Coffee Break #3

Coffee can be used in artwork and as a natural insecticide. It is also used in soaps, scrubs, and perfumes. Coffee grounds can be used to eliminate odors and repel fleas. It can help with hair growth and even be used as a meat tenderizer. Coffee businesses are now focusing on giving back to communities and supporting charities. Companies like Black Rifle support veterans, while others provide clean water to those in need. Cold brew coffee is a popular trend. Welcome back everybody to another episode of Coffee Break with Rio and Joe. Joe, I'd ask how you're doing today, but I already assume mighty fine. Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, you should have a catch phrase for that now. Mighty fine, mighty fine, mighty fine. How about you Rio? How's it going with you? Eh, I'm doing alright. So, you know, I was doing a little bit of research before we start this, and I figured what would be some good topics to talk about. With coffee, a person might think that there's not a lot of topics or a lot of details, but there actually is a lot more than somebody might realize. And some of the things that we're going to touch up on are the things in which coffee is used in, because there's so many, and it seems like that's growing by the day. And also some of the health benefits that coffee provides. And we're also going to talk about some businesses in a little bit here too. So we'll just jump into the first part, which is coffee and some of its usages. And so let's start with coffee and artwork. Did you know that it could be used in artwork? Oh, I absolutely did. You want to hear something fascinating about coffee and artwork? When I started this business back in 2005, I went to a coffee conference, and I met a gal there. She was doing coffee art with espresso, and it had to be a specific kind of espresso, she said, that she was working with. Well, I bought a bunch of prints from her, and I told her I'd buy them from her if she would number them. So I got all number one prints from that gal, and one of them is the Mocha Lisa. She was an absolute artist with that, let's call it coffee watercolor. So Lynn, do you just dip your stencil in coffee water and draw on there, or how does that work? Yeah, she had a little paintbrush, and she did the Mona Lisa really, really nicely, called it the Mocha Lisa, since it was made with coffee. That's pretty interesting. I guess I never knew that that was a possibility. Oh yeah, yeah, really nice artwork. Well, now we know that coffee can be used in art. But let's just not stop there, because there's a lot of other things to go over too, such as, you know, coffee can be used in a garden too, to repel insects and pests, can't it? Oh, absolutely. It brings in really good animals, such as worms, to help keep your garden healthy. And it's also an insecticide, a natural insecticide. And a lot of people were worried when they heard that years ago, they thought it was harmful to humans. Well, we're humans, we're not insects. It's beneficial to us with the polyphenols and the chlorogenic acids and some of the other chemical makeups of the coffee, but for an insect, the caffeine is a death trap. So what happens if you have a parasite growing in you, does the coffee kill that said parasite? I've never had a parasite, so maybe. Well, maybe it's because of the amount of coffee you drink. It could be, yeah. I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think you need to take specialized medicines for human parasites. And so it could also be used, and this is kind of a delicate area, because with dogs it's toxic to them, but it can also be used to help clean them and get rid of fleas too. Oh, absolutely. After you give your dog a good shower, or before you give your dog a good, well, bath, you want to rub a bunch of coffee grounds through their hair, and then you can rinse them off, and it'll help repel and keep the fleas at bay. Don't you got to be a little careful with that, because it might be too abrasive? No, not necessarily. Have a gentle hand if you have a short-haired dog. If you have a long-haired dog, you want to ruffle them up a little bit. So when that kind of leads into the next thing, as far as it, it's good for dogs, as we found out, because it helps the fleas and the cleaning, but it's also good for humans too, because there's soaps and scrubs and stuff that people have used coffee in. Yeah, studies have shown that caffeine is really good for hair growth, and it's really good for exfoliating as well. So like, before you shower, you want to massage some coffee grounds into your scalp. It'll help exfoliate the dead cells in your scalp and help with hair growth. It works good as a facial scrub as well. The only problem with facial scrubs, and I've used a lot of them, is you want to be very, very gentle with that process. One of the interesting things that I had seen was that it also is an odor eliminator, and not just helps clean the skin and exfoliate, as you were saying, which, whatever that means, but it can also be used if you're, say, cutting onions, which I love onions, and they leave quite the smell and they're hard to get out. You can use a coffee scrub, and that'll take care of that smell, that odor. Yeah, it sure will. As a matter of fact, if you go to some of the high-end perfume shops, they have a little tray of coffee beans sitting on the counter, so you smell the perfume, and then you sniff the coffee beans, and then you can move on to the next scent. It eliminates those scents from your olfactory system. It's a palate cleanser. Yes. And, speaking of perfumes, I saw that some people even put coffee in, say, socks or something, and they'll put them in their car. Yeah, that's true. I had a friend one time tell me she was going to, well, she suggested I make sachets of fresh coffee to hang in the car because it smells so good, according to our delivery drivers as well, but it wouldn't last very long. It's a nice thing to do. Have you ever had any of them other car fresheners? Those don't last very long either. No, not at all. And it seems like, well, some of them, they say that they're car vent clips or whatever those are called. They'll last for X amount of days, 90 days, or what have you, but it seems like after the first two weeks, the smell's gone. Yeah, kind of. And I think with freshly ground coffee, because that's what you'd want to put in some little sachets to hang in your car, you don't want to ever have brewed coffee in there. You'd be blowing nonsense around. So yeah, freshly ground coffee, it would hold its smell for several days, I'd say. So how well do you think that that would work in, say, a gym bag, sweaty gym bag? Do you think that that would eliminate the smell and make it smell like coffee? In other words, make it go from smelling like something putrid to something that smells pleasant. I'm glad we weren't talking about this about 10 years ago when your brother was in hockey. Well, heck, you might still have a market for hockey athletes. I could, yeah. We'd have to try it. I don't know if it would combine with that much odor in a gym bag than it would to neutralize the smells. And it's also a meat tenderizer. Yeah, a lot of people are starting to use them in their marinades and stuff, too. Yeah, it's a very good meat tenderizer. See, we're kind of going all over the place here, but we're just talking about everything that it can be used in. And we found out that it can be used in exfoliating your skin, to cleaning your skin, to making your car smell better, to maybe even making your gym bag smell better, too. Being able to be put on pets is a way of getting rid of fleas and cleaning them. See how many things there is with coffee? Yeah, exactly. You've got to make sure you never give your pet any coffee to eat or drink because it is toxic. But it is a good deodorizer and flea repellent. It can even be used to help with hair growth. Yeah, it's a good scalp exfoliator. Caffeine will, according to studies, help regrow some hair. And you can use it to buff out scratches on wooden furniture and darken them to match your existing finish. So it's like a natural stain. You don't have to smell the disgusting stain that makes you feel lightheaded. You just have to smear some coffee grounds on it. And there you go. And clean it up and you've got that. It's very, very helpful. Yeah. And then, it also helps if you like mushrooms and growing them. It helps grow them, too, or what? Yeah, mushrooms, I guess, are a real tough crop to grow and coffee is a good medium to help those mushrooms grow. You know, and then, so we've gone over quite a bit of things that it can do to help you and what you can use it in. But let's go ahead and dive a little bit deeper into now as far as, and it's not just coffee businesses, but it seems like some coffee businesses are this way. And it seems like a lot of other businesses nowadays are this way where they don't only just sell the product. They're also having a bigger mission behind what they're selling. Do you think that that's a great thing with the entrepreneurial spirit going on now as far as businesses providing and giving back to organizations and, well, one could say charities that they hold so dear? Absolutely. I think with the, say, rebirth of entrepreneurism in this day and age, we are more giving. We're more thoughtful and we're more community oriented. You and I, for example, love to involve ourselves in as many communities as we can to be a benefit, a value-added asset to those communities. And it's more about the human condition and also the ecological condition, too, that people gravitate towards benefiting. Yeah, it's nice to see that there's, say, for instance, a bigger coffee company like Black Rifle that holds dear to them giving back to the veteran community. Or even if you go as far as hydration companies and liquid IV and they supply kids and people in foreign countries that don't have clean water access, drinkable water. So it is bigger than just the business. Yeah, it's service above self, I believe, because that's the way this company was born. And when you put yourself in a mindset like that, you look around you a lot more and in doing that, a person will see the needs that specific communities or organizations may benefit from. So to piggyback on another conversation we had earlier about, like last week, the cold brew craze, to completely change the subject, how does cold brew contain 67% less acid than conventionally brewed coffee? Because when you put hot water on coffee, you're extracting everything out of it. When you put cold water on the coffee, there's no heat involved there, so you're just extracting the subtle nuances and the beautiful flavor that coffee has to offer. Well, that makes sense. And here's something else, because I find it important to say it, and it's, I guess you could call it Rio's rant. I was in Grand Forks this, well, last week, I guess, and I went to three coffee shops, right? Yes. And not a single one of them sold decaf coffee in drip. When you told me that story, I was absolutely dumbfounded, because when we had our kiosks, we always had a hot pot of freshly brewed decaf ready to go for the consumer. I couldn't believe it that there was no decaf offered at all. They all told me, well, we can give you a shot, or we can pull shots for you. It's like, no, I want a cup. And so then it led me to go to a gas station, and guess what? Of all places, they had decaf coffee. Was it good? It wasn't terrible. It wasn't great. But if it's the only place you're getting decaf, I guess you're going to drink it. Yeah. It's not something you'd think that specialty coffee shops would have, fresh decaf, and really have that as a badge of honor. I do in my company, I have cupped so many horrible decafs. Right now, we currently have this beautiful decaf from Peru, from crop to cup, no chemicals have been put on it, and it tastes like a real cup of coffee. It doesn't taste decaf. So through all these health benefits that we had talked about, does decaf provide the same ones as the caffeinated? Yeah, it still has the polyphenols and the chlorogenic acids in it, it just doesn't have the caffeine. So, is it the caffeine that, say, helps with the garden growth and the deterrence of the insects? Yeah. So the decaf coffee won't work for that? Not so much, no. Regular caffeinated coffee is a great mulch for your garden, too. So decaf