A coffee adventure

Philip Meech and Caffè Lusso take people on a coffee journey around the world. A coffee roaster and entrepreneur for over 25 years, he wants coffee drinkers to slow down, taste the roasted beans and enjoy the rich variety. 

In this episode, Philip talks with Washington State Magazine editor Larry Clark about enjoying coffee, his lifelong love of coffee, the art and science of coffee roasting, and his journey from Washington State University to running a successful micro-roastery.

Meech, a 2000 WSU business alum, also gives some tips on brewing and tasting coffee.

Read about Meech in “Coffee, community, calm” (Fall 2025 issue of Washington State Magazine).

Learn more at Caffè Lusso.

Check out some other coffee tasting tutorials on YouTube recommended by Meech:

·       A Beginners Guide to Coffee Tasting (James Hoffmann)

·       HOW TO TASTE COFFEE: A Lexicon for Coffee Lovers (Lance Hedrick)

Transcript

Washington State Magazine webisodes podcast

Episode 42: A coffee adventure

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Philip Meech:

The idea is, let's go on a little adventure where you can let your palate just sort of be dazzled by just how much variance there is from all the way around the world, and then different roasting and brewing techniques.

Larry Clark:

Philip Meech and Caffè Lusso take people on a coffee journey around the world. A coffee roaster and entrepreneur for over 25 years, he wants coffee drinkers to slow down, taste the roasted beans and enjoy the rich variety. 

[music]

Welcome to the Washington State Magazine podcast, where we talk with fascinating Cougs and hear about their journeys from Washington State University to all corners of the state and beyond. I'm Larry Clark, editor of the magazine. 

In this episode, Philip talks with me about enjoying coffee, the art and science of coffee roasting, and his lifelong love of the delicious beverage. 

How are you today, Philip? 

Philip Meech:

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here. 

Larry Clark:

Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you a little bit about your journey, about coffee and your business and how you ended up doing all this. How did you get into coffee? What led you to this path? 

Philip Meech:

Well, it started a long, long time ago. Um, I guess I traced it back to when I was eight or nine years old. I grew up in Bellevue, Washington, near crossroads. Uh, but every summer I would go to my grandfather’s and uncles’ and cousins’ cattle and corn and wheat and alfalfa farms in northern Colorado. And like, for summer break for two months. And it was good to be kind of out of the big city and into a very small town near Severance, or Windsor I guess today would be the biggest town. And we went to my grandfather and I almost every day, maybe every other day. He was very patient with me and kind of went along with it. And but we would go to this diner every morning, just about, and for pancakes. And he always had a cup of coffee. And it was the type of small-town USA diner where if you turn over your mug because they're always on the table, the waitress will come by and fill it right away. And, like, your grandpa's cool and whatever your grandpa does is cool. And so when you're an eight-year-old boy, you want to be like grandpa, you know, farmer and wise and experienced in the world and funny and all this. So one day when he did that, I turned over my mug. Now, in a small-town USA, in a farming community where you're used to driving combines by the time you're ten and John Deere tractors in and out of ditches when you're younger than that, or doing the hay baler when you're twelve. If you turn over your coffee cup, it's going to get filled without any questions. So that happened, and I don't really remember the taste, but it was more about just doing the thing with grandpa. 

And so I did that and then just kept that up all the way through high school. And in the meantime, I was in theater in high school and getting ready for the six a.m. makeup and costume call for the first period class. One of my dearest friends brought an espresso maker into drama, into the theater. And one morning I look over and I hear this sound that sort of sound like paper tearing or something like that, and he was just steaming milk. And I thought to myself, What? What's going on over here? This is like 1991. And he said, I'll make an espresso. And I'm like, well, tell me more. So that was my first sort of introduction to coffee made on demand, made expressly for you. One of the origins of the term, and I don't know what about it. I was just so perplexed or curious or excited or whatever it was. So then I started talking to him about coffee, and his grandmother got him into coffee. 

