 Hello, this is Carl Ackermann, host of Journeys of the Mind for Think Tech Hawaii. And we are so enthusiastic because we have Kevin McCaffrey, who is our wonderful guest today. And Kevin is quite a remarkable man. We're going to talk about his journeys of the mind, first in terms of broadcasting, then as a distinguished historian who actually went to the AP European reading on an annual basis. That's where we met. And third and most important first day's discussion is his newly established Papa Max Roastery. So Kevin, am I missing anything? You should tell me if I'm missing anything about your wonderful introduction and things like this. Carl, you've done a good job so far. I'll help you as we go along. The story is long. As you did in the reading. I remember, I remember. I think I should point out also about Kevin is that although we in Hawaii have Ren's aloha shirts, which both myself and the men's J. Fidel wear all the time when we're interviewing, but Kevin has one of the largest collections of aloha shirts of anyone in the world. And so that's an additional part of it. And of course, what he's wearing today is the symbol of his new roastery. OK, so Kevin, you did a lot of broadcasting early in your career. And from what you've told me, it's not only, I thought it was baseball, but it's really more. The majority of your broadcasting was swimming. And of course, and covering swim meets and big swim meets of professional college, et cetera. So my question to you is, and I've always wondered this about broadcasters, how do you keep all the information in your head to be a successful broadcaster? How do you remember all the bloody names that you're going to have to broadcast? Well, the higher the level, the more likely that the names are familiar to virtually everybody in the audience, and including me, the announcer. So that's a plus. But I do spend time before every meet, going over all the names, talking to coaches, or if they're not available, talking to other media people about what I need to do to make sure I get that name right. So there's a lot of preparation to go into that. And I think I mentioned to you earlier that one of the reasons I did it is that all my children were swimmers. And when they started as little kids, you were expected as an adult, as a parent, to volunteer in some way. So early on, this is back in the late 80s, early 90s, I volunteered as an official. So I was out on the swim deck wearing the white suit and the white shirt, white pants, calling kids for disqualifications and stuff like that. And it was fun, but it also was incredibly time consuming. So when the oldest child, Sean, got to high school and started swimming for the high school team, I'd go to a meet. But meets are kind of boring. So even when your kid is doing pretty well, your kid swims, you wait a half an hour, 40 minutes, your kid swims again. So I got kind of antsy after the first couple of meets and I asked the swim coach, if there was ever a need for somebody to come down and do the announcing for the meet, I'd love to do it. And so that was 1998. And I said, yes, they liked what I did. And then after that, things began to just explode because the high school I taught at, from my student where my children went to school and where I actually went to school back before dinosaurs roamed the earth, was a nationally known swim program and had been a national champion several times in the middle of the 20th century, a lot of success. So it was a great program and it was fun to be able to contribute to that as an announcer. So that's how it got started. Well, when does not think of Evanston or any place in the Chicago area as being sort of home of swimmers? Because having grown up in West LA, there's always great swimmers and water polo teams and of course Hawaii, of all ways. But can you talk a little bit about that? I mean, why swimming? Obviously we have the Great Lakes, but why swimming in Evanston? It seems, you know. You know, there's probably a couple of things going on there. Well, Evanston was one of the largest public high schools east of the Mississippi, maybe east of the Rockies. Just the way the city is organized, it only had one school for a city of 80,000. At one point there were about 5,400 kids in the building. This is not when my son got there, but it's a big school that had a big academic and athletic success track record. So there was kind of this built-in history. That's probably the best way to say it about the program. And actually several of the 1950 Olympians came from Evanston High School and several more came from our school's biggest rival, two suburbs to the north. So this area has kind of been pretty big for swimming in general, not water polo until recently. We've begun to produce some more water polo players, but yeah, California had the water polo thing locked up pretty early on. Well, and don't mind me, Carl, because there's never a bad time to drink a good cup of coffee. Can I just say that? Oh, you know what? I will join you then, okay? Here's, and this is from Starbucks, not from your Rosetree, but we'll talk about that. Cheers. Indeed. So I do have to talk to you because of course the World Series is coming up and we have four teams remaining, well at least until today maybe, we'll see. Well, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. So, you know, tell me a bit about your broadcasting in baseball because, you know, you think of the people like Ben Scully, you think of, you know, in your neighborhood, was it Harry Kerry or, you know? Well, both Harry Kerry, Jack Brickhouse did broadcasting for the Cubs at one point. Actually, Harry Kerry then he did some time with the socks. He did actually the way that I first was introduced to him, again, back a long, long time ago. My dad taught at the University of Illinois Champaign, which is in the middle of the state, you know, Chicago's North, St. Louis's South and Champaign's right in the middle. It