is pretty much all you can really do with that is just drink it. That's it. Tastes great. Yeah. And, you know, the thing about that, I think some people think, well, decaf, that's disgusting coffee, it's not good. But I think that it all has to do in the way that it's treated from, like you would say, crop to cup. Yeah. Oh, exactly. Like, there's methylene chloride, hypercritical CO2, decaf methods along with a few other chemical ones, and then there's the Mexican and Swiss water process, which are natural. And some people say that decaf is even worse for you than regular. You know, that really depends on how it's been decaf and if there's been chemicals used in that process. But then again, when you hear about the chemical processes, they have a certain boiling point each chemical process does, and when you put it in a drum roaster like we use, that gets up to 450 degrees, sometimes more, but it's already burned off any chemical that would be on that product. But you don't use a chemically treated decaf. No. Uh-uh. And tell me, how exactly does decafing work? It's just a layer in the skin. The coffee seed itself has various layers, and the caffeine is in one of those layers, and it's gently lifted off. Like say, for example, you do the hypercritical CO2, where you turn CO2 gas into a liquid under extreme pressure. It will lift that layer of caffeine off of that bean. So then how does, say, the Swiss water process work? You just use pressurized water, and then that strips the layers off the bean until you get to the decaf portion? It's more of a water bath system, not a pressurized system. So you just let the bean sit in water until the skin starts peeling off? More or less. Okay. I figured it all out on my own. You did. Yeah. Well, it's kind of interesting as far as how that works, and then like we had discussed earlier, what they do with those, when they extract the caffeine, what they do with that caffeine is then they take it and put it in drinks, pops, energy drinks, food, you know. There's quite a bit of food that has coffee in it, too. Right. If you're working with like your meats that you'd like to marinate, a lot of people have started using coffee in those, and they use coffee ground rubs on their meat to tenderize it, and also a lot of desserts use coffee. Some of our favorite desserts use coffee, like coffee ice cream, for instance. Yeah, we have a great coffee ice cream. Yeah. Well, is there anything else that you can think of as far as what coffee it can be used for? I know we've gone over quite a bit. Health and beauty, gardening, food. What other item in the value? Health and wellness. Health and wellness. What other food in society can offer as much as coffee does to us? Yeah, and a lot of times people just think about it when they drink it that, you know, it's not my drink every morning, and that's about as far as it goes, but they don't really dive in deeper than that. You can use those grounds to make your garden better, to clean your pets, to even be able to stain things, say furniture, to be able to clean yourself even, exfoliate your skin. Yeah. And that's all just based off of keeping your grounds that you already used. Exactly. And here's the thing. I think as a society, we just kind of go through it daily, and we don't think a lot about what we're consuming. I know back in the early, my early days, it was just, you just go grab a cup of coffee. Nobody thought about what they were drinking. It's the second largest traded commodity in the world, right under oil, and nobody thinks about what they're drinking. Well, it's also the second most drank beverage in the world behind water. Yeah. And it's interesting. How do you think somebody came up with all of those things? They were drinking their coffee one day, and they're like, I wonder if I could clean Frodo using this. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. There's some scientists, probably read a scientific study. You and I are always reading up on stuff like that. Yeah, but I would have never guessed trying to clean a dog with it. Yeah. Just don't let them consume it. That's all. Yeah. Would they even try, you think? Oh, yeah. Where can people find more about you? Well, I think if they really want to check out our offerings and have something extremely special, they can go to MojoRoast.com. We're on Facebook, Mojo Roast. We're on threads. We're on Instagram, Mojo Roaster. We're on X. That's Mojo Roaster as well. Or Twitter. Whatever you want to call it. Or Twitter. Yeah, whatever you want to call it. But I think the most important thing to know is we will make sure that you'll be conscious consumers and know that in making a purchase from our company, it's not just helping an entrepreneur. It's also benefiting humanity. Like for example, we do giving hearts and we're working with the Micro Foundation, which we should get into a little more on our next podcast, I think. Yeah. Foundational work. Yeah. Our giving back. Our being a value-added benefit and making a footprint, making a difference. And how we live by our mission statement. Absolutely. And all of you listeners out there can help and know that your help is going to benefit so many other people. And I think it's intriguing to the concept to think that people that you'll never probably ever meet in your lifetime are going to benefit from your existence. All you got to do, drink a cup of coffee. That's it. Isn't that profound? It is. It is. You get it here. You get the right stuff and we'll get you on a good track and we're excited about this. So with that being said, this episode isn't a very long one, but I think that we've met some pretty important topics and we've discussed some pretty important things. For our consumers to be able to know that there's a lot more that coffee could be applied to. And if you ever run into one of these issues or if you ever run into wanting to use a coffee for something else, at least you have the base understanding of what it can provide. With that being said, we will conclude this episode of Coffee Break with Rio and Joe. Or Joe and Rio, it doesn't really matter how you guys want to say it. We thank everybody for listening and we look forward to next time.