Anyway, we as drama nerds would go to Seattle's first coffee house in the U district, The Last Exit on Brooklyn, which was open until two a.m. every night. And that was really where in 1991, I saw my first commercial espresso machine in use. And what I remember about it was the machine was not between you and the barista, but it was sort of off to the side. And you could see the whole theater of an espresso drink being made, the milk steaming, the shots pouring, emptying out the portafilter, reloading. It's kind of like a coffee version of being a bartender. Uh, and there was something about the drama of that that really pulled me in. 

So I started getting to know all of the drinks and trying to learn more. And as soon as I got my driver's license in ’92, I started applying to coffee places everywhere. Took a while, but ended up as going into my senior year of high school that I got a near fulltime job thirty hours a week or so, because I only had one or two classes left to do to complete high school. And then I've been working professionally in coffee for the last 31 years. That was the introduction in the hook into coffee. 

But then I wanted to, you know, my career choice was going to be medicine. And the sports trainer at Sammamish had just graduated from WSU. I came to find out that WSU had one of the top couple, two or three programs in the country for sports medicine under Mark Smaha. So I only applied to one college in the entire United States. There was one college I wanted to go to and that was WSU. And so that brought me to Pullman. 

Larry Clark:

And then you got to Pullman. And what changed your mind? You were going to pursue sports medicine? 

Philip Meech:

Yeah, and I did for about the first two years. I helped open the first Starbucks in Pullman in December of 1995, so I've never stopped working in coffee. It just kind of wouldn't let go. I was taking all the courses anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, getting involved. And about halfway through in 1997, I was working out in the Palouse Mall at a place called Eric's Cafe or Eric's Espresso right at the main entrance. And I took a job there working, running the coffee bar. And about that time, he introduced me to a friend of his who had just started a professional roastery in Lewiston on the old spiral highway. So I got more and more curious, like, I've been working in coffee for three years, but I've never really known anything about roasting or the equipment or what that looks like. He said, come on down, I'll show you. So I go down one Saturday, I think it was in October of ’97. I opened the door, probably about a thousand-square-foot building that he had built onto the side of his property, had a 25-pound batch roaster in the corner, bunch of sacks of raw green coffee and not much else. And I walked in, and it was the first time that I think I had seen a batch of coffee drop from a roasting drum into the cooling tray. And there's a little bit of smoke in the air. That wonderful aroma of freshly roasted coffee. And it just hit me like, What? What is this really all about? Because I need to learn more. 

And the taste of the coffee was I just couldn't believe how good it was. And I felt like, here's somebody who's doing something that's really craft, and it's a lot of art and it's a lot of science, a lot of process control and QC, but a lot of leading with your heart and specifically your palate. Because for all of the technology, it still has to be tasted. And as a beverage, you're trying to create something that a whole bunch of other people would also enjoy tasting. So I told Gary, I've got to, what can we do? How can I learn? And he was picking up wholesale clients, but didn't have a background in preparing coffee or educating. So I started going down there, I think on Thursdays at five a.m., four a.m., something like that. It was early o'dark thirty, and I would train his wholesale customers in coffee preparation that I had been doing for the past several years. And then he would show me what he was learning about roasting. 

And so that was the beginning of understanding how to work with the seed. We call them beans, but they're really seeds. It's a stone fruit. Coffee is really like a Rainier cherry or a Bing cherry. Except here in the States, we typically throw the seed away and eat the fruit. In the coffee production world, you pretty much dispose of all the fruit and the mucilage and the mesocarp and all of that, and you retain the seed, wash it, clean it, and get into more of that if you want. And then you roast it and then you grind it, and then you run water through it, and then you get what essentially we call coffee. So that was our trade-off, teaching each other about different sides of the industry. 

