Coffee with Alex Kaplan

On innovation in the coffee industry, sustainable energy, and why caring about drinking good coffee is key to the good life

Alex Kaplan is a junior studying Physics and Sustainable Energy at Princeton University. He has an unending passion for coffee and entrepreneurship as vectors to change the world. Through his first coffee venture at 16 selling roasted coffee subscriptions to parents at his high school, he has since expanded his work to become a rising coffee entrepreneur. As one of the world's youngest certified Q Graders, he started the Princeton Coffee Club – a student-run, specialty coffee shop at Princeton University.

Journey

What are you up to these days?

These days, I am writing a senior thesis on a project to turn natural gas into hydrogen via photocatalytic degradation. I'm designing a quantum cascade laser, at 3.4 micrometers for photocatalytic degradation of methane for hydrogen production. The idea is, you could plug a little box with a laser on it underneath your stove in your natural gas pipeline, and it would zap all of the methane and pull the carbon off and then you would burn clean hydrogen and not emit any greenhouse gases for the 10% of heating and residential natural gas use that emits 10% of greenhouse gases. I'm also working at Cometeer, which is a coffee startup that makes the most precisely and consistently extracted coffee in the world from super high quality specialty coffee roasters, and then sends you a box of little frozen capsules of these coffees. I think it's going to change how we all drink coffee because it's really delicious and really easy.

Are you currently drinking Cometeer?

I am, I only drink Cometeer now. I'm drinking a coffee from a farm called Monte Carlos in El Salvador roasted by George Howell. George Howell is one of the founding roasting partners of Cometeer. We're very lucky to get to purvey some of his really unique offerings that he scours the world to find. Then we extract it using the world's most advanced coffee extraction machine, freeze it and send it to you.

Your passion for the coffee industry really shines through. But, I have to ask on the flip side, if you weren't currently working in the coffee industry, what would you be doing with your time?

That's a great question. My experience at Princeton is heavily bifurcated into my academic life, and then my non academic life. Almost all of my non academic life revolves around coffee. But the things I study in classes mostly center around basic research and solid state physics for renewable energy applications. It's a field that I think is really cool because the pipeline from basic research to commercialization is extremely short. It's like one year from a new battery in the lab to in a car. There's so much really exciting stuff happening. It's a very vibrant field, and you can really approach it with whatever you're interested in. 

I've been lucky to get to do amazing independent research on organic solar cells, which could be an incredibly cheap way to spray organic chemicals onto glass and allow them to be photovoltaics. On solid state surface interface engineering for solid state electrolytes in batteries that could allow you to use lithium metal, which has a much higher energy density. And then as I was saying, this senior thesis on methane photocatalytic degradation, the very specially designed laser. So these things are all very exciting to me, because I think there's a huge realization that there has to be a global push for decarbonisation over the next 10 to 15 years. There are many mature technologies that are ready to be implemented. And then there are many, which we don't know how to do yet, but we know we need to figure out. And there's thousands and thousands of really smart people working on these problems and just so much room for creativity and innovation. So that's the other thing that I'm really excited about, and that I spend a lot of my time on.

You seem to have a very good understanding and background in physics and are very interested in sustainability. So that's your more academic side, how do you see your more academic interest meshing with your coffee interests in the future?

I think that studying physics has allowed me to approach coffee in a somewhat more rigorous way. I think that the specialty coffee industry gets a bad but not necessarily undeserved rap, as just hipsters with mustaches brewing coffee in fancy cafes. And it's too bad because the beans that are coming into cafes are the highest quality coffee beans ever sourced and roasted in the world. We want to make the experience of drinking the coffee approachable and enjoyable and delicious. But a lot of it ends up being paying $4 for a cup of coffee where $2 of that is going to the rent of this fancy cafe. So anyways, the point of this is that I think that there's a lot of room for specialty coffee for rigorous understanding of what contributes to a higher quality flavor and really makes great coffee that has not yet really been approached rigorously. We're starting to see in coffee extraction, naturally brewing coffee, more research now on what parameters influence the brewing with what degree of correlation. But there's still a ton of room in coffee roasting, and especially in fermentation and coffee processing, which is a totally new field that there's a ton of research in right now that I'm excited about. In general, studying physics has allowed me to try to question the underlying assumptions and structures of the science and mechanics of coffee in a way that I'm excited about, because I think there's a lot that we can improve there.

How did you initially get into coffee and what captivated you about coffee?

