From Vietnam Egg Coffee to Italian Espresso, A Canadian Expat’s Coffee Journey: S8E4

Erin and I met in Vietnam many years ago, the place where both of our coffee obsession hit a peak, so it only made sense to have her on the podcast. In this episode we dive into her coffee explorations in Australia, many countries in Asia, Italy and Canada. 

Original publication date: July 24, 2020

More: https://linktr.ee/stephfuccio

Transcript

SPEAKER_06 0:00

And I mean I love how like you could just like oh you know I'm just ever so tired for a moment. I think I'll stop for an espresso. And you could like knock back like four or five espresso. Whereas if I had four or five espresso in my normal life, the people around me would start to wonder.

SPEAKER_05 0:13

But in Italy, it was just like, well, of course you're going to do the pawns now on an espresso. You're aren't you human?

SPEAKER_02 0:20

With candles, books, and wine crafts, albums filled with photographs and rooms that echo tuneful lives. I'm so happy I could die.

SPEAKER_04 0:31

Hey there, I am Steph Fuccio from Here Share Productions, and in this episode of Geopath's Coffee, we will go to Australia, Vietnam, South Korea, China, Italy, and Canada with our globe-trotting caffeinated guest, Erin Garnum. Erin and I met in Vietnam ages and ages ago when both of our coffee addictions were starting to hit a peak. It is absolutely thrilled to have her on the podcast to dig into the different parts of her coffee life. Some that I knew and some that are new to me, and some that are new to her, but you'll have to wait for that. Let's get straight to the conversation, shall we?

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Will I manage my defeats before the moment? For the moment.

SPEAKER_04 1:13

Thank you so much, Erin, for joining us for the Geopaths Coffee Podcast. Hey! I'm so excited to talk to you about coffee. But first of all, do you have anything to drink close to right now?

SPEAKER_06 1:27

Right now, I'm drinking a increasingly warming glass of rose.

SPEAKER_04 1:32

Oh, that works. We usually do a quick, annoyingly loud slurp at the beginning of the show.

SPEAKER_06 1:38

Oh, okay, yeah, I can do that. Okay, ready? I am definitely prepared to slurp this. One, two, three.

SPEAKER_04 1:45

Slurp away. That was an impressive slurp. Touche. Thank you. That's a big bold glass. Let's do a little bit of geography first, actually. Where are you from and where have you lived in the world? Just a quick overview.

SPEAKER_06 2:04

Sure. Okay. Um, well, I'm originally from Canada, Nova Scotia, uh, place outside of Halifax called Cool Harbor, which is basically a suburb of Halifax. And in my early 20s, my husband and I moved to Asia. We started first in South Korea in a place called Incheon, which is just right next to Seoul, and did a couple of years there. Then we moved to Vietnam, where we were in Hanoi, uh, discovered a good taste for coffee there. And we moved to Japan and then finally to China, where we've been since 2009, I think. Wow, has it been that long? It has. Oh yeah, doing the math. It's been a while.

SPEAKER_04 2:44

And my yeah, my coffee addiction started just before Vietnam, but it definitely kicked off there too. And that's where we met. Yay! Yeah, that's right. Yeah. But you've also traveled a lot too. Not just where have you been, but where have you sought out coffee? And we'll go into more detail of it, but just as an overview first, where have you coffed it up globally?

SPEAKER_06 3:05

Like the first place that I really kind of thought about coffee is more than just I don't want to say like a commodity, but you know, like a, you know, just a thing that you got with breakfast, was when we first traveled to Australia. And that took me by complete surprise, and I have a very distinct memory of um going into a cafe in Sydney right after we arrived. This was like, I want to say like 2005, 2006, I'm not sure which. And I went into a coffee shop and it looked like, you know, like an independent coffee shop I'd see in Halifax, you know, nice espresso machine and you know, chalkboard menu type place, lots of plants open to the street. And um, but none of the words on the menu looked anything like what I was, you know. First of all, like the word coffee wasn't up there. Uh, I think the word espresso was probably there for sure, but I didn't really want an espresso. There were words like long black and or short black and like long white. And I was like, oh man, like I am really because I, you know, we had just come from South Korea and I had been like super, super excited to go to a place where I could communicate with the barista in English. So I was so surprised that that couldn't happen in Australia. So I get to the front of the queue, and the lady's like, okay, uh, what would you like? And um I said, Well, I to be honest, I'm not really sure. Like, I can describe the cup of coffee I want to drink, and then maybe you can tell me what you would call that. And she just looked at me like, okay, all right, American, right? And so I said, like, I would like, you know, a fairly strong, but at the same time, quite a lot of water coffee. And she's like, Oh, you definitely want like a long, what we call a long black. And so that was my first experience with Australian coffee culture, which I think we reached the apex of when we got to Melbourne. And I still think that's the finest cup of coffee I had anywhere. And to my great regret, I do not know like what the name of the place was, but it was somewhere, somewhere by the beach. That does not help at all when you're talking about.

SPEAKER_05 5:09

This is terrible.

SPEAKER_06 5:10

There's like there's like someone yelling at their computer right now, uh, somewhere spot. It was one of those streets where they have all the little cafes with the cake. So I'll look it up later. I'll Google it. We need that that guy like on Joe Rogan who like Googles everything for a molecule and talking.

SPEAKER_04 5:26

No worries, we'll put it in the show notes later. Don't worry about it. Yeah, I was I was surprised by that too. And it was actually China is where I got used to Australian coffee because there were so in Shanghai there were so many Australian coffee shops, and I got obsessed with flat whites and and experimented with other things, but it I yeah. Uh for the listeners, sorry, Erin, just a second. For the listeners, you can look back at the episode with Bianca. She is from and in Melbourne right now, and she enlightened us on some of her favorite places there and some of the drinks that I haven't even had yet. So, yeah, I get that. Australia, shocking but impressive. Where else have you coffied it up?

SPEAKER_06 6:02

Well, of course, uh St. Kilda. There you go, I've just Googled it. Somewhere in St. Kilda. So obviously, Vietnam was a great place to drink coffee. Um, just love the smell of like when they would roast the coffee, which doesn't really smell like coffee, like coffee being brewed, but that kind of burney, caramelly, um, hot smell that you could get in the afternoon on the streets when you're driving around and and everything's open to the streets there, obviously. And having all of the really great kind of iced to Vietnamese coffees. Um it was fine. I mean, you remember because you live there, but like you could get like a basic, very sweet one at the Highland chain. But then you could also go for like the touristy thing um at the egg coffee cafe. The great view over the lake. My favorite when we lived there was Cafe Mai, and it was like really expensive coffee. Like if you bought it by the uh the gin, I forget what that is, but you know, like a half kilo of it was like 180,000 dong or 200,000 dong, which is quite quite a lot, right? But uh totally worth every penny.

SPEAKER_04 7:08

Amazing, amazing. Like they had a whole range of different prices and different qualities, and the top stuff was just amazing.

SPEAKER_06 7:18

Well, that's how you know like you're in a good place, right? Like, you know, there's weights, there's there's like vast quantities available for purchase, you know, and there's like a a range of things that you might purchase. Yeah, and I mean we would occasionally stop for like an actual drip coffee there, but I usually just brought it home and had it. Um, because my favorite way to drink coffee is black with a pour over. And I don't even remember when I started doing that, probably out of pure practicality in um either Korea or Vietnam, because I I had one of these, like I don't know what you call them, but you you know, they're a filter holder that you just stick on the top of the cup. Yeah, the the cone thingy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't even know. And that and an electric kettle will get you through anything, as far as I'm concerned. Like I remember when we moved to South Korea, like going to get in the main coffee culture when they we arrived there in 2002, which I know has evolved to probably, you know, some extreme level. But when we got there, people were still spending like 5,000 on uh basically you're renting the spot for the afternoon, not the coffee itself. So it would be like a little packet of instant coffee. Maxim, Maxim brand, I think it was called. And you get like a little paper cup, or you know, and it was like three in one, the three-in-one stuff, you know, where it's got the sugar and the milk already in it.

SPEAKER_04 8:39

Yeah, Evan talks about this. He talks about do you like it the red or the yellow one, or like something like the color of the packet? Yes, it's how people decided what they wanted.

SPEAKER_06 8:48

Yeah, yeah. And there would be cafes that like would, you know, like you'd go there and because you were just there to hang out on the sofa with your friends or whatever, the actual cut quality of coffee wasn't, you know, uh that important, so it was instant. But I mean, I think Starbucks started, I mean, it had just it was it must have been a fairly recent arrival when we moved there in 2002, because we had to go like probably six subway stations away to find a Starbucks, and that was like the place to find the most obvious reproduction of what I was, you know, calling coffee back then, right? Which was like rude filter what the British call filter coffee.

SPEAKER_04 9:28

What years were you guys in Japan again? I forget.

SPEAKER_06 9:31

Was that 2010 or that was I remember Obama being elected when I was there and the financial crisis happening. So it must have been like the tail yeah, the tail end of 2008, 2009. No, yeah, 2007 to 2009, because we moved here in August 2009. So yeah, there you go.