And by that point I was hooked and I told my parents and we made a quick plan to try to open retail coffee houses. I was going to transfer back to the Seattle area, somehow, finish up a degree somewhere at night school, but then open retail coffee bars. End of the story, it fell through, but it was too late. I was too deep into coffee, too deep into roasting. And I had to find out. Is there a viable way to participate in this as a career? And this is very, you know, 25 years ago, 26, 27 years ago, it was a very different scene than what it is today. Micro-roasters everywhere are very prolific all over the country and now all over the world. But back in the end of the nineties, there was probably four or five roasters in Seattle. 

I basically said, I got to do this. I started taking some business courses, accounting, stats, law, and I was really into that. So kind of made a little pivot and stepped away from the pre-med program, which was incredible, by the way, and into the business program, and then ended up specifically with a concentration in corporate finance. All the while working in coffee. So I kept working for small coffee bars, kept apprenticing, kept researching, reading everything and anything that I could get my hands on. Obviously the internet was around, but I think we were on a 56K modem, so some of the downloads were a little slow there in 1997. I was just a very voracious reader, so anything that I could find, I just wanted to learn and educate and keep tasting, keep experimenting. And I could see that my heart was in it. 

And ultimately I wrote a business plan in May of 1999, coming out of my junior year and going into my senior year, and my mindset was pretty much, I think we could start something like this in a garage. Minimal investment, maybe ten thousand dollars at the time. And if it fails, hey, that's okay. You can, in entrepreneurship, the failure rate is pretty high. I think it's nine out of ten. Businesses do not make it past year five. So it's daunting. And if you think about it too much, you might be discouraged. So I didn't think about it too much, and I just kind of followed my heart there and wrote the plan and said, you know what? Hey, if a year goes by or two years goes by and it fails, start over and you can try something when you're 25 and you can fail and you can start over, and you can be 30 and you can fail and you can start over. You can be 40, you can be 50. If you're 50 and you're still thinking about that dream, you can start your company at 55. And if you fail, you can start over. 

So for me, I just didn't want to spend the rest of my life going, what if I just? That would have bothered me too much. I would much rather try something and have it not succeed, but then learn and then go on to the next thing. So that's what we did. 

Larry Clark:

That's great. And you ended up starting your business and it didn't fail and continues to this day. Tell me a little bit about what you are still doing. 

Philip Meech:

Still doing it 25 years later. We've expanded quite a bit. We're roasting about 150,000 pounds a year, trying to get to over one million. We're in 7,000 square feet, trying to get into 20 to 30,000 square feet. Big, big plans, big goals, big dreams. Having a lot of fun. But boy, the road to get here. It's not like I hit one speed bump or two speed bumps. The last 25 years it was all bumps. Um, we the first five years actually went pretty well. Then we started having problems. Costs were rising. We didn't have strong pricing power. I was still kind of a one-man band. My dad was helping out a lot. And I think actually we did go bankrupt in May of ’07 for about 22 minutes and then by the end of the day, a customer that had been we'd been talking to came through and said, we want to switch all of our roasting to you next week. So we're like, well, we'll just take that as a strong sign from the Lord that we need to keep going. 

So we did, and we had all kinds of other problems. It seems like all we ever have is constantly trying to figure out how to put fires out. Not literally in the roaster. That could be a problem. But we haven't had a roaster fire yet. But we're just trying to constantly figure it out and adapt and solve problems. But there's been a lot of problems. I was watching a clip from maybe about a month ago, two months ago from Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia. And that company is over 30 years old. I've only heard about it like the last year, maybe two, in AI, but he was interviewed and he asked if you had known what the first ten or fifteen years were going to be like. I think they were doing video cards for computer for gaming or something like that originally, Yeah, that's how it started. So I think he was something to the effect of, if you had known how hard it was going to be and what it was going to look like after 10 or 15 years, not knowing what it would look like after 30 or 31, 32 years said, would you have still started it? And he thought about it for a second, looked at the interviewer and said, no, no, I don't think I would have. And I could say the same thing if I had known what the first probably ten years were going to look like without knowing what it was going to look like at year 20 or year 25, I wouldn't have started it either. But like Jensen, I think I thought, well, we'll just figure it out. That was our strategy as well. We'll just figure it out. And you know, we're here and thankful. 

