Transcript of Barista James Hoffmann on The Diary Of A CEO

So even 10 hours after you drank a cup of coffee, there’s still a decent amount floating around in your system. Enough that might delay onset of sleep or reduce the quality of your sleep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Isn’t it bonkers that people offer you an espresso after dinner in restaurants?

JAMES HOFFMANN: I don’t get it. For some people they find it very calming and they really enjoy it. They love it. They have no issue sleeping. I cannot touch caffeine after like 3pm I have like a hard cutoff and I’m done. But yeah, I find the, you know, there’s the idea that it’s a digestive aid. I’m not sure that’s super well evidenced to be honest, having looked into it anyway. But if people enjoy it, I’m not going to get in the way of it. And some people sleep like a baby afterwards. I’m always amazed by those people who were like, yeah, have coffee, I go to sleep. Like how?

And there’s big genetic differences and I think we’ve started to see those. And you can get genetic tests done that will give you an idea of your caffeine metabolizer kind of rate. Are you slow? Are you fast? But yeah, it’s one of those weird things where because how coffee is made can impact the quantity of caffeine in the end cup, you can’t accurately predict how much caffeine is in a coffee from a coffee shop. There’s a bunch of variables that could happen that will produce a pretty big variance.

So this incredibly popular drug, we don’t know how much we’re taking most of the time, which I think is kind of wild and maybe not a good thing. And so I’m kind of pro mindful consumption of this stuff if that makes sense. Like just be aware of it and thoughtful about it and still enjoy it. I want people to drink and enjoy coffee, but I want as much upside as possible as little downside.

Tolerance and Benefits

STEVEN BARTLETT: You used the word drug there with drugs. You get a sort of tolerance that requires you to have more and more of the thing to get to the same levels of, I don’t know, psychoactive ness. Is that the same with coffee where if I have one coffee today, in a couple of months time, I’m going to need two to get to the same level of like, alertness?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yes and no. It seems to be that the benefits that we see of caffeine when it comes to cognition disappear with habitual usage. And actually adding more doesn’t change it. That first coffee that feels so good is taking us sort of, instead of going from 0 to 1, it’s taking us from minus 1 to 0. It’s removing the kind of withdrawal symptom almost and bringing us back to a kind of level of like, okay, I’m here now.

And so if you really, really want maximum benefit from caffeine, be it cognition or sports or anything else, then actually having a period without coffee beforehand will give you the sort of greatest benefit afterwards. So there’s a habituation, I guess, but it doesn’t escalate the way that drugs do. Like, you don’t need to suddenly be drinking 6, 8, 10 cups of coffee to have an effect. You’d feel weird. So yeah, a little bit though, again.

The Health Impacts of Coffee

STEVEN BARTLETT: Going back to my first principles, one of my first principles in life generally, and this is why I often avoid medicine, paracetamol, you name it, I will. I’d rather take the headache than start dabbling because I always think there’s a cost to something. When I think about the way we live our lives in society, we literally, many people will have three or four cups of coffee a day. Some people even more. Some people will just drink coffee all the way through the day throughout work and then have one on their way home from work as well. And I look at that object and go, that’s insanity. That the entire Western population is just like caffeinating themselves just to function. And then you hear phrases like, I like, oh, I can’t function, I can’t function. I’ve not had my coffee yet. And I just go, oh, this is, you know, But I don’t know enough about coffee to understand if that’s just, you know, maybe there is a free lunch as it relates to coffee or maybe sleep is the only.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I think sleep’s the primary concern. You know, if you, and if you’re not suffering any issues with sleep from your coffee consumption, then, you know, if you look at the science, I’m not a scientist, I really, I like to read the research papers, but I’m not doing the research. But on almost every front, coffee seems to be healthy and have a really positive impact wherever it’s been measured and across a whole range of different stuff.

So, you know, as to why caffeine’s one part of it, I think the fact that coffee contains a surprising amount of fiber is another one. Or the quantity of polyphenols in there. If you’re interested in the gut microbiome, like coffee seems to be really good for that. And I think we know more and more the microbiome. You know, Tim Spector has taught us all the importance of that, that it impacts us in so many different ways.

So on almost any front, if you’ve researched, is coffee good for longevity? Yes. You see a reduction in all cause mortality that correlates to coffee consumption. Is it good for cognitive decline? Yes. You tend to see coffee consumption associated with less cognitive decline in old age or liver function, cancer. All of these things seem to have a positive association with coffee drinking. But if it’s messing with your sleep, I don’t think it’s worth it. That’s just me. That’s the line for me of like it’s not such an incredible benefit that that is worth the loss of sleep quality.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Sleep has become just the most sort of the biggest obsession in my life over the last year.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I think for all of us. I think it’s just if you pay attention to this stuff, you can’t help but begin to obsess over it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I hope healthily so to avoid the impact of coffee impact on sleep, you think the best thing to do is because I’ve just not been drinking coffee after like 1pm?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Great. Okay. I think that’s a pretty good way to go. I think decaf is still a good option. I think people are kind of really negative about decaf because we have this caffeine first association with coffee. A lot of people, like, why would I drink decaf? What’s the point? You know, you see a lot of death before decaf or whatever, but I think decaf can be really tasty, which is good. Like it’s a nice delicious hot drink. And also, yeah, there’s a little bit less of the downside if you are concerned about caffeine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m so composed. You and Tim Spector are the two people that have made the case. I think the first time I spoke to Tim Spector about coffee, he was a little bit on the fence as to whether it was healthy or not. He came back a second time and I think there’s been a little bit of a shift in him. He’s now pro coffee in terms of the gut microbiome, which I thought was super interesting. He says it counts as one of my 30 fruit and vegetables a week that I need to get, which was really surprising. So it helped my gut microbiome. He talked about the longevity impacts as well, which I thought was staggering. That it can. Studies seem to show that it will extend your life.

Health Benefits of Coffee

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah, it’s a reduction in all cause mortality. So you’re just less likely to die early I suppose is the easiest way to think about it. Or that’s what we see from the studies. And it’s not that the studies aren’t without flaws, but there’s been a lot now and you tend to see people dying less often or less early when they drink more coffee, not a huge amount of coffee.