SPEAKER_04 9:54

So that was that was before Japan got really good at at coffee, because they're their roasteries now are crazy amazing.

SPEAKER_06 10:02

Yeah, and I mean I don't recall drinking bag, like I mean, so like anywhere, like anything in Japan, you'll always find in a small neighborhood someone who went somewhere and lived in the apex of whatever industry they've decided to, you know, maybe they're maybe they're a glass blower, so they went to Venice for like 10 years, or maybe they're a um, you know, a pantisserie maker, so they went to Paris and studied under some, you know. So there was coffee to that. You could get a decent cup of like espresso, you know, that what I think of as leaf coffee, you know what I mean? Like it's like espresso with like milk poured into it, and there's a pattern on top, and it's inevitably a leaf I find in Instagram. So that I think you could find, like, you could seek that out. I don't think that we had that with any kind of regularity, but um, I know like you know, you could find anything in Tokyo if you looked.

SPEAKER_04 10:53

Yeah, it's changed a ton. We were there last year briefly, and we just literally typed in coffee and hit return. Granted, we were in Shinjuku area, but still there were a ton of specialty places. So we located a neighborhood that had a few nearby in case some of them were too busy because we're impatient people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 11:13

Well, and plus in Japan sometimes you can just never sit down.

SPEAKER_04 11:16

Yeah. Yeah, but it was amazing how many like specialty roasters, not just a random coffee shop, like the the housewife coffee shops where they're just inside smoking all day and just sitting in that one place. It wasn't like that, it was like specialty roasteries where you could see them roasting while everybody else was like partaking of the goods. It was just it was amazing.

SPEAKER_06 11:34

I love Japan for that. I love it. Like it's just so very Japan, you know. Like, we're gonna do this one thing, we're gonna do it so well.

SPEAKER_05 11:43

Like it will travel an hour on a train to come to the place where I do this.

SPEAKER_04 11:47

If it's there, it it is done well.

SPEAKER_05 11:51

Yeah, it's true, or they don't do it. Exactly. That's what I find out to be true.

SPEAKER_04 11:55

So those are the places that you've lived and traveled. Australia was travel, but were there you you also spent quite a bit of time in Italy. What was your reaction to the coffee there?

SPEAKER_06 12:04

Well, that's interesting. I didn't get a sense that people went in for like that kind of bespoke Australian, Japanese, you know, niche roaster experience, which is not to say that there was not good coffee. So we really enjoyed uh of the Italian coffee that we drank. Um, kind of the price, the convenience. I like like you could walk into these beautiful. I remember stopping in, I wanted to call it Bourgogne, but that's the wrong word. Uh Bologna. There you go. In Bologna we went and we were just wandering around, we were just there for a day. And somewhere in the market right off the square, uh, there was this beautiful marble with like a nickel bar, like gorgeous, like chrome machine. I don't know, like it was beautiful, it's like something out of a movie. And an espresso was one euro for everybody. And it was a perfectly delicious espresso. Like, there's nothing, I mean, like I like good coffee, but I'm also not what I think is uh, you know, if if the coffee is freshly roasted and ground and brewed, I'm pretty much open to it in all of its its forms. So I was very happy to to have a nice quick cup of coffee in those surroundings where it was obviously so beautiful. And I mean I love how like you could just like oh, you know, I'm just ever so tired for a moment. I think I'll stop for an espresso. And you could like knock back like four or five espresso, and I don't think anyone would have got whereas if I had four or five espresso in my normal life, the people around me would start to wonder.

SPEAKER_05 13:29

But in Italy, it was just like, well, of course you're going to do the pause and have an espresso.

SPEAKER_06 13:34

You're aren't you human? So you do. So I I love that very much about the the coffee in Italy. Uh, we only went to one roaster, and probably just because of, you know, like it was our first time in Italy, so we're like, let's go see the paintings. So maybe the a future trip can be visiting the roasters and things. But we were in Venice right around New Year, and there was um a roaster that is in the Canareggio district, and we stopped there and got a coffee right along one of the canals, and it was really exceptionally delicious, you know, it and and quite a lot of it's just like when something is freshly roasted, you can really taste it. The crema is kind of like thick and luscious, and the coffee is like you know, it's not too acid, there's enough acidity there that it's interesting to drink. And they had several different beans on the menu, so Peter and I, my husband and I got a choice, and we kind of you know tasted our way around the espresso's, which was probably very touristy to do, but we nevertheless, you know, you're only in Venice for the first time once, right? So we're like, whatever. We're clearly tourists.