But it's been hard, and things are really going well right now. We have an incredible team of six. We're getting a lot of traction. We're shipping coffee all over the US, and it's looking pretty good. There's still problems and still problems that need to be solved. And I just take that will always be the case. But that's when you've got to have the grit of a of a cougar and the passion to keep working at it. 

Larry Clark:

Everything I understand about entrepreneurship and and people that I've spoken to over the years, you know, that's a consistent theme, is that grit and the passion kind of combined to make it all work. 

Philip Meech:

Yeah, I completely agree with that. I mean, I don't quite fully go in with the saying, if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life because I love what I do, but I definitely work. But there's nothing else that I would rather do. There is no place that I would rather be than at headquarters with that team of five other just incredible humans. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I mean, this is really not about money. I hope we get large and profitable. I mean, we've been very profitable the last few years, but wherever we end up, honestly, it's... I got into this whole thing for the coffee. I'm staying for the people. 

Larry Clark:

So I want to go back a little bit to, you know, you were talking a little bit about roasting and how you got into it and not knowing a great deal about the industry myself. Can you tell me a little bit, what are some of the techniques of roasting, and what are some of the things that you do to make really great coffee? 

Philip Meech:

Well, it definitely starts with the ingredients, like anything in food and beverage. I mean, we don't have any alchemy and there's no magic and there's no special process with a cool marketing name. We're really taking amazing, high-quality ingredients and trying to not ruin them, to turn them into roasted coffee, and then teaching people how to not ruin that when they make beverages. 

So it really begins with the growers that we’re so blessed to work with around the world. We’re heaviest in South America and Central America, but we have these great direct relationships and have since year number two where we can buy directly and the coffees are not mixed up with a bunch of other coffees. They're like estate level where it's all culled out from one farm or one part, one plantía, or one part of the farm, and we get to work with different varietals and seed stocks. It's very similar to wine, where you might like certain grape varietals like Cabernet Sauvignon or Syrah or Cabernet Franc, or Nebbiolo is one of my favorites. Whatever it might be, coffee is similar. There's lots of different cultivars, and you find which cultivars grow best in which areas, and then what kind of nutrition and everything else that's part of crop and earth husbandry is how do you work with the land and understand how to do that better? And that's nutrition and maybe that's shade or that's your processing methods. 

So that's the first step is you have to have good ingredients. There's no way around it. There is no magic on the face of planet Earth. You have to have good ingredients because the coffees that we roast, we are roasting in such a way to accentuate to the maximum their differences from one another. Now, if you roast coffee's dark enough, you can mask a lot of those things, for better or worse. Whether the green coffee is great or not great, or somewhere in the middle, you roast it dark enough and you're breaking sugars down. Sucrose, the principal sugar that breaks down into glucose and fructose. And then those sugars can keep being reduced down to their simplest parts, on and on and on. So ultimately you end up with carbon. And that's kind of all that you'll taste is a very roasty, smoky thing if you roast your coffees too far. 

We're trying to roast very balanced, but on the lighter side, to really showcase the blueberry and strawberry tones that you might get from a natural process in the region of Ethiopia, versus the caramel and nutty and chocolatey flavors you might get from coffees grown at a lower elevation, say, 3,300 feet in southeast Brazil, versus the floral and the chocolates from some Central American. You know, all these coffees all the way around the world are different because of their terroir, the “somewhereness” of a place. We're talking about the soil, the sun, the cultivar, the weather patterns, the harvesting techniques, the processing, all of that. So we're trying to really showcase coffees where the terroir, the earth, the sun, awareness of a climate really stands and shows you what it has to offer when it's maximized. 

