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#16. Meet Jared Dennison Barista, Trainer & Lab Assistant at Wonderstate Coffee 🇺🇸
72 Plays2 years ago
Meet Jared Dennison, Barista, Trainer & Lab Assistant at Wonderstate Coffee in Viroqua, Wisconsin.
Jared is also a full-time dad with a three years old son. After 11 years in the coffee industry, what has he learned, what motivates him, and what tips he has for the baristas?
We asked Jared what coffee means to him, he answers:
“Coffee is constant change and reinvention, it's my punk rock. Something ubiquitous and wholly unique. It's a platform for me to communicate something to those I serve. With coffee, I can take this mutual language of taste and share experiences and passion in a way that words or even images can't communicate. Coffee is so much more to me than just a morning routine or "hot brown" it's literal passion in a cup.”
Jared is also one of the recipe contributors of the Brewing Guide project, check out his go-to Aeropress recipe here
https://notabarista.org/product/jared-dennison/
Follow Jared on Instagram @depeche__mocha
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Guest's Morning Routine
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the I'm Not a Barista podcast. We're here to talk about all things coffee from industry careers, brewing tips, community support and more with some really incredible people who love coffee as much as you do. We hope their stories inspire you because humanity runs on coffee and together we can empower all the people behind every cup. Hello, Jerry. Welcome to the first podcast. Do you have coffee with you? I do.
00:00:33
Speaker
And cheers. Yeah, cheers. Second cup already. Second cup already. So, you are a morning person, right? Not by nature, but I have an almost three-year-old son and he wakes up very early. So, I've become more of a morning person. Alright.
Jerry's Roles in Coffee Industry
00:00:54
Speaker
So, first, tell us about your professional life. What do you do for a living?
00:00:59
Speaker
So I have two positions within the same company. So one position is
00:01:07
Speaker
Like I work in our cupping lab as a, the term is like assistant, but I set up our cuppings. I do all of our green eval for arrivals and samples for green coffee. I sample roast those. And in that position, I'm also a trainer for wholesale customers as well as
00:01:32
Speaker
are like internal cafes. We own three cafes. You know, that looks like generating little training documents on best practices to actually like going out and visiting customers and helping them get like a little bit more out of their coffee or their coffee program.
Weekend Barista Job and Coffee Journey
00:01:51
Speaker
Then my other position, I work a couple days a week in one of our cafes.
00:01:57
Speaker
Saturday and Sunday mornings, I get to open our cafe and see a lot of regular customers and just make drinks and interact with people for a few hours a day. So we can say that you are a weekend barista.
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah. On the weekend, I'm a barista, which I've I recently one of my employees, coworkers, it's like a 17 year old kid and he's like, how many years have you worked in coffee? And I had to actually get a piece of paper to count everything because it was a lot of years on and off. And I think it was like around 11 years. Wow. 11 years. So how did you end up in the coffee industry? I remember.
00:02:41
Speaker
Stealing my dad's coffee like and we're talking like 80s robosta
00:02:46
Speaker
you know, not good coffee. And I remember just like loving it and being intrigued by it and, you know, getting into like high school, junior high school, not having a lot of access to coffee being in a small town, but just really loving the coffee shop that we had and, you know, very dark roasted coffee. And so jumping forward a little bit to about 2006,
00:03:12
Speaker
my town got a Starbucks for the first time and I was looking for work and I had a friend that had worked at Starbucks and she was like, it's a great job, you know, as far as benefits and pay and all of that. And I was like, all right, you know, and started working there. And that was when coffee changed, even though Starbucks is very dark roasted. You know, at the time, that was very much what I was used to.
Relocation and Joining Wonder State
00:03:39
Speaker
And I can remember
00:03:41
Speaker
no longer being able to enjoy like inexpensive easy diner coffee because I was just I became aware of all the sensory aspects of coffee and tasting terroir which with a dark roast is rather difficult but I was able to do it and
00:04:00
Speaker
My eyes were opened and I could no longer go backwards to just simply having a hot cup of coffee and not thinking about it. And so I was with Starbucks for a few years and left and worked at a small locally owned chain and left to work at a completely independent, very, I would call it like second and a half wave. It was lighter roasted. Yeah, it was like lighter roasted.