This is really important. If you ever go into the research, a cup of coffee to you or me might look like this. A cup of coffee to a researcher is 120 mils of coffee, which is about half of this. So you’ll see loads of studies say three cups of coffee. Three cups of coffee is when you see these benefits. That’s not a liter of coffee, that’s more like 300 to 400 mils total a day of say filter coffee. Or one or two or three espressos, single espressos. So the definition of a cup from all these studies is really confusing and problematic and I think encourages excess coffee consumption. But yeah, three cups of coffee for heart disease, for all sorts of things is seen to be associated with improvement in outcome.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why might that be? What is it about the bean, the coffee bean that is causing benefits?

JAMES HOFFMANN: That’s probably above my pay grade. I would probably, at this point I’m probably aligned with Tim in that it’s a great source of fiber and polyphenols. That it’s just like having another vegetable into the diet. It’s more diversity of diet.

I think one study showed that for some people in the US, cups of filter coffee were their primary source of dietary fiber. Now that’s kind of wild and not really how things should be, but it is a significant source of fiber if you think about it that way. You know, a large cup might be 3 grams of fiber, which doesn’t seem like much until you start tracking your fiber intake and you realize, oh, that’s a decent contribution for a drink.

So, yeah, I think that’s the biggest part of it. I don’t think caffeine has been shown to be neuroprotective necessarily. So I think people are trying to understand the mechanism more. Caffeine’s been studied separately and is much easier to study because you can dose it. You can look at the effects of that.

To really do a study on coffee consumption is really hard. You can’t really do a randomized controlled trial where you raise people from, say, 15 to 60 years old, you control their diet, exercise, sleep, and you just randomize the coffee consumption, because then you might see something. You could really say coffee is good or bad. We can just look at these large epidemiological studies and say, well, trying to control for diet and exercise and cigarettes and all these other things, it looks like coffee drinkers survive longer or have less issues. And it might just be that healthy people are just attracted to coffee. We don’t really know which way around that is. There’s no strong mechanism, but at this point, I’d probably be aligned with Tim on this one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Primarily going to be the gut, the fiber point. Super interesting, because he said to me that we’re like, as a society, extremely fiber deficient.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think the number he said that we needed was about 20 grams of fiber a day.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I think so, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if coffee’s giving us three or four of those grams, that’s almost sort of 25% of our requirement, which is pretty staggering. And I never really thought of coffee as a source of fiber.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Neither did I until he told me. It just didn’t cross my mind that this, you know, it’s a drink. It’s not like a thick. I lived the life of, like, fiber is miserable, cardboardy brown cereal. That’s fiber in my brain. And the idea that this was fiber was inconceivable to me. But, you know, then I read the studies, and it was fascinating.

Coffee and Mental Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about mental health? I’ve always wondered, you know, even things like depression, anxiety. I’ve always assumed a little bit that coffee because of the caffeine is going to be bad for anxiety.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I would certainly say not a doctor, but I would certainly say that if someone suffers with anxiety, cutting out caffeine would be something to test and to see if there’s benefits to cutting caffeine out. There are a bunch of studies done on it. They’re not uniform in their outcome. Some found different results for caffeine consumption and I think because you’re trying to study what is ultimately quite a generic term that covers a lot of different experiences and challenges that people face.

So, yeah, I wouldn’t say consume it regardless, don’t think about it. I think if you struggle with anxiety, it would certainly be worth considering cutting it out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about depression?

JAMES HOFFMANN: I think the same sort of thing is true there. I think there have been studies that correlate caffeine consumption to depression. I think there are people who have used it and have found benefit from it. Again, it’s one of those ones where I just wouldn’t blindly consume caffeine, assuming a benefit to mental health. If I have mental health challenges, I think it’s a place to check and it’s pretty easy to check. Cut it out for a month, it’ll suck for a few days, but, you know, you may see benefits or you may not.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Another sort of complicated, tenuous link has been made towards cancer with coffee.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Most of the meta studies now seem to come down on for almost every cancer there’s a lower incidence associated with coffee consumption. Again, that’s not universal. Some studies have found differently. Again, they’re just really hard studies to do effectively, I think, I think that’s the challenge of it.

I have certainly not seen anything that makes me concerned about drinking coffee from that perspective. Anyway, I think whatever impact it may have, I think would be pretty minor compared to something like cigarettes. And you know, I remember, I think you said on the Internet some time ago, you think in 10 or 20 years time people will see coffee consumption the way they see cigarette consumption.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I did. I remember saying that two years ago.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah. And I think to some extent there’s something in that. I think we are getting more thoughtful about caffeine consumption and I think caffeine is going to be the root of it all rather than coffee as a whole.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, that’s what I should have said. I should have said caffeine.

JAMES HOFFMANN: And I think there is change and I think, you know, we’re definitely seeing that. I don’t think there’s enough health benefits in the coffee itself that we would benefit from keeping it around. You know, I don’t think there’s any health benefits associated with cigarette smoking, but I think coffee will have some benefits. But I think our attitude and our relationship with caffeine is going to change. I think you’re right about that.

The Future of Coffee Consumption

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, that’s really what I was getting at. I almost couldn’t pull apart coffee from caffeine, because I’m a muggle on this subject matter. But what I really mean is that addiction to this drug of caffeine and how it’s like running everyone’s life and we need three cups or four cups a day just to be normal and to show up to work and think straight. I go, Jesus Christ.

Like, as is always the case with these sort of health revolutions, we kind of go to one extreme, then we go to the other. There’s the counter movement, there’ll be like the big decaf movement. There’s now because of neurodiversity and anxiety concerns. There’s this jitter free, crash free caffeine movement emerging and things like matcha and etc. So are you seeing a rise in people choosing decaf?

JAMES HOFFMANN: The great frustration of decaf is that decaf drinkers are typically very poorly served by the coffee industry.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

JAMES HOFFMANN: For a bunch of reasons, coffee shop owners tend not to invest in decaf. A lot of coffee roasting companies don’t really care about decaf, despite the fact that decaf drinkers are the ones who are drinking it just for the taste. They are the purest coffee consumer, actually, because they just want the flavor. They don’t even want the caffeine, just the flavor.

So it’s always been an important thing for me over the years that decaf be good. But yeah, I’d love to see more decaf consumption going on. I think decaf can be really delicious and good if it’s done properly all the way through from sort of farm to cup. But it’s not as available as it should be to most people, which kind of hurts me.

