The Rise and Fall of an Instant Espresso Bar With Bailey Manson of Intelligentsia Coffee

Garrett Oden (00:01.564)
All right, Bailey, welcome to the podcast.

Bailey (00:04.321)
Thanks for having me.

Garrett Oden (00:06.634)
Alrighty, so I first heard about the Illumination Bar in 2022 when there was some coverage around the opening and how you were using instant espresso as opposed to pulling shots with an espresso machine. And I think you were using your standard black cat espresso only as the instant, and that was the basis for all your espresso-based drinks. I was really bullish on instant.

Specialty at the time. We just had sudden coffee was doing well voila was was having a good time and Swift cup I think was was coming around at that time as well. So there was a lot of optimism around instant specialty But I had not seen anybody doing this in a cafe setting and it was so you know So fascinating to see that that this was happening and that it was an intelligentsia and not some sort of like, you know random you know gonna throw things at the wall type brand that you know what

That might have nothing to lose, you know, if it were to go south So I knew I knew I had to get you on the podcast because this is so fascinating and you know There’s a lot of other things that you are doing at the illumination bar that are atypical and I think there’s a lot to learn about the kind of experiments y’all are doing

Bailey (01:21.878)
Yeah, it was a wild idea. It still seems crazy that we did that. But there was a logic to it, you know? And so, yeah, I’m happy to discuss it.

Garrett Oden (01:38.602)
Well, I wanna talk all about illumination bar, but I wanna start with you because you’re the director of innovation at Intelligencia. And that’s not a typical role to have at most coffee companies. So I wanna hear a little bit about what’s the 60 second recap of your coffee career before you found yourself in this innovation role.

Bailey (01:58.944)
Yeah, I started in retail. So I was drinking coffee in college so I could write papers and then was kind of had a hobby relationship with it. It was like, maybe I should get a job in this and try it because it was 2010 and it was hard to get jobs. And so.

did that and then I was like, hey, I think I want to make a career out of this. And so I moved and tried to get in at a place that had more upward mobility in telly and.

got in at the bottom basically, I was bar backing, washing dishes, but I needed to make more money because I had all this student loan debt. so, yeah, I I look back on my career and I was really in the right place at the right time so many times. I think a lot of it is just being really lucky. I’m really grateful for that. I do think that when opportunities presented themselves, I did bet on myself and say yes, even if I didn’t know

how I was gonna pull it off and just kept pushing and got here. And a big part of it has been being in communication with Intelli the whole time and saying, I’m thinking about this, I want this and having a really long game, talking about ideas years in advance in some cases, like, and so being able to do that together.

Yeah, I don’t know how we pulled it off, but yeah, that’s how we got here basically.

Garrett Oden (03:35.721)
So what was your role directly before you became director of innovation? How did that transition go?

Bailey (03:41.894)
was like, it was like manager of innovation or something like that. It was just like a, almost like a test role sort of. So, and I think before that it was like education and service program manager, which was mostly focused on what we were doing in retail with our education program and then just coffee service in general. And so it’s just, and then before that was educator. So it’s been like a gradual move that way where.

from retail always being kind of focused on like brewing type stuff and then product stuff? Yeah, is that answering the question?

Garrett Oden (04:18.493)
Yeah, so going from like retail to product development, you know, that’s not like the standard, the next rung up the ladder. That’s kind of like a horizontal move. How did that happen?

Bailey (04:29.226)
Yeah, that was again a serendipity. So I don’t really know how my name came up, but we had been working on developing a coffee concentrate. So we have today a bag and box coffee concentrate and we sell it to a lot of wholesale accounts. It’s what we serve as our cold coffee in our coffee bars. We no longer brew cold brew. We haven’t for many years at this point. And

that product had just been developed by a number of people who were just doing what they could to piece it together. And then it existed and it was 100 % Yirgachev and people were like, this is not gonna work. And so they needed it to become, we needed it to become like an annual, a year round blend.

Garrett Oden (05:12.905)
You

Bailey (05:18.986)
And so Jeff just called me and was like, hey, here’s this problem. Everyone is so busy. Do you think, and I was still an educator in Venice, so could you do this? Could you turn this bib into a year round blend? And that’s a good example of me saying, yeah, totally. And I have no idea how I’m going to do this, but I’m just saying yes. Yeah. That was my first product development project. Yeah.

Garrett Oden (05:47.731)
Who’s Jeff, if the listener doesn’t know?

Bailey (05:48.878)
Jeff Watts, who’s like, you know, synonymous with the intelligentsia, you know, the one who conceived of direct trade. I had the, again, fortunate opportunity to be largely trained by Jeff when it comes to sensory work. He was based in LA at the time when I was an educator and I got to work with him every Friday for years.

That’s an amazing thing. Jeff’s trained cupbers all around the world, so there’s a lot of us that get to say that he trained us, but it is an amazing opportunity to have had, for sure.

Garrett Oden (06:24.733)
great. So how long were you in an innovation and product development role before the idea for the illumination bar came up?

Bailey (06:34.542)
Oh man, so I think I finally was no longer based in a retail location middle of 2017. And then Illumination Bar was a 2020 idea. Yeah, so it’s about three years.

Garrett Oden (06:49.193)
2020 idea. And, okay, where’d this idea come from? Because you just do so much here. That’s, that’s, that’s off the wall. So you know, how’d you get this started?

Bailey (07:00.598)
Yeah, so a couple of things lined up, which was COVID and that gutted us, right? So like…

Intelligentsia doesn’t get PPP. We gotta like, we gotta do other things to stay alive. And I don’t even understand what we did and how we did it. Amazing kudos to to our CFO and CEO and how they managed it. know, definitely there were a lot of sad things that happened as well with people getting laid off and nobody feels good about any of that, but we did survive. And…

So that was happening and it was just like, what is the future of retail? Nobody knew anything at the time. And simultaneously, the lease was up on that space and we were in the process of renegotiating. And so there were just more question marks than ever. And…

The credit really goes to our CEO, I would say, James. He was like, if we’re going to re-up this lease, we have to do something different. Like, I’m not going to sign this for us to open another status quo coffee bar that just looks like the rest of them. You need to go and come up with an idea and come back to me. So I went and we came up with a few ideas and service models, essentially.

One of them was a superado concept because I am a fan of the Eversys machines and I thought there was a way that we could pull it off and you know for Intelligencia at the time he was like borderline offended at that proposal and

Garrett Oden (08:43.209)
You

Bailey (08:45.144)
was like, you need to try again. And so I was like, I have this other idea. I think it’s insane, but like, it’ll, I think it can work. So I put a little work into it I was like, I think we could serve freeze dried coffee.

And that’s when people are like, what? You think we could what? And I was like, I think this is how it could work. And I showed like, this is the way we could, we get this equipment, we get this equipment. This is the process for how you actually make it. was shooting video in the lab of like, this is the process. And like, this is the time from the sign. Somebody says, can I get a latte till the drink hits the counter? Like, does this work? Like, what’s the cost look like? And

Garrett Oden (09:01.833)
You

Bailey (09:25.774)
I think everybody was just like, this is so wild and it’s not remotely status quo. And what you’re showing us as far as it working, like it does appear to work. So all right, we’re doing it.

Garrett Oden (09:41.758)
Let me just make sure I know what this sort of the initial concept was. You have instant freeze dried black cat espresso that is the basis for all espresso drinks, but you still have like other filter coffees that are, you know, ground from whole bean and your concentrate products and the tea and the whole, the rest of the whole nine yards. Is that right?

Bailey (10:04.862)
Yeah, and we weren’t really sure what it was going to look like. So the original name of the project was InstantRate because we weren’t sure if it was going to be freeze-dried or if it was going to be concentrate. We weren’t sure that it was going to be all espresso or all coffee in general. Included in the InstantRate concept was even Cometeer. It like, should this be frozen? Like there were so many… everything was on the table.

So, but yeah, eventually it did whittle down to, all right, it’s gonna be freeze-dried black cat. We did eventually also add freeze-dried decaf for decaf espresso drinks, but we opened with a ground control, yeah, for filter coffee.

Garrett Oden (10:51.913)
So ground control for filter, making it by the cup or making concentrates.

Bailey (10:57.678)
We did both. were making batch, you know, air quotes normal, batch brew, there’s nothing normal about a ground control. And then we did have a concentrate recipe as well because we had other ideas for things we could do with concentrates and we did have concentrates when we opened as well. We’re no longer brewing concentrates. I double checked on that a couple days ago, but it’s not that we couldn’t, it’s just that offering kind of moved away.

Garrett Oden (11:28.689)
Okay, so you present this big plan to the team. You know, is this something that takes like months to go over all the data and do the spreadsheets and like, you know, say yes, or is this something that happened pretty quick?

Bailey (11:42.092)
So from my perspective, in hindsight, it happened very quick because we were…

because it was in COVID because there was this lease renewal.

Part of the negotiation included some work in the construction. We used to be in the basement of that space also, for example. When Pasadena opened, it had a restaurant as well. So the downstairs is a full kitchen. And we haven’t had the restaurant in a long time, but we wanted to move out of that space and just be in the upstairs. So that box that’s up there, we built that, we closed in the stairs. So a lot of it needed to happen with that police renewal, which was fast.

And also like it’s COVID, we’re in the middle of like reopening stuff. And so it was just like, we need to get reopened, like ASAP. we’re just, you know, everyone who’s closed is hemorrhaging. Or even if you’re just doing window service, which we did some window service out of Pasadena for a while, we had these huge roll up windows in the front. Like that was something, but it wasn’t much. Colorado, like that road there in old town Pasadena got hit really hard.

Garrett Oden (12:56.201)
Is this something that you were just sweating hardcore over because you’re pitching this wild idea and you don’t know if it’s going to work and nobody’s tried it before? is this something where you feel pretty confident that you’ll get the team buy-in and you’ll all accept the experiment together?

Bailey (13:13.93)
No, there were two, I think two elements to that. So one is that we quickly learned and increasingly gained understanding through collaborating with Swift that.

the Frise Arc coffee is extremely hygroscopic. So that was a big problem that we needed to solve for, and that was extremely stressful to me. I knew that August in LA can get humid, and how do I know that this coffee isn’t gonna turn to a brick and we can’t serve anything?

because it just wants to absorb moisture so bad. And you’re in a coffee bar, it’s a wet place. You’re dumping out hot water all the time, it’s just in the air. You’re steaming things, you’re purging steam wands, you’re putting moisture in the immediate vicinity of this product. So I was very nervous because I thought there’s a non-zero chance this is not possible to do. Then…

The other part was, well, what about like, people gonna buy it? Like, that’s, you know, this is a business. That was the other concern and I think…

We quickly focused, really, really quickly. We said, our peers are gonna drag us through the mud for doing this and we need to not worry about that. We need to focus on our regulars. The people that come here five days a week, we need to work with them and we need to convince them and we need to show them what we see. And that’s really what matters, you know, cause that’s who’s in here every day. And we put a lot of work into that and…

Bailey (14:54.338)
we increasingly felt more more optimistic about our ability to do that because we felt like it’s just in the cup. Like when people taste it, they see it pretty quickly. And so we were optimistic about that part.

Garrett Oden (15:11.078)
Why only espresso and not for filter coffee?

Bailey (15:15.084)
we thought that the difference was too big. So if you’re doing a freeze-dried latte next to a fresh-brewed latte, in most instances, I would suggest that the freeze-dried latte is better. And this comes down to like, Intelligentsia having like this…

siloed set of values. You know, like we have our own cupping sheet. We don’t use the SCA cupping form, for example. We have our own set of like, this is what our vision of coffee quality is like, and we want this to be in the cup and we don’t want this to be in the cup. And this is going to be there no matter what. And so bitterness, for example, is something that I think in general, the industry doesn’t really reward. But it’s a largely inherent part of coffee. It

is certainly an inherent part of a black cat traditional fresh pulled espresso and it’s not really a part of

the freeze-dried version of it. So we’re taking the same exact coffee, and really, the way we talked about this is that we were accrediting Swift largely, and this is again part of why we went to Swift to see and get a better understanding too. like, this whole coffee bar is gonna be reliant on this other business. If Swift closes its doors for some unknown reason, now we’re screwed, so we visited them.

Garrett Oden (16:39.955)
Mm-hmm.

Bailey (16:47.074)
gained a lot of confidence in them. They’re amazing, Nate, amazing. And so we saw how they brew and I’d known like, man, they must be brewing well. And then when I saw how they brewed, I was like, yeah, this is it. Like their brewing is so good that when they eventually go through freeze drying, that like, that’s why you have all these really good flavors, because they’re getting them in the initial extraction. And so…

and largely they’re leaving this bitterness behind. Bitterness is not something that we’re rewarding, and so if this latte is less bitter than this one, like, I like it more.

Garrett Oden (17:25.417)
Is that something where you can share what made their process different or why it works so well or is that sort of like a trade secret?

Bailey (17:31.382)
No, I will err on the conservative side of not talking about anything that Swift does. We were the first guests in that building and definitely want to respect them there. There’s even one part I remember there was one thing that like they wouldn’t even show us or talk to us about and you know, they do an amazing job and I wouldn’t want to, yeah.

Garrett Oden (17:54.281)
Yeah, props to Swift Cup. I, you know, we buy their coffee when we’re, when we’re traveling, especially on the holidays, you know, it’s just easier to take that than the whole get up. yeah, props to them.

Bailey (18:03.926)
Yeah, and then sorry to fully answer your question, then when we would do side by sides with the filter coffee, it’s just not the same. And so like, is it great when you’re traveling? Yes. Is it great when you’re in a pinch? Yes. Is it the same? No. And Swift would say the same thing. Like there’s just an inherent loss and volatiles. There’s just, there’s

the acidity doesn’t come through the same. That’s just part of how Free Giant works. What you get from them is as good as it gets. it doesn’t really get better. But there’s just these, those couple things, which is like acidity and volatile aromatics that are highly valued and extremely relevant in a filtered coffee. And that’s why we were like, okay, I think we gotta keep this fresh brewed.

Garrett Oden (18:55.337)
What about espresso then, you know, if somebody just comes and orders an espresso, you know, are you worried about that?

Bailey (19:00.866)
Yeah, we were super worried about that. That was extremely stressful. So we knew from the sales data that 14 people a day were going to order espresso. And that was the thing we poured the most into. That was the thing we stressed out about the most. so, okay, so then we did a lot of training on it. We did a lot of mock, like…

like in a just in a completely different setting we would somebody would just pretend to be the guest and like you know do devil’s advocate kind of pushing and role-playing to like how are we gonna have these conversations and what we were shocked by is just like the level of curiosity I don’t

I still to this day don’t really understand it. I mean, like I had a little bit of an idea. like we did the, do you remember the La Marzocco, KEXP pop-up bar that changed in Seattle every month? had this, La Marzocco had this cafe and every month there was like a new installation. And I was a part of that. That was another thing I did in my journey. And that’s where I learned like, wait a second. I think that…

Garrett Oden (20:03.15)
yes, yeah, that’s right.

Bailey (20:16.066)
Guests, regulars are way more resilient and way less sensitive to change than the industry thinks they are. That’s what that place taught me. And this was where we really saw that happening is people would order espresso and we would say we had to be upfront. We were not just going to serve you a cup of diluted free straight coffee. And so we told them, explained what we were doing. If you came in and said, can I get a latte? We just said, yes, and made the latte. But if you said espresso, we’re going to explain what’s happening here because

we want no surprises on that. Like that’s a just a different scenario. And almost all the time people said, well, I mean, can I try it? I want to try it. And a couple of people were like, that’s good. Like they were surprised.

Nobody was really upset. I never once heard a story where somebody was really upset. And a number of people were like, oh, okay, like, nevermind then I’ll just get like a filter coffee instead, or I’ll just get a latte instead. sometimes people change their order. Sometimes people actually enjoyed it. And sometimes I would say maybe some other percentage of the time people tried it but didn’t really enjoy it. So maybe they’re not ordering it again. So there was a definitely a hiccup.

there for sure.

Garrett Oden (21:36.617)
Let’s talk about the gear, the workflow. I’m sure this is a totally different process. What kinds of tools or systems did you have to have to make this work?

Bailey (21:50.56)
Yeah, so we were wondering how we were going to dose the coffee. One of my earliest ideas was wondering if we could make like tablets out of it. Can we? And that was weird. I went to weird places on the Internet where I was like, this is how people make drugs at home. This is not this is weird. And I also then realized that like that it doesn’t really work very well. And so.

We were trying to find, we dose the powder as is? And we found a powder dozer. We had to order it from Singapore. I talked to them and I was like, hey, this is our idea. What do you think? And they were like, oh yeah, that sounds like a great idea. have, they make it for pharmaceuticals as like their primary customer, but they were like, yeah, we have people that use it for.

cosmetics when they’re like manufacturing and they need to just like dose this powder for this thing or they had somebody who used it for like an edible glitter in like a liqueur when they were dosing. like using it for food for consumables was not new to them. We were definitely concerned about like getting approval from the city because it’s not NSF and sure enough they flagged it on our submissions and they were like what is this? What are you doing? And we had planned ahead and so

So what we had done is we got a list of all of the food contact materials in the doser and then I showed the city that these were all on the FDA’s list of approved food contact materials and they were like, all right, cool. And they just immediately stamped it. So the powder doser.

Then we used a Curtis Corinth because we needed the water element. And so you just get your powder, boom, get your water. And then we needed to get this dissolved. we had a few different options. We were trying to think, could we use like…

Bailey (23:47.97)
I’m looking at all this lab equipment basically. What of this lab equipment can you use? There’s lots of ways that things are mixed in the lab, that solutions are made. And ultimately we landed on a stir plate. So I was able to find this stir plate that’s fully stainless and designed to be submersible. So when people need to mix things like in a hot water bath, and I was like, this is it, cause this is not going to break. And it also was not mechanical. It was magnetic driven. So it was like, great, this is not going to have parts

Garrett Oden (24:09.907)
Hmm.

Bailey (24:17.904)
that are gonna be breaking. I think for most of the couple years that we were doing this, that stir plate did not turn off. Like the braces didn’t turn off at night. It was running 24 seven, 365. And it’s just through the magnetism that without those moving parts, like it was really resilient.

And then we needed to figure out like, are we gonna dose these stir bars into the beakers on the stir plate to do the dosing? now you’re, do I just pick it up with my fingers? You know, there with COVID, there’s like a lot of this.

germaphobia kind of like increasing and you know there’s already this movement in coffee where like people are trying to move away from stock flasks for example so we found like a way that we get these little stainless cups that hold the dosers or hold the stir bars throw that in the beaker now it’s stirring and you’re essentially ghostwriting the shot at that point like it’s just making itself now

Then the question is, well, how do you get that stir bar out? You do not want to accidentally pour that stir bar into someone’s latte and then have them swallow a magnet. Like that’s really bad. So we needed to figure out how to get that out of there. And I had this again, of like Rube Goldberg idea. Like, I think this will work. And it was basically, we built this.

Stainless stand with like a T on it a little arm off the top and we put super powerful Magnets off the top of that their PTFE coated so it’s like what all stir bars are coated in all like food safe, know inert and Basically, what you do is you pick up the beaker off the stir plate Hold it underneath this T stand with the powerful magnets on it and it just is strong enough that it just rips the magnet up out of the beaker and grabs it at the top

Garrett Oden (26:10.939)
How big of a beaker are we talking about?

Bailey (26:11.05)
So you’re sort of like doing a drive-by. You like pick up the beaker, pass it by that magnet, it pulls it out of it, and then you can pour it into the ceramic or the paper cup.

Garrett Oden (26:20.669)
When you say beaker, I’m thinking of like a little vial, like a little ceramic vial. Is that what we’re talking about?

Bailey (26:26.262)
Yeah, and that was part of it. was like, which, type of glass, where are we going to use here? What shape? And so we did, we did start with just like more cylindrical type beakers. that we did start with glass. Those proved to be too fragile for the real world. And we eventually did switch to plastic beakers. but yeah.

We worked for a little while, like, should this be more like an Erlenmeyer shape? And should it be like an oscillating table that mixes instead of a stir plate? And should it be a vortex machine? Like, there were so many ideas for how to do it and what it was going to mix in. But yeah, just a normal, standard beaker.

Garrett Oden (27:06.249)
So what’s the time to make a shot like this? Like how many seconds?

Bailey (27:11.832)
So powder dosing was like…

two or three seconds. So about the time it takes for you to grind your coffee is like how long it would take us to dose the powder. Water is similar, like a couple seconds. And the Corinth was amazing. It was the machine for it because you have these different programs you can do on these three buttons and it was amazingly consistent and down to very small doses. So a lot of hot water dosers and coffee will not allow you to have such a small dose or to adjust the dosing.

in such small increments. If I recall correctly, was like one or two tenths of an ounce was the increment that it would dose in. So we were pretty much able to get 40, 42 grams of water all the time. Very easy. And then once you start stirring, it’s mixed in like 10 seconds less, five seconds.

So it was always mixing for longer than we needed to because now we’re gonna go do milk for the most part. And so the shot’s just like going longer than it needs to because it’s waiting for milk.

Garrett Oden (28:23.497)
Okay. Yeah, talk about milk. What happens next?

Bailey (28:28.354)
Yeah, so milk was a big question because I don’t…

In Kahave, all of our machines, their milk and espresso are married together. So we spent a long time, do we want the Astra steamer? Is there another steamer that we can get somewhere? What do we wanna do here? We talked a lot about just the manual versus like an automated capability. And then we learned about the Wall-E and I was like, I’ll buy one now. Like Mike Lanz who like runs sales for La Marzocca USA actually is a…

customer of IntelliPassadena. And so I’m used to seeing him. I’ve known him for a long time. And so it was like, when I heard about that, I was like, we’re ready. Like, I’ll take one. we had some delays. They had some delays. And it just perfectly worked out. We bought the first two Wallis in the US.

And that’s what we did our milk on. And so we were finally able to get a machine that was re-standing that only did milk. There were other machines like a Perfect Moose or something like that. I forget, I’m blanking on some of the other machines, but they’re only available in Australia or Europe and we just don’t have them in the US. We were super behind on that stuff. so Wally is what we did. One steam bar module.

and yeah, steam mod bar module and then two wallets above counter and

Bailey (29:56.174)
That was interesting. We learned that through consistency, like we really wanted to weigh the milk. So there’s a little scale in bar, pitcher goes on, weigh the milk, throw it on there, let it do its thing. so steaming was hands off, making the shot was largely hands off and it introduced some more free time for the barista to be able to start on the next drink. And the stir plate also had, I can’t remember, it was like four or six stations. And so you could be making six shots at a time. You could be steaming two milks at a time.

And then there’s also your ice drinks that don’t need steam milk. So you could be doing a lot of drinks at once. Yeah. And then we did choose to manually pour latte art. You know, there was a minute where it was like, well, do we just dump the shot into the?

into the milk? you know, do we just dose the powder into the pitcher, pour the milk on top and let the Wally mix it and heat it and give up latte art? Like there were a lot of things that were up for consideration. We eventually at the last minute, like it was like probably three days before we opened when we were doing barista training that we made the final call to like keep latte art.

Garrett Oden (31:06.761)
Can you describe what the Wall-E looks like and what it does for people who might not know?

Bailey (31:11.042)
Yeah, wow, I don’t know if I can, but I will try. So, Wally is like a, it’s got like a little.

tray that you set the pitcher on, it’s probably like, I don’t know, six, seven inches wide and deep, and the tray actually tilts. So you put the milk pitcher in it, it has this little corner that it registers in, and then there’s a steam wand that actually lowers into the pitcher, and then the tray that the milk pitcher sits on actually tilts, so that’s how you get your angle. And then it has a little screen and a dial, and we just wrote recipes, so basically it’s like, give me this temperature, give me this much aeration.

and it would manage the aeration by like the wand moving up and down. And it used like infrared to measure the temperature. yeah, so the baristas would just select latte, cappuccino, whatever. And we had a little recipe essentially where it was like this drink gets this many grams or ounces of milk in the pitcher so that the Wally can steam it to the same temperature and…

foam expansion every single time.

Garrett Oden (32:19.081)
So if I’m a customer and I walk into the illumination bar and I order a drink, I’m not looking at a big espresso machine that you’re behind. I’m looking at some like lab equipment and that some things are being stirred magnetically and the magnets being ripped out of the beaker by a giant magnet. I mean, this sounds like a pretty wild experience if you’re on the customer side.

Bailey (32:40.994)
Yeah, well, think it, that’s what I thought. To me, what really stood out to me is the sound actually, because you don’t hear purging steam wands like you do, like Wally’s a little different. You don’t hear pucks getting knocked out. You don’t hear the portafilter slamming into the bayonet ring.

You don’t even, you don’t hear the espresso grinder running. The powder doser is really quiet and a different pitch. So to me, the sound was the thing that was most jarring. Like this place sounds different and…

From a visibility standpoint, when you walk up to that front bar, it’s really just like a pastry case and then a register person with like, you know, normal register, like, you know, impulse purchase, merchandise, granola bar kind of things there. And so you’re not really engaging straight away with the machine anyways. And then people order and then they kind of go to handoff and then they’re on their phone. So.

Most people didn’t know, didn’t notice. And that sounds crazy to consider. What do mean they didn’t know? They didn’t know. They weren’t, didn’t notice. I remember having in the first week, cause I lived nearby. I was there every day for three months or every five days a week for three months.

I remember having a conversation with some ladies and they were really excited that we were reopened and the coffee was tasting great and like they, you know, they were, they loved the space was beautiful. It’s totally different. You know, it’s very bright and used to be very dark, things like that. And we, we did get into the conversation about the instant and they were like, wow, that’s so cool. I’m so curious about that. And, and it dawned on me, like they did, they didn’t realize that the latte they were drinking was made that way.

Bailey (34:32.63)
And I told them and they were just like, what? No. And they go back to take another sip like they missed something. And they were like, that’s crazy. It’s so good. so it was just kind of shocking how much people didn’t notice.

Garrett Oden (34:37.449)
You

Garrett Oden (34:51.093)
The sound comment, that’s really interesting. When I’m in a busy cafe, there’s all these sounds and it sounds like craft and work and motion, but it sounds like what you’re describing sounds like a lot more elegant, don’t know, quiet, peaceful maybe. How would you describe it?

Bailey (35:09.87)
Yeah, I think so. I when I was an educator, that was a really big value to me. You know, it like I didn’t want people yelling out names or yelling out drinks. I don’t want to yell in here. Even the pucks. was like if we can if we can flick the puck out of the portafilter, let’s do it. Let’s use the bar if we have to. Things like that. you know, people aren’t necessarily here to like hear all the slamming. Like, let’s try to create a space that’s like a little more peaceful for people. So even in like even in Venice, I was trying to foster something like

that. And in Pasadena it was a way more exaggerated, different version of that.

Garrett Oden (35:50.025)
That’s really interesting. Okay. You have other things that you’ve got going on that I’ve heard you mention. You’ve got like the Flare 58X Bloom, Arrow Press. You’ve got some other things going on. Are these all happening at the same time or are you kind of layering on these other ways of working as you go?

Bailey (36:08.438)
Yeah, so first we just like needed to get our feet underneath us. I said, number one priority was our regulars. Get them on board. Are they with us on this? Are we out of our element? Do we need to pivot? Are we crazy and we need an espresso machine on this counter immediately?

that and some of the other offerings like with the concentrates we were doing on the ground control, that was like a little more chaotic than we thought it might be. Just trying to figure out that offering back then.

And then it was eventually like, finally the team was like, okay, what next? Because we told them like, this is going to be a playground where we try new ideas. And yeah, so we started introducing things gradually and I think it’s kind of up to you which ones we want to get into. Cause I very easily can go into down the rabbit hole and get in the weeds. But yeah, we added a…

an Aeropress offering that unlocked Brutal Order Iced for us. It unlocked like every coffee in the building at any time offering. I was super excited about Modern Espresso and using the Flare 58 to do profiles. And so we put that in and we also offered any coffee at any time on that.

Some things have changed. You know, like I said, we’re not doing the concentrates, but we’re also not doing the AeroPress there anymore. And we’ve got the X-Blim in there now. yeah, and I mean, to give away the ending, like we also don’t have the freeze-dried in there either anymore. you know, that’s been pulled in and iterated as well. So yeah, I don’t know sure where you want to go with some of these.

Garrett Oden (37:51.207)
Yeah, let’s keep talking about freeze-dried for a little bit here. you know, there’s some point probably where you start to think…

this isn’t quite what we thought or maybe this doesn’t have the longevity that we suspected it might. I don’t know, when did you start to see the cracks that maybe this wasn’t gonna be the long-term solution?

Bailey (38:12.503)
Hmm.

I know. I think that’s a hard question to answer actually because there was always some acknowledged reservation from the beginning. It was just like, from the beginning…

we didn’t necessarily think like, this is wildly scalable. This is going to be the future. Everyone’s going to be doing it. But I don’t really say that from the beginning. Some people even, I can think of one person in mind who even thought like that almost certainly it would have an end that like it was going to end one day and we would just move on to the next thing. And so it, I think it was always on our minds. Like how is it going? I,

But eventually it was like, pull reviews and we look at, how are reviews doing? And when we started to see a lot of customer reviews that were just like the people that did notice and they did not like it, and they were making it very clear that they value bespoke espresso, that, hearing that.

from a lot of people in writing, we needed to do our job and listen to them and respond. So I think it was when we finally saw and we had a PDF of a collection of these reviews, it was like, this is not one disgruntled person. Like I said, it was really, really well received in the beginning, but the few people that were upset gradually increased in number as time went on.

Bailey (40:02.198)
And in Pasadena on that street, there’s no shortage of places you can go instead.

Garrett Oden (40:08.553)
Is this feedback that’s like aggressively, this is not what I wanted? are people saying, I get the experiment, but I would move on.

Bailey (40:20.684)
I don’t think that people thought of, like, acknowledged the experimental factor of it. I don’t remember that if they did. But it was more like, this is not what I want. This is not like why I’m going to a specialty cafe. It’s not why I’m going to Intelligencia. Yeah.

Garrett Oden (40:38.089)
That’s so, I mean, I’ve heard you say the taste of this is better if you have a latte and it’s side by side. But people are saying this is not what I go for. How do you make sense of that? What’s the difference there?

Bailey (40:54.018)
Well, I think part of it is that sensory is really complicated and expectation bias is massively powerful. And so if you see somebody push a button, get a powder, add some water, make a drink with it, and you think, what the heck is that? It’s probably gonna taste bad. If you see somebody…

grinding this fresh beans, you smell the aroma, then you see this like, you know, strategic like tamping intentionality, you see the espresso trickling down, you see this beautiful coloring, and you see the latte art, all these things and you’re like, man, this, I’ve been waiting for this. Like, you I can’t make this at home. Like they don’t make it like this down the street. And then you taste it, like that’s probably gonna be amazing. So like sensory is just complicated and…

Also, a big factor too was I can do that. And I resonate with that a lot. I have a hard time going to restaurants where I’m like, I can make this food. And so when people are like, I can mix free-stripe coffee, then why am I paying you to do that? Whereas they’re like, I can’t make espresso like you can, fresh.

Garrett Oden (42:06.345)
Yeah, yeah. That resonates. I often will do espresso based when I go to a coffee shop or get like a really nice coffee that I don’t have at home. You know, I’m not typically getting drip because that’s what I do every day at the house. Yeah, that’s interesting. You know, does that mean if you’re a restaurant and your coffee gets made in the back, you know, should you be doing freeze dried because it’s a…

simpler in lot of ways and people won’t know or might not have that sort of expectation that conflict for them.

Bailey (42:39.414)
Ooh, I’m not gonna should on any one knee, but I think it would be helpful to consider it. Like, we made it available to wholesale accounts. There was some adoption, but extremely little. And it’s hard to say why. I think for some people it’s just like instant? No, no.

You know, I think there’s like a small subset of specialty coffee people that are aware of somebody like Swift that’s like, no, it can be good. But like the greater food world is still like what instant? No. So I think it’s been a harder sell. like, and if the answer is just no on its face, then like you don’t even get to get to the, you don’t get to get, you don’t even get to the point of tasting.

Garrett Oden (43:36.669)
What about costs? think you wrote somewhere that this is a more expensive process and of course you have to go through a partner, Swift, you’re not just having the roasted coffee and working from that. So how did that affect your costs and was it more expensive on the customer side?

Bailey (43:55.726)
Yeah, no, I’m more expensive on the customer side. We have pricing models for our retail locations. I don’t really fully understand them. I’m not really involved in that, but it was, I think we have like a couple tiers if I recall correctly, or maybe it’s all in one now, but no, it wasn’t higher for them, but the cogs were a lot higher, a lot, a lot higher. And I don’t need to get specific, but that mattered a lot. And

you felt it a lot. In the original model building, when we had the idea, the idea was that the throughput would be so high that it offset the additional cogs with labor, essentially. So.

You know, like in a cafe, it’s like, okay, maybe we can have one person open or two people open and then they can handle this much volume until the next person needs to come in. And then they can handle this much volume until the next person needs to come in. And the model showed that like the threshold for where the next person needs to come in was just higher. So that was supposed to be what made it work.

and it’s just not really clear that that ever was true in hindsight.

Yeah, like I think in general, it’s like, you’re always as a as like a responsible business, you’re always paying attention to your cogs and like looking for ways to improve things. But that was never the thing that was like going to kill it. Like we were signed up for that from the beginning. We knew what the the margin was going to be. And we signed up for it. It was it was ultimately like the people who live in the neighborhood and want to come in. And they’re saying like, for me. That’s

Bailey (45:48.144)
who we were ultimately listening to when it came down to it.

Garrett Oden (45:52.842)
Yeah. you know, what, about for baristas? You know, is this something that they, they liked? Was it, you know, hard to get on boarded for this new way of service?

Bailey (46:04.79)
So that was a really big question too, was like, what’s gonna happen here? Like you’re revoking this like opportunity for a perceived sense of craftsmanship and.

concerning, we talked a lot about putting energy into like dialing in filter coffee and curating that, being informed about coffees, being able to engage in coffee conversation and like whole bean conversation as well.

That went pretty okay, but there was a point where it was like, okay, we need a little bit more. And that’s where introducing the Brutal Order offerings, which the Air Press was the original one, and then eventually the Flare 58. Once we added those, the engagement for staff went way up, I think. It was just, there was a lot more to be engaged with, and curating for guests with intentionality and a personal opinion. And…

Also, like there were people, like I can think of one person who was just like, I’m done with this and they quit. Like it was not engaging enough. But for the most part and the way that that coffee bar is today, like that team is amazing. They are so adaptable, so interested and they’re the ones that come and say like, what’s the next thing? Like what’s next? Because there was a lull for a little while where we hadn’t introduced anything new and it was like we needed to

something. And so that’s been really interesting and I’ve been there a couple times to like introduce a new offering.

Bailey (47:44.462)
And people are excited. And what I also love about it too is that like I’m from an era in Antelie where it was like you only drink black coffee and you like, you know, other drinks are kind of frowned upon or poo-pooed. But one thing I also love about this current staff is that like they’re totally down to happily drink an ice vanilla latte. And then they can also dial in

filter coffee and talk about all the nuance in what they’re tasting in the cup and manipulate dial-ins at a high level. And that didn’t really exist. There was an insecurity in specialty coffee, I think, in the past where if you liked an iced vanilla latte, you couldn’t admit that and it was frowned upon. And now I just think this staff is just so much more confident. And this is, I think, also just part of food service and coffee changing post-COVID.

is I think more space for people to feel confident in what they actually like, own it, and then still be skilled at these other parts of the job that we really value. And I just am like really excited about them. I’m really happy whenever I get to go there and yeah they’re great.

Garrett Oden (49:02.025)
So let’s see, you’ve taken out the instant, the whole workflow, correct? This doesn’t exist anymore in this coffee location. When did that happen?

Bailey (49:11.628)
Yeah, that’s right. Pretty recently that was, I think, January. Yeah, January.

Garrett Oden (49:17.321)
Gotcha. Okay. And so you’re back to an espresso machine, a grinder, you know, the more typical setup. Is that right?

Bailey (49:26.486)
Yeah, and it was like…

Well, what, how was this, you know, so when we were proposing, Hey, we’re gonna, we think we should go to this thing. folks, other stakeholders in the company are like, well, how, you know, does that mean you’re giving up the illumination bar aspect of this? Like how, like, I’m not signing off on this. If you’re just going back to the status quo, violating the original idea of this concept. And so we needed to like, make sure that we weren’t doing that. So we have a swan in there, which is still pretty rare and that grinder is pretty unique the way it works and what it can

do. We have it at 100 RPMs, the slow setting, and it produces the fluffiest coffee that I’ve seen. we have a buck press, which is great, good for baristas, and a KB90, also good for baristas, and scales so we can do mass mode. And we’re brewing, we’re pulling, we are pulling turbos in there. So

This is our first coffee bar that’s pulling fast espresso for guests. They have been pulling fast espresso on the Flare 58 all along, but that’s like a manual modular profile. this is not, it’s a Lama Rizoko, it doesn’t have flow profiling. And I prefer flow profiling over pