Hi everyone, I’m Patrizio Blandi from blandicoffee.com. Welcome to this very first episode of the Blandi Coffee Podcast. All coffee no sugar.

This episode is action packed.

This is the first episode, there is so much information I want to share with you but what I have to do is to keep it short and to the point. I just want to cover as much information as possible but in a very reasonable time as well. This  being the first episode, I think it’s quite appropriate that I introduce myself for those people who don’t know who I am.

I’ll talk a little bit about how I got into the world of coffee, how I got into the roasting side, the reasons behind making this podcast, how it’s benefitting me and more importantly how it’s going to benefit you from listening to this podcast.

I will share this with you a little bit later on. This podcast is a little overdue. There has been a few technical issues, if you want to call them that. There have been some audio problems I’ve had.

I’m recording this podcast at my factory, it’s in a warehouse complex and where I’m situated. I’m in Sydney in the area called Revesby. Not too far away from where I’m situated, there is a small aircraft airport and the amount of light aircraft traffic that’s flying above my warehouse is not funny. It’s just incredibly, I never noticed how frequent and how noisy they are until I started recording. Besides all that, there’s been a lot of activity in my complex. People decided to renovate. There’s been cars zooming in and out. It comes out very clear in the audio.

It’s amazing what a microphone can pick up. So, yes, there’s been technical difficulties with the audio but I’ve overcome that now. I’ve setup a little studio in my factory now and the audio is much better but still there is still little bit more work to be doing to the audio. But I think this is a good start.

I just want to share with you. This should have been out there much earlier. Unfortunately, due to the activity around my warehouse and me trying to get this to up and running, it took a bit of time. But now, it’s here so I’m moving forward. It has taken a little bit of time but I truly believe that this podcast had to be out as soon as possible because I know that this podcast can impact someone in some way in the world of coffee, my job is done and that’s basically – I know that this is possible and I had to get it out.

This podcast is aimed at pretty much anyone. It really covers a wide aspect of people. If you’re starting your journey into the world of coffee, this is a great podcast because you’re going to learn very important things about making great coffee, form getting great coffee and getting great results with coffee. If you’re already in this lovely world of coffee at home making coffee either you are using your espresso equipment, with your plunger, or with a stove top, regardless of how you make your coffee, you will be benefit from listening to this podcast because there are things that will, again get you great results.

You don’t need to spend a lot of money to get great results. I’m just concentrating on little things that will give you the biggest output. The other thing is, as well, if you’re starting your journey in the business of coffee looking for a cafe to buy, to buy an existing cafe, or to make new cafe, this podcast is for you.

If you’re an existing cafe owner and you want to take some pointers and want to see and put them to your business and take action on the things I discuss on this podcast, you will get great results. And the very basic stuff, again, it’s very basic, you don’t need to spend lots and lots of money, you don’t have to spend heaps of money, and millions of dollars or thousands of dollars to do marketing and to buy equipment. You need to buy things or you need to spend time on things that are going to give you the biggest results. That’s the most important thing. Concentrating on the things that will give you the biggest results.

People entering the industry of coffee as a barista or a waitress, this is probably a good podcast to be listening to because it’s going to show you, it’s going to show you a lot of behind the scenes and what is involved around the coffee industry. The same with the business – the coffee business. I’ll show you pretty much and gets into the details of behind the scenes and that’s what it’s all about my title, All Coffee No Sugar.

The title is really something that I enjoy. It’s coffee without sugar. Originally, my title was going to be Coffee No Sugar because that’s how I drink my coffee. I have my coffee with no sugar. And that’s pretty much how I’ve designed my coffee. I’ve roasted my coffee to follow that principle.

This podcast is following the same principle. It’s about enjoying something without adding anything to it. This podcast is the same thing. I want to share with you as much as I can. That’s the raw element, without adding any hype, marketing spin or misinformation or shining objects to make it better.

It’s not about making it better. It’s about giving you the raw information and it’s up to you to filter out what you think is worth implementing and not implementing that’s going to suit your business or suit what you do.

I will be doing this by – with what I share with you as a coffee roaster. I will share with you all my knowledge that I have about finding a great coffee, how to find it, where to find it, how to best treat coffee and give you background information about coffee.

I will share with you as much as I can on what I believe will give you great results in your business. It’s all about taking action. If you hear something on this podcast and you believe it will impact your business in a positive way, it’s about taking those steps and doing it. Not waiting months or weeks to say, “Oh, I’ll do that next week.†It’s about hearing it and making your plans to do it.

