Food writer Lee Tran Lam talks to Nawar Adra, who runs Sydney’s Stitch Coffee and Ensemble of Coffee Research & Education. Like many people, he jump-starts the day with this drink.
Some people really need it in the morning. I'm at a point where if I don't smell it, I'll have a headache.Nawar Adra
Nawar was born in Lebanon, which has a big coffee-drinking culture. He’s been consuming the gritty brew since he was five years old.
Rowena Chansiri, another barista and roaster, also joins this episode. The founder of Sydney’s Ickle Coffee got her first caffeine hit at age nine, with sweetened convenience-store iced brews in Thailand.
Today, Rowena and Nawar can detect the nuances in beans from around the world – and they share their advice on how to prepare and appreciate a good brew in this episode.
Long before salt-sprinkled coffee was a TikTok trend, it played an important role in Turkish wedding customs. And recently, Starbucks started adding olive oil to its espressos. Do Rowena and Nawar think these food trends are worth copying?
Lee Tran also talks to Dr Emma Beckett, a food and nutrition scientist at the University of Newcastle, about how to get the most buzz from your coffee and how much caffeine is ‘too much’? She addresses whether filter coffee is the healthier way to brew, and how pregnant women and other coffee-cautious people can still get a buzz from their beans.
People are super interested in the different ways you can brew coffee and what's the best way?Dr Emma Beckett
Credits
Should You Really Eat That? is created by Lee Tran Lam
Mixed by Max Gosford
Artwork: Grace Lee
Theme music: Sydney Sunset by Nooky
Transcript
This podcast is recorded on the land of the Gadigal of the Eora nation. I’d like to pay my respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country.
Nawar Adra: We don't have an age cap of how old you need to be to drink coffee. I was drinking coffee since I'm five years old.
Rowena Chansiri: Putting salt or olive oil in your fancy coffee, I think anything that makes coffee fun is a good thing.
Dr Emma Beckett: People are super interested in the different ways you can brew coffee and what's the best way.
Lee Tran Lam: Around the world, people drink coffee – whether it’s sweetened with condensed milk in Vietnam or spiced with cinnamon in Mexico. It powers us through our workdays and deadlines and helps us stay awake during the most sobering of office meetings. Maybe that’s why it’s the most socially acceptable drug we consume – but is there a limit to how much we should have or what it can really do?
I’m Lee Tran Lam and you’re listening to Should You Really Eat That?
This show explores the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet.
Should you be consuming more tea, less coffee, should you skip the rice, bread, seafood or cheese? It can be bewildering keeping up with what’s quote unquote good for you and so many different beliefs shape what we consume – what’s fact and what’s fashion and whose perspective is being overlooked? Untangling all of this can be tricky, which is why I started this podcast.
Today’s episode is on coffee.
Coffee fuels the planet in so many ways. This dark brew is poured in the espresso bars of Italy, powers the coffee ceremonies of Ethiopia and the jazz cafes of Japan started when a record player cost more than a car, but a cup of coffee made hearing vinyl hits affordable. Long before salt-sprinkled coffee was a TikTok trend, it played an important role in Turkish customs before a wedding – a groom’s ability to handle salt in his coffee was seen as a test of his worthiness as a husband.
We use this drink to jumpstart our days – but is there a wrong way to consume it? And can you go overboard with coffee? Let’s talk to some experts and figure this out.
Nawar Adra: Hi, my name is Nawar Adra. I'm based in Sydney. I run two companies: Ensemble of Coffee Research & Education, which is a co-roasting space and a coffee roasting education academy and Stitch coffee, which is a wholesale and a retail store.
I was born in Lebanon – we don't have an age cap of how old you need to be to drink coffee. I was drinking coffee since I'm five years old pretty much, and just in mind, I was drinking Lebanese coffee. There was like no latte in my country, so it's a full-on heavyweight coffee drinking culture.
Lee Tran Lam: So what is Lebanese coffee actually like?