was difficult to pick up the Cubs games back in those days when you listened to AM Radio at night. We could get the St. Louis games. So my mom, who was never much of a sports fan, loved listening to Harry because he was always way more exciting than most of the other broadcasters that she ever heard. So she kind of got excited. I was a baseball fan probably anyway from the get-go but listening to her get excited and then my dad telling me about Harry Kerry. And then when we moved here back in 1970, he wasn't here until the mid-80s, I think it was. But Jack Brickhouse was here who was kind of a legend of his own. So yeah, a lot of chances for me to hear and try to model even the smallest things based on some of these great announcers. Yeah, I have to point out because you mentioned your dad that for all our audience that Kevin's father was one of the foremost historians of Ireland from what I understand. But let's get back to you because I want to find out what was it like broadcasting baseball because we just mentioned some great broadcasters but it must have been just a joy. So yeah, because that was the sport that I grew up with. And even though I lived in the Midwest all but one year of my life so far, I mean, one year I lived on the East Coast but baseball was the sport. That's what I played, that's what I watched. And while I did watch other things, I was one of those kids who had statistics just floating through my head. I had them all memorized. So being able to watch baseball, we lived in Milwaukee when the Braves played there until 1968. Then we moved to East and came back here in 1970 and there's the Cubs and the Socks. It was fantastic to be growing up in a baseball household and it was the sport that you could count on to be either televised or for sure produced on radio. So like other kids my age, my little transistor radio, I stuck in my pocket with my ear clips trying to make sure the nuns didn't get mad at me for playing my darn radio in school. Well, so when you were broadcasting yourself, you just mentioned that you had to have statistics in your brain. And so, does this mean you have, if you're a broadcaster, you have to have some sort of affinity for math because it seems like a lot of... No, Carl, I think what you really, you might be a very mathematical kind of person, but I think you have to do is to understand how numbers and statistics both reflect and distort the picture on the field. So yeah, if a pitcher is able to throw 80% first pitch strikes, that's likely gonna mean something somewhere down the line. It's not an irrelevant statistic. Being able to calculate all sorts of things quickly in your head, that's nice. It's not necessary because if you're broadcasting a game, the chances are really good that you're gonna be given a media package or some sort of information sheet that preps you on some of these things. You could not, I don't think, unless you had some crazy computer system. You could not track all of these things, enter all this information and update yourself in real time. So announcing, it helps to have a good voice. It helps to, it really helps to enunciate well to show honest excitement, but it also helps to know what information you have and how to use that in the broadcast or in the transmission. Because information's great, but it's no good if you don't use it well. That's a very important point. So you also, I've talked now about your broadcasting and you mentioned swimming and baseball, but you come from a history family. Is that what grew you to teaching history? And I have to point out to all our viewers that Kevin and I both attended the AP European History Reading and Kevin always had a table and his table was not far from mine often. And he would bring such good snacks for all of his readers who were all jealous. But okay, but what was your attraction to history? Why European history of all subjects? And maybe you taught more at US history, I don't know, but what track did you do to history? Well, part of my life story that you probably don't know is when I graduated college, I had no plan and backed my way into a 15 year career in insurance. And when I got to my mid to late 30s and that was petering out and I didn't like it and I didn't, even though the money was good, I didn't like the lifestyle, I became a teacher in my late 30s and it was easy. My dad was a teacher. My mom had trained to be a teacher before we kids started coming along. My wife's side of the family, lots of teachers, some of my friends, teachers. So when I made the decision in my late 30s to become a high school teacher, it was not a hard decision to make. I mean, I had the facts. I had a pretty good idea what to expect and boom, because of my dad, because of his background, his friends, his work both in Ireland, Northern Ireland and here in the States. It was pretty easy to decide to be a history teacher. I do also have the capability in Illinois and most States to teach English literature too, but history was the big thing because I heard it, I lived it, I was very much a part of it. Side note, I don't know how well you know folk music groups, but one of the most famous of the folk music renaissance or craze in the late 50s and 60s was the Clancy Brothers. And the Clancy Brothers were friends of my dad. And so I met them, I was pretty young when I met them, but I also met indirectly at the age of four years old, Roger Ebert, one of the most famous movie critics of all time when we crashed a party at our house. So history was in the blood. And I got to the high school where I went to school, where my kids had just started going to school and I was fortunate enough to land a position as a high school history teacher. And it was the best thing for me. I mean, it was who I was and what I wanted to do. You know, and judging from the way the people that sat at your table responded to you, I'm sure, I mean, I'm sure that your kids loved you and they were