00:04:28
Speaker
coffee actually from the company that I now work for, but a lot of the things that we would think of as being very modern specialty
00:04:40
Speaker
Wayne input and output and just that level of crafting quality. It wasn't there, but it was quality focused as far as like steam your milk correctly. Here's how you pull shots. Here's how you tamp, but it wasn't fully third wave. So I'd say like second and a half wave.
00:04:59
Speaker
It wasn't dark roast. It wasn't. And then my now wife and I moved out to the Pacific Northwest to Washington State. And I wanted to get into coffee there. We're about an hour north of Seattle. It's like, oh, the epicenter of American coffee, or one of them.
Small-Town Coffee Culture Growth
00:05:19
Speaker
And I just couldn't find a job in coffee. So I actually worked retail. I worked in shopping malls for almost six years.
00:05:28
Speaker
And then when we came back to where we live now, I'd heard that Wonder State had opened a cafe and I heard that they were hiring for a barista and I sent an email and had an interview and left the interview and quit the job that I was at, hoping that I got the offer from a wonder state. And luckily I did. And, you know, that was about three and a half years ago. So many years in the coffee industry. Would you say yourself a coffee pro now?
00:05:58
Speaker
I always say in coffee, the more I think I know, the more I realize how little I know. And I keep on climbing to steps of understanding and knowledge and thinking that I've got this great perspective, then all of a sudden my eyes are opened and it's like, you think you're climbing a hill and you look down and you're just a meter or two off the ground.
00:06:20
Speaker
I'm pretty sure there are a lot of things has been changed since you joined the coffee industry at the first place, right? I would say I have seen that. I mean, coffee has expanded so much like where I'm from, which is, you know, kind of small town America. Not every town had a Starbucks, maybe near a college campus. There were, you know, little cafes. And I've seen that just expand so much more.
00:06:50
Speaker
Drive-thru coffee is really popular in in the United States Especially in the West Coast there were like little drive-thru like they call them like coffee huts Those are like super huge Really really popular and I think you know starting to see like specialty coffee or like things that are more affiliated with like third wave are starting to become
00:07:16
Speaker
much more accessible to like the average person.
Customer Preferences and Coffee Philosophy
00:07:19
Speaker
Like in the United States, we have like Target stores, kind of like Tesco in England, but like Target or Walmart. And some of those stores are even selling stuff from like Stumptown and Intelligentsia, you know, these like pioneers of modern specialty. That is very good because you can access to especially coffee everywhere almost. And how do regular coffee consumer respond to that?
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think a lot of people are still very much commodity market price conscious coffee shoppers and I think a lot of people associate coffee with that darker roast, that more confectionary dark chocolate side.
00:08:06
Speaker
the percentage of people drinking specialty probably isn't very large. But I think people are able to find specialty much more easily than six or 10 years ago. I'm pretty sure the coffee shops also change a lot. And what kind of coffee do you serve? Do you serve only specialty coffee?
00:08:28
Speaker
Yeah, so we kind of have a motto of meeting people where they're at. So for like filter coffee, we have two typically blends going something that would be, you know, really acceptable to most people that are like specialty coffee drinkers, brighter, lighter, juicier acidity. And then we have something that's a bit more developed. And
00:08:52
Speaker
You know, people come back and there are several people who want a very dark coffee, but it's a honestly pretty.
00:09:02
Speaker
good grade of coffee. I would say it's at least like an 83 or 84 point coffee that's just roasted darker. It's still sourced to be sweet and full. We have that. We have two different coffees on espresso, usually something single origin and like a lighter roast and then we do have a darker
00:09:26
Speaker
darker roast My motto is always like the best cup of coffee is the coffee that you drink all of it and I rather serve someone something that I know is sourced with a lot of intention and a lot of ethic put into the sourcing I rather they drink that that is roasted or prepared in a way that they're more comfortable with then something that is
00:09:52
Speaker
too light for them or they're modifying it a whole bunch and they just they don't like it. I'd rather they finish their coffee than have it hit like a trash bin or dumped into a sink or whatever. Like you said, the best coffee is a coffee, drink all of it. And tell us about the most popular drinks, the beverage in your coffee shop.
00:10:17
Speaker
We sell a lot of like larger flavored lattes. That's what a lot of people like. I've seen a huge rise in matcha. Like matcha lattes are like really huge here. And I think maybe in the States, just in general. Anytime we have a natural process as like a pour over, like that is always something people want to try. For a minute, we were just making cortados like left and right. We were like running out of like service where for cortados actually, because we'd have so many at the same time.
