Episode 24 — Deaton Pigot | Coffee Was the Anchor

Deaton Pigot pulled his first shots at fifteen in Orange, a country town four hours west of Sydney, and coffee has been the one constant ever since. Through a rough stretch in his late teens, a chef's apprenticeship, a run at accounting and years fronting a band, there was always a coffee job holding the line. As he puts it, "coffee was the anchor," and everything else was balloons in the wind. At 23, walking to an early shift at a clifftop cafe in Wollongong with the sun coming up over the Pacific, he asked himself whether coffee could be a career. Then he kept asking the roaster's founders the same question every Friday until they made him their first full-time barista trainer. From there the conversation follows the stepping stones: a band that moved to Dublin after one unforgettable concert, learning to roast in Ireland, Intelligentsia in Los Angeles, Toby's Estate in Brooklyn, and in 2016 the founding of Tectonic Coffee in LA, a business he says was always a matter of when, not if. Joshua and Deaton talk about explaining the hard things in public, from his early coffee blog to the posts that walked customers through the recent green-coffee price spike, and about time: quarter-to-five mornings with a quiet cup, the big clock that runs his five-year-old's school routine, and why ordering your hours lets you settle into them instead of fighting them. They close on an open question for the industry as some roasters begin moving production to origin: what it means for the people and the craft here, and whether it's a canary worth watching.