So, to that end, really good ingredients go into the roasting drum, which is coffee roasters are on average, mostly something like a like a clothes dryer. It's a spinning drum thing. It's usually metal. Ours are cast iron. Some are Schedule 40 mild steel, high carbon steel. Some are pure stainless steel. There's lots of different materials. And that gets into the thermodynamics of how you want the heat transfer to work. But basically roasting coffee is applying heat. In our case, natural gas to heat the drum, to roast and toast these seeds until they go through their various changes. And that size changes mainly until it, after about ten minutes, goes through a popping mechanism visibly or audibly. First you really hear it sounds like popcorn. Same thing is happening as popcorn. You've got moisture inside that ultimately fissures. Except instead of getting something that is cloudy and puffy and white, the coffee just grows by about 25 percent, and it starts going through its main color changes from green, yellow, orange, then light cinnamon stick, and then various shades of brown, and then mahoganies and darker and darker. And then that's really where you develop coffee and you're really working with two things. We say coffee roasting is about primarily about two things. It's about the sugars in the bean and the airflow in the machine, and modulating and regulating that hot air and the velocity of it and the incoming temperature up or down, and all these other things that our control will affect how the sugars interact and what other compounds break down and what other compounds form that are very tasty. 

So in the Maillard reaction phase, it's very similar to cooking a steak where you're putting some color on the protein and you are breaking down some fiber, some components, but you're also creating new things that didn't exist before that we register as tasty. And that is very fast, very high-level scope of roasting coffee. But it's really comes down to what are your ingredients, are you working with? And then is your heat transfer even or are you getting like a microwave corn dog dinner where it's frozen in the middle and really ripping hot on the outside? So uniformity of energy transfer is very important. And that's really what controls what potential are you coaxing out of the bean? What nuances are you preserving that the farmers work so hard to cultivate in so that you can express them out and teach everybody else how to present those to the world, or to a friend, or to themselves. 

Larry Clark:

That's fascinating. And it's you know, you mentioned the comparison to wine and everything that I've, you know, talked to people about with wine terroir, you know, the somewhereness of it, you know, like you describe. It's very similar. I think, you know, fermentation too, in its own way has that, you know, art and science to it. So it's fascinating to hear about the roasting coffee in those same terms of the process and the ingredients and really delivering something that speaks to the original ingredients. I love hearing about the roasting.The first time I ever visited a roaster, I was living in Olympia. I went to Batdorf and Bronson. It was, I think, the first time I smelled freshly roasted as they were roasting. 

Philip Meech:

Yeah. It's really something. The aromas are, well, they say that the human taste experience is about 80 percent smell. And to that end, just by way of comparison, I believe wine has approximately 200 separate, identifiable chemical constituents. At last count, I believe coffee, when I started it was around 955. I believe it's over 1,000 now. So this sort of endless permutation of different complexities. But really, when you think about coffee, the first thing you do is smell it, maybe while it's grinding or when you take it out of the bag, or even while it's brewing. So we really do sort of eat and drink with our nose first, I think maybe eyes second and then palate third, but it's an all sensory experience. That's one of the beauties of it. 

Larry Clark:

Well, that leads me to my next question about coffee tasting. And I know at your cafe, you have tastings, if I understand correctly. That's right. So I just wanted to ask a little bit about how does that work? You know, if people come and they want to taste, say, a flight of coffees? Sure. How do you walk them through that? And how do they do it? 

Philip Meech:

We usually take for no more than five coffees at a time. And primarily we work with single origin. So coffees from a single country or a single farm or single part of that farm, as opposed to blends which are beautiful and wonderful. We do mostly blends, but when you start wanting to have placement points on what are the different seed stocks, the cultivars around the world and their techniques and what makes them different and special and unique. We'll go with the single origins, and we'll do like a light roasted coffee from Ethiopia, where inherently people can smell and taste more of the fruited tones of coffee. Roasted lighter. We'll take our one of our darker roasts, which is from Sumatra, and that's dark relative to us. If you looked at the world of coffee, there's many companies out there that are famous for dark roasts. If you held our dark Sumatra up next to it, it would be very light in comparison. But it's all relative. But the Sumatra that we work with is our darker roast, and it's all about mouthfeel and body and viscosity. It is a lower acid coffee, and it's really about the weight on the palate. And it is roasted a bit darker. So we get just a little bit more of that roasty hint. And then we'll bring in coffees in the middle. Our floral and chocolatey coffees from Guatemala are always fun. The nutty, sort of like peanut and almond and pecan and caramels that we get out of the Brazilian coffees. 

