https://www.cultleadercoffee.com/product-page/astral-projection-medium-roast

https://www.hodinkee.com/

Counter Culture Coffee

https://thegreynato.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

Joe Bean Roasters

Joe Bean Coffee - Coffee that lifts everyone. https://shop.joebeanroasters.com

Lunchador Podcast Network

Lunchador Podcast Network is a network of podcasts originating in Rochester, NY. Our goal is bringing creative people together to be a positive force in the arts community. The shows that make up Lunchador are owned by the creators and cover a wide range of topics and backgrounds. http://lunchador.org/

Welcome to the Level up podcast.

I'm your host today, Aaron Pascucci, and I am joined once again by fellow coffee drinker, armchair connoisseur, Chris Lindstrom.

Hey, Aaron, how you doing today, man?

We're good.

I am excited.

I don't know if you go through these waves where you feel super motivated to do stuff.

Yeah, I am.

I'm in a weird.

And it's a, it's an enviable position, but one I'm very uncomfortable with.

So I'm off for the rest of the year.

Oh, you mentioned that.

So you hit that point.

Yeah, I'm off for the rest of the year and I, I can't just not do things.

I, I start to fall apart almost instantaneously.

So whenever I'm off, I end up being like, wildly productive.

So drinking coffee at 8:30pm on a Thursday is probably not bad for you right now.

Perfectly fine.

Also, my.

The way my brain's wired like caffeine late at night doesn't affect me that much.

I know.

Isn't it sad?

Yeah.

I don't drink coffee at night typically, but mostly just out of like, oh, I need to try to be a decent person and fall asleep at a reasonable hour.

Well, and let's be honest, nighttime is.

For scotch and something we might be having right after, so.

Well, this is.

I don't know if this is going to be a coffee drinking episode or if it's going to turn into a full episode, but we'll see what's going on here.

So my motivation is we're going to push forward on this and we're going to start trying to make sure that we can get some episodes published routinely here.

Yeah, that's the goal.

We were talking about how nerdy people are nerdy about lots of nerdy things.

Yeah, absolutely.

So one of the things that's going to come out is I've got a guy.

I met Evan Johnson, met him through another podcast called the Gray NATO.

If you are a watch guy or you happen to have a really nice watch, either a hand me down or you did really well and you bought yourself a Rolex.

At some point you need to go check out this podcast.

Very short history here.

The leading expert in both vintage and watches in the, I might say the world right now is a guy named Ben Clymer.

He runs a company called Hodinkee.

It started out as a blog and is morphed into.

It's an entire production company.

They've got podcast, they've got video, they're really A lifestyle brand at this point.

Ben Clymer grew up in Brighton with myself.

Oh, nice.

So, you know, tuning my own horn a little bit.

If I can pretend that I'm famous in some ways.

You know, we were friends through middle school, knew each other, and kind of kept in contact in high school, and then we kind of split ways.

But he started this, you know, during the recession, you know, from his desk at a bank job.

And I started reading his blog there.

And there you go.

I'm into watches now.

Yeah.

So 10, 20 years later, I've got a bunch of watches talking with a bunch of watch guys, and there's a bunch of coffee nerds on there also.

That's awesome.

No, I'm actually.

I'm super excited.

I know you're mentioning we might get a chance to chat with him at some point.

That's the goal.

If you're listening, Evan, or I'm coming after you.

Yeah.

So I think he's excited too.

Yeah.

I think it would be interesting to talk to Ben at some point, too, because, you know, we're.

We're learning all the time as Lunchadore about, hey, how do people grow things?

How do you.

How do you do something that you really believe in from top to bottom and grow something in the way you wanted to grow it?

So I think we could have a fascinating conversation with him at some point, too.

Oh.

I mean, if.

If we could get him on the show, that would be life changing.

Yeah.

Well, that's the thing.

It's like, the nice thing is because Rochester is still such a small town and people with roots here still want to contribute, still want to be involved.

And I think there's a lot of excitement in Rochester right now that it might be interesting to talk about with somebody who's done great things.

And also, you know who.

It's just occurred to me, you know who.

We have a mutual contact, Mr.

David Lane.

Oh, yeah.

Dave would be great to have over.

We should get him on.

David is a Leathersmith, and he has met Ben more recently than I have because Ben sells his watch straps through Hodinkee.

Oh, that'd be fantastic.

And then the guys from the Gray Nado have also visited Rochester, or at least one of them has in the past, and he's gotten to kick it with them a little bit over in his little studio.

Nice.

So fun stuff.

You know, the world is so small.

Sometimes I feel like if I ran into the guys at the Grainito, they got a premium subscription, which I'm a member of, and they.

They do these meetups and stuff.