Coffee and Alzheimer’s

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about Alzheimer’s? Randomly? Something I’ve got increasingly more interested in over the last couple of years, I think from doing this podcast and speaking to health experts. But it has almost felt like this mystery disease that strikes some people for a reason that we haven’t quite yet figured out. Perfectly healthy people can suddenly get the news that they have Alzheimer’s. Is there a relationship from the studies that you’ve seen between Alzheimer’s and coffee?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yes. And I’m going to sound like a broken record where you see, once again, up to about three cups of coffee a day saw an association with reduced cognitive decline and reduced incidence of Alzheimer’s. So it’s again, I’m not saying that coffee is causing this. I’m saying in the studies, the people who drank coffee had better outcomes. But you can’t just say because they drank coffee. That’s a really important disconnect in these kind of things. That doesn’t happen often enough.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I had Dr. Daniel Amen on the podcast, and one of his. He’s like a neuroscientist that scans. I think he scanned a quarter of a million brains. Now, he is one of the only people that has really expressed a concern about the impact that coffee has on the brain, because he says it reduces the amount of blood flow to the brain, and that is a net negative thing. Have you ever heard about that point of view before?

JAMES HOFFMANN: I haven’t heard much about that. Most of the studies I’ve read that looked at cognition, see that kind of lift that caffeine will give you in that people tend to perform better on cognitive tests after caffeine or with caffeine than without. I’m surprised in that I had thought caffeine was a vasodilator, which would, in theory, allow more blood flow around, but maybe it’s not. You know, I haven’t scanned a quarter million brains, so I’m not an expert on this one, but that’s the first time I’ve heard someone talk about blood flow to the brain and coffee specifically.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You know, I used to believe that coffee was basically giving me energy, and then it was actually Dr. Daniel Amen, that helped me understand what’s actually going on.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: He says it’s just like blocking something.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yes, it’s stopping a compound called adenosine working in your blood. And adenosine calms you down, lowers your heart rate, makes you feel tired and sleepy. And caffeine just gets in the way of that receptor and stops it working.

And so a lot of people experience a kind of accumulation of adenosine. And so while they’re consuming coffee, their body’s trying to put out adenosine, lower the heart rate, calm them down. It’s not working. And eventually your body clears the caffeine and you have a kind of crash afterwards where you suddenly just feel extremely tired because finally your receptors are clear to receive the amount of adenosine that’s in your blood.

So, yeah, there’s a kind of downside that way. Again, big doses tend to come with bigger crashes. I think a lot of people now are pushing the idea that you should delay caffeine consumption a little bit later in the day. I think Huberman is big on no coffee for the first 90, 120 minutes after waking to help sort of mitigate this effect and sort of clear out everything in your bloodstream before you start inhibiting adenosine reception.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that why people get crashes and stuff like that? Because a lot of drinks that are coming to market now that are like caffeine based products are promising that you won’t get crashes and jitters. So I was wondering if they’re right.

Understanding Caffeine Consumption

JAMES HOFFMANN: You see a lot of people pushing L-theanine in there as a product, which seems to have a synergistic effect and helps people feel a little calmer while sort of maintaining the benefits from that. I think the evidence is reasonable on that. But again, those products tend to be a bit more thoughtful about the amount of caffeine in them. And I think the amount of caffeine is really kind of key.

You might have something with say 100 milligrams of caffeine. That’s a pretty acceptable dose. You might find that in a single espresso or in a small cup of filter coffee. If you take a pre-workout, that’s often 300 milligrams of caffeine. And so there’s all these ways that we can consume caffeine quite easily.

Coca-Cola is pretty low, I think like 50-60 milligrams of caffeine in a can or a bottle. But you can easily end up drinking 200-250 milligrams in coffee as well. If it’s a lower quality coffee, it tends to have more caffeine in it if it’s brewed. It’s just knowing how much you’re taking that I think is kind of key.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And why does that matter? Is that again about sleep or is it just because if you take huge doses then there’ll be significant consequences like crashes and stuff like that?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah, I think the more you dose, the longer it’s going to take to clear from your system, the more that will be in your blood come time to go to sleep. You know, I think the lethal dose of caffeine is really pretty high. A few people have got there, sadly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

JAMES HOFFMANN: But it’s a huge amount of coffee. It’s usually done with pills or other forms of caffeine consumption. To do it with just cups of coffee is like, I think 50 or 60 cups of coffee at a very short time frame. A very strong coffee would be about what was necessary for a small person to hit caffeine toxicity. So it’s quite hard to do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You die of a cardiovascular issue or…

JAMES HOFFMANN: I think it’s more unpleasant than that as I recall. Yeah, I think it’s a sort of neurological thing as well. I don’t think it’s a good death, if I’m honest. Not that, you know, maybe there are good ones, but yeah, I don’t think it’s a good way to go.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Coffee was originally a snack, kind of.

The Origins of Coffee

JAMES HOFFMANN: Kind of, yeah, the coffee fruit was. Most people don’t think of coffee as fruit. And coffee fruit grows on these trees. They’re usually about 2 meters tall, full of these sort of ripe red cherry looking things. We call them coffee cherries. They’re about the size of a grape, but inside there’s these two seeds, kind of like a peanut facing each other. And they take up most of the fruit.

So if you eat them, they’re not very satisfying. They’re mostly seed, bitter skin and a little bit of kind of fruit flesh on the inside. But it is delicious. It’s kind of like a tangy watermelon taste. Coffee fruit is very delicious. I recommend if you can try it, definitely try it.

Caffeine exists in coffee primarily as an insect repellent. That’s why the plant produces it. So that if an insect attacks the fruit, it gets a whack of caffeine and it’s like, nope. And it leaves the fruit alone. So that’s its function in nature.

Other plants produce caffeine. There’s some interesting stuff about how caffeine improves the memory of bees, which helps with pollination. So some flowers produce caffeine and they think for that reason, but the caffeine in fruit in coffee trees specifically is basically insect repellent, which is why the higher you grow coffee, the less insects there are. And actually the lower the levels of caffeine, you tend to see the plant produce.

Becoming a World Barista Champion

STEVEN BARTLETT: You became a competitive coffee… I don’t know what you call it. Do you call it a player? Barista.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Barista.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You became a competitive coffee barista when you were what, 25 years old?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah, about that. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then by 27, you’re named the world barista champion.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yes. I think I went hard, you know. I really fell in love with it. I got into coffee at like 23. I didn’t like coffee, didn’t drink coffee. And then I read a book called “The Devil’s Cup.” It’s a fun book. I don’t know how well it’s aged, but it’s just travel writing. So he traces the route that coffee took from Ethiopia to Yemen through kind of Turkey into the Mediterranean, how it spread around the world.

