, whatever the future of work holds, I think creativity and empathy are important parts of that. And passion is another piece of it. And I hope they have the opportunity to be passionate about something. And, you know, I figure that's what your 20s are for, right? Like find the thing you're excited about.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I definitely go through the thing of like, yeah, I will do this. I'll spend less time on this stuff. I'll have more time. I'll do yoga. I'll spend more time on myself in the future. But I think I know I love what I do. I really enjoy it, and it changes all the time, and no one day is the same as the next. And I love that, and I can cope with that.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, I'd love to, I think for me, I'd love to just find more time for stuff like exercise and that kind of stuff, investing there. And you could argue and probably should argue that I should be doing that now because what is more important than health? What is more important than health? And the answer is nothing is more important than health. So why am I not making the time for the additional cardio and making the time to get a little bit more lifting, a little bit more hit in? Why am I not making that time now? There's no good reason. Well, I am starting to now. I'm resting with it enough. I'm like, fine, I'm going to make my life even more complex. Squeeze my day even shorter and I will find the time. Peter Atier has broken my brain too. It happens to all of us. But like, yeah.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would love to me knows that I enjoy what I do. And if I sold all my businesses tomorrow, I'd just start another one. And that's going to happen for a while. And maybe if I get older, it changes. You know what I mean? I'm like, oh, maybe I'm done doing this or whole thing. But it's the part of you learns that these can be fun. Like the game is fun of making things, creating things and then growing these things. It's just fun.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think a lack of space would probably be my loss. And I don't know what I'd do with it if I had time to do nothing. But I occasionally grieve emptiness in the day.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think Probably if you stopped me and said, what'd you do for fun? I'd have to stop and think about that for quite a long time because it's a really tricky question of like, oh, wait, as I work and I do coffee things and then I sleep and then there's like whatever home life Oh, yeah. I've sort of sacrificed a little bit of that, and I don't think I have a hobby, if that makes sense. I think that's probably not unusual in a certain group of people. But yeah, I do sometimes think the kind of feeling of like, I've got so much to do all the time.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty good. I work hard at that though. I pay a lot of attention to sleep because it's important to me and it's important for future me and I'm trying to do a better job. I'm old enough now that future me is an important thing in my 20s. Future me was not very important to me. In my forties, I've got to think differently.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, because I would rather have, say, a darker roast that I don't enjoy as much that's fresher than a lighter roast that's been sitting around a couple hours or something like that. I don't know whether, I can't remember what their use times is. It might be an hour, hour and a half”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to look at the tanks. They'll have two tanks of filter coffee prepped. They'll have timers counting down on them, which is how old they are, because the longer filter coffee sits, the worse it tastes. And so I'm going to look for the one that has the longest time left on the tank before they have to throw it away. I'm going to get a small cup, or what is it there? I can't remember tall, is it? Who knows? A tall cup of that filter coffee because it's going to be the freshest brewed thing that they have, and that's my kind of answer. It's a bit weird to start looking at timers, though, but once you notice it, you'll see them sitting there.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I like filtered coffee, and so, by and large, I would typically probably end up at a Starbucks because they're one of the few that do filter coffee where it's sort of brewed as filter coffee, distinct and different from an Americano. And sometimes you can be mean and ask them to make a specific coffee and they have to do that for you if you ask just right. So that would be the lazy answer to that. You walk into stock.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's much harder because otherwise I'd go to like Starbucks and get like a dessert and a cup and go because those, you know, there's enough fat and sugar in there. It's a good time. You know what I mean? I can't deny there's a little bit of delight in a little Frappuccino.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really difficult question. If I'm honest, if you made me buy a coffee drink, did I assume I have to buy a coffee drink, right? Muffin in the fucking water and run away.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great way to kind of find the new neighborhoods and just check places out and just have something fun and enjoyable in the day. And I think coffee is a great way to explore new cities. And you talk to people who work in great coffee shops. They'll recommend you the best bars, the best restaurants. Like that network is so easy to tap into there that it's the best hack. You throw me in a random city. I'll find a good coffee shop and ask the question where should I eat?”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“London has some of the best independent coffee shops in the world. And that's true of most major cities now. Incredible coffee is very available now if you know where to look. And I guarantee that's the tricky bit, knowing in advance. By and large, though, there's enough written about on the internet. If you search best specialty coffee in whatever city, you'll find a great list of 20 that will be a good experience. It might be a bit more expensive, but it will be, I think, a better coffee experience. I get, I buy coffee from chains when I have to. I get that. But given the choice, I would love to go and visit an independent business, see someone's expression, you know what I mean, someone's aesthetic, someone's vibes, someone's experience. It can be different. And why wouldn't I want to explore different and new? So I think it's just an opportunity for discovery. Loads of bands that tore the world get obsessed with coffee because it's a great way to explore a city.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“spent good money on two great cups of coffee a day than just five average ones just to get them through. I'm okay with lowering consumption and increasing the quality of it. That works very well for me because I think it will bring more pleasure to people ultimately. They enjoy the coffee. They drink more. It's not this mindless cheap thing they endlessly consume. It's a moment of pleasure. And I think it can be this moment of absolute delight and interest and pleasure.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where we said You know, the promise of specialty coffee where we said coffee can be better. It's a bit more expensive, but it tastes more interesting. People have enjoyed that and found that to be true. So right now, I feel very good about coffee consumption from a longevity point of view for the industry. People want to keep drinking coffee. Like I said, the challenge on one side remains coffee production's future. It's going to be increasingly difficult to grow great quality coffee in the future with climate change. We're already seeing the impact of that now changing rainfall patterns, all sorts of other stuff is making coffee harder to grow. That's going to put the price of it up in the future for the high quality stuff. But for a while, I think it will sort of stay. I don't think we're willing to let go. I think we are going to be paying more attention to caffeine in the future. And I think that's a good thing. I would encourage people to pay more attention to caffeine in the future. And that may decrease our consumption overall. And I'm also okay with that too. I'd rather people.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think we've fallen pretty deeply in love with coffee in a different kind of way in the last few years. I think the pandemic caused a seismic shift in coffee consumption around the world. People had grown used to going out to coffee shops drinking good quality coffee, and that was part of their lives. And when the pandemic happened and people couldn't do that, the growth in coffee equipment at home was astronomical. This was something people wanted to invest in and were not willing to let go of. I wasn't really sure, pre-pandemic, you said how much people really love coffee. I'm like, well, they like it a lot, but, you know, maybe they'd let it go if it got too expensive. But in that moment where we took it away, people like, absolutely not. Coffee stays. And that was really heartening to me. And that was all over the world. Every market, every country I spoke to people, they saw the same thing. Huge interest in coffee at home. So I feel good about that. I feel like the promise of specialty coffee.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you get a lot less for your money in terms of flavor. It will have degraded, they can gas flush it and they'll pack the bags with inert gases and stuff. But the minute you open that bag, it's on its way out and it will happen really quickly. And so the downside is coffee grinders cost a little bit of money and they take up a little bit of space. And they're another step in the morning between you and getting your caffeine in the system. I understand that. If you want the best value for money, a bag of beans costs the same as a bag of ground coffee, even though the ground coffee has more cost in terms of manufacture. But the value of the beans is just way higher. It just tastes way better. And so having a grinder lets you get better value for money in the coffee that you buy going forwards.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Once you grind coffee, Most people would easily detect a difference a day later And they would say it tasted notably worse two days later. And so buying pre-ground coffee is buying high convenience, but the cost is you never got to experience how good that coffee was at the moment it was ground”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is sadly not the case. It's fresh food, unfortunately. The challenge coffee has is that we just can't see it change. If I dice up an apple and I leave it for a couple of hours, you can see the change in it. It's staling in a bunch of different ways. When you smash coffee into little pieces, when you grind it to fine powder, you kickstart a bunch of chemistry that you can't undo. And some of that's oxidation, where oxygen transforms things and turns fats a little bit rancid over time. You lose a bunch of the aromas locked inside the bean. It just gets less interesting tasting. If you want the best experience for coffee, grinding it fresh is the way to do it. Also, grinding coffee is one of the best smells in the world. Fresh food, and if you treat it like fresh food, it tastes way better”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't use sugar milk, and I get why people do, because most coffee benefits from sugar and milk. Milk is a very, it has a weird quirk. It's a bitter blocker. It inhibits bitterness. So when you put it into a harsh bitter cup of coffee, it does soften that. We, of course, like sweet things. I think one thing to note when it comes to all of the studies that look at coffee in his coffee healthy, they'll be like, yes, coffee's healthy if you drink it black. And if you're putting a lot of cream and a lot of sugar into your coffee, there are the health benefits very quickly taken away. You know what I mean? It's not quote-unquote as healthy a drink. For me, putting milk or sugar into coffee kind of hides the flavors a little bit. And so I want to test it without. I get why people want to put it in there. I don't have an issue with people sweetening or adding a little milk or cream, but you kind of lose.