And it's one of those things where I know that I'd walk into one of these, you know, breweries, go up to the guy and be like, jason, what's going on?

And he would have some vague idea of who I was.

Yeah.

But he would act like we were best friends.

Yeah, of course.

And it's like, in my head, you are like this God of watches in writing over here.

And he's like, yeah, you're a cool guy.

I know.

And I'm like, there's something to be.

Said for at some point.

Part of the fun about doing these kind of things, whether it's writing, whether it's podcast or video work or other things, is connecting with people and having real conversations isn't.

Doesn't turn off.

I think sometimes, yes.

You know, with, you know, with the size of fandoms and things like that, it can be overwhelming, of course.

But in the end, you know, the best podcasts tend to be either amazing production pieces or they tend to be conversations.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the thing that I've realized about what we're doing is I want to get more towards that interesting conversation more than just hammer down on coffee all the time.

Yeah, it's both.

Right.

It can be fun.

It can be fun doing the deep dives.

It can be fun doing the nerd outs about the news and all the different aspects of coffee.

And, yeah, that's an important part of, you know, what we're doing.

But this part's also a blast.

Like, why not try.

Why not have some of these conversations with different people in the industry or adjacent things?

I mean, I know Dave would happily come over and do this because, you know, he's been on my show Food About Town a couple of times in the past, and foodie, he would love to come over and talk coffee and talk about watches and things.

I'm sure we'd have a blast.

It'll be great.

I miss Dave.

I ran into him when Rising Storm opened, and he had another watch guy.

And I pulled up, I'm like, dave, how are you?

What's going on?

And he looked right over his friends.

He goes, aaron likes watches, too.

And, like.

And, like, without hesitation, like, they both put their wrists out, and they're like, what do you.

What have you got on right now?

And, like, my wife is looking at me.

She's like, are you serious?

Are you serious right now?

So.

Sounds about right.

Carrie's learned to tolerate my diversions from everything we do, depending on who we Run into.

Oh, man, it never stops.

It's great.

But.

So we've got Evan's coffee in here.

Cult Leader coffee.

If you are happen to be one of the few who found us on YouTube first, this is the corresponding podcast that I'm gonna link up to.

Our little video there.

Actually, it occurs to me that we might be posting this conversation in video also.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, you'll be able to have this whole thing on your, on your show.

So we can cross post it on there or on the Lunchadore network.

So, yeah, it's one of the great things.

You know, we're setting up more video in the studio now for this.

We have a one shot video.

We're working on individual video for every person right now.

You know, just expansion slowly and not, not trying to go too fast.

For those of you who are not watching the video, then, yeah, go check out the video.

We've got some really bad footage of Chris brewing coffee.

It was a great effort, mostly because.

It was his face.

No, I'm kidding.

The camera work.

Playing with a gimbal for the first time.

But yeah, go check out the video.

We're going to start doing multimedia stuff, or at least I'm going to hope to.

So fun stuff going on.

Yeah.

But we've got Cult leader Coffee in here.

We brew this on a Kalita wave.

This doesn't have a roast date, so some people listening might be interested to know more about that when we can figure that stuff out.

And this is a Papua New Guinea.

When we looked at it, it is kind of a standard medium, possibly getting towards dark, but I think it was actually more of a medium to a light medium than I've seen.

It definitely wasn't like a French style.

Yeah.

And so when, when Aaron's talking about that scale, we're also talking about, I'd say the general coffee scale of roasting, not specialty scale.

Often when we're talking about coffee tasting, we'll call it specialty medium or specialty medium minus.

It's basically taking a smaller window and expanding it for the sake of, you know, separation.

I'd say this definitely lands in the overall medium roast range.

The outside of the beans had a little bit of oil on it, which definitely indicates that it hit that, you know, solid specialty, medium level.

And that oil we're talking about solid meat, classic medium.

Yeah, classic medium.

And the oil we're talking about, if you're unaware, is like a sheen that is on the beans as you roast them.

The oils in there will come out more if you find A lot of specialty stuff.

It actually has more of a matte finish on the bean.

And that's kind of a key to some people when they're looking at buying their coffee is to the degree at which it's roasted and what they're looking for specifically.

Yeah, it's a little bit of an easy indicator, to be honest.

Like, if you see a very obvious oily sheen and you don't look at the color at all, you know, that has been pretty darkly roasted.

And a side note there, from selling Gaggia automatic espresso machines for years, there was problems with their grinders.

And I don't remember if Gaggia actually ever acknowledged this as being a problem, but when you put dark roasted coffee through these beans, there was a sensor that would get gummed up.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And it would stop grinding.

And it's all coming back.

It's all coming back coming back to me now.

It would say, no beans.

It was the no beans error in the.

The automatic espresso machines.