I've always loved science experiments. My dad got this book of 100 science experiments you must do at home. Every Friday we would do a science experiment. There are all these fun ones, like putting a candle in a pan of water, pressure collapsing a soda can in boiling water, these really fun things. So when I was in middle school and high school, I was always looking for ways that I could do fun science experiments on the side. My freshman year of high school, my physics teacher started advertising this coffee roasting workshop where you do experiments with coffee beans, and you put them in a little roaster and see what happens. I didn't drink coffee at the time, but I liked physics a lot and it sounded like a fun science experiment. So I joined his coffee roasting workshop. 

There were six or seven students. We would roast coffee once a week. We had a Thursday morning meeting at 7am before school started where we would brew the coffee and talk about coffee roasting and learn about coffee. It was way cooler than I'd ever imagined. There was this enormous rabbit hole of information to get into. I thought the roasting was so fun. It takes 10-12 minutes to roast a batch of coffee. And it makes these noises and smells really incredible like caramel and popcorn and sounds cool. You can see the colors changing. So it's a very fun science experiment. I really fell into this rabbit hole of coffee roasting. 

So every study hall, I started roasting coffee on a little miniature home coffee roasting machine. We had some extra green coffee beans leftover, I would just roast a bunch of them, and then brew a pot and serve it around to the crowd. I would have a little sip of it. And usually I didn't like it. But I started to notice the differences and roasts. So I got really into coffee roasting. I helped run the workshop the next year. And then I wanted to get into it a little bit more intensely, so I worked as an apprentice to a master coffee roaster in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at a cafe called Devocion. I started to learn the fundamentals of coffee roasting at a production scale and I kept going from there. I  turned this coffee roasting club into a business where we sold subscriptions to parents and they could pick up student roasted coffee. 

When I got to college, I wanted to start a cafe. First I started a club of students where we would just make coffee for people and do coffee tastings, and then we turned it into a coffee shop. It’s called The Coffee Club. That went pretty well. We had some delicious coffee, great vibes. It was  my perfect cafe. I think a lot of other people liked it too. 

Then I got a grant from Princeton to study coffee at the professional level for a summer. I've always dreamed of this thing called the Q Grader, which is a certification for tasting coffee, kind of like sommelier certifications they have in wine. It sounded really cool and really hard. When I got this grant from Princeton, I was like, well this Q Grader is really expensive. And I got this money to do something with coffee. So I might as well try it.  It's a six day long series of sensory tests of  smelling different things and tasting different things. There's these cups with one drop of salt water, and one drop of sour water. And you have to say which is which. All these pretty tricky tests over six days to certify you as a Q coffee grader. So I took the test, and there's about two or 3000 q graders in the world. And I ended up passing. I think 50% of people pass typically. Then I got the Q grader, and I was one of the youngest Q graders in the world. Then I spent the rest of that summer learning about coffee fermentation in Quindío, Colombia, which is a coffee growing region of Colombia with this amazing social business coffee exporting farm called Raw Material, at their experimental, super high quality farm called El Fenix. I was able to learn a lot about coffee fermentation. I ran 24 experiments of different fermentation styles on Castillo and Bourbon coffees, and was able to use my kind of coffee grading experience to notice all the differences in them. And then I joined Cometeer.

Are you still the youngest Q Grader?

No, there's actually this crazy story of Frankie Volkema, who was 14 years old when she got her Q in 2020. For her coffee ran in the family. That was a cool story. 

On Coffee

In 10 years from now, what do you want to see happen in the coffee industry?

So here's the problem. About 70% of people drink coffee every day. And about 95-98% of coffee that people drink is what we would categorize as in some way defective. It's a little bit pretentious to say that. But really, a lot of coffee in the world has been roasted very, very dark to mask any problems with low quality farming and production, or is also often stale by the time you drink it. And these two problems contribute to a huge decrease in quality for the coffee that almost everyone drinks. 

So if you get super fresh roasted coffee beans they are going to taste unlike very stale coffee beans. And then if you get really well roasted coffee beans, you're going to allow the flavor of the coffee to shine through much better. But unfortunately, most people treat coffee as a caffeine delivery device. Which is great because it is and that's nice that we can do that. But there's so much richness in flavor that is being lost because people don't really care for a coffee that tastes good. And what we've developed as a society are ways of getting around this bad taste, which is that you should just put cream and sugar and milk and syrups into coffee because it tastes bad. The proof of this is that if you give a child a cup of coffee, they think it tastes disgusting. And they are correct. It is gross. We just learned to drink it and end up masking it with milk and sugar or just socialize ourselves to drinking this really bad thing. 

So my hope for the specialty coffee industry, the coffee industry as a whole, is that people start demanding coffee that tastes good. And it's quite difficult to do that. It requires a lot of dedication throughout the supply chain to improve quality. Oftentimes that improved dedication comes with much higher prices for the people struggling in that supply chain and a more sustainable approach to growing, procuring, producing, roasting coffee writ large. So in essence, what I'm asking for is what we think of in the coffee industry as the decommodification of coffee where people are buying coffee for the flavor of the unique bean the way you might buy a bottle of wine rather than buying coffee as a bitter drink that we use in the morning to wake us up.