SPEAKER_05 14:38

We're gonna we're clearly nobody's you know mistaking us for locals, so whatever.

SPEAKER_06 14:45

One thing I liked about traveling to Italy in the winter was that yeah, you can just reliably get a nice as long as you want espresso or a um a cappuccino before lunch. Looking for a long black, I think. I didn't even bother because it's not something I don't think I would have found. And if I'd found it, I wouldn't have been happy with it.

SPEAKER_04 15:02

So very true. Well, I was just obsessing about the cappuccinos because I couldn't believe. I mean, we went from Shanghai to to Rome and then back. And it was like four, through depending on the place in Shanghai, the equivalent of a what four or five dollars to Rome were 90% of the places, if not 95%, were like one euro per cappuccino. And granted, it wasn't as big, but it was more lush. Like the milk was nicer, the coffee was.

SPEAKER_05 15:31

Exactly. This country deserves to be properly caffeinated.

SPEAKER_04 15:42

Hey, hey, Steph from HairShare Productions popping in. I want to tell you something that's happening with the Geopaths Podcast. And that's not like the sip at the beginning of the episode. That is a very excited, uh, elongated S sound that I just did because Geopaths Podcast, as you may have noticed, has uh grown into many different podcasts. We've broken all of the shows from Geopaths Podcast out into their own creations. Thus, Geopaths Coffee. If you literally go into your podcast app and type in Geopaths with an S, hit enter, you'll see all of the selections available currently. We did this to bring the podcast to their next level. That does include upgrades in our equipment and so much more. And what better way to ask for your support than to ask you to buy me a coffee? If you like what you hear on the Geopaths Coffee podcast, I would gladly appreciate going to buymeacoffee.com forward slash geopats, G-E-O-P-A-T-S. You can buy just a one-off coffee, thank you very much, or you can support us monthly by doing a recurring coffee. Let's get back to Erin Garnum.

SPEAKER_06 16:55

Before I use a pour over. And um, when I travel, I usually bring that with me because it's so light, it's just a little plastic thing. And some filters and some ground coffee so that my first cup of coffee in the morning can be like a long coffee like I I'm used to. And then, you know, as the day goes on, you kind of opportunistically take whatever coffee comes into your path when you're traveling. I think I think it's important to be open to the local coffee culture and not be too hung up on what you consider to be the cup of coffee you want, you know. For sure, for sure.

SPEAKER_04 17:27

And it you bring coffee back with you when you find good stuff on vacation, right?

SPEAKER_06 17:31

Usually, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a product I um especially if I like it, and definitely if it's fresh roasted. It's a good memory and it's light, usually.

SPEAKER_04 17:40

And it makes your clothes smell really good.

SPEAKER_06 17:43

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 17:45

So have you seen any surprising things done with coffee anywhere that you've had it?

SPEAKER_06 17:52

Yeah, I mean the obvious one that comes to mind is the egg coffee in Vietnam, which I'm still not quite sure how they do, but I I assume they like beat the uh egg white with a coffee syrup to get it all foamy and thick. It's a bit like, I don't know, have you ever talked about it on your program before?

SPEAKER_04 18:08

Uh, not very much, but we actually at the beginning of quarantine were a little bored with the stuff we had in the house, so we actually YouTube it and we made it. It's a little more grueling than I thought.

SPEAKER_06 18:19

My sense of just like from cooking and knowing what that top layer tastes like, it's almost like they make a boiled icing with it. Like they have to like whip up egg whites and pour a hot syrup into it. I don't know. That's what it tastes like to me anyway.

SPEAKER_04 18:31

I'm not sure how they actually do it in the cafes in Vietnam, but the way that I was that we saw it on the YouTube channels we were looking at, the huge portion of it was just the whipping part. You just had to whip it for forever. So of course people had uh what are those things called? Those the machines that you use to whip stuff?

SPEAKER_06 18:46

Kitchen aid.

SPEAKER_04 18:48

Yeah, they use they use machines, but we had forks and everything was closed, so we couldn't exactly go buy anything else. So we just sat there, like my my hand seriously hurt.

SPEAKER_06 18:57

That is such a quarantine project.

SPEAKER_04 18:59

It really was. I was like, we have the time.

SPEAKER_06 19:01

Let's do this. There's no excuse for us not to recreate the egg coffee of Hanoira.

SPEAKER_05 19:07

We're not gonna play a game of Uno or anything. God knows on our reroll.

SPEAKER_04 19:10

That's not happening.

SPEAKER_05 19:11

We're gonna recreate the egg coffee of Hanoi.

SPEAKER_04 19:13

But we did keep it simple. I don't remember putting much more other than the egg, the coffee. Although, wait, a lot of the recipes we had said to use instant coffee, and we didn't have instant coffee around us. We had just ground coffee, so I used that. So I we cheated a little bit. And there might have been a third component that we didn't have. So it wasn't perfect, but it definitely did come up creamy, even just with the hand whipping with a fork.

SPEAKER_06 19:35

Well, I urge your listeners to seek out these videos and see what we're talking about because it it is. I mean, it's I don't know, it it come it's halfway between a cappuccino and a Vietnamese coffee, isn't it? Like it has that thick, foamy layer, but it's sweet because it's sweetened somehow. And then that hot, strong coffee beneath. Oh, it's really yummy.

SPEAKER_04 19:56

It is, it definitely is. And if I'm I'm slightly lactose intolerant, so I don't have milky coffee as often as I would like. And having that creaminess from the egg was beautiful because I got that creaminess without the after effects. So yeah, definitely egg coffee.

SPEAKER_06 20:11

I guess the other horrible thing that I could describe as being, you know, interestingly done to coffee is you know the classic Canadian coffee, which I mean I haven't really touched on, but um it would be kind of immoral of me being Canadian and to talk about coffee without not discussing Tim Hortons, which is I mean, less less and less these days, a national icon. Um, it got bought out a couple years ago by some international conglomerate, and everyone's sworn that it's gone downhill ever since. I don't know if that's kind of convenient nationalism or what, but I'm increasingly less impressed with it when I go back. But yeah, the the classic double double of Canadian proletariat lore. Like every every working person in Canada. You know, you get it's like yeah, again, as the British say, filter coffee. Um and it's kind of like a very strong bitter coffee. I I drink coffee uh black because I don't drink milk, and it's not a coffee you want to drink black, like they roast it so that it still tastes like coffee after you add a quarter cup of cream and a quarter cup of sugar to it, which is what most Canadians do with their double doubles. It's like two big tablespoons of sugar, and you know, you don't even measure out the milk. There's like a milk machine when you work at these coffee shops. Because I I worked at a coffee shop and I worked at a couple of coffee shops in the village, actually. Pre-coffee renaissance, so uh not that interesting, really. But um, yeah, there's a milk machine that you basically put these giant bags of milk in, and they have timed pulses of milk that go into the coffee, so you can do it faster.

SPEAKER_04 21:44

So the default is to have like almost more milk than coffee.

SPEAKER_06 21:49

Yeah, or I would say like a good third of the cup is not even milk, it's cream, which is like, you know, you want to know why everyone's so unhealthy. Yeah, you have to if you especially like if you say. A double double, you're getting cream. You're getting coffee cream. It's like 10% or whatever.

SPEAKER_04 22:04

Is it actually cream cream or is it like the sub cream substitute stuff?

SPEAKER_06 22:09

No, no, it's cream. Like it's coffee cream. So it's like a 10% milk fat, I think. I don't know. Lowest 20 years ago. That's when I worked there. These days, I'm sure you can get almonds milk and you know the whole minairs. Um, but that was definitely the coffee experience that I grew up with.

SPEAKER_04 22:35

They opened Tim Hortons in Shanghai before we left. Have you been to this?

SPEAKER_06 22:38

I do have it here. I know of course I have because my son really wants I mean the other main draw of Tim Hortons is its fried dough donuts products, which haven't been good since I was like 12. But they're not good in Canada now because they're frozen and kind of centrally baked, and they're not particularly good in China either, because I don't I don't really know why they're not good here, but they're not at all the same. They're mostly yeast, but they leave them kind of sitting out for a while. So, you know, a good yeast donut has to be like crispy cream, like right off the press, right? But the coffee is definitely like the Tim Hortons coffee that I've tasted in China is better than the Tim Hortons coffee available in Canada. And it could just be a different supplier. It could be exactly the same supplier, except they brewed it fresh instead of me having it kind of burnt from the back of the yarn.

SPEAKER_04 23:29

Who knows? Right. So many different things. Could be the water, I mean so many different factors.

SPEAKER_06 23:34

It's a fairly standardized product, but nevertheless, a lot of things can can interfere with it. Freshness just makes so much of a difference, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_04 23:43

It really does. We had a grinder in a few places, but when we were in Chianghive for sure, we had a like a mini grinder at home. And so we would grind the beans before we, you know, filtered it. And now we don't, and we're trying not to buy too much stuff till we're settled, settled here. And so we have them grind the entire bag. And you can tell. You can tell the difference. Yeah. By the time we get to the end of the bag, it's like it's still good, but it's not as good.

