I recently pitched an environmental story to the @BBC about the world's largest tropical wetland (Brazil’s Pantanal) and they accepted it!
The Pantanal is an extraordinary ecological hotspot is facing significant threats, and I spent five intense days on location, capturing sounds and learning from @FrTortato of @Panthera_BR about its unique wildlife. Despite layers of clothing and repellent, I experienced the full force of the wet season's mosquito swarms!
And for once it’s not a coffee story! I’m taking everything I’ve learned creating narrative audio over the years in the coffee world and applying it towards other issues that I’m passionate about, such as the environment.
This in-depth journalism is still only a side hustle though. There are too many other stories I still want to explore in the world of coffee!
I’m in the middle of drafting the final piece, and I expect it to go live to millions of listeners in the next few months on the BBC World Service’s documentary podcast channel.
#pantanal#bbc#documentary#matogrosso#filterstories#bbcdocumentary#onça#jaguar#wetland#swamp
I recently pitched an environmental story to the @BBC about the world's largest tropical wetland (Brazil’s Pantanal) and they accepted it!
The Pantanal is an extraordinary ecological hotspot is facing significant threats, and I spent five intense days on location, capturing sounds and learning from @FernandoTortato of @Panthera_BR about its unique wildlife. Despite layers of clothing and repellent, I experienced the full force of the wet season's mosquito swarms!
And for once it’s not a coffee story! I’m taking everything I’ve learned creating narrative audio over the years in the coffee world and applying it towards other issues that I’m passionate about, such as the environment.
This in-depth journalism is still only a side hustle though. There are too many other stories I still want to explore in the world of coffee!
I’m in the middle of drafting the final piece, and I expect it to go live to millions of listeners in the next few months on the BBC World Service’s documentary podcast channel.
#pantanal#bbc#jaguar#onça#onca#audiodocumentary#filterstories#podcast#coffeeposcast
I went behind the scenes at the never-before-seen R&D department at @mahlkonig!
Listen to the Filter Stories podcast episode ‘Freshness and Grinding, Part 2’ to discover why tiny changes in your grinder setup can have huge consequences.
👉 Link in Bio!
#mahlkönig#mahlkonig#coffegrinder#coffeegrinders#coffetech#grindingcoffee#coffeeburr
Thank you to everybody who came to my lecture with @CoffeeHistoryJM on how coffee got so cheap! Your questions were hard hitting and excellent.
It was wonderful to meet coffee friends and colleagues at the Expo. The American coffee world continues to change very quickly and it was fascinating to see the latest technology trends in coffee. There are MANY ways to make cold brew, it turns out!
#sca#scaexpo#specialtycoffeeexpo#coffeexpo#history#thehistoryofcoffee#coffeehistory#specialtycoffee#cheapcoffee#filterstories#filterstoriespodcast
Farming coffee organically often leads to healthier soils, more plentiful birds and insects, and farmers avoid getting sick with agrochemicals.
But, if it’s so great, why is less than 10% of the world’s coffee grown organically?
The fact is, going organic is hard. Much harder than growing coffee conventionally.
In the latest episode of The Science of Coffee series, I travel to Honduras and show you the story of one of Central America’s most successful organic coffee cooperatives, @cooperativaraos (Cooperativa Regional Mixta de Agricultores Organicos de la Sierra).
I explore the four big hurdles standing in the way of a smallholder coffee farmer who dreams of switching over to organic: acquiring specific organic farming know-how, facing initial yield drops ("the trough of despair"), securing higher prices for lower yields, and the necessity of joining a well-managed cooperative.
In the episode, I show you how the RAOS cooperative overcame these hurdles and changed the town of Marcala and the surrounding region into one of Central America’s organic coffee hotspots.
Listen to “Organic Coffee, Part 2: Why don’t we see more organic coffee farms?” at the link in bio.
Brewing green, unroasted coffee!
One day I wondered why do we bother roasting at all? So, one sunny day in Berlin, I got hold of some ground up green beans and brewed up a V60 pourover.
Instead of beautiful caramel brown, the coffee looked yellow-y and green.
I enlisted my flatmate, a former coffee professional, for a blind taste test.
His verdict? It's not terrible!
(But we both admitted we prefer coffee that’s been roasted.)
In my latest Filter Stories episode, I delve into the science of coffee roasting and why today anyone can do it very easily.
Tune in at the link in bio!
Greetings from the ceiling of my studio, perched atop my loft bed. 😀
I'm up here to try and find a sound effect....!
For an episode of my upcoming series The Science of Coffee, I needed some 'whooshing' sound effects, and sometimes you gotta get creative.
I can't wait to share this episode with you about our sense of taste and smell. It drops on January 8th. Mark your calendars!
t sucks when you fail as a storyteller.
I played a rough podcast draft to a test listener… and they fell asleep 💤
Every episode of mine goes through intense edits, and when it’s nearly finished, I like to give it to a test listeners for some brutally honest feedback. I did this recently with an early draft of an episode on how our sense of smell and taste works for the upcoming Science of Coffee series. And it bombed. It was too technical.
It’s not unusual for my early drafts to miss the mark. Because I’m so in the weeds of the story, I often forget what the ‘essence’ of the story is. This is why I always ask a handful of test listeners to give me feedback on rough drafts.
And I was really grateful for the golden advice my test listener gave me on this specific epsiode: show how all this technical sensory information helps you to better appreciate coffee. So I went off, did another expert interview, spent another two weeks reworking it, and I’m now super happy with the piece!
Would you like to listen to draft episodes and give me brutally honest feedback? I would really appreciate it! Drop me a DM :)
When manga collides headlong with specialty coffee!
I took a few steps outside my hotel in Shanghai, found this nondescript tiny coffee shop and had one of the best coffees for a long time. Many bags of Cup of Excellence just chilling on the shelf behind five different grinders and posters of manga!
It's beautiful so see the owner pull his passions together into this lifestyle business. It feels weird, because if I were as passionate about manga as I am about audio stories, I probably would have set this cafe up myself!
I’m back from China with a head full of insights from the 'Innovations in Origins' conference! It was a hub of discussions, from Young Baek @youngsdrip.exp’s cup tasting techniques to the transparency debates ignited by Andres Felipe @colorsofcoffee.co around coffee experimentation.
I’m very grateful to Catherine Gu @gugu_cathy for the invitation, wonderful hospitality and so much learning.
I walked away from the conference thinking, 'there is so much I need to understand about China generally, and especially its coffee world’. I’d love to go back!
So while I was in China, I took a high speed train from Shanghai to the scenic trails of Huangshan! It was a beautiful (tough) climb up, the Yellow Mountains are gorgeous…and I found Costa Coffee nestled amidst this emblem of Chinese natural heritage!
Who'd have thought?
I played it safe and ordered a chocolate mocha coffee before starting my descent all the way down…
Cheers!
I’m working on an episode about how to think like a scientist, and spoke to lots of very smart people from topics around poor sensory methodologies, problems in academic research and the issue of “bro science”. I had about a hundred interesting pieces of audio, but I could not for the life of me “see” the story. Normally I can do this no problem. But this time I was totally lost!
So I did something I haven’t done for many years: I printed them out, cut them up and lay them out on a table. I grouped ideas together, ordered them around, had flashes of inspiration…and voila! A story emerged from the chaos.
I can't wait to share this story with you!
Hey peeps, here's another behind-the-scenes of making an episode for The Science of Coffee!
I'm going through every single interview I've conducted for this episode, relistening to each one, scribbling notes, and constantly asking myself, "Does this piece fit into the bigger story I want to tell?"
At this point I'm two interviews down, many more to go, and by the time I finish this marathon in 3-4 days, I'll have a brain dump doc that's maybe 5000 words long!
My head is going to be swimming with info, and I won't even know where to start....But that's where a long sleep, a cup of coffee and a clear diary come to the rescue 💪
One of the hardest things to do as a narrative podcaster is to kill a story that you’ve invested hours and hours of your time into. That is what I had to do today with a story about coffee ‘quality’ that I had in mind for season two of The Science of Coffee.
After re-listening to an advanced draft of it, I had to admit that the story needed more time to brew. More research, more interviews, more consideration.
Hitting the delete button stung, because I’d invested so much energy crafting an entire narrative arc. A week of work wasted.
But it’s not in vain! I plan to bring an even more comprehensive story later ;). Maybe in season three of the Science of Coffee series?