Coffee travels thousands of miles to get on our tables - from Kona, Hawaii, from Kenya, from the Arabian Peninsula. What is your response to critics who question the impact on the environment that comes from transporting coffee beans from farm to table from producer to consumer?

The average cup, it's quite remarkable. The average coffee you drink, over 100 people have touched that coffee before you drink it. There's so much work that goes into growing the trees, harvesting the cherries, processing the cherries, fermenting the cherries, washing the cherries, bringing them to the mill, dry mill, export grade qualification, packaging, shipping, transport, roasting, brewing. And it is a very fragmented supply chain. In terms of the embedded carbon emissions of transport, it's a very difficult problem. 

There's two ways you could think about approaching a solution for it. One is, should we grow coffee closer to home? It's an interesting idea, there's some coffee production in California now. But costs about $100 per pound of coffee from the farms in California, because they are generally very wealthy coffee farmers who have access to super high quality production and make very high quality products, and charge a hefty premium for their services and profit margins. Whereas the global coffee industry, the average price around the world for a pound of coffee is about $1. So it's much more expensive to grow coffee closer to home. It could work, it probably will have to be industrialized in some way. But it's very hard to industrialize coffee growing, because it grows on mountainside rain forests. 

The other option is how can we reduce the embedded emissions of transportation? And I think this is a problem which coffee plays a very small role in. It's one of the top 10 most traded commodities on Earth. But in terms of kilograms transported per year, it's it's minute fraction. So from a sustainability perspective, I am excited by what solutions  we can have for global scale transportation emissions reduction, especially with shipping. I think that it's a very difficult problem, we haven't figured it out yet. 

To me, it sounds like there are only two things that are really feasible – batteries are not really feasible for ships, because you can't get enough energy density. And they're very expensive at that capacity.

The only two options that can have the required energy density to go on a ship and not slow it down are some kind of alternative fuels. One of them is biofuels, and the other is hydrogen. We haven't really figured out either one yet. Biofuels may be able to be a drop in replacement, with much lower greenhouse gas emissions because they're sucked up at the farm and then emitted out for generally net zero besides processing. Hydrogen doesn't emit greenhouse gases, but we haven't commercialized a low cost way to produce hydrogen in a way that doesn't emit greenhouse gases yet. There are some methods like electrolysis that are too expensive. I think methane thermocatalytic degradation could be another way. 

I don't know how to solve transportation emissions. There's a lot of people thinking about it. I think in coffee, we are subject to the whims of global market forces and larger economic incentive structures. But I'm hopeful that alternative fuels can start to power shipping vessels.

This demand for coffee is nearly never ending in human society. What do you think makes coffee so captivating? It lives forever in the human imagination, what do you think about coffee makes it that way?

There's a very romantic aspect of coffee. It's really a remarkable liquid. There's so many great books that have looked at how coffee has impacted world history and its place in our society. One of these funny tidbits of stories is that right before the Enlightenment period, in Europe and especially in England, you couldn't drink water because it would give you cholera. So if you wanted hydration, you'd either drink beer or wine because they were fermented, so they didn't have bacteria. Little did the British know, you could boil the water and kill cholera. But they didn't really have any reason to boil the water, until coffee came along! This drink, made with boiled water and beans from a place they called Arabia, was very exotic, and people started drinking coffee. It gave them this huge caffeine boost, first of all, but second of all, people weren't drinking beer at 10am every day anymore. There's this huge shift in the intellectual capability of the nation, as coffee started to replace beer as the drink of choice throughout the day. Many people have linked this shift in consumption towards the whole enlightenment period in Europe. The intellectualism that sprouted across Western Europe is really linked to the fact that people started drinking this beautiful beverage of coffee that made you smarter. 

I think that coffee continues to play a large role in life, primarily because caffeine is the world's most socially acceptable, common and beneficial psychoactive drug. It's addictive, but it turns out to be very good for you as well. Besides caffeine, the chemical composition of coffee is strictly beneficial for your health. But really, we drink this coffee, and it just gets us going. So I think the reason coffee still plays a large role in our culture is because of caffeine.

Since the 1980s, this creation of the coffee shop in our cultural discourse created the idea of a third space to meet people, that's not work or home. That is really valuable. It's something we've lost in COVID, that I've missed a lot, just being able to hang out at coffee shops with people. I think that's a big part of coffee in our everyday life as well. But really, it is a great thing to drink. It's very fun, makes you smarter.

Coffee consumption has increased during COVID. What are the long term effects of COVID on coffee consumption, and on the socializing around coffee? What's your hypothesis there?

The biggest thing that happened in COVID, is if you want to start making coffee at home, you have to spend a bunch of money. Usually it's kind of annoying, because you can't figure out which one's the right one to buy. And the good ones are all really expensive. The Aeropress is cheaper, but you need to grind the coffee or you can buy ground coffee, which goes stale very quickly. So what happened was a lot of people made this one time capital investment to buy coffee brewing stuff. Once you make that investment you can make coffee at home for a 10th of the cost of buying coffee at a cafe. But unfortunately, it's very hard to brew coffee. This is a thing that I go on for many hours about. Brewing coffee is an enormously complex set of chemical diffusion reactions that are extracting soluble flavors from coffee beans into a liquid. We have these heuristics for how we could do it with pouring water over grounds and a filter. Really, it's very hard to dial in the correct extraction profile to get the really good flavors out of coffee and not really bad flavors. Cafes are really good at brewing coffee. Whereas a really incredible home coffee grinder, maybe $250 and that's for the top line ones, the common ones are like $100 or so. A cafe has a $1,000 coffee grinder behind the bar and the grinder plays a huge role in the quality of the eventual brew. 

So that's one part of it. A lot of people are brewing coffee at home. That's probably a long term thing. But will cafes continue to exist? Almost certainly. People love coffee shops. Coffee shops play a central role in urban life in America because of their functioning as a third space outside of work and home. A lot of people like going to coffee shops as a break. Even during COVID, a lot of coffee shops are able to stay in business just as a takeout place, which to me indicates the veracity of this urge to just go outside and do something. Coffee shops are oftentimes a great place for that. 

One of the really big problems with COVID is that most of the small cafes didn't really have the capital to stay in business, because they were just hammered by a lack of customers. The disappointing thing for me is that we're very likely to see not exactly monopolization but in some sense cannibalization by larger coffee and cafe chains like Starbucks or Blue Bottle that are well positioned to absorb economic shocks and have the cash reserves to get through it. Whereas your local coffee shop is just really struggling and don't know if they can pay back all of their depths they took out over the last year.

Lightning Round

What's the biggest innovation occurring in the coffee industry today?

Cometeer.

Why?

We've totally revolutionized how to extract coffee. And we've made specialty coffee easier than ever to drink at its best flavor.

What are the incentives for innovation in the space?

70% of people drink coffee every day. It's an enormous market. Almost all coffee in the world tastes really, really bad. So there's a huge amount of area for improvement, but it's really hard to make good coffee. It requires a lot of subject matter expertise. But there's a huge market if you can access it.

Are there any innovations in business models? You mentioned that during your apprenticeship, you did some innovation there. What's the biggest innovation in business models so far?

Most of the innovation in the coffee business has come with how coffee is purchased from farmers, with the realization that roasters have to commit to longer term buying contracts in order to make investment in quality sustainable, because it's very expensive to produce higher quality coffee. So these kinds of long term contracts have really revolutionized how quality can be created at coffee farms.

You mentioned that coffee is a fragmented supply chain. You have a magic wand - what's one thing you would change?

If I could change one thing in coffee, I would give every coffee producer an internet connection.

Do you think coffee is healthy?

Yes. It's actually one of the healthiest things in the world. It's incredible.

Do you consider coffee a drug?

No, but it has psychoactive effects. I don't consume it as a drug, I consume it for pleasure and enjoyment. But I can't deny that it has psychoactive effects.

Robotics plus coffee. Is that a thing or not a thing?

No, these robot coffee makers cost a million dollars each. So you can't ever amortize it effectively. So the startups are all failing now.

On the Future

10 years from now, obviously we cannot predict the twists and turns of the future, but what do you want to be doing?

The thing I want to do after coffee is chocolate. I've been learning a lot about chocolate recently. My hypothesis about this is that no one has ever made a good bar of chocolate before, it's very hard to make chocolate. The problems with coffee are just exaggerated tenfold in the chocolate industry. I think there's a ton of room for really exciting innovation, cacao quality and procurement, but it's very hard to do. The really big problem with chocolate is that, a really bad cup of coffee tastes terrible. But a really bad bar of chocolate, like a Hershey's bar actually kind of tastes pretty good. So it's tough to get people to switch to higher quality products in that space.

Last question, what is some advice you would give your younger self?

I still try to be my younger self. I still think of myself as a kid. I think just, keep at it, stay driven. Don't let the problems bog you down. It's easy when you're in a rabbit hole to just feel overwhelmed by things. But it's worth it. And it's really fun. So keep going.

That's good advice. And I guess stay childish, stay open and playful and all that.

Well, that's the advice I give to my current self.