I will be interviewing baristas. I will be interviewing business owners in the coffee industry. The main objective about interviewing these people is to give you, again, the raw information, all coffee, no sugar scenario. What it takes to run a business; what frustrations it’s affecting them, what frustrations they’ve had to buy the business or to create a new business from scratch, running the business and cash flow problems.

Whatever I can dig out, I’ll make sure that’s put into the podcast and basically what I’m doing with the interview. I’m really interested in people to interview that would like to share the nitty gritty, that will let me go down under the hood and have a look what’s making the thing tick. What has worked for them? What hasn’t? What frustrations they’ve had running a business; staffing problems, roasting problems, finding staff or keeping staff.

All this information is the core element and it’s all coffee no sugar. There’s nothing to make it better than what it really is. By them sharing these information, they will get a plug at the end of it.

Yes, they’re getting a plug for their business but they would have shared with you so much valuable information that cannot be bought. That is, information coming out from a real life case scenario. So that is very, very valuable information that they’re sharing with you.

Interviews have to be very interesting especially if it’s in your field that you want to pursue. So that’s a little bit about my podcasting.

I will share one topic or an interview then I will try to share some resources or tools that’s going to be beneficial to get you great results. Also, I would like to share with you a book that’s impacted me personally or in  business sense to get great results or a person I’m interviewing to see what they’ve read that has impacted them in some way. And then, it’s pretty much giving you an action step to take. This action step to take is for you to go out there and take that action. It’s about taking action. And to get that result – I believe that by setting out an action step in my podcast for you to go out there and do something, it’s quite important.

If you do take those action steps, you will see a positive reaction to what you’re doing. If you’re trying to improve your coffee or you’re trying to improve the way you make coffee or you’re trying to improve your business, taking those steps quickly and as soon as possible is the key.

The guy that created the intro and the outro is an amazing person. He created two pieces of music that’s amazing and the first one is a little bit soothing and easy going. That’s just to sort of ease you into the podcast and then the outro is about getting you motivated. It sort of cheers you up and gets you ready. What I can see out of that outro music is amazing. It just resembles coffee.

If you listen to that outro, it’s coffee. It’s an amazing piece of music and the person that’s written that is from Israel and he’s just amazing. So I hope you enjoy the intro and the outro.

The purpose of creating that piece is to get you motivated at the end.

For those people who don’t who I am, my name is Patrizio Blandi. I’m the owner and the coffee roaster for Blandi Coffee. I have a website called www.blandicoffee.com I call this the hub because this is pretty much the place where you can get everything you need. You can access all my podcast episodes, read my blog posts. You can buy my fresh premium coffee and you can have a look at the services I offer to business.

This website is very easy to navigate and to use. The way I’ve designed this website is point and shoot situation. It’s very easy. If you want to look for podcast, point at podcast. If you want to read blog post, read a blog post. If you want listen to my podcast, listen to a podcast. It’s very easy to navigate.

When you get there, especially if you’re listening to this podcast episode, if there are pieces of information that you need, you don’t have to really stress too much and write things down or jot them down. If there are books or resources, links to some websites or tools, don’t stress because what I’ve done is I’ve created a transcript for every episode that will be uploaded to my web page under the episode.

So for this episode, it will be episode number one and you’ll find the transcripts. You can download the PDF or you can read it on the website.

You can click the links that will take you directly to the resources or the book or if I link to websites, it’s all there. It’s amazing how you can listen. You can be on the train, it might in a hard situation to write down this information while you’re driving but the main idea is to listen and just relax, get a cup of coffee.  You can get a take away coffee If you’re on a train, sip on your coffee and listen to the podcast.

If you’re doing a jog good on you because if you’re going to sip on a latte or something it’s probably working against your exercise. Preferably have the coffee after your run.

A little bit about my business.

It is a coffee roasting company. The objective of my company philosophy is supplying you with fresh premium coffee to order. The idea is to have zero coffee roasted on hand. I have very minimal coffee on hand and that’s due to sampling or depending on my orders. Sometimes my orders, they’ll be a little bit of coffee leftover per roast. Depending on the amount of order I get, I can’t get it exactly so there is minimal coffee leftover. But the objective is not to have excessive stock on hand. And when I mean I have a little bit leftover, it’s only a couple of kilos leftover. It’s not a huge amount of coffee leftover. And that pretty much goes within a week anyway. So even if there is some leftover it only last one or two weeks maximum.

If you order my coffee from my website you will fall into a roasting cycle. So when you pay for it, I’ll get a notice saying you want two kilos of coffee. That will get into a roasting cycle. So if you ordered that on a Monday and if I’ve got a roasting cycle on a Wednesday, your coffee will be roasted on the Wednesday and shipped out that day.

Yes, you might have to wait one or two days. It is pretty regular. But all the people I’ve talked to that are waiting that extra day to get that fresh coffee and that’s what I drum into the people I supply fresh coffee. I get a lot of customers especially in the wholesale side that give me one or two days’ notice. They say, “Oh, I need coffee. I’m out of coffee.â€

I tell them, there is a cycle. I’m more than happy to put you into a cycle every week. Some do, some people don’t. They want to order as they go. It’s up to you. If you want to ring me up or I can ring you up every week and find out, that’s fine. But if you run out of coffee and you give me one day’s notice it’s going to be very hard because if it’s not in that cycle period, it’s going to take one or two days.

It’s not stocked. The hardest thing they don’t understand, every supplier has stocks of items. What I try to explain to my customers is that it’s roasted to order. If they ring me today for something they need tomorrow, it’s going to be very, very hard. I’ll try my best to get it out there as soon as possible.

Most of the suppliers I deal with, they have stock on hand. Basically, I don’t. I roast it to the order. If you order it today, I’ll roast it either today or tomorrow and ship it out. That’s the beauty of having fresh coffee. It’s the consistency that I can guarantee to my customers that they’ll have fresh coffee.

By them having a fresh coffee roasted for them on demand is very consistent because that consistently passes on to their customers.

How I got into the world of coffee.

I’ve always loved coffee. Ever since I grew up I’ve always seen my father make coffee. Every morning he’ll make coffee without fail and after dinner he’ll make coffee and he would use his traditional Italian stove top coffee maker.

It’s called a cafeteria. It’s got three parts. It’s got the tank where you put the water in. Then it has a filter basket where you put the coffee. And then it has the brewing holding tank. Screw them together. You put it on a stove top and you let it sit there and then it will automatically brew the coffee for you. And when it stops spitting out the water at the holding tank, you shut it down and enjoy the coffee.

It’s pretty easy to make. The aroma that comes out of it is amazing.

So that’s pretty must been instilled to me. Seeing that when I was a kid, it sort of passed on to my life now where I make coffee every morning the same way. A big game changer for me was when I went on my honeymoon.

I travelled around Europe and I took this stove top with me and it was amazing because I was making coffees in different parts of the world in Europe, with different coffees and tasting the different coffees was amazing. It was filling up the room where we were staying with that aroma. It was something amazing. And the beauty about smell or aromas is that it brings back memories.

It’s very powerful to experience. Now when I make the coffee, it sort of brings back that memory of being in Europe and about my honeymoon.

So when I came back from my honeymoon, I was determined to find something better than what I had, better than this stove top. And to cut a long story short, I was basically searching for something that was portable, had no moving parts and I was looking for something that was making an espresso style coffee.

It’s similar to what you get in café’s. This was really hard to find. The closest thing that I found was one, it was in a regional stove top coffee machine made in the 1950’s by a guy in Milan called, Giordano Robbiati.

He created this in 1950s. Don’t really quote me on the dates but it is around the 1946-1950 where he created this stove top.

It’s an amazing piece of equipment. It’s called the Atomic Coffee Maker. If I was you, Google it and have a look. If you go to my about us page, you will see there. I have a link there as well. This is an amazing piece of equipment. It was done in the 1950s.

It was actually making something similar to an espresso and you can froth your milk. And also done on a stove top.

Then it was something that I liked, but personally, I didn’t want to use something that was made out of aluminium. It’s just a personal thing. So I was looking for something that was made of stainless steel or similar product.

I did come across another product, a coffee maker, made of stainless steel.

It was not making an espresso style coffee. It was claiming that it may close to an espresso style. It was not making the true-blue espresso coffee that your commercial coffee machines can make.

Espresso coffee needs to be brewed under pressure and that is nine bars of pressure. It needs to have water at temperatures between 92-95°. You’ll get between 25 to 30 millilitres of volume of brew within 25-30 seconds.

Now if you make it under those conditions, you’ll get an express coffee.

The machines out there were not doing it at nine bars. It was impossible for a machine working under steam pressure to produce coffee at nine bars without burning it.