Nawar Adra: Pretty much a super dark roasted coffee, very similar to Turkish and the Greek side. There's no filtration. There's nothing in between, you just heat up the water, put a couple of spoons in the hot water, mix mix mix, and then you let us sit for a bit so all the sediments kind of fall all the way to the bottom – that doesn't mean it's not going to be half of your cup. It's called like finjān in Arabic, a small little cup and you just sip it straight away.
Lee Tran Lam: As a five-year-old, how did Nawar rate this gritty, dark sediment-heavy coffee?
Nawar Adra: I think they put a lot of sugar so [laughs] it didn’t really matter. We stopped drinking sugar honestly, in coffee, is when I came to Australia. When I got to specialty coffee, this is when I learned that you shouldn't be adding a lot of sugar in your beverage. We don't judge if you want a little bit. It's okay, but you shouldn't have you know four or five, it's a little bit too much.
Lee Tran Lam: Nawar grew up in Tripoli, in the north of Lebanon. How important was coffee there?
Nawar Adra: It had a massive impact in our social life and remember like those countries or our specific area of Lebanon, drinking is not a big thing, so in the Arabic world, I guess adapting to coffee was you know taking the alcohol out of their life to bring a new beverage in.
I’m one of those lucky people you know, finding what you really love earlier on and because it's in my DNA being Lebanese, growing up in a culture that coffee is highly regarded.
Lee Tran Lam: Coffee was first found in Ethiopia, but the drink has kept minds alert all around the world. It made its way to Yemen, where it was linked with Sufi mystics in the 15th century. Coffee houses then became huge throughout the Islamic world, and brewed an appetite for the phenomenon in Europe and beyond. Waves of migration led to espresso machines becoming a fixture in Australian cafes and the coffee culture we have today is thanks to many international influences.
If you’ve ever stepped into a nice cafe that’s really into its single-origin coffee and the farmers behind their beans, often staffed by people who literally get a buzz about what they’re pouring, you’ve probably walked into a place that’s focused on specialty coffee.
Specialty coffee is kinda synonymous with third-wave coffee - but what does that actually mean?
Nawar Adra: The first wave were the Italian espresso bars.
Lee Tran Lam: Some people even say first wave coffee started even earlier than that – all the way back to the 1800s, when coffee was about keeping you awake, there was not much interest in where it was from or who was farming it. It was really about convenience, and coffee as a commodity.
Nawar Adra: The second wave is actually Starbucks. Starbucks, they were able to really diversify the beverage into cappuccino, flat white, latte, all these different ways of doing it.
Lee Tran Lam: It was about the coffee-shop experience and culture. The third wave prizes the quality of the coffee – where it’s grown, sometimes down to the specific lot, altitude and very person who planted it.
Nawar Adra: It's a movement that really was built to give more to the farmers and to help them to gain better price for their coffee.
Lee Tran Lam: That kind of care and the very specifics of the land and climate can really make a difference in a cup.
Nawar Adra: The first time I tried an Ethiopian natural process coffee that for me was like, tasted berry, you know, banana milkshakes. Coming from that part of the world where it’s super dark, you need sugar to drink it – suddenly this coffee was like super sweet, super balanced. I think that was the moment where yeah, I want to be part of that type of beverage that really blow people's mind once you get into it and understand it.
Lee Tran Lam: Let’s hear from another barista who had a career-changing coffee experience, too.
Rowena Chansiri: Hi, my name is Rowena Chansiri. I'm the founder and roaster of Ickle Coffee in Sydney.
I'm originally from Thailand, we actually been drinking sweet ice coffee with condensed milk since such a young age. I probably had my first ice coffee at nine years old, because it's so accessible. It's 7-Eleven, it's really sweet and rich.
Lee Tran Lam: But it wasn’t this convenience store, sugar-filled coffee that inspired her to join the industry.
Rowena Chansiri: I think a lot of baristas fell in love with coffee for the first time with Ethiopia coffee, so it was Ethiopia Yirgacheffe washed long black. So it was espresso on water, it changed the whole concept of coffee for me. It's really fruity, really sweet; to me, I refer it, like white wine – it's citrus-y. It's fruity. It's very palatable.
Lee Tran Lam: Roasting beans really was key to making her appreciate how complex and sophisticated coffee could be.
Rowena Chansiri: At the light roast degree, you roast until it kind of pops, like popcorn. That's when you know the coffee is developed enough to be brewed into a coffee. The longer you roast the body, the more viscosity, the darker, sugary, caramelised taste develops during the roasting time. The lighter roast has more acidity. Usually it reserves a lot more fruitiness in coffee. So the longer you roast, the fruitiness kind of turn into caramelisation. So instead of having a bright strawberry flavour, it would slowly turn into a strawberry jam and then the darker you go, the more chocolatey, dark caramel or if you roasted a little bit too much, it kind of turned into some kind of ashy or roastiness.
(Coffee beans being poured)
Different coffee-growing areas provides a very different distinct taste in coffee. So usually when I describe taste, I describe in colours. A lot of central and South America coffee has a lot of darker flavours. Like cacao, chocolatey, caramel, a lot of nuttiness like peanut butter, biscuits and that's usually very suitable for roasting medium and into medium dark. It works really well with milk. In Kenya, in Ethiopia, they have a really really high elevation on the mountain that produce a lot more higher acidity and the coffee generally tastes very fruity, very bright colours. A lot of lime, a lot of bergamot, a lot of bright berries. Generally those coffee are very suitable for roasting light and when you drink it, you perceive the flavours of bright, limey, cranberry, lemonade and if you kind of roast it a little bit darker, that is almost like defeating the purpose of buying coffee from this beautiful high-elevation country.
Lee Tran Lam: Even though every barista I’ve met has been really friendly and open-minded, there’s a paranoid part of me that wonders if I’m ordering the wrong thing. I also think of institutions like Sydney’s Bar Italia, which had a ban on requesting soy, light and skim milk with coffee for many decades. Are baristas really judging us when we ask for a flat white or soy latte?
Nawar Adra: We really don't care anymore. We’re all drinking oat these days a lot more than we're drinking normal milk anyway.
Lee Tran Lam: Nawar does point out that a good barista will try their best to accommodate you. But there is some pay-off to being a little snobby about the water that ultimately ends up in your cup.
Nawar Adra: If you're at home and you just have very bad tap water, it doesn't matter what coffee you're going to buy. It's not going to taste good. ‘Cause the water is 98% of that beverage. If you boil it, that's even worse because you're making it even harder, right?
Lee Tran Lam: And what about recent trends, where we’ve seen people sprinkling salt into their coffee or Starbucks adding olive oil to their espresso? Is this something we should be drinking – or doing?
Rowena Chansiri: I think there is definitely no right or wrong in what you like in coffee. Putting salt or olive oil in your fancy coffee – I think anything that makes coffee fun is a good thing and experimental is really good as well. I actually have a lot of customers asking about, “do you believe that like putting salt in your coffee makes the coffee less bitter?” So my answer is, “if your coffee is bitter, it would help”. But if you're drinking coffee that is really nice, it's fruity, it has a balanced sweetness and acidity, what it does is it adds saltiness in your coffee, it's like a hack for a bad coffee. But if you start from a good coffee, then you wouldn't want a hack to make it taste better.
Lee Tran Lam: Judging from the many "don't talk to me before I've had my coffee" mugs that exist, this isn’t something we drink just for its taste. I mean, there’s a whole industry that declares warfare on anyone who attempts conversation with pre-caffeinated people. That morning buzz really matters and some of us just can’t imagine our days without it.
Nawar Adra: Some people really need it in the morning. I'm at a point where if I don't smell it, I'll have a headache. It's a very important part of my life.
Lee Tran Lam: Clearly, coffee has quite a hold on us. But what are its actual effects on our body? We like having a long black or iced filter or latte because it seems to improve who we are – it makes us so productive, sharpens our mind and even gets us through those painful moments in the day that really drag. But is it actually that great for us? Let’s hear from an expert, who can help us out.
Dr Emma Beckett: Hi, I'm Dr Emma Beckett. I'm a food and nutrition scientist at the University Of Newcastle and Nutrition Research Australia.
