Tamper Tantrum

Coming soon new Tamper Tantrum Videos from Ozone Coffee in Auckland New Zealand. 

As with every speaker-focussed Tamper Tantrum event, we always try to include a speaker from outside of coffee who would be able to provide insights relatable to our industry. San Francisco’s interesting and unique culture provided us with lots of potential options, but our host partners (Wrecking Ball Coffee) presented us with a unique and exciting opportunity through their work: Chef-Owner of the Michelin-starred Khin Kao, Pim Techamuanvivit. Following the lead from Khin Kao in how it subverts expectations, we chose instead to have our hosts, Katie Carguilo and Stephen Leighton, interview Pim to learn more about how her approach to using ingredients, building flavour combinations, and giving good service could have a positive impact on specialty.   -- 📷: Cris Mendoza (Saint Frank Coffee) Pim grew up in Bangkok, was shipped off to study in other places, and somehow found herself living and loving it in the San Francisco Bay Area. She quit her Silicon Valley job in 2005 to pursue a career in food: the writing, reporting, and basically anything interesting thereof that comes her way. Her recipes, writings, and photographs have since appeared in the New York Times, Food & Wine Magazine, Bon Appétit magazine, and more. She’s also moonlighted as a judge on Iron Chef America, been profiled on Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie, Food(ography), and cooked Pad Thai on the Martha Stewart Show, for Martha, natch. Pim opened her first restaurant, Kin Khao Thai Eatery, in March 2014. In September of that year, Kin Khao was included in 50 Best New Restaurants list by Bon Appetit. In 2015, it was ranked #6 in 25 Outstanding Restaurants 2015 by G.Q. Magazine. The Michelin Guide awarded Kin Khao 1 Michelin Star in 2016 and again in 2017.

One of the things we really enjoyed about the podcast in 2017 was the “From the Field” segment, shared by Alejandro Martinez from Finca Argentina in El Salvador. Every time we’d have an event, we’d ask ourselves: is there a way to get Ale here as a speaker? Finally, the stars aligned and we were able to have Ale join us, in person, on stage in San Francisco. Here, Alejandro provides a personal insight into one of the issues raised in Hanna’s talk earlier that morning: coffee farming profitability. In sharing his own story, Ale calls attention to the challenges and opportunities to farmers working within the specialty model, offering some actionable advice to anyone looking to ensure the future of quality specialty coffee. -- 📷: Cris Mendoza (Saint Frank Coffee) Alejandro Martinez doesn’t have the usual “coffee producer” backstory: once a VP of Investment Banking in the Technology Mergers and Acquisitions Group of Bank of America Securities (now Bank of America Merrill Lynch), Alejandro began his career in specialty coffee in 2008 managing a 35 hectare farm originally acquired in 1967 by his grandfather, Luis Guillermo. Today, he manages a coffee estate of approximately 70 hectares, working remotely from Ahuachapan in El Salvador with the financial planning and analysis team of a cybersecurity tech company to keep the farms afloat as he builds initiatives to secure the future of the land and its workers. Alejandro holds an MBA from Tuck Business School at Dartmouth and a BS in Business Administration from Universidad Fidelitas in Costa Rica, but it doesn’t stop him from talking about the biodynamic gnomes.

Think you like to get geeky with your coffee? Think again! We’re pretty sure our second speaker from our San Francisco event last September has you beat. Professor William (Bill) Ristenpart takes the idea of being “curious about coffee” to the next level in his role as the Director of the first multidisciplinary university research center in the world devoted to post-harvest coffee studies: the UC Davis Coffee Center. Like most of our professorial guests, Prof. Ristenpart packs a lot of information into both his short time on stage and his slides: the relationship between chemical engineering and coffee, the development of the UC Davis Coffee Centre, a sneak peek at some on-going research into the coffee brewing control chart, and many, many equations. It’s time for you to level up! -- William Ristenpart's research is in complex transport phenomena, with an emphasis on using advanced experimental techniques to extract quantitative measurements from complicated phenomena. Ristenpart Research Group strives to answer fundamental scientific questions about a variety of systems where the transport behavior is paramount. Recent topics include: electrocoalescence of charged droplets, shear-induced deformation of red blood cells, electrically-induced aggregation of colloids near electrodes, and turbulent dispersion of airborne pathogens. Ristenpart's lab has two Phantom high-speed cameras (a grayscale v7.1 and a color v7.3), both of which can capture at more than 100,000 frames per second. They also have several microscopes and various optical and laser systems. He is also passionate about coffee - he serves as Director of the UC Davis Coffee Center, and see here for an overview of his undergraduate course, The Design of Coffee.

If you’re a regular podcast listener, you’ll already be very familiar with our first speaker last November in San Francisco - World Coffee Research’s Hanna Neuschwander – but this time, we’re talking about far more than WCR’s sensory lexicon. We’re talking about the future. After asking us to imagine what life will be like for each of us in 2050 – well within our expected lifespans – Hanna explores both the challenges (“This is going to be, like, a super downer for a minute – sorry!”) and the opportunities (“more optimistic stuff!”) that the future holds for coffee and the industry built around it. --Hanna Neuschwander has been communicating about coffee and science since 2004. Her writing about coffee and food has appeared in publications including Travel + Leisure, Edible Seattle, Portland Monthly, and the Oregonian, among others. She is the author of Left Coast Roast, a guidebook to artisan and influential coffee roasters on the west coast. She has presented about the history, sustainability, and economics of coffee at everywhere from Boston to Panama City. She is based in Portland, Oregon.