And what got me about that book was like, coffee’s in every culture. Italian espresso culture is totally different to Scandinavian coffee culture, totally different to Australian coffee culture or what coffee culture is in the U.S. I was like, well, this drink’s kind of interesting. Like, it’s a part of every society now. And then I started to drink it, I fell in love with it, and I just went deeper and deeper and deeper. And, yeah, in 2007, I won the world barista championships.

Coffee Misconceptions and Quality

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if you’re the former world barista champion, and I am a Muggle, which I am on coffee and many things. What do I need to know? What are the biggest myths and misconceptions about the drink of coffee that someone like me should be aware of? I’m trying to have better coffee. I’m not going to be a coffee snob, but I want to make nicer coffees that are good for me, that are healthy and that taste great. What do I need to know? What are the misconceptions?

JAMES HOFFMANN: There’s probably less misconceptions now than ever, I would say. I think more people are coming round to the idea that coffee is not just a bitter, painful experience that you go through to get the caffeine on the other side. Like, it’s a little trial each morning that we come to enjoy.

I think people now understand more and more that there is an astonishing range of flavor in coffee. Twenty years ago, there wasn’t. Forty years ago, there was no diversity of flavor in coffee. Coffee was brown and mean and miserable, and that was it. And now you can have coffees that taste kind of fruity and floral. You can have coffees that taste earthy and rich or chocolatey or whatever else.

So I think the thing that I want to get out into the world is whatever you enjoy, I’m pretty sure there’s something you could enjoy more because there’s so much out there. There’s so much diversity.

The second thing that I think people do understand is that coffee’s kind of made three times in a weird sort of way:

1. Coffee’s made at the farm level. And we would understand that with wine. Like a grower grows the grapes, they make the wine at that point. And the producer of raw coffee carefully grows fruit, harvests the seeds, processes them carefully. And you can do a good job there or a bad job. And you’ve kind of got a peak quality moment there.

2. Coffee is made again when you roast it. It’s transformed completely from a kind of green plant smelling thing into one of the most aromatic things.

3. And then it’s made again when you brew it.

And at each of these stages you can lose the quality completely. You can do a terrible job roasting it, make it taste awful, and you can do a terrible job brewing it and make it taste awful.

I think for a lot of people, coffee making was not particularly a skill. Coffee making was not complex or hard, and it shouldn’t be complex, but it’s easy to get wrong. And I think you can be disappointed by a coffee that you’ve made without really understanding why. And a lot of what I’m interested in is like, okay, you don’t need to understand everything about this process. You need to work out what are the most important things to understand and get those right. And then you’re most of the way there. I don’t think the kind of average consumer is necessarily uninformed or confused, but potentially overwhelmed by choice still.

Coffee Tasting Experiment

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I see a variance in the price, so I assume there must be a variance in what I’m putting in my mouth and I’m not sure what’s marketing and what’s quality. I’ve brought five different cups of coffee from five local shops, outlets, etc, and I’m going to, I don’t know which ones are which. So my team got me these five cups of coffee. Jack is just bringing them in now. So we have five different cups of coffee here from five different suppliers. You’re smelling them all. When you’re smelling them, is there anything you’re noticing just from smelling them?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah, one of the things I can assess pretty quickly is how darkly the coffee’s been roasted. The longer you leave coffee in a roasting machine, the darker the color of the beans will be. And for a long time I think people associated darker roast with better coffee. Oilier beans looked kind of fancier, whereas it swung the other way. And lighter roasts now are considered better or more expensive because they kind of preserve more of the inherent qualities of the raw materials.

So these are all reasonably dark roasts just from smell. The smells I’m getting are more in the kind of heavier, not burnt smells, or some of them actually smell a little bit burnt and kind of harsh. But nothing’s particularly fruity or floral smelling. So it’s just, for me, a kind of gauge of where things are going to be. So there’s going to be an expectation with that of bitterness.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In perfume shops, they give us sometimes coffee beans to smell, to kind of try and wash out our nasal senses, I guess. Does that work?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah, it totally does. It’s why dogs sniff really fast – you’re looking for change. Your sense of smell works quite well on change. And so, yes, you will get what’s called suppression. If you smell the same kind of smells over and over, they become less and less intense. It’s why people end up wearing too much of the same perfume they’ve worn for 20 years, because they can’t, literally can’t smell it anymore. We can. They can’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it’s also evidenced when you go for a run and then because you can smell yourself, you have to ask your friend if you smell. So you go, “Dave, do I stink?” Yeah, because your brain, your nose, I guess, is habituated to the…

JAMES HOFFMANN: There’s a good hack. If you ever want to break apart how something like Coca-Cola smells. If you take a component smell of Coca-Cola, like lime, right? Because Coke just tastes like Coke to people. But it’s actually lime, neroli, cinnamon, orange, nutmeg. And if you smell a bunch of cinnamon and then smell Coke, it smells weird because you’ve deleted cinnamon from Coca-Cola’s aroma profile. And you can do that with, say, lime and smell. And it’s like, whoa, I’ve thrown the balance out by kind of deleting that and suppressing that. It’s a dull but fun kind of trick.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The interesting thing with talking about Coca-Cola, I remember those Coke and Pepsi studies from back in the day where people would rate Pepsi as tasting better unless they had it in a Coke can. So when they could see the brand of the Coca-Cola, they rated it better, but when they could see it in a plastic cup, they rated Pepsi better. And I wonder here as well, because you don’t know what these coffees are. You don’t know what brands they are. Neither do I. What the results are going to be. So coffee number one.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have a taste and a smell.

JAMES HOFFMANN: So that’s a, to me, a pretty standard kind of commercial coffee taste. There’s not a lot going on there. Relatively high in bitterness. To me, that’s a fairly bitter cup of coffee. And that’s coming, I would say, mostly from roast. And if something’s good or bad, it can be bad because it wasn’t made that well that day. It could be bad because it was not great raw materials and finding why is sometimes tricky. I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly expensive cup of coffee.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No. It didn’t taste petrol station coffee.

JAMES HOFFMANN: You can say that. I like that. You can say, yeah, I’m going to just lead you into saying terrible things and I’ll say nothing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, yeah. It tasted like it came out like a vending machine or something to me.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah. I’d be surprised if that was expensive. I’d be a little bit outraged if that was expensive.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What would you rate that one out of five. Let’s do 10.