I barely even remember when I first started drinking coffee, but I think that it would have been when I was about 14 years old and started working at McDonald's and we had that filter coffee that was just like always sitting there. I definitely remember tasting that burnt old pot of coffee, and adding a lot of sugar and a lot of milk to it.
Lee Tran Lam: As palatable as it sounds, I suspect she didn’t keep sipping that burnt crusty brew over the years. So what is Dr Emma’s coffee habit like nowadays?
Dr Emma Beckett: I am 100% an everyday coffee drinker, but I'm a cold brew drinker and an instant coffee drinker because I'm really impatient and in the morning, I don't like to do much before I've had my coffee – so instant or cold brew because they're right there. And I've got one of those jugs where you put the coffee grinds in the middle and it just sits in the fridge, brews very slowly, so you can just pour it straight out of that in the morning. It's great.
Lee Tran Lam: So she gets her buzz from coffee that’s been brewing overnight in her fridge rather than a quick hot espresso hit. So what’s the best way to get that all-important caffeine spark?
Dr Emma Beckett: People are super interested in the different ways you can brew coffee and, and what's the best way? All of those different major brewing methods are going to have different profiles as to how much caffeine they release and when they release it. And then how much of the volatiles that give us our taste and flavour are released. So if you look at something like espresso, that's going to use a high temperature and a high pressure over a short period of time, so you get a lot of that caffeine really early in the brewing and you don't need to brew for very long, the pressure and the fine grind helps push out all those volatiles and you get a really strong cup, in terms of caffeine and the robust taste.
But the catch there is that, when we drink espresso, we don't drink as much of a volume as we do the other brew methods. You actually could be getting more caffeine in something like a cold brew, because we let that sit for a longer period of time. But we drink a larger volume of it when we drink it – because cold brew is done without that high heat, we don’t get a lot of those nasty bitter compounds in there, and so you actually could be consuming more caffeine in a cup of cold brew as you would normally drink it as you would a smaller serve of espresso.
(Sounds of coffee being brewed)
People are interested in drinking beverages like coffee for that caffeine hit, and so we think of caffeine as adding energy, giving us something extra, but there's not really actually any energy in a cup of coffee. What the caffeine actually does is it blocks some receptors that normally detect the compounds that tell us that we're sleepy, so these sleepy compounds include things like adenosine and they're part of our normal sleep/wake cycle – as we use energy during the day, the adenosine is going to build up, bind to its receptors and that's a signal to say, “you need to rest now”. What caffeine does is bind to that receptor, because it's kind of a similar shape, so it blocks the receptor, stops its normal sleep-inducing compound from binding to it, and it makes you therefore feel a bit less sleepy, which is a bit more awake. The problem with this is, it's really just a loan, it’s a buy now pay later.
So as we continue throughout our day more and more of that adenosine is going to build up. Eventually, the caffeine is going to start losing its hold on those receptors and so later on in the day, you're going to get more of a sleepiness crash as your coffee wears off.
That's fine if you're using it to shuffle your energy around the day. So I'm not a morning person and so for me, having the caffeine in the morning and trading that off for a sleepy trough in the afternoon is totally fine, because that's when I normally feel more energised. Where it becomes a problem is when we are constantly just kicking that can down the road. So if you need your caffeine every single morning to get going and you're not getting enough sleep to be able to catch up and actually move all that adenosine back to where it needs to be in the energy cycle, then it's not going to help and you're going to eventually need to have that rest to catch up, so caffeine is a short-term solution, it’s not a long-term solution to tiredness.
Too much caffeine is a really interesting point because a lot of people will want to know,
“how much is too much and when have I gone over the top?” And that's when you know you've had too much really, when you start feeling those side effects and for some people too much will come after one cup and they'll start feeling jittery and nervousness and they'll get, you know, sweating and all kinds of other symptoms. For other people that's not going to come until you've, you know, gone multiple cups over multiple hours over multiple days before you see that adding up.
So if you're a non-coffee drinker, one cup can hit you a lot harder than someone who regularly drinks multiple cups.