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like I'm forcing myself into a tiny space here. If I could only drink coffee from one country for the rest of my life, it would probably be coffees from Colombia. They just have a real spread of flavors, but some really just incredible coffees come from that part of the world. But there's amazing coffee from just about every producing country. If you're within the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, that kind of belt around the Earth, then you can probably grow coffee above certain altitudes. And almost every country that is in that band does grow coffee. So there's a lot of different places that grow it. And there's going to be great coffee in all of those places. And there'll be cheap and low quality coffee in all those places too. But yeah, the range that the spread is massive.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, filter coffee is not from an espresso machine, so it's going to be brewed either in a filter coffee machine or by hand. You'll see a lot of people pouring water over coffee. The drink is going to be the same kind of strength as an Americano, but it's a weaker thing. I'm not obsessed with espresso the same way. I want a cup of black coffee because I want to take my time. Because as you taste a cup of coffee, if it's a great cup of coffee, as it cools down, its flavor kind of opens up and becomes really interesting and complex. And so I like the idea that I can sit for ten, fifteen minutes, and if I want to, have a really enjoyable kind of journey of flavor. That for me is the kind of great bit about coffee. Yeah, I'll drink an espresso sometimes if I want a little short shot of something tasty, but the idea that I can if I want have ten, fifteen minutes to myself to enjoy this thing and see some benefits afterwards. That's a wonderful thing. So I like coffees from all over the world.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jake asked this all the time, and I still, after 20 years, don't have a great answer. I drink a lot of filter coffee. What is filter?”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit nowhere near the quantities of coffee. But, you know, if you're drinking ten, twelve cups of tea a day, it's probably worth paying attention to how much is in there and how you steep your tea and all that kind of stuff will have an impact on how much caffeine is in there.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, 100%. Huge change in culture. Because we were no longer drunk all the time. So, yeah, it arrives in London, I think, in 1652. It's the first coffee shop that's right just near Bank Chief Station. You can see a little blue plaque on the wall if you go looking for it there. Yeah, we absolutely fell in love with it. It became a part of industry, culture, politics, everything. It supercharged the nation. There are people who argue that we awake from this drunken stupor and then are like, well, what's the rest of the world got to offer? And we go and become the colonial horror show that we were after that. And you can blame coffee for that. But that's a bit of a stretch. But yeah, it was a massive shift in society.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of the university degree, and so they were these incredible places for a while. Eventually our colonial interest shifted to tea and the coffee house went into the decline in sort of seventeen hundreds, eighteen hundreds. But for about a hundred years, London was the most incredible coffee drinking city in the world.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's this safe drink that is totally the opposite Tabir. It is stimulating and it transforms London society of the time. And we get obsessed with it. Coffee houses appear everywhere. There is the story that in the square mile in the early 1700s there were 2,000 coffee shops. Now that's excessive. It wasn't that many. It was probably, but it was several hundred. They were everywhere. And they quickly diversified and sort of specialized into specific things. And so very famously, Lloyds of London, the insurance broker started as a coffee shop called Lloyds of London and people did business at the tables, those became offices, and to this day runners in there are still called waiters. And so that just happened to specialize in shipping insurance, that coffee house. Others specialized in politics. Others specialized in literature. They became known as penny universities because you could pay a penny to get into a London coffee house and you would gain the education just from listening to people talking.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, everyone drinks coffee. People have tried to ban it a few times. It was seen as a kind of seditious drink that's kind of, so from a political perspective, they tried to ban it here in the UK briefly, I think King James, I want to say tried to ban it. It doesn't last very long. We tend to get pretty grumpy if you try and ban it. They asked the Pope to ban it at one point and he was like, no, it's great. And so he didn't do that. That was hundreds of years ago. But yeah. Coffee was often linked to politics in the early days. So London was the greatest coffee drinking city in the world for a while. From 16 late 1600s, coffee just comes here to the city of London and takes over. Because up until that point, we were drinking a lot of weak beer. That was the sort of safe high calorie, high B vitamin kind of drink that we drank. And we were all a little bit drunk most of the time from drinking a couple of litres or three litres of weak beer a day.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to pay more for that convenience. So I get it. I get not wanting to make espresso, but wanting something like espresso in the mornings. They've really succeeded in sort of filling that market. But they are to me still a kind of microwave meal.