SPEAKER_06 24:07

It's not as punchy. I don't know, I lack the vocabulary. But yeah, we even switched because we got sick of replacing the kind of tabletop grinders. We switched to a burr grinder, and I love it. Um so you just drop the top in. And we got gifted with an espresso maker recently from somebody who's leaving. So, because there's a bit of a mass exodus here now.

unknown 24:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 24:29

Uh we even got a juicer out of the bargain. But yeah, so many things, all the things.

SPEAKER_06 24:34

But yeah, look, I love my my drop burger grinder and um my fresh coffee. Now, what we normally drink here is, and I feel almost embarrassed for admitting this on a coffee podcast, but we get the big bags of Starbucks, the kind that you get at Costco, like the one kilo or whatever. Uh my favorite is the French roast, which is actually pretty hard to buy at a uh a Starbucks here because they most people like a blonde roast. I think it's very, very uh much the fashion these days to like a high acid, medium or light roast to taste the kind of varietal flavors. But you know being a hard child of the 90s, I um really like the I like a coffee that slaps you upside the vase in the morning. And uh I mean like for my for my morning brew, you know, like the rest of the day. If I'm in a nice cafe somewhere, I can appreciate the subtle notes of a a varietal, but yeah, I don't I mean I'm not some people are very kind of anti-Starbucks. I kind of look at it as like a kind of a haven to get a cup of brewed coffee in the rest of the world. Sometimes, like if that's what you want, they reliably have it.

SPEAKER_04 25:48

I have no problem with Starbucks. If there's a lot of places around it that have more specialty stuff or have like more interesting food selection or something like that, I'll go there. But you know what you're getting at Starbucks. It the base quality is decent. Like you just and you know you're gonna have air conditioning or heating depending on what you need at the time. I mean, it's gonna be a comfortable sitting environment, blah, blah, blah.

SPEAKER_06 26:09

Bathroom. I remember going there in Manhattan because I'm like, well, um, I need a place that has a toilet, so we'll be going to stay, even though that I know like in in the village in Manhattan, there's like a trillion better coffees to be had. I'll uh I'm not guaranteed a toilet. Yeah, no, um, yeah, so that that that's our kind of basic route. But uh were you here when the Starbucks roastery opened? Because that actually is an interesting place to try some varietals, because that's not I mean, certainly where I am in Sujo, you can't there's not a lot of interesting coffee. Um that Renaissance hasn't arrived here.

SPEAKER_04 26:46

They yeah, they they'd opened a few months before we left, I think. And I went in there once at the very beginning on like a Monday morning when there wasn't much of a line, and then every other time I walked by there was a giant line, and I was like, I don't need to go back. But that place is massive. But at the time when they opened, they were the biggest Starbucks in the world, but who knows what's happened since then because people seem to be doing like bigger, bigger, bigger stuff.

SPEAKER_06 27:11

Yeah, we have one here, um, a smaller roastery here, because we had a large shopping center open up, and so it is nice. I think it's probably the only place um within median distance that I can go and get a varietal coffee brewed in a pour over. That's my best option.

SPEAKER_04 27:29

No, you keep saying varietal coffee. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_06 27:32

Like I mean like a place where so it's got an origin, so it's not like a blend. So French roast, obviously, it's just like a roast, right? But um a varietal, like you know, I mean, I like how much do I know to to buy their marketing, whatever. But a varietal would be like when you say, okay, this coffee's all from Costa Rica or whatever, this coffee's all from Kenya or like a single origin? I think a single origin one has to be like probably from one particular producer, I think. I'm not sure of the terminology myself. No, me neither. You know, if I want to try a Rwandan coffee or an Ethiopian coffee, then that you know that's pretty much the only place I'm gonna find around close to me now. And I do really like, like I really like the opportunity to try uh African coffees. I really, really like whenever I see them, if they cross my path, I'm there. I'm there for them.

SPEAKER_04 28:21

Yeah, me too. Me too. We went back to Japan last year and we went to Caldi, which is like like kind of like an international food store, but they happen to have a pretty big coffee selection, and we stocked up on so much of their coffee.

SPEAKER_06 28:36

Yeah, I love going to Caldi Coffee.

SPEAKER_04 28:38

They have a beautiful range from around the world.

SPEAKER_06 28:41

Yeah, like I mean, they're all there, and you can see how recently they've been roasted because the beans are there. So I mean that always has a an influence on my choice. Like if I go for a pour over, I I always choose the shiniest beans.