JAMES HOFFMANN: For me. And what coffee can be, I’d say that’s like a two.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I would say that was a five out of ten.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah. I think it’s kind of fair. I probably should be fair and call it a 4 out of 10 because I’ve tasted way worse than that.

Okay, let’s go for number two. Now. This one will be a little bit more divisive for a lot of people because it’s got a little bit more acidity in it. It’s like a little bit of recipe. You might describe it sourness, almost like it’s a little zingy tasting. Generally, acidity is associated with quality in coffee, which is a real sticking point for a lot of people. It’s down to the fact that when you grow coffee, the higher you grow it, the slower it grows, the sweeter it will ultimately be. But you do get more acidity in higher growing coffees.

Some people don’t want that in their coffee. They really don’t want sour coffee. So that tastes like it’s got better raw materials in there for me than this one. Roast a little bit lighter, brewed a little bit better. I’d like it to be a less kind of sour thing. It’s a little bit old, obviously it’s sat around for a while. But I would say for me, it’s a better cup than this one. Like it’s got a little characteristic to it. Like it tastes of something that’s a little bit fruity in there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, it’s got more of a personality, hasn’t it? The aftertaste is a little bit something going on there. And what you rate that out of 10 in your preference?

JAMES HOFFMANN: There’s things I’d like to change about it. So, like, six, seven somewhere there. But it has, I think, better raw materials in it. That does appeal to me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. I’m going to say six as well. I can reveal that number one…

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Was McDonald’s coffee.

JAMES HOFFMANN: That’s not surprising. That’s kind of what I would have expected McDonald’s to taste like.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that cup of coffee cost us £1.30, so the cheapest thing here.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I feel like McDonald’s are aiming at the kind of cheaper end.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. Your assessment there was probably fair. You did originally give it a 2.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Out of 10, I feel not bad about that, but it’s fine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: There you go. So number two, you talked about there being sort of a bitterness to it.

JAMES HOFFMANN: And a little bit more acidity in this. Tastes like the raw materials are of a higher quality. Certainly than number one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That is an independent local coffee shop.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that cup of coffee is double the price of the McDonald’s one at about three pounds per cup. Let’s move on to number three.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Very different taste.

The Coffee Taste Test Continues

JAMES HOFFMANN: For me, it’s more akin to number one than anything else. Like, it’s again, it’s a darker roast. It’s got a bit more body to it. Feels a bit fuller, a little bit richer, bit earthy at the same time, for me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s fuller, isn’t it?

JAMES HOFFMANN: It is a little bit fuller.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that first one was quite watery to me.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah. And that’s in part to be how it’s made, in part how it’s roasted, in part, you know, where it’s from. Price wise, I wouldn’t expect it to be much more than the McDonald’s, if I’m honest. That tastes, again, like a reasonably commercial grade coffee. I wouldn’t say it tastes bad. Roast a little dark. Yeah, it’s another kind of three, four… three. Actually, there’s something about the… there’s a sort of earthiness that I don’t enjoy in coffee. Some people really like earthy flavors. I really don’t. And that’s just a preference thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that is Costa coffee.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Interesting.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Number four, you’re doing a swirling. I can see you doing a real…

JAMES HOFFMANN: I try. I like to slurp. Usually do a little aeration, but down a microphone, it’s brutal.

Okay. So that’s probably the darkest roast of all of them, I would say. It doesn’t taste like the raw materials are particularly bad, and so I can have a guess at who that’s from. But it is definitely a darker roast. So more bitterness. Again, quite full so, you know, my gut says that’s a sort of Starbucks style thing to me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Try the last one as well then.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Before we reveal, before I get into trouble. That’s kind of weird. It’s a little bit vegetably to me, if I’m honest. It’s not my favorite again. It’s within the world of coffee roasting. It’s darker. It’s not as dark as this one. Yeah. I like it probably less than this one here, so I’d probably be back to like a four again.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So number four, which was the one you gave five out of ten, is Pret.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Is it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Wow.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And number five…

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is Starbucks.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Is it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

JAMES HOFFMANN: There you go.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So of the high street chains, then the coffee that you rated highest in our taste test…

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Was Pret.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Second was Costa. And then third was Starbucks.

JAMES HOFFMANN: But I would say from my point of view…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

JAMES HOFFMANN: The variance between them, surprisingly small.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

JAMES HOFFMANN: They’re not… I don’t think they taste particularly different to each other in a big way. I think the independent stood out a long way from the others. It was clearly different. It has a lot more flavor and character going on, which is good. Which is what, you know, I like about coffee. But, you know, I think the chains, the brand experience may be different, but at the root, there’s not a huge variance in the coffee.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I agree. I wouldn’t really… I mean there are… I can taste differences, but it’s not as profound a difference as the McDonald’s taste and then the independent taste, which was really full of personality.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And interestingly, the price variances. The independent cost £3, Costa’s £3.20, Pret’s £3.20 and Starbucks is £3.60.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Really? Yeah. It always blew my mind for years and years. I would work with loads of, like, essentially startup coffee shop owners and their mindset would be, “Oh, I need to be like, the same kind of price as Starbucks or maybe a little bit more.” And you’re like, what are you possibly thinking? That you have the same kind of supply chain that they do, that you’re going to make and you… They make great margins. You’re not buying 20 million paper cups a week. You know what I mean? Like, nothing makes sense.

But people feel very tied to this idea that the price is set by the chains. And I think that’s changed now and people are more comfortable charging above that. But for a long time, people were terrified to charge more than the chains, even if the product was noticeably better and, you know, a real frustration for me.

And that’s why I’m always going to bat for independents, because it’s not like you can spend more. You can get a better product by someone who cares deeply about it. And I think there’s a risk in going to an independent if you’re traveling. And, you know, Starbucks, the model’s built on, I know where to queue, who to talk to, where to stand after I place an order, what kind of food I can get there. It’s very safe. If I dropped you in Moscow and told you to get coffee, you’d go to a chain because you know how it works and you get it done. Independence feel like a risk, but the reward, I think, is often there for sure. And there’s more independents and they’re better than ever now. So, you know, I’m very pro-independent coffee shops.

James Hoffmann’s Business Ventures

STEVEN BARTLETT: You have quite a lot of businesses. I read somewhere that you’d started, I think 11 or 12 different companies.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Getting on for that I think at this point now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are those businesses?