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really. Not there. Like there are some and there are kind of separate and different. I don't want to get into it right now. I think a lot of the sort of small Nespresso cast style capsule ones are very popular. I just wish they're a bit more recyclable. There's a bit of waste associated with those. But ultimately they're very expensive. Actually, for what you're paying a lot of money for that and you're paying for the convenience, I think, for the same price per kilo. You could buy some of the best coffees in the world for what you're spending on a capsule because you're spending money for five grams of coffee because that's what it is. But the convenience is very strong. And it's been so successful. I can't argue with convenience. We love a little convenience. But the possibility of quality is far greater once you move beyond those. You know what I mean? Anytime we go convenience, we have to sacrifice something. And it's usually quality. And it's usually value.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wake up Outcomes coffee. Yeah, the best analogy I can make is that they're a microwave meal. And microwave meals are what they are. They are of equality. They are super convenient. There's a fair amount of waste attached to them. And you could probably do better with a little bit of effort, and it would cost you less.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if we are to remain customers, we need to be comfortable spending a little bit more on coffee in the future. And if you enjoy coffee, spending an extra pound a bag, two pounds a bag, if you really enjoy it, fine. No problem at all. You know what I mean? I will keep coffee as a part of my life. But that's kind of one of the motivating factors for me. I want more people to enjoy it just because I like bringing pleasure to people. That's great. You know what I mean? But in the future, I want coffee consumers to still be there through the challenges that coffee production faces.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the future is there'll be less great coffee in the future. Cheap coffee will be around for a while. It doesn't need the same kind of conditions, but great coffee has a difficult future ahead of it. And there are millions of people whose livelihoods depend on that. And it's not a great system, so to speak. There's a lot of problems with how coffee production is incredibly unfair towards the people who produce it.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'll listen and you'll trust me. And that sort of trust is super important to me in terms of building an audience. Because coffee has this really depressing future. Climate change is bad for coffee, really, really bad. And to some extent, maybe we don't deserve to have coffee after we've ruined the planet. I'd hear that argument. But as temperatures increase around the world, coffee needs cooler temperatures to grow. And the only way you can sort of get cooler temperatures as the world heats up is to go higher up the mountain. It's already mountain grown. It's already growing at 1500 meters, 2,000 meters. The problem with mountains is that the higher you go, there's generally less of the mountain. There's less area around the world that can grow specialty coffee, great quality coffee.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no. I mean, for me, the strategy initially was, so my bigger umbrella goal of YouTube is that I want people to enjoy coffee more for a bunch of reasons, and I want them to see it as a more valuable piece of their life, so that at some point they might be willing to spend a bit more money on it. That's the sort of top line goal. What I'm then trying to do is find them. And reviews are a great way to sort of find people. Someone will be like, which is the best dispersal machine to buy? They find me if I entertain them, if I build trust with them, I hope they'll keep watching, and then I can take them on a journey into coffee, and I can open up new kind of avenues of exploration for them. That's the kind of goal. That's what I'm trying to do. So in part, we do that through machine reviews and equipment reviews, in part through kind of techniques. So if you've got a French press, Cafetier, what is the best way to use that? I want to be there to help you do that. But it's a lot of it's about building trust so that down the line, we can go and talk about something totally different.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I can get you a really great grinder that should last a lifetime and make you cafe quality coffee. It just couldn't do it 500 times a day the way a coffee shop's one could. But that's where you're going to spend money. And then you could just get a simple pour of a cone and just pour water onto coffee on top of a mug and life be real easy that way.”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tiny particles I'll be big rocks Really hard to evenly brew tiny pieces the same way you'd brew a massive piece of coffee and so you get a kind of bitter sour coffee as a result of it good coffee grinders have spinning discs inside that cut to a specific size so all the coffee is pretty much the same size mostly and that's much easier to work with but they cost more money because they need better motors and nicer cutting discs and that kind of stuff Not crazy amounts, but Yeah, you're looking at like at least a hundred to two hundred pounds for a good grinder. And I'd love to tell you it wasn't the case, and grinders are getting, it used to be like £500 for a good grinder at home. It's coming down all the time. But yeah, I'd say I'd need like £150. Maybe off”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so the bad news Is that good bad news coffee grinders are the right investment? They are more important than the machine. You can give me a 20 quid filter coffee brewer from Amazon, but if you give me a decent grinder, I can get some pretty good coffee out of it. If you give me a £20 coffee grinder and a £5 machine, I can make pretty terrible coffee. Average coffee at best, right? So the grinder, how it cuts the coffee, essentially you'll often see people have little whirly blade grinders. You push a button, it spins madly, just smashes it to pieces, but there's no real control of the size of the pieces. So some will be...”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it depends on your aesthetic at this point then, right? Like there's some really nice filter coffee. It depends how much coffee you need. How much do you need in the morning?”
2023-11-20 · The Diary of a CEO · The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee, Mental Health, Depression & Heart Disease! James Hoffmann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT