You didn't like coffee? How old were you?

Oh, I was like 23.

I'd never drunk hot drinks.

People, you know, the first weeks are painful to think about.

I would make people coffee and they'd be like, is it supposed to be this bitter? And I'd be like, I have no idea.

Honestly, no idea.

But do you want to buy one? But I started to read about coffee.

Is that also true of coffee?

Do you have any advice for me as I get started?

The actual process, the actual sort of nitty gritty of making espresso is actually pretty simple.

And yet it goes wrong all the time.

You know, we've both had plenty of terrible coffee in coffee shops.

Like for something so simple, how does it go so wrong so often? There's a lot of variables hidden in all of this.

So trying to be consistent in what you're doing and understanding what the variables are is absolutely key.

And some of the most important variables? The amount of coffee you use is actually really, really, really important because a combination of how much coffee you use and the grind control the resistance that the kind of coffee gives the machine and therefore the brew time.

cups a day do you think I need to make to get really freaking good?

Right.

I think good coffee is, comparatively speaking, extremely affordable, and I think it's cheaper than it should be.

Yes, if you start to spend serious money, you're buying into something else.

You're buying into kind of an intellectualized experience there where it's meaningful to you about the story of this particular coffee or the experiment behind this particular lot.

But from a sheer flavor perspective, you're not getting something better necessarily.

You, you might be getting something weirder or more unusual or rarer, but not necessarily better.

So, I think good coffee, great coffee is fantastic value for money, unlike great wine, which is harder to argue, you know, that, that a $100 bottle of wine is good value.

Um, I, I can't imagine those beans were still tasty, but maybe I'm wrong.