probably very sorry to see you retire. So there we go. I did have, I think a pretty good rapport with most of my students. And over the 20 years that I was a teacher at that high school, I had probably 21, 2200 students in total. I think I could count on one hand and probably only on a couple of fingers, students with whom I had a very difficult relationship. And so I think I did pretty well. And starting as a midlife person, starting in my late thirties, I found talking to parents way easier than 22 and 23 year olds. So I had a lot of advantage of just going into the job. And I felt I took advantage of my willingness to be honest and open and funny. Sometimes sarcastic, you know, you can't be too sarcastic with third graders, but high schoolers, you can sometimes get away with sarcasm. This is true. This is true and sarcasm, I think it's part of our field. And so is, you know, telling corny jokes. I think that this is all part of the process. But I now want to focus on your new career. And you know, I've, you have a new Roastery and you may want to talk about it. And if we have any graphics for that Roastery, if someone could put it up, there we go. Papa Max Roastery. And with you and that Aloha shirt and with that hat on. So that's absolutely wonderful. So why don't you just tell us about this transition? So this is the third of your life journeys. And I'm very interested in it. And I drank your coffee and it's really good. So the shortest version of this long story is I've been drinking coffee since freshman year in college when I thought that this would, drinking coffee would help me stay up all night to do all the nighters to prepare for final exams. So for a long time, I drank bad coffee or I made good coffee poorly. It was about three or four years ago when I decided, when I knew that I went, once I had retired, I've been retired since 18, I decided that I wanted to take my interest in coffee to another level. And it took me about a year or so after retirement to start kind of figuring out what I might think about doing in about two and a half years ago, probably late 2020. As we were building this new space by garage which is more than just a garage. It's an amazing space. I began to think about what I wanted to do post teaching retirement. And I started thinking, well, I like coffee. I like good coffee. This is a place here in Chicago where there are a ton, I mean a ton of small coffee shops. And even in the pandemic, while many didn't make it, many stayed. And so within five, six miles of my house, I can probably lay claim to saying that there are well over 300, maybe 400 small coffee shops, not Starbucks and not the disparage Starbucks. But if you take Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts and Caribou out, there are still 400 places that are either little cafes, bakery cafes, small little restaurants that's focused on coffee. So I took my interest, took my desire to do something different but not in some ways, not all that much different. Cause I'm actually teaching some things I will be teaching some things pretty soon with the people who've helped me learn about coffee. I took all that interest, that passion and by the way, Carl and for listeners who may or may not know much about coffee, there's a tremendous amount of history, some of it pretty ugly history tied up with coffee, especially in Central America. And I don't know how much we'll have time to get into but one of my products is a coffee produced by a totally women's owned women produced women worked co-op and it's amazing coffee from Guatemala. So I took the history, the passion for coffee, the interest of doing something and decided, okay, how can I make a business of it? And about two years ago, I discovered a firm in a suburb a little ways away. The husband and wife who run the firm are big names in the coffee industry like people in Hawaii probably know these people. I contacted them, they were not only interested in helping me but they actually teach classes and they advise small companies and they do safety checks and they do OSHA things. So I have gone down a gazillion rabbit holes in coffee in the last couple of years and I've decided I really like doing this whether or not I can make something bigger than what I have, I'm not sure but I'm loving it, many of my neighbors love it. My better half doesn't drink coffee and I don't drink pop so she's not much of a taste tester but she's at least indulged me in this coffee venture I'm on. So explain the process, Kevin. Do you like then import the beans to your house like in big bags like you'd see in some of the coffee shops I attend and they put them up as sort of displays and just explain the process. Yeah, so I buy green unroasted beans from one of several, actually there are probably two dozen large coffee importers. The one I use is mostly in New York although it has a West Coast presence. I take the beans, they come here, you're correct. The normal look is to have these 130 pound bags of green beans. I don't buy them in that size, I buy them in half size, 65 pound boxes, that's still a lot. And since we're not showing places, I've got probably on both sides of me 800, 900 pounds of unroasted coffee and probably 200 pounds of roasted coffee. I take it, I put it into my roaster which is, again, you've not seen it but it's a small, small by comparison I think, small machine I'm gonna get in trouble for this probably but go off a blur just for a second and let's see if we can see some of those machines. Will we be able to see them? I think we can. Oh, there we go. Yeah. Yeah. Right, yeah, you can, if you can see the silvery things to the, I guess it would be your right of that blue Lama Raina bag. Right. So, what's going on? And if you go back on blurb whenever you're here. I'm going right now. Great that we got to see it. Yep. So, Carl, what that is, it's called a fluid bed. It heats air with a fan that blows the beans up and around and they constantly go up and come down, up and come down and they get heated. And depending on what I want to do with that bean, I might roast them in that machine for 10 minutes, 12 minutes, maybe as long as 14 or 15 minutes and they'll come out medium dark, like sort of medium brown or come out very dark brown and almost black and oily. And depending on where the beans from, I might apply the heat intensely early on and then back off or I might start slowly and ramp it up near the end. There are a lot of different ways. I am learning. Oh my gosh, am I learning? All the intricacies of how to best roast some of these amazing beans. Because I get my beans from, well, there are probably 42 or 43 countries that grow coffee. They're mostly all equatorially located countries. I'm probably getting coffee routinely from 20 or 22 of them and a coffee bean is not the same as a coffee bean, it's not the same as a coffee bean. It looks the same. It may smell many ways the same when it's unroasted, but I need to do a lot of work to get it to where I wanna be. And so you can't see it and that's no problem. I've got three or four plastic bags of Ugandan coffee that I've roasted in different levels to see which one comes out with the most memorable taste. I mean, they all gonna taste good but some of them are gonna be more memorable with others. So I get the beans, I roast them and then it's my job to get them to my individual customers or more and more looking for wholesale customers. So let's say I wanna buy your beans. How does one go about doing that? Well, if you know me, then of course you're familiar with where I live or with my website, but if you go on the website and you can, I don't know if you're allowed to show too much. No, no, that's good. We should show it again, the website. And maybe go, yeah. It's just papamexroastery.org. There it is. It's got a full site. Right now I'm offering 15 coffees. Five or six of them are single origin. That is there just one kind of bean. Five or six of them are blended coffees that I have made through mixing and matching. Then there's some espresso and a decaf that gets me to 14 or 15. So you can go there, you can do the order. As you'll notice, some of the coffees have funny names. I have two very naughty golden retrievers. They have been the inspiration for one of my blends. It's called Naughty Dogs. But you go there, you order. I can ship. If you're in the area, I can deliver for prettier people pick up. Obviously, Carl, I'm gonna be shipping to you because driving to your location would be a bit impractical. Well, I have one last question for you, Kevin. This is, so explain, why are you're heating the beans, but that doesn't produce the jump. What produces the jump in the beans when they're up in the air? I mean, do you have a blower in there? Well, almost all roasters, you have to move the bean around, because if you leave it in one place under heat, it will scorch and burn, and you'll either get a fire, which is bad, or you'll just ruin the bean. So in my case, I have essentially a big blower underneath that blows the beans up about six inches off the bottom. The heat stays constant. And as the beans go up and cool, they come back down the heat up and cool. They stay pretty warm once you get about halfway through the cycle, but you don't want the bean to sit on the heat. It will start a fire, I've had that before, or it will ruin the bean. So it's basically floating through hot air. So I'm gonna ask you a difficult question, and if you don't know the answer to this, I certainly don't. But so is it the more of where the bean comes from, or is it the process of roasting that will most determine the flavor of the coffee? Truthfully, and I'm not dodging you, it's both. For instance, I have some beans from Ethiopia that the best way to roast those beans is to what's called the light medium or no more than a medium roast. And when you do that, you're going to get a fruit flavor taste in your coffee, which startles people if you're not used to it. Myugandan coffee, there's a hint of fruit, but it's much more earthy. There's a dark chocolate flavor. So I can do the same, I can take five beans, do them exactly the same way, everything the same, and they're gonna come out significantly differently, or if they're from different parts of the world. So the answer is both. Okay, and probably the most difficult question I'm gonna ask you is, is there a thread through your journeys in life? Is there a thread that connects your coffee roasting to your history teaching, to your broadcasting? And if there's a thread, it may be that all produced from strict nuns when you were going to elementary school or something. No, I don't know. Is there a thread? You know, actually, Carl, that's a really great question. I mean, your questions are all been great, but that one's really great because that one didn't occur to me until I got to this part of my journey. All my employment that I considered to be a part of my career has been about being in big industries that serve lots of people that are really important to lots of people. The insurance industry, big and important. Not always love, but big and important. Teaching, big, not always love, but big and important. Well, coffee is not necessarily the same service oriented, but if you think about coffee now, it's still a humongous part of the world. And you know, it's the second most valuable traded commodity behind oil in world markets. So in a sense, my journey has been big industries that deal with lots of people that if done right, impact people very positively. This one just happens to be maybe less socially organized, but considering the history around world coffee, you know, maybe I can have a hand into being part of a positive thing. Well, that's a perfect way to end. Thank you, Kevin McCaffrey, for your three journeys of the mind. And we shall both say together on the count of three, aloha. One, two, three, aloha.