JAMES HOFFMANN: It’s a good question. My first business I started back in 2008 just after I won the World Barista Championships which is a coffee roasting company. And that still is I suppose my primary business today. Even if I don’t run that anymore, there’s an amazing MD and then I just sort of try not to start fires and be useful where I can.

Over the years we’ve started other things, distribution companies, kind of importing stuff or we have a coffee shop, we’ve done training businesses, kind of education, that kind of stuff. Equipment businesses, kind of the big commercial espresso machines in there. I started a coffee recruitment business that I ultimately sold a little while back. I’m trying to think of other things. I’ve started a magazine, I’ve started a bunch of other stuff and then this, you know, getting into YouTube, that’s become a weird business in and of itself that I didn’t plan to start but is now a kind of all consuming business.

STEVEN BARTLETT: With the YouTube business you must have learned a lot about what people are interested in as it relates to coffee because you’ll see you talk about certain things and people just seem to gravitate towards those subject matters.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is it that people care so much about as it relates to coffee and your audience care about?

JAMES HOFFMANN: That’s a great question because I think coming into this I, for years and years as people did back then, wrote a blog and I wrote a blog to sort of share information about coffee because it was great for me to learn. And also there’s a benefit to sharing, I think if you give things come back to you in the world.

And then people stopped reading blogs and started making videos. And I think having worked in the coffee industry for 20 years, we had tried to talk to people about coffee and nothing really hit and people weren’t really interested and they didn’t like the way we talked about it. And suddenly YouTube… I found a way to connect with people, and it turns out we vastly underestimated how broad and how deep people’s interest in coffee is. Yeah, people care about which machine should I buy? And that remains a question that I will be asked, I think, for the end of my days.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which machine? I genuinely want to know which machine I should buy.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Well, I don’t know. It depends what your needs are. What’s your budget? Like, what do you want to spend? What kind of experience do you want?

Home Espresso vs. Coffee Shop Experience

STEVEN BARTLETT: But I love an espresso and I like speed. And I want… I mean, I’m like everybody. I want it to be super fast and really nice.

JAMES HOFFMANN: So the problem with espresso specifically is that good espresso is a little bit tricky. And it means to get really great espresso at home, you kind of want to have it as a hobby. And if that does not appeal to you, then don’t get an espresso machine for home, because you will spend a ton of money and get the best machine in the world. Put it on your counter after a week, you’d be like, I just can’t be bothered. I don’t want to do this.

And I think suddenly the £2.50 that the independent business charges you, you’re like, oh, that’s great. I will happily pay you to go through the pain of making espresso because it’s messy, it’s slow, it’s convoluted, it’s tricky, it’s frustrating, and as a hobby, really rewarding. But as a way to caffeinate yourself in the morning, not the best.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about an Americano? Like a great Americano, like a great filter coffee?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah, there’s definitely options there. And you can buy a machine and grinder and spend… You can get an incredible setup for like £500. Bearing in mind espresso machines, an incredible setup will be 2, 3, 4,000 pounds. If you’re looking at the top end of stuff, you can go all the way up to… I can spend 10, 15,000 pounds of your money if you’d let me. That’s where the budgets sort of top out in home espresso. But it’s kind of at that point, it’s like home audio, where people just… They want the best possible thing. And if they have the budget, that market exists.

Finding the Right Home Coffee Solution

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m moving into a new house, so I’m right in the moment now of thinking about how to solve this morning coffee problem. So I’m trying to find something I can maybe install. And the thing with me is I don’t have a huge amount of time, so I kind of just want an iPad. Ideally I just speak to it and say, please give me coffee and it would just come out, you know.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah, we’re not there yet. We’re not there yet. The coffee industry is improving and the automation side is improving. By and large, this sort of super automatic stuff, we just push a button and everything happens and coffee comes out. There’s a bunch of dull technical challenges that mean they can’t make as good a coffee as you could do if you were willing to do a little bit of work.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I thought so.

JAMES HOFFMANN: And that’s, I’m not going to lie to you, that’s just the truth of it. They’re getting better and there are more and more solutions and there’s some great high kind of convenience solutions to coffee. But if you want to have fresh coffee made at home and just be as good as possible, I’m going to ask you to do tiny bits of work. Just pour beans in a grinder, put ground coffee into a little machine and push a button.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which machine?

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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. Like how much do you need in the morning?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve got, say I’ve got 100, 200 pounds to solve this coffee problem.

JAMES HOFFMANN: In total?

STEVEN BARTLETT: In total for the machinery.

The Importance of a Good Grinder

JAMES HOFFMANN: Okay. So the bad news is that good coffee grinders are the right investment, right? 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 pound coffee grinder and a five grand machine, I can make pretty terrible coffee. Average coffee at best.

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 tiny particles, other 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’s 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 100 to 200 pounds for a good grinder.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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 you 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 over cone and just pour water onto coffee on top of a mug and life be real easy that way.

YouTube Strategy and Coffee’s Future

STEVEN BARTLETT: Going back to this point though, about what you’ve discovered about people’s interest in coffee from your YouTube journey, the first thing you said there was people want to know what machines and stuff. And then I interrupted. So please do.

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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 espresso 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. If you’ve got a French press cafeteria, what is the best way to use that? I want to be there to help you do that. But a lot of it’s about building trust so that down the line we can go and talk about something totally different and you’ll listen and you’ll trust me and that sort of trust is super important.

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, 2000 meters.

The problem with mountains is that the higher you go, there’s generally less of the mountain. I mean, there’s less area around the world that can grow specialty coffee, great quality coffee. 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. 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. 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. 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. But in the future, I want coffee consumers to still be there through the challenges that coffee production faces.

Coffee Pods and Convenience

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about these pods, the coffee pod machines that a lot of people are using and that are getting more and more popular? Wake up in the morning, grab the pod, whack it in. Now, boom, hit button, out comes coffee.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah. The best analogy I can make is they’re a microwave meal and microwave meals are what they are. They are of a quality. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you use those pods?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Not really. There are some that are kind of separate and different. I don’t want to get into right now. I think a lot of the sort of small Nespresso style capsule ones are very popular. I just wish they were a bit more recyclable. There’s a bit of waste associated with those, but ultimately they’re very expensive, actually, for what you’re… 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 5 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.

Like, anytime we go convenience, we have to sacrifice something and it’s usually quality and it’s usually value. Ultimately 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 morning. They’ve really succeeded in sort of filling that market, but they are, to me, still a kind of microwave meal.

Coffee’s Cultural History

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there any culture that doesn’t drink coffee?

JAMES HOFFMANN: No, everyone drinks coffee. People have tried to ban it a few times. It was seen as a kind of seditious drink. 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. 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 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 drunk and we were all a little bit drunk most of the time from drinking, making a couple litres or three liters of weak beer a day.

Coffee arrives and it’s this safe drink that is totally the opposite to beer. It is stimulating and it transforms London society over 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. That’s excessive. It wasn’t that many. It was probably several hundred. They were everywhere.

And they quickly diversified and sort of specialized into specific things. And so very famously, Lloyd’s of London, the insurance broker started as a coffee shop called Lloyd’s 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 of a 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 1700s, 1800s. But for about 100 years, London was the most incredible coffee drinking city in the world.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When coffee came to the UK and when it came to the western world, was there a productivity boom?

The Evolution of Coffee Culture

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah, 100% huge change in culture, etc, massive 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 tube 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. Like 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 millennial horror show that we were after that. And you can blame coffee for that, but it’s a bit of a stretch. But yeah, it was a massive shift in society.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think for most of my life assumed that tea didn’t have caffeine in it. I don’t know why, I just always thought coffee, caffeine, I think. Because they sound similar.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But then I heard at one point that tea also has caffeine in it as well.

JAMES HOFFMANN: A little bit. Nowhere near the quantities of coffee. But you know, if you’re drinking 10, 12 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.

Coffee Preferences and Brewing Methods

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what’s your favorite cup of coffee. You must get asked this all the time.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I do get asked this all the time and I still, after 20 years, don’t have a great answer. I drink a lot of filter coffee.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is filter coffee?

JAMES HOFFMANN: So filter coffee is not from an espresso machine. 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 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 10, 15 minutes and if I want to have a really enjoyable kind of journey of flavor, that for me is the 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 10, 15 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. 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 really just incredible coffees come from that part of the world.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But.

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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 and the spread is massive.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you put sugar and milk into your coffee?

JAMES HOFFMANN: I don’t use sugar and milk. And I get why people do, because most coffee benefits from sugar and milk. Milk 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 and is coffee healthy? They’ll be like yes, coffee’s healthy – if you drink it black. If you’re putting a lot of cream and a lot of sugar into your coffee, the health benefits are very quickly taken away. 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 taste 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 some of what makes coffee so interesting.

Coffee Freshness and Storage

STEVEN BARTLETT: In this book…

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: “How to Make the Best Coffee at Home.” One of the points you make is quite surprising. You say that… Because I used to think that coffee was a shelf staple. I used to think you get it, you can grind it, you can put it in the cupboard and it kind of lasts forever.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it doesn’t change. You make the case that I’m wrong.

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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. Why would you not have that as part of your life? And so, yeah, coffee is fresh food. And if you treat it like fresh food, it tastes way better.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How long does it take to decay?

JAMES HOFFMANN: It’s a good question.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I had it in the cupboard, you know, once you…

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I buy it in supermarkets, it’s going to taste awful compared to in a coffee shop.

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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 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, but 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.

The Future of Coffee

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think the future of coffee is? We’ve talked a little bit about the history of coffee, but where do you think the coffee industry and public opinion around coffee goes from here?

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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 if you said, how much do 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 were 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 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 spend good money on two great cups of coffee a day than just five average ones just to get them through. Like, 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.

Finding Great Coffee

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you were looking for your moment of pleasure walking through the streets of London…

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Where would you turn? Which shop would you go into? I mean, we’re talking about coffee here. When I say moment of pleasure, just in case you thought it…

JAMES HOFFMANN: Was.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Where would you turn? Because I’m walking through London all the time and as a muggle, I look up and I go, okay, all these logos, they’re all saying coffee. Where should I be? Should I be going for random independent and rolling the dice? Should I be going to a chain? What’s your point of view?

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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 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 vibe, 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 tour the world get obsessed with coffee because it’s a great way to explore a city. 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. The 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?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the best? Challenge for you here?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I throw you into a random city. Let’s just call that city London.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I put you in front of all of the chains.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They’re all the same distance from your feet.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah.

James Hoffmann’s Coffee Preferences

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which one does James walk towards and why?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Really difficult question, if I’m honest. If I’m made to buy a coffee drink, I assume I have to buy a coffee drink, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. You can’t just get, like a muffin.

JAMES HOFFMANN: And sparkling water and run away.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You have to get your favorite coffee from.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Oh, that’s much harder because otherwise I’d go to Starbucks and get like a dessert and a cup and go. Because those, there’s enough sort of fat and sugar in there. It’s a good time. I can’t deny there’s a little bit of delight in a little Frappuccino.

Well, I like filter 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You walk into the Starbucks, would you say.

JAMES HOFFMANN: If I’m being fully weird, be fully weird. Fine. Then I’m going to look at the tanks. They’ll have two tanks of filter coffee prepped, and 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? Camera 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 apple answer. It’s a bit weird to start looking at timers, though, but once you notice it, you’ll see them sitting there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting. So you walk in, you look at the timers and then you make a request to have the one that’s freshest.

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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 can’t remember what their use time is. It might be an hour, hour and a half. I want it fresher than that. So that’s my thing.

I think in a lot of Starbucks, if you ask them to make a French press for you, they still have to do that. That’s like an off menu option. Some have said yes over the years, some have just been like, straight no. But that was a good little hack for a while. But yeah, by and large, I’ll get filter coffee from the freshest pot that they have.

On Sleep and Work-Life Balance

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is your sleep like?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Pretty good. I work hard at that, though. Like, 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 important thing. In my 20s, future me was not very important to me. I’m in my 40s. I’ve got to think differently.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You seem like a very obsessive person.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I wouldn’t say obsessive. I would, because others would disagree.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re so. Passionate is a better word. You’re starting lots of businesses. You probably got more ideas than you have hours in the day, comfortably. You remind me myself there’s a cost to this obsession.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the cost?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah, I think probably, like, if you stopped me and said, what do 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, what do I do? As I work and I do coffee things and then I sleep and then, you know, 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. Like, 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. I 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: As you play your life forward, are you mentally planning to make some adjustments to the way that you’re living now as you look forward into the future? Because I always think I’m doing that. I think in five years time or in 10 years time, I’ll do this. I’ll sell this thing, and I’ll just be a little bit more chill.