Again, we don't want to overwhelm anybody. We just want to present a small flight where you go, oh, now, I don't think coffee is coffee anymore because we're slowing down, which is really what we're trying to get everybody to do. In some sense, it's an invitation to pause, and we like to think of coffee as an excuse to have conversation. We like to think of coffee as a way to put the world on time out for ten minutes. And honestly, to stop drinking coffee and start tasting it. So engaging the senses and thinking, does this have a nutty characteristic or is it more chocolaty? Or is there something in here that evokes a certain memory? Do I like the ideas of fruit in my coffee? Or some of the washed coffees from Africa that are winey, wine like acidity and brightness? Do you want florals? Like, do you want bergamot? And do you want Meyer lemon? And do you want cracked white pepper? And do you want jasmine? There are coffees that will convince you that they're tea. So this just depends on what you're working with, how you roast it, how you brew it. And that's going to determine what you accentuate or mute out depending on what you're trying to do in the cup. 

So the idea is, let's go on a little adventure where you can let your palate just sort of be dazzled by just how much variance there is from all the way around the world, and then different roasting and brewing techniques. And we don't even get really deep into the popular things now, like fermenting with mangoes or doing anaerobic process. You know, similar to some of the red wines that are done in Beaujolais and southern Burgundy. Like we're not trying to push like a banana-type characteristic, but some roasters out there are. And that's why it's so good to try really great coffees from many of the highly talented roasters in this country is you'll just have so many worlds open up in front of you. 

And that's even without going to the espresso machine and turning it into a latte or a mocha or something else we're just talking about. Pour over coffee. French press coffee. Black coffee made one cup at a time, where you can just have your entire paradigm of what you thought coffee was the last 10 years, 20 years, 50 years into something where you just can't believe that something could taste that incredible. 

Larry Clark:

Excellent. And it sounds like it just opens up this galaxy of flavors and a different way of approaching it. I love the idea of people slowing down. I think it's something we could all use more of nowadays, and using coffee as a way to do that, and also enjoying something new. That sounds great to me. 

Philip Meech:

Yeah, it's a lot of fun. We usually have open houses in the summer once a month. In fact, we have one tomorrow on Saturday, and that'll conclude the summer series. But we'll have more this fall and winter. It's just such a fun thing to do, to share coffee with people. No matter if you just want to go in at a shallow level or a very deep level, wherever somebody is feeling like they're willing to let you take them on a palate journey experience very similar to getting into microbrews or wines, or we've got a lot of distilleries in the Northwest now, gins and vodkas and all these things. It's just such a treat to be able to work with great ingredients, create a truly memorable cup, and then share that and catch up on life. 

Larry Clark:

Yeah, certainly. So how can people get in touch with you? Go to some of these tastings. Sign up for it. 

Philip Meech:

The easiest way is if you do a search on your web browser for Caffè Lusso, c-a-f-e l-u-s-s-o, which means luxury coffee in Italian, and we post our events there. Or if you're on Instagram, same thing. Caffè Lusso, c-a-f-e l-u-s-s-o. You'll see our trademark lion, our logo, and we post through our email distribution list. We post on social media, Facebook, I think as well. And that will let you know like what events we're hosting and when they're going on. We don't charge for them. They're always free to the public. We just like to take people on the journey and they can find out kind of what we're up to and what ingredients we're working with. And everybody gets to have a memorable experience because we're trying to nurture the idea of staying curious.  Even if you found your favorite coffee 20 years ago and you're never going to switch, that's great. But we are just trying to have a lot of fun in this huge sandbox and share that experience. And you might, your taste might change and you might come to find something you never thought you would have liked. 

