It seems like whatever your interest is, there’s a show revolving around it. Baking, pottery, glassblowing, climbing, Legos, real housewiving, all have their own dedicated programming. Not so much for coffee though, save for Todd Carmichael’s early 2010’s TV series Dangerous Grounds, which was maybe more of a Bear Grylls-ized version of the reality of coffee buying.
Luckily for those looking for coffee entertainment in the reality/travelogue vein, there’s Coffee Breath, a brand-new coffee series on YouTube. Highlighting the people and places of the global coffee culture, Coffee Breath wants to bring the inner workings of specialty coffee to the homes of coffee nerds and noobies alike.
Coffee Breath is the brainchild of Jason “Double J” Johnson, the co-founder of Black Rabbit Service Company, a coffee equipment sales, repair, and consultation service based in Portland and Los Angeles. Working alongside Field Theory Pictures, Johnson wants Coffee Breath to “fill the gaps in the food and travel doc. category in television,” he tells Sprudge. “I’ve been lucky that my work in coffee has taken me all over the world and there are many people and places I’m excited to have on the show. However, we wanted to change up the traditional travel show format and mix in topical episodes as well, so not every episode will be focused on a city.”
Straddling that line between food and travel shows, each episode will center around a different topic, some will be city-focused while others will tackle a specific subject in the world of specialty coffee industry. Per Johnson, future episodes will be set in Los Angeles, New York, Amsterdam, and Rome, while others will delve deeper into roasting, food in coffee shops, coffee drinks, and equipment. In each episode Johnson will be joined by a guest (or guests) with a particular expertise in the topic.
For the pilot episode, currently viewable on the Coffee Breath website, Johnson takes viewers inside his hometown of Portland, Oregon, where he interviews cafe owners like Deadstock’s Ian Williams, Upper Left’s Katherine Harris, Phuong Tran of Ridgefield, WA’s Lava Java, and Matthew Vinci of the Fresh Pot as well as Johnson’s Black Rabbit co-founder Alex Lambert and Portland poet Matthew Dickman.
The regularity with which Coffee Breath episodes will be released remains up in the air, but Johnson plans for the first season to have five or six episodes; he currently has 20 episodes storyboarded.
So if you’ve blasted through all your favorite shows and you are looking for something that speaks to your interests—those interests being coffee—check out Coffee Breath. For more information, visit Coffee Breath’s official website.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