SPEAKER_04 28:53

For sure, for sure. The shiniest beans. That's beautiful. So we had this guest on earlier in the podcast who came, I don't know if she came up or she was quoting somebody else, but she said the peak coffee experience, and she she wanted us to ask future guests what their peak coffee experience. It can be like an experience that was repeated in a place, or it can be that one moment in that one place with that one coffee that will never leave you. What's your peak coffee experience?

SPEAKER_06 29:20

Oh, wow. I think I have two, like one from travel and like one from everyday. My peak travel one would probably be the first time I tried a Vietnamese coffee in Vietnam. Which would, if I think about it, would probably be like at a tourist place in the old quarter in Hanoi. So we were there on holiday in 2003 when we were living in South Korea, but we went there. Just the first time, like that iced kind of it's I mean, it's so different from European roast coffee, you know, it hits your mouth and you're like, whoa, that is I was not expecting that, you know. And Peter, my husband, would say like even better would be on like a motorcycle trip when you roll up to a place that you know serves just beer, fruit juice, and coffee and like the coffee. I remember having a coffee there once, like on the side of a road, and I by accident dropped a drop of it on the skirt I was wearing, and I just never got the coffee stain out because it was that rich and that dark, and that kind of the titration or whatever was so high ratio that it was just never coming out. I have never had a coffee that that I characterize as too strong for me. I just really like it so that your tongue curls. My daily kind of peak coffee probably happens like once every 10 days or so. So normally I drink a lot of coffee, like a like probably an unhealthy amount of coffee to to fend off other addictions, right? Like it replaces pretty much anything else. I'd rather be doing, you know, eating muffins or smoking or whatever. I've never been a smoker, but like if I didn't have coffee, I probably would be. So I take it, like from a Chinese perspective, like I'm just probably just killing myself every time I open. It's not hot, pure hot water, it's it's deadly. I take in a flask of coffee, and it's about a 500 mil flask, and I get my i, so my the the lady that lives with us, our housekeeper, nanny, she makes coffee and breakfast in the morning because I usually am up at five and I'm into work by six, six thirty. So I don't eat first, I just grab a flask of coffee and go. And so, like once every 10 days, she gets just the ratio of water to coffee. Absolutely perfect. And you open the coffee flask, and like you know, you know right away when the smell hits you, you're like, oh yeah, it's gonna be really good. And you're just the right amount of dehydrated just to freaking kind of sleep. And I usually because like you know, I I get to I get to work better at least so I can get some work done before people start showing up, and so like I pour it out into a cup. I usually try and warm the cup first so I don't lose any heat. I mean, I don't know about other places, but like I like my coffee kind of strong and lots of water, um, and in a tall, very narrow cup so you don't lose a lot of heat quickly. So I have like one coffee cup that I eat, and like when I look around for coffee cups, I always look for this one kind of cup that has to be quite certainly taller than it is wide to keep the heat in it. And even like I'm I didn't realize how picky I was about coffee. It has to be the right kind of porcelain, and I don't even know, like I don't know enough about it, but I know that if I if I lift something up and it's too light, I'm like, oh no, that's no good for a coffee cup. It has to be like quite heavy ceramic. I don't know, because I guess it holds the heat better. And then I just kind of pour the coffee into that cup, and I have it as I'm doing my emails and my, you know, sorting out my lesson planning and that sort of thing for the first thing in the morning. And that is peak, like just me sitting in my classroom, that perfect ratio of water to bean, it's perfect temperature, and you just like okay, it doesn't matter what else happens today. Uh, this was a good moment. I'm leaning into this moment with everything I can until the people show up and the people hit. And I mean, I'll probably have like another three cups of coffee after that. Like after I finish that flask, I'll have like at recess at like 10:30, I'll go and do like an espresso in the teacher's room, and I'll probably fill up because they have kind of uh what do you call it? Like, you know, a big urn of like the world's saddest coffee that can be found in any workplace or ever. And I always joke, like, you know, and I work in a British school, so like the the the coffee to to water ratio is always more like the person who's been making tea. Like I have been known to pour that free coffee. I shouldn't turn my nose up, but it, you know, somebody's making me a free cup of pot of coffee in the morning, but then I'll shoot an espresso into it so that it has some flavor. Because they have one of those, um, it's not an espresso maker. I make it sound better than it is. It's one of those, like a Nespresso, they're quite popular in Europe. They take the pods, and it's you know, it's not as bad as a curry, but it's not as good as like a proper espresso. Settling coffee. It's like there's nothing else. It's this or a warm glass of water, so I'm gonna take this. And that gets me through to lunch, and that's when I usually s switch to tea so I can sleep at night.