Larry Clark:

I would imagine that anybody could find something new. And keeping an open mind is always great when you when you try new things like that. A lot of us, you know, they have a we have a grinder at home, you know, we may have an espresso machine, French press. What advice would you have for people who really want to kind of enjoy, say, the coffees you roast or other really good coffees at home? Is there any advice you'd give?

Philip Meech:

I mean, certainly education helps. We publish brew guides on all of our coffees on our website. So if you navigate to caffelusso.com and you look at either the blends or the single origins, whichever coffee selection will make recommendations in there about we think that you should use like this kind of a brew ratio. Like if you're grinding and brewing by weight, which most people are starting to do now, where you weigh the coffee on a gram scale. And so maybe you're going to make, you know, what's called an eight-cup French press, which is really enough for like three big mugs, right? It's like 32 ounces. We'll say we want to use a sixteen to one ratio. So that would be 50 grams of coffee. That's the one part. And then the 16 multiplier is 800 grams of water. So we would weigh both of those as we combine them and then wait four minutes and depress the plunger. Espresso. Similarly, if you're using 18 grams in, you probably want to halt the extraction at around 30 to 35 grams out. And we have ways to approximate that. 

We spend a lot of our time fielding these kinds of questions. They come in all day long through the email box, through the phone. Sometimes people stop by and we'll just do a quick brewing demo if we can. But I would say, in these last 25 years, one of the things that has pleasantly surprised me the most is how these questions never stop coming. More and more people are getting into great coffee all the time. We're trying to remove any sort of weird snobbery or elitist attitude. We're trying to make it where there's no intimidation factor. And this is really all about you getting a better cup of coffee at home. So finding out what you like and what you're going for. And then how do we pick the coffee, pick the brew method, and pick the ratio and the recipe to land the plane where you're trying to end up. 

So YouTube is also your friend. I mean, the internet is a very dangerous place. There's plenty of false information out there, but there's also just endless amount of talented teachers and tutors. So I do recommend hunting around online. James Hoffman is very well known, well regarded these last ten years publishing lots of high-quality content. Lance Hedrick is another name that comes to mind. Where the information is out there, and it's for free, and I recommend that people take advantage of it. And then you can control how deep into this world you want to get and at what pace because at the end of the day, you know, for us it's a lot about fun and camaraderie and experience. 

Coffee like the world of wine has, you'll find out quickly enough, has all these rules. It has to be this temperature. It has to be this brew ratio. There's all these rules. And at Caffè Lusso, our first rule is, don't be ruled by the rules. It helps to have some structure and a starting point, some guidance, like, you know, everything in life, but you don't have to try to become a master after 20 minutes or a week. So it's really as many things are it's about the journey and not so much the destination. But you want to get to a good destination too with your daily cup of coffee. 

So lots of good resources out there. Again, you can always contact us and we'll point you to any further specifics. It's a lifelong process. I mean, I guess I started about 31 years ago, and every week I learn new things about coffee, constantly trying to study it, work with it better, with the same ultimate end goal of like, end up with this crazy result that you just can't stop sipping. 

Larry Clark:

That's wonderful. Well, thanks for joining me today, Philip. I really enjoyed learning more about coffee and hearing your story too. 

Philip Meech:

Yeah, well, thanks very much. Um, it's always great to connect with fellow Cougs. I remember my years there from ’95 to spring of 2000 very fondly. I would go back in a heartbeat. I love recommending WSU to everybody. It was such a wonderful time. So many good experiences, so much great learning, so much fun. I just can't imagine, I wouldn't have gone anywhere else. 

Larry Clark:

Thanks for listening. Links to Caffè Lusso, coffee tasting tips, and more are in the show notes. You can follow the Washington State Magazine podcast or visit our website for more episodes at magazine.wsu.edu. And please give us a good rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me, Larry Clark. Our music is by WSU emeritus music professor and composer Greg Yasinitsky.

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