Lee Tran Lam: Dr Emma says offering a one-size-fits-all definition of ‘too much caffeine’ is tricky because it all depends on our genetics and is based on our tolerance to caffeine, which is something that builds up over time.
I remember once ordering a so-called ‘danger shake’ from a cafe when I was much younger, it was spiked with a triple-shot coffee and I couldn’t walk properly after drinking it because it gave me such a knee-knocking buzz. I barely had any coffee growing up – and if I did, it’d be an iced Vietnamese coffee sweetened with a lot of condensed milk. But if you grew up fortified by lots of cups of strong, gritty coffee, your tolerance level is probably a lot higher.
Rowena Chansiri: A lot of my Greek-background customers, they drink coffee at midnight and they go to sleep fine. So it's really how, how your body is built and how you react to caffeine – always listen to your body.
Lee Tran Lam: You do hear that anyone who is pregnant should be cautious about consuming caffeine. So should they be ditching their coffee breaks entirely?
Dr Emma Beckett: So there is advice that you should reduce your caffeine intake and keep it below a certain amount during pregnancy. Part of that is based on concerns about the potential effect of caffeine on the fetus. But part of it is also because there isn't a safe way for us to ethically test what those effects would be and so there's a lot of things where we say, “do less in pregnancy and there's no safe amount in pregnancy.”
But it's because we don't have the evidence of safety in the same way that we could ethically and soundly test that in non-pregnant people, because obviously there's a much bigger ethical risk when you're talking about pregnancy. The flip side of that, though, is if you're a really heavy coffee drinker before you get pregnant and you quit your coffee, the effect that that stress can have on the body is something that we haven't well measured. And so what most people do in pregnancy is try to reduce the caffeine consumption, rather than quit it completely. I know a lot of pregnant women who'll say, “I'll have my one cup and I'll keep it under that amount.”
But if you do need to reduce your coffee intake for pregnancy or any other reason, a really cool fact is that decaf coffee has a bit of a placebo effect and it has a bit of a chemical effect on its own to wake us up. So the caffeine is only one way that coffee makes us less sleepy. The coffee smell and the coffee taste on the tongue does something to stimulate alertness, above and beyond that effect on caffeine and then there's also the placebo effect where you feel like the coffee should wake you up because it smells the same and it tastes the same – so a really good decaf can really scratch that itch if you need to to reduce or limit your coffee intake.
Nawar Adra: These days, decaf is a very good quality. The decaf has revolutionised itself. We're doing a lot more better work on the decaf, we're roasting it better. We brewing it better and it tastes amazing.
Lee Tran Lam: It looks like there’s some data on how filter coffee might be better for your heart health. Does it actually stack up?
Dr Emma Beckett: So there is a bit of research that says that filter coffee is a healthier way of brewing and there’s some observational studies that show that people who drink filtered coffee and have better health outcomes long term, particularly in old age. If we filter the coffee, some compounds called diterpenes bind to the filter paper, which means they don't end up in your cup and those compounds are associated with increasing blood pressure and increasing risk of cardiovascular disease. But whether or not the diterpenes are going to be high risk to you, again, is going to vary by the individual and what else we're eating and what else we're doing and what our genetics are. So I wouldn't be suggesting that everyone needs to go and start filtering their coffee and you know getting rid of their espressos. I filter my cold brew after I make it, not because I'm scared of diterpenes but because I want to reduce the grittiness of any of the small grinds that have gotten into my cup. So for me, it's for clarifying and texture rather than for worrying about what's actually in the cup.
Lee Tran Lam: There’s a great YouTube video by world champion barista and coffee expert James Hoffman which asks the question, “Is Coffee Good For You?" He points out the research can be contradictory, the data keeps evolving and even working how to measure what counts as one cup of coffee, let alone whether it’s great for your health, can be tough to determine. So 3-4 cups of coffee a day might be good for cardiovascular disease, but for some people, coffee can exacerbate reflux issues. The polyphenols and fibre in coffee are beneficial, but too much caffeine can ruin your sleep. And yes, scary-sounding things like acrylamide (which can be carcinogenic) and mycotoxins (which are produced by mould or fungi) can be found in coffee – but at very low levels, and roasting the beans makes it even less of a worry.