As you get above one bar of pressure, it goes above 100°Celsius and the temperature increases exponentially. So when you get to nine bars, it’s pretty much about 180° Celsius. So brewing coffee at that temperature will actually completely destroy the coffee.

You’ll have pretty much nothing left. Those were the limitations plus the machine that was made of stainless steel could only brew two cups of coffee, it would have to be shut down, restarted, actually, cooled down first and then restarted and by the time you make a second batch it would have been about half an hour by the time you do all that process

It was not fitting to what I was looking for because if I have a guest, I don’t want them to wait half an hour for a cup of coffee. So I decided to see if I could make something better. I spend a lot of time researching on how to make coffee. How does an espresso coffee and how does a coffee machine work. What makes a good espresso? What makes a better espresso?

It was amazing. And that journey to finding that information sort of created and built the love of coffee. It was so much to learn and it was an amazing experience. And then finally, I came with a concept on making this espresso coffee machine that was portable, did not have any moving parts and overcome the high temperature limitations working with steam.

So I had a concept that would make a cup of coffee, espresso style, working at nine bars of pressure, working between 92-95° and giving you that beautiful cream of coffee that came out in an espresso style 25-30 seconds with 30mils of coffee.

That concept, then I had to put that concept and make a prototype. And this was the fun bit. It was the fun of not knowing whether this concept work or didn’t work, about designing, all the other features that had to be put on to the machine.

So I had a local metal worker create and hand make the actual body of the machine. Then I was buying off the shelf parts so the machine looked a bit industrial looking. I named it “The Ugly Ducklingâ€. It looked bad. Well, it didn’t looked back. It just didn’t look very enticing. But it made a beautiful cup of coffee.

I could only use the off the shelf parts because custom making parts will cost me a lot more money. So basically, I just went with what I could find. Finding parts is quite hard. It involved working at temperatures of 180° and working steam. Put those two together, it’s very hard to find parts.

When I did make the prototype and I fired it up, the first time I fired it up, it did what I need to do. It was amazing. So that concept that I had, worked.

The first shot was not up to scratch. I think all of the machines out there, it takes one or two shots before you get the machine ready for making your coffee. Even commercial machines need to fire up a couple of shots and get the water moving through the system then the machine’s ready for firing up coffees.

The second shot, it worked. It was brewing coffee between 92-95° Celsius. I had to manually control the brew. Turn on like you would on a normal coffee machine. Instead of pressing a button, I would rotate a valve. The valve would let the water through to the basket where the coffee was held and brew the coffee and then I will shut it off at between the 25-30 seconds range.

And that would give me 30mils. I was quite happy with that. And that was basically the reason I got into roasting.

In 2011, I established this company, Blandi Coffee for that purpose, for this machine. I put this machine on to hold because I really believed for this machine to really benefit, I decided to put it on the back burner until I was ready to take this product to the next level of production and distribution.

I was either on my own or with a joint venture with someone. Instead of moving forward with this machine, I decided to stick with the coffee roasting for now because the time I was making that machine, finding good coffee was very hard. I’m talking about 2011. That was about 3 years ago.

A lot of things have changed now. Coffee was very hard to find that was fresh, good quality. Walking to your major supermarkets, you will not find freshly roasted coffee.  It was quite hard. Buying off the shelf was not the ideal place to buy your coffee. So I had to find other places to source my coffee. It was either through a café or through roaster directly.

A lot of cafes I talked to did not even know when the coffee was roasted. That again was really a hard place to find. Even in a café, it was hard to find. Then if I went directly to a roaster, it was quite hard to buy coffee in very small amounts like one or two kilos. They only wanted to deal with people that will buy five to six kilos minimum per week.

I didn’t believe this was the right way for someone to buy coffee. I believe that you should be able to walk in some way to buy fresh coffee. So I decided, I wanted to make it easier to find this coffee. That is the main reason why I started Blandi Coffee, the roasting company. And another reason why I started the   Blandi Coffee podcast.

It’s all about giving you the information about coffee and the real facts behind coffee and the coffee industry.

I hope you enjoyed the show. Please subscribe to iTunes if you enjoyed the show. If you have any questions or anyone who you would like me to interview,  Please Email Me.

You can download the full transcription and the PDF to this episode number one by visiting my website, www.blandicoffee.com go to episode number one and there will be a link for you to download this episode.

All reviews will be greatly appreciated and a five star rating on iTunes would be greatly appreciated as well. Take care and see you on the next episode. Bye for now.

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