JAMES HOFFMANN: A little bit more chill. Yeah, yeah. I’ve been lying to myself that way for 15 years. I would love to. I think part of me knows that I enjoy what I do. And if I sold all my businesses tomorrow, I 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 whole thing.

But it’s the punishment. You learned that these can be fun. Like, the game is fun of making things, creating things, and then growing these things. It’s just fun. 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 how is… 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 wrestling 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. You know, Peter Attir has broken my brain, too. It happens to all of us. But, like, yeah, 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.

Career Advice and Finding Passion

STEVEN BARTLETT: If your kids come to you, though, your two young kids, and they say, daddy, I want career advice.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Based on the journey that you’ve been on yourself and the path that you’ve walked. When you look back at the sort of the key components of the success you’ve achieved in a very specific industry, what advice would you give to them?

JAMES HOFFMANN: I think lean into the things that genuinely interest, because there’s opportunities in everything.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Even if it’s like pen lids or.

JAMES HOFFMANN: 100%, if 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. Do you know what I mean? Like, oh, 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then in your 30s, do it.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Do it really well. Don’t do it stupidly. Like I did. I fell for the whole hustle, grind nonsense and I worked too many hours and I nearly hated the thing that I loved because that’s what culture was then was like, you’ve got to work every hour and if you’re not sleeping under your desk, what are you even doing? Which is a lie and stupid and deeply unhealthy in my opinion.

But, you know, that was when my career really took off. And yeah, I’d won this world Bristol championship thing in my twenties, 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, yeah, 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 okay 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.

The Power of Communication

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you think about, particularly though your success in this industry because some people will have passion but they won’t be able to become the number one world barista champion. When you reflect and do kind of a skills audit of yourself, what do you pull out of there and go. That’s the reason why I was able to go so far in this particular industry.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I think I had a lot of practice at communication.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s what I was going to ask. One of the things I really noticed about you is your communication skills.

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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 car I had a commercial machine projector screen.

I was a mobile cafe and I would travel the whole UK, build out electricity room, lecture to 30 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 a sort 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 trying, oh, that was 25, 26 and I was a terrible public speaker before 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And yeah, isn’t that just everything like communication? Isn’t it? You know, if I was thinking, if I had young kids now, the most useful thing I think I could do for them is to give them some kind of repetition based sales experience. I spent four years working in call centers on the phone. Yeah, it’s no surprise to me now that I’m a podcaster and I’ve done sales and I’ve raised investment and I tell stories and I speak all around the world and I’ve been all around the world this week speaking and I go, well those four years working on those phones where I made no money was the essence of the development of that skill.

The Value of Empathy in Hospitality

JAMES HOFFMANN: But I think it’s also realizing whether you did it consciously or not, that skill is rooted in empathy. That skill is 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 of 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. That’s the key thing. But that requires someone on the other side looking at you and being like, what do you need today? And 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When I look at you, if I was to do a skills audit, I’d say, clearly an incredibly hard worker. That’s going to be a great tailwind through your career. Curiosity, huge amount of curiosity, which I think kind of couples up with the word learning that you used at the start. You love to learn.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And yet your wealth of knowledge because of that curiosity is huge. Your ability to then articulate what you know and what you’ve learned and what you’ve condensed, I think is a huge one. But not just articulate it. Tell stories that are compelling in a compelling way. The way you speak, the intonations, all of that keeps people with you. And then, yeah, I guess the repetitions of the craft itself, like knowing how to make great coffee yourself by actually spending a long time doing it, which is different from being a parrot. Like, practitioners and parrots are two separate things.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re clearly a practitioner and a great, not parrot, because you’re not repeating things. You’ve learned these things yourself. But you’re a great talker, but also a great practitioner.

JAMES HOFFMANN: That’s very kind of you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then you’ve got 20 years behind you and, 20 years of doing anything, you can become a master. So, yeah, that’s my assessment. And then you’re like a likable individual. You’re very likable. Your resting face is a smirk and a smile, which is endearing.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I think I’m broadly happy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You seem like a happy guy.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I don’t think I have any reason not to be.

Coffee’s Message to the World

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. What is the message to the world then? The closing message to the world about coffee? If you had to give one, if you were speaking to everyone on planet Earth right now and you had to just give them a few couple sentences, this is your megaphone to the entirety of the world. 8 billion people.

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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 it’s, I promise, a ton of fun.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s what I walk away here with, as many. With all the other insights into you, your life, coffee itself. The big thing I walk away from this conversation with is an increased excitement about coffee.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Good. I hope to fan the flames of that after this.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, and I’m really going to. I really mean that. I feel like you might have just sent me on my own little coffee journey.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Oh, 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I know you’ve got no time, so that’s not a real invite, but thank you.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I’m just up the road from here, like any time. We’ll do it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I appreciate that. I’ll take you up on that.

JAMES HOFFMANN: All right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. So we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest and I cannot believe I have to ask you this question.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I’m ready.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You will think I’m lying when I read this. Okay, but I have to read it because that’s my job.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I’m ready.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, you’re not.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the duration of your nighttime erections?

JAMES HOFFMANN: 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. Yeah, I don’t know. We should all be finding out.

James Hoffmann’s Books

STEVEN BARTLETT: Apparently, neither do I. I mean, that’s not going to make the conversation cards that question. But thank you so much. Do you know what? These books are just absolutely beautiful.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Thank you very much.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you just done two of them or is there more to do?

JAMES HOFFMANN: Yeah, the atlas is a second edition now. And then the other one just came out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The World’s Atlas of Coffee is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen in my life. And they did a great job, beautifully rich photography in it, lots of history, all of the equipment questions that I’ve been asking you about. So if anyone really wants to understand coffee or I tell you what, get someone a great book if they’re a coffee fan. That is the book that is absolutely gorgeous.

And then the second book, How to Make the Best Coffee at Home. I mean, we touched on this a little bit, but it goes into such great detail because even as an idiot, I can understand all of this stuff as how to build your own little home setup and the process that is important to great coffee.

JAMES HOFFMANN: That is right. Yeah. The first one was kind of written as a guidebook. As 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You didn’t have to make them so beautiful, but they’re such beautiful books throughout. So I’m going to link them both in the description below for anyone that wants to check them out.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

JAMES HOFFMANN: I feel inspired, really enjoyed this. Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I am excited to go and get a wonderful McDonald’s coffee immediately after this conversation start. So thank you.

JAMES HOFFMANN: Thank you.

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