00:10:47
Speaker
So tell us what is your favorite drink? I typically will order like a cappuccino if I'm going to have something at a cafe. I like just like smaller espresso drinks. So Cortado. Otherwise, if I'm doing something that's like a filter, things from the Americas, I really, really enjoy like
00:11:09
Speaker
Right now I'm drinking a honey process from Colombia. That's super tasty Before that I had a pour over Guatemala those are kind of my comfort zones, but You know give me something weird too. I love to try it. I think I like I like the experiences so Even like a funky weird anaerobic is something I definitely want to check out
00:11:35
Speaker
Coffee is amazing, isn't it? You have so many kinds of new experimental processing methods that I can try.
Impact of Tipping on Baristas
00:11:43
Speaker
And while talking about coffee, talking about US, I immediately think of the tipping culture in US. It's a really big thing. And it does really happen a lot in the rest of the world. Could you tell us more about the tipping culture?
00:11:59
Speaker
I mean, tips make a huge impact. Like, I'll be completely honest, we have very generous customers that love what we do and definitely contribute to making the wage a livable wage. My lab work job does pay more than barista wage, but even the company I work for, Wonder State, like in the cafe, pays
00:12:26
Speaker
significantly more than I think a lot of entry-level cafe jobs or coffee jobs. And again, with like tips, there are times where like especially during peak summer where that wage that I make as a barista is
00:12:44
Speaker
equal to or greater than like the last job that I had where I was like managing an entire store and managing a team of like 15 people. And you know, that was a pretty good wage. So tips do make a huge difference. I don't know what it would look like if tipping
00:13:03
Speaker
weren't so normalized. I don't know if that would be rather than the customer I guess subsidizing wages, if the business would just pay more if it were a non-tipping culture or just it wouldn't pay much, I'm not sure.
00:13:23
Speaker
I guess the big tipping culture help a lot of artists stay in a coffee industry. How about you? Have you ever thought about changing your career, doing something
Commitment to Coffee Industry Challenges
00:13:33
Speaker
else? Yeah, I think I'm a lifer. You know, I don't know what the next few years will look like. Just with coffee and like, even right now with like supply chain issues that everybody has seen and delays shipping green and
00:13:52
Speaker
commodity green price is soaring. I don't know how that will affect specialty like wonder state when we're sourcing coffee. We have a minimum price guarantee that we don't pay below $2.95 this year for green coffee. And I mean that's
00:14:12
Speaker
above commodity C market price, but with how that has fluctuated and increased, I don't know how that will impact green prices even for us. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see where things go.
00:14:28
Speaker
Yeah, you're right. The pandemic is really changing a lot of things, especially the hospitals industry. I'm currently living in Moscow, Russia, and I like visiting coffee shops. And from what I know, it's interesting to see that, especially the coffee prices here in Moscow is relatively cheaper than Starbucks.
00:15:08
Speaker
I just typically don't enjoy their espresso beverages. So I honestly don't even remember what the prices are like. I want to say like a small latte from Starbucks is maybe like three or four dollars in the States.
00:15:18
Speaker
Is
Pricing in Coffee Shops
00:15:19
Speaker
Yeah. And I think like the big thing is like, you know, specialty shops have always felt like they've been a little bit more expensive than Starbucks. And I think just with rising green costs, rising labor costs,
00:15:22
Speaker
it the same in the US?
00:15:35
Speaker
Starbucks has had to increase prices multiple times. So it's probably kind of catching up to specialty if it hasn't surpassed. You mentioned earlier that you also burst the trainer.
Training Baristas: Practice and Patience
00:15:48
Speaker
And how often do you train bursts right now? For wholesale, it is a little bit less often. It's probably only about once a month right now, just with COVID and not a lot of places opening.
00:16:03
Speaker
Previously, when I was in the cafe more full time, I'd be training people. New baristas less often, but just refining techniques and practicing even things like latte art. I mean, that was daily in some cases.
00:16:20
Speaker
So what is the most common problem you see among young new baristas? People want to be experts before they're beginners. And I think that often looks like when it comes to pouring, you know, train someone like Pora Monks had just, you know, get like a nice
00:16:41
Speaker
even aesthetically pleasing drink, you know, don't overcomplicate it. Just look for something that you can replicate and do with finesse.