SPEAKER_04 34:35

Can you think of any other coffee experiences that you've had anywhere in the world that stick out to you?

SPEAKER_06 34:42

The the most recent one that I remember, because like for me, coffee and travel are so wrapped up in each other, it's been really hard to not be able to travel because like I always love that feeling of getting up in the morning in a new place, you know. Because where I am, I inevitably seem to arrive late at night, and then you get into bed, and then you wake up, and then the first thing you do for me anyway is have a cup of coffee in my new place, right? You look out over everything, and you're like, oh wow, look at this place. I haven't been here yet. So it's been kind of sad because we would normally be traveling in the summer, and it's one thing that we often do in Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia, our home province, has quite a lot of independent roasteries as well. And we love to go to it's actually a UNESCO World Heritage um town, and they have a roaster there, and I love their French roast. It's one of the few places that actually still makes a French roast, actually. They're kind of like inured to fashion and they make it, and it's called Oh la la. That's the name of the the I forget the name of the roaster. It's called Little Whale or something like that. And so normally I'd be coming back like with a suitcase full of Nova Scotian roasted coffee, which is predictably strong. And not having this this summer is kind of sad. But the best memory I have in the most recent time is yeah, sitting on that canal in Venice having this, it was right outside the Jewish, the old Jewish ghetto. And the coffee maker, the roastery name is ghetto. The the brand, the coffee roast that I bought. The uh roaster's name is I'm going to butcher the Italian Torfazione Canareggio. And uh just sitting on the canal and drinking that coffee with that beautiful crema. Can't beat that.

SPEAKER_04 36:23

But keeping in mind that we do talk to people from all over the place about the different places they have coffee, what are some questions or what are some things you'd like to know that we can ask future guests?

SPEAKER_06 36:34

I would love to know more about like I was saying before, uh, you know, like I like to show up for an African coffee. I would love to hear stories of people who've drunk coffee in Africa and production, coffee production in Africa, and just hear about all those amazing coffees that are coming out of places like Rwanda and Ethiopia, Kenya, and what it's like there. I mean, I can't imagine it's anything like drinking coffee here in Asia. How do they drink it? What does it look like? How do you order it? Where do you find it? Is it like a breakfast thing? Like I I know nothing about it. So that would be cool.

SPEAKER_04 37:07

Like I see stuff on YouTube because I I'm an idiot and I'll follow anything the algorithm gives me. But once you type in one coffee video, there you go. It's like five weeks worth right there. Thank you to our guest Aaron Garnham. This podcast was produced by yours truly, HairShare Productions. If you need help with any of your podcasting needs, please do contact us. Also, thank you to Damon Castillo for the music that he graciously lets us use in all of the Geopaths podcasts. In fact, the full song that you've been hearing snippets of in this entire episode is coming at you right after I say his name. Damon Castillo, Damon Castillo.com. The song in today's episode is I'm So Happy I Could Die off the Mess of Me album. Enjoy.

SPEAKER_02 38:09

If there is a man to be strum a chord and sing to me, that there will be another time, a time for you and I. With candles, books, and wine crafts, albums filled with photographs, and rooms that echo tuned life. I'm so happy I could die.

SPEAKER_03 38:32

I could die, I could die. Someday I won't have to try.

SPEAKER_02 38:38

Until I do, I think of you. I'm so happy I could die. Days of change in coffee spoons, lights on the exotic moons, lazy morning hotel rooms. Well, it's time for you and I'm empty bottles of champagne, rolls upon a window pane. Cocktail dresses and at this chain. I'm so happy I could die. I could die, I could die.

SPEAKER_03 39:10

One day I won't have to try.

SPEAKER_02 39:13

Until I do, I think of you. I'm so happy I could die. And through half-deserted streets, in half-hearted retreats. Will I manage my defeat? For a moment, for a moment, I think of you. The home to live a life and more. The trips made to the hardware store, the dances on the kitchen floor. Will it time for you and I? Working minds and broken hearts. Collaborate, the greatest arts. Thunder through the empty parts. Still I wonder why.

SPEAKER_03 39:59

Wonder why, I wonder why. I wonder why we have to die.

SPEAKER_02 40:06

Until I do, I think of you. I'm so happy I can die.

SPEAKER_03 40:11

I could die, I could die. One day I won't have to try.

SPEAKER_02 40:17

Until I do, I'll think of you. A star to light the sky. Until I do, I'll think of you, a light to grace my eye. Until I do, I'll think of you. I'm so happy I could die.

SPEAKER_00 40:45

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