And they finally solved it.

I think there was a technician that I knew there, and he had been working.

He's been working there as long as I've known him for over 10 years, probably closer to 15, maybe 20.

And I think last month or a couple months ago, I was talking with his wife, and she goes, you'll never guess what happened.

They finally fixed it.

Interesting.

So I don't know what they did, but it was something along those lines.

And we would have these conversations with customers of, are you using oily beans?

He's like, no, they're not oily, I promise.

And they'd send a photo in, and it'd just be like, jet black reflective coffee.

Yeah.

And it's just one of those, like, one of those indicators where as soon as you start to see it, you can't unsee it.

Yep, yep.

It's like most things, you start to dive in, and all of a sudden it's now in your face and you can't get rid of it, But.

So start medium roast.

I did verify there's a little thing here that says roasted deep in the woods of Reader's, Pennsylvania, where the cult leaders are.

Ooh, nice.

He, Evan, nicely sent out a bunch of bags.

And I missed the joke where he said, oh, now you're one of us.

And I was like, oh, I'm one of the people who got his coffee.

No, I'm part of the cult leaders now.

So, yeah, the notes that they have on the website for this, this is the astral projection this is the notes of spiced dark chocolate and dried fruit.

And, you know, medium.

Medium on the coffee scale isn't normally where I drink my coffee.

You know, for a long time I've been a, you know, pretty hard specialty light roast coffee drinker.

So this is a little outside of my normal day to day, but this is what the vast majority of people like to drink is specialty medium roast.

Not specialty regular medium roast.

It's a force of habit to say specialty, by the way.

So this is what the vast majority of people drink all the time is classic medium roast, what they call city roast many times as well.

This is what almost everybody's drinking every day.

Um, I'd say even the lightest roast at, like, the big chains is medium for sure.

You can't get anything that we would consider light at Starbucks.

No.

Tim Hortons doesn't have anything close.

Yeah, this would be the absolute lightest you'd see at most.

Most big chains or in what most people drink at home.

And even what.

A lot of the bigger specialty brands roast closer to this than they do to specialty light.

I just bought a.

A bag of.

Who is it?

I want to say chromatic, but it's not.

They have a hologram roast at Wegmans.

It's not Verve, is it?

No, I was.

Does Wigman's call carry Verve?

I don't.

I've seen it at some point, but, you know, that's like.

Everything rotates at some point.

But, you know, the reason I brought all that up is that even though this isn't my typical drink, you definitely.

So the notes that they lay out there, you know, that dark chocolate, this really plays at that high.

Cacao bean.

Yeah.

This doesn't have like, char to it.

This isn't like.

No over roasted.

This is.

It plays like very dark chocolate, like a, you know, like an 85, 90% dark chocolate.

That's a very good description there.

Yeah, because it plays.

It plays pretty dry.

It doesn't play particularly sweet.

But I do have to say some of those.

Some of those dried fruit notes I'm trying to isolate right now.

I'm definitely getting some.

Some of that dry fruit on the nose.

It's just almost like cherry, like dry cherry, where it is a darker dried fruit.

It's not like mango or, you know, tropicals.

If I'd say it would be like, like dried cherry or dried, not blueberry, but like dried cherry or something like that.

Sure.

Now what I was going at, it is counterculture coffee.

So again, specialty coffee brand, they've Blown up a much.

They've blown up enough that they are now stocked at Wegmans.

I've had their hologram and I remembered liking it.

So I got another one that I'm not seeing listed here on their main website right now.

But they've got three main blends that they put out there.

And I needed something to fill in a gap between my specialty shipments there.

And I was like, you know, maybe I'll pick up one of these.

And it was much darker than this and slightly disappointing for what they're charging for it there.

Yeah.

Because I've had a.

I've had a ton of.

I've had really great counterculture coffee.

You know, their.

Their specialty lighter roasts.

I've had great counterculture coffee in shops that are based on that.

Sure.

Just like you have intelligentsia shops or counterculture shops in towns where they aren't.

Right.

I've had great coffee from.

From their stuff.

But, you know, this is also how things tend to go.

Looks like the blends they have are even keel gradient, which seems to be dark.

Big trouble, which is a little lighter than hologram than fast forward and 46.

Yeah.

Oh, they even have more.

They have Apollo as well.

That's like the lightest roast of their blends.

Right.

So, I mean, it's.

They've got a lot of different options even on the blend side because there's such a big company now.

But something like this, which is a small roaster, you know, this is definitely what most people are expecting.

And I would say most people are going to like this a lot because it's definitively roasty.

It has just a little bit of that roast bitterness.

It has a little.

It's nods to dried fruit.

It's not like overtly fruity.

But this is the kind of drink where I think this.

This feels like people are going to love to put a little bit of milk in here.

I was just, just going to say I.

I am drinking this black.

And number two things, I brewed this morning, that counterculture on almost the same settings there.

I used a hario instead of the kalita.

Yep.

And it was not as smooth as this.

Yeah.

I'm not getting any bitterness, really.

Which is surprising also for how dark it is, for sure.

And typically, if I was to brew this at home, I would be adding cream or a little bit of sugar to it just to kind of round it out.

And I'm not even feeling a need to.

No.

It's got a.

A nice smoothness to it.

It gives you that.

That Coffee flavor.

Yeah.

In a very like full bodied way.

And yeah, it's, it's, it's good that way.

Yeah.

And I'm wondering, I'm wondering if it'd be easier to pick out some of those, some of those different accent flavors with almost.

With the softening.

But I say this is a well made coffee that the vast majority of people are going to really enjoy.

It's not for me, but that doesn't mean it wasn't well roasted and well made.

I.

My imagination was going, was like, where would I encounter this?

You know, I don't know that I would have picked this up if I had walked into a store.

Yeah.

Which is an interesting thought experiment in itself.

But I was like, where would I have encountered this?

If this was served to me at like a work function, I would be extremely happy.

Yeah.

And this.

Perfectly content.

You know, I would be perfectly content if this was the only thing available.

But I'm thinking like, usually like people brewing coffee at work functions, you're not getting.

It's.

It's all gonna be over roasted.

It's all gonna be over extracted and brewed way too hot.

But you know, we brew this at home on a modest setup there.

You know, even if you just had a standard hot water kettle and possibly a blade grinder.

I bet you the grinder is a big part of this though.

Yeah, the, the O2 we've just been talking about, the big burrs are giving you super consistent extraction and piece sizes there.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that definitely benefits from that.

Makes it a little easier to pick out some of the, some of the little details.

You said this town was Readers Penns?

Yeah, Readers, Pennsylvania.

It's just north of Allentown, so.

Just a little bit north of Allentown, which is obviously a little north of Philadelphia.

Right.

So, yeah, not to get to.

And yeah, this is, I guess, like I said, this is very well made.

It's not something I'm going to be looking for just because it's not my preferred roast profile, but I see a lot of people really enjoying this.

Well, and I would say too, you know, before we, you know, kind of wrap up our tasting notes and things here, that this is probably a coffee that would get people to that deeper level, I think.

So, like I.

This would be a coffee shop that I would go back to consistently for having good coffee.

Yeah.

And yeah, like, that would be my in there and there would be somebody there who would add a tidbit of knowledge that would take you to a couple deeper levels there.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Side note, that spice, dark chocolate, I was getting like, almost graham cracker spices for a second.

Okay.

It's not like cloves, but it's got almost like cinnamon kind of.

That's what it was.

I wanted to say honey cinnamon.

Yeah.

Cardamom.

It's that kind of like rounded spice.

It's not like one specific spice.

It almost feels like that graham cracker spice.

Sure.

And that's kind of.

Yeah.

I think cardamom is a good one, too.

This would actually do well with, like.

You could put cardamom in this.

Yeah.

Would actually go really well.

Like, if you put one pod in while you were brewing.

It actually would.

I've had cardamom forward coffee.

A lot of the West Asian countries.

Okay.

Will have cardamom in the coffee.

So, like Syrian coffee or places like that.

A lot of them actually put cardamom in there.

Huh.

You learned something new.

Yeah.

So it actually goes really well with darker, you know, medium plus roast coffees.

Yeah.

I think they would actually go really well in this.

It would.

But very pleasant.

Such a.

I'm glad.

So, Evan, thank you for sending this out.

I can't wait to have the rest of our conversation because it's.

It's going to take us down a rabbit hole and it's going to be super fun.

I am rambling now.

It's all right.

You mind if I close this out?

No, let's close this out.

All right.

I'm trying to get there.

So just one more plug for the coffee brand at the end.

So throw that in for us, Aaron.

Yeah.

So we have been drinking cult leader coffee company.

It's cultleadercoffee.com they're out of readers, Paul.

And these nice one that we were sent was Astral Projection, which is a Papua New Guinea.

Awesome.

So thank you.

Thank you for getting us some coffee to taste today.

We really appreciate it.

And if you're interested in learning more about the other shows on the Lunchadore podcast network, you can go to lunchadore.org check out all the other shows.

This is our new show covering Rochester's music scene.

So we just recorded one before this.

I'm really excited to dive in more to the music scene, learn more about it, and get Rochester more engaged.

So hopefully tune in for that and join us next time for another episode of the Level Up Coffee podcast.

This has been a presentation of the lunchroom podcast network.

Sip sip all night long.