The smell of coffee is one of the great joys in this life. As professionals we take this important sensory aspect of coffee and build tools and protocols around it so we can fully and accurately assess a coffee’s quality and ultimately serve something consistently wonderful to our customers. In order to do this we need to bring balance, calibration, …
326 : A Conversation w/ Alan Jarrar of 50%Arabica and Jokes Aside Coffee!
Everyone’s favorite coffee culture commentator and meme lord, Alan Jarrar is in the house! If you are like me and follow the account “50%Arabica” on Instagram, you know full well that there is more to the funny content than what you see on the surface. There is a world of professional coffee experience and philosophy that fuels not just …
325 : How to Manage Your Trainers
When you have a trainer on staff there are specific responsibilities you have as a leader that will determine their success and how happy you are with their performance. Often we can set someone in a position and let them loose with little to no guidance. Of course this is a recipe for disaster and today we are going to …
324 : Encore Episode! Organizing the Community w/ Espresso State of Mind Founders, Javier Alvarez and Joseph Gonzalez
Community exists all around us. When we start a coffee shop we see the blossoming of community in our customer base, baristas bonding with one another, and then across the industry people of similar interests who are desirous to learn, grow, and connect make an effort to establish friendships. One of the ways these communities thrive is when people step …
323 : Reflecting on 5 Years of Keys to the Shop w/ my Wife Lynnsy Deferio
Welp, KTTS is now 5 years old! In this time KTTS has aired 560 episodes and is closing in on 2 million downloads around the world and it simply feels surreal. I have been so blessed by the guests on this show, you the audience, and most of all, my biggest supporter, my wife. SO…on this episode my lovely wife …
RoR #10 : What Your Broker Wishes You Knew w/ Scott Merle of La Minita Coffee
Relationships are what the coffee industry is built on. The quality of those relationships determines the strength of the supply chain and the success of all involved. One of the most important relationships that is not talked about very often is that between green buyer and the broker. Today we on the Rate of Rise series from Roast Magazine we …
322 : A Conversation w/ LaNisa Williams of Barista Life L.A.
Creating a path forward and up in the coffee industry sometimes requires we take matters into our own hands and build the opportunities for ourself and others that we don’t see. This is exactly what today’s guest, LaNisa Williams did with Barista L.A. LaNisa Williams has been in coffee over 14 years as a barista, manager, trainer/educator, and all around …
321 : Marketing and Moral Injury w/ Josh Tarlo of Kiss the Hippo
How we market our values to potential employees and the consumer is often at odds with what we actually do. In a past episode we called this the “Values – Action Gap”. Question is, what is the result of this gap on the people who sign on with us and believe our marketing only to discover it was insincere at …
320 Founder Friday! w/ Francesco Sanapo of Ditta Artigianale, Florence, Italy
It’s Founder Friday! Today we are going to be exploring the story of a ground breaking and standard setting Italian coffee roaster and cafe. Our guest on this last Founder Friday of 2021 is the founder of Caffe Artigianale, Francesco Sanapo! From learning the classic Italian way of coffee working for his fathers coffee bar at age 14 – to discovering …
319 : A Conversation w/ World Barista Champion, Diego Campos of Colombia!
This year the World Barista Championship was held in Milan, Italy. The winner of that competition accomplished not only a historic win as the first world champion to hail from Colombia, but accomplished a life long dream born from a long history of developing as a person and a professional all to better serve others. Today we get to talk …