So there are a lot of variables to keep in mind, and remember, we’re all affected by coffee in different ways.
Dr Emma Beckett: We all consume different amounts and we all live different lifestyles. So a lot of the studies that look at health benefits or health, negative health effects of coffee are looking at people who live different lives. So if you have data that says, you know, people who drink six coffee a day is more likely to have a heart attack, you have to ask the question in what circumstance does a person drink six coffees a day? Are they working a really stressful job and therefore does that mean they're not getting enough exercise and therefore does that mean that they're eating a whole bunch of, you know, less healthy foods?
And so, on balance, there are some health benefits and some health effects. But it's going to be super variable by person, by amount, by other factors and so I wouldn't recommend that people go quitting coffee for its health benefits and I wouldn't recommend people who aren't coffee drinkers go taking up coffee for its health benefits.
It's really important, I think, to remember when we think about coffee, that not every food choice that we make is about optimising health outcomes, because there are so many health outcomes, because maybe for some people we've got higher risk of some cancers or higher risk of heart disease and that would change then our risk benefit analysis of the coffee. But if we spent all our time figuring out for every single food what our risk benefit analysis was, we would never have time to eat or enjoy any of it and so for me, it comes down to too much coffee is bad for you. That's literally what too much means. But what too much is looks different to every single person.
Lee Tran Lam: Dr Emma points out her own coffee consumption isn’t altered too much by what she’s learnt through her job. Yes, she’s transitioned from sugary, creamy, milky coffees to pure black coffee over time, but she points out that’s also a reflection of how our taste literally changes as we get older.
Dr Emma Beckett: Because when we're younger, our sense of taste is a lot more acute for our negative compounds. So things that taste bad and bitter, taste worse when we're younger and that's part of evolution trying to protect us from putting poisons in our mouth and caffeine, if we have too much of it, is going to be a poison and a lot of those bitter volatiles, and bitter acids that are in coffee, if we had too much, would be a poison. And so coffee does taste bad when we first start drinking it and so we do use sugar and cream and and milk and and cocoa powder and all those other things to mask that flavour early on and as we get more accustomed to drinking coffee and we learn in our brain that coffee isn't actually a poison, or the beneficial effects that we enjoy weigh out of the risk of it being a poison, coffee actually starts to taste better to us. So we get better at drinking it straight and without all those additives, the more we drink it and as we age.
Lee Tran Lam: And while we’ve gotten deep into the health side of drinking coffee, there’s one aspect I think can’t be overlooked, even though it’s incredibly hard to measure. And that’s the socialising power of coffee. Yes, we use it as a unit for paying people favours – I’ll get you a coffee, or you’ll owe me a coffee – but it also aids and sanctions daily breaks from the office, under the cover of so-called productivity. And meeting up with someone for a latte or long black or even just catching up with the person who pours your daily brew adds a literal spark to your morning.
Rowena Chansiri: People having coffee as a ritual, this is like a mindful way to start their day. We have a really really nice inclusive community – people actually can be themselves and can have a good chat over a cup of coffee and I think it is really important in this society that we have a connection with someone who we're not related to and who are not judging us and it's very beautiful to to share something and I think because it's in such a friendly environment and when you're relaxed and when you're talking to someone that you can connect with, it's always leading to something beautiful.
Lee Tran Lam: Should You Really Eat That is an SBS podcast. It’s written and presented by me, Lee Tran Lam. Thank you to the SBS Audio team, Max Gosford, Joel Supple and Caroline Gates, for their contributions and guidance. The brilliant artwork is by Grace Lee and the theme song is Sydney Sunset by Yuin artist Nooky. The email address for the show is audio@sbs.com.au.
On the next episode of Should You Really Eat That, we’re laying out cheese boards, slicing up wedges and wheels and cutting into big creamy knots of burrata. Follow on your favourite podcast app and feel free to spread the word and tell people about the show.