Here’s me strolling through the Natural History Museum in Paris, looking at the bones of dinosaurs and all sorts of creatures, then all of a sudden I stumble upon…. you guessed it, coffee!
Well not exactly coffee, but an artifact of coffee history: the box that carried the first coffee tree to France from a Dutch botanical garden.
This beautifully crafted piece is a testament to the lengths the French went to protect this valuable plant back in the 1700s, knowing the prosperity it could bring to the Empire, built on the back of suffering for enslaved Africans. It’s a chapter we delve into with @coffeehistoryjm in our second series of A History of Coffee - you can hear all about it at the link in bio!
When I’m immersed in the process of making a new Filter Stories episode, I spend a lot of time sculpting the intro, trying to find a strong opening hook. Because those first five minutes of any story are all I have to convince someone to continue listening to the next 40 minutes of the episode!
And often, a good opening hook is a simple fun anecdote.
I was making an episode about our sense of smell and taste, while sitting in a Paris cafe, literally wondering “how am I going to open this episode?”. And then the barista gave me a cup of super sour passion fruit fermented Colombian coffee that blew my mouth open.
Et voilà! This is the anecdote I’m going to use!
I’m going to open the episode talking about how this coffee sort of assaulted my senses and then take it from there, hoping you’ll enjoy a breakdown of what happens in our mouths and noses while sipping on coffee.
It was one of those cases where you’re literally living the scene while you’re developing the episode. I love this creative process!
Bonjour de Paris! This is my “office” view this week.
I’ve been enjoying brewing coffees near the top floor of an eastern Paris skyscraper with my trusty Aeropress and Made by Knock grinder. The delicious coffee I’m brewing is from Elvis Tineo Rafael from Peru, roasted by @rebelbeancz and kindly gifted by my friend and coffee pro @alica.banszka.
It’s cool that I’m here because I helped produce an episode on the @5thwavecoffee
business of coffee podcast on the changing Paris coffee scene, and I can see it for myself now!
Here’s the gist of it (link in bio): Over 10 years ago, the specialty coffee scene in France was not really French. People were traveling in France, and some talented baristas started settling there, but it was a mostly English speaking community.
In conversations with influential coffee operators, major roasters and suppliers, it appears like the specialty scene is finally blending aspects of traditional French culinary culture into the global specialty coffee template.
More recently, COVID-19 might have stopped a possible explosion of new specialty cafes, but the specialty coffee sector has grown nonetheless. Consumers are now more open to take-out culture, and are pursuing quality coffee at home.
What an incredible time I had visiting the team at @roestcoffee in sunny Oslo a month ago!
This is me with ROEST’s Veronika Bolduc and Callum Gilmour exploring how coffee flavours evolve the longer you roast coffee.
We roasted a sample right at the beginning of first crack, and continued in intervals until we got well into second crack. It was really fascinating tasting how acidity and bitterness slowly modulated.
Another highlight of my visit was having Callum as my personal guide into the inner workings of ROEST's roasters. The amount of technology, sensors, and data analytics left me stunned.
This will all feed into an episode about the science of coffee roasting in the next series of my podcast, The Science of Coffee.
I've been in conversations with some very knowledgeable scientists in the coffee roasting science, and there are still many more to have!
As for Oslo in May, what a gem of a city. I even managed to return to Berlin with a suntan. I still can’t believe it…
Here’s a little behind-the-scenes of what it takes to create narration for my podcast The Science of Coffee!🔬☕️
I prefer not to script the narration because I believe it makes the topic of science more easy to understand and approachable. If you feel like you’re having a conversation with me, I think you’re more likely to get what I’m saying.
The problem is, I am a Grade A bumbler…just terrible at expressing my thoughts succinctly! 😂
But with the magic of editing, it all comes out fine in the end 😅
Fun fact: for every little snippet of the piano music that you hear in my podcast, I spend up to 10 times its length to produce it…! ⬆️This is a small snippet of my process. I record straight from my electric piano into Cubase, delete the wrong notes (quite a few of them…) and it’s good to go!
This is the intro melody you hear in the second episode of the new A History of Coffee series about Haiti. Surprisingly, this one actually only took five takes and not the usual 20!
So next time you hear the sound of a piano, you can imagine a version of Guitar Hero!