00:16:52
Speaker
all the time. And they go, oh, that sort of looks like a butterfly on a rock in the ocean. And it's like, nope, just beautiful texture and just like a nice monk's head. That is so much more pleasing to the customer than some blobby Rorschach ink blot. And I was guilty of that too.
00:17:17
Speaker
We see it all through social media and we all think like latte should be these beautiful, super well poured drinks and that takes years of practice in some cases.
00:17:29
Speaker
Well, I'm not bursting, so I can even make a latte or the basic heart. Let's talk about normal drink, most common specialty drink. Let's say pour over. If customer order a pour over at a shop and how would you prepare to need to follow specific recipes?
Using Serafim Machine for Pour Overs
00:17:48
Speaker
So we have a pretty standard recipe. And so our pour overs are actually brewed with a machine called the Serafim from Wilbur Curtis. So it's like two shower heads connected to a boiler with a computer that program or is programmed for pulses and in time. So the recipe will change in terms of like grind size like that styled in.
00:18:17
Speaker
But as far as like pouring patterns, that's consistent across the board. So you guys use machines. That's cool. Pretty sure machines are more consistent and have less arrows than human, right?
00:18:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it it should be, you know, it takes the the human element of air out of it. But I mean, in a coffee shop, anything can happen. You know, someone grinds it on the wrong size or the portion is mismeasured. But I mean, errors, as far as that go, are are pretty pretty uncommon. Yeah. And, you know, the benefit of that machine is that consistency. I'm sure there are
00:19:02
Speaker
world barista champions, like Elika Lifty in the States, who's going to brew an amazing pour over that's just so, so dialed in and just so beautiful. And it probably is better than what this machine does. But that machine does like, frankly, a pretty good job. And being able to
00:19:25
Speaker
to walk away is pretty huge when you're the barista on during service. Being able to give your attention to multiple places is pretty great.
Family, Coffee, and Online Community
00:19:39
Speaker
When you're not working at a coffee shop or in a lab, what do you do? How do you spend your time?
00:19:45
Speaker
So I spent a lot of time with my wife and my son. We have a dog and we have a really nice like nature trail right across from us. So when it's not super cold, we'll spend a lot of time outside. I will honestly work an eight hour barista shift and come home and start making coffee too.
00:20:04
Speaker
I just really love to make coffee and previously I was really into comic books like Marvel Comics. I'd read a lot of comic books. I spend a lot of time communicating with like a lot of other coffee industry people through social media. Yeah, other than that is just like raising a child, you know, it's a lot of keeping him happy and entertained and trying to read lots of books and trying to keep our house from looking like a total disaster.
00:20:36
Speaker
As a coffee professional, I spent years in the coffee industry.
Advice for New Baristas
00:20:42
Speaker
I want to know what are your tips for young versus someone new in a coffee industry? Yeah, I think, you know, much like just life in general, it's really easy to see depictions on social media and think that that is the entirety of what
00:21:01
Speaker
coffee or being a coffee professional is whether it's going into competition and placing well or pouring immaculate beautiful latte art drinks. But that's that's just such a small part of it. And I think not measuring your success by where other people are not measuring your progress by other people. Like it's it's great to have
00:21:28
Speaker
peers and like look at how they're doing and like we started out at the same time and they're now able to pour a 11 stack tulip and I can't and like use that as fuel to like push yourself but it doesn't mean that their beverage is better or that their skills are better. They can just do something really specific.
00:21:51
Speaker
If you're into coffee, don't be intimidated. There are many different ways to stop or not to stop many different entry points. And like you said, the best cup of coffee is the coffee that you love and things don't have to be complicated. You can have a very simple AeroPress recipe where you just throw everything in for a while and drain it and it can taste fantastic and you can grow from there.
00:22:16
Speaker
Thank you so much for sharing your experience with us and all those tips. And thank you for sharing your favorite AeroPress recipe with us. We hope we can try your recipe in the brewing game soon. Absolutely. I hope you stay safe in Moscow, Mickey. Thank you.
Closing and Community Support
00:22:32
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to this I'm Not A Barista episode. Subscribe to this podcast and follow us on Instagram at I Am Not A Barista for more empowering vibes and true coffee stories that connect you with coffee lovers around the world. You're a part of our global community where we celebrate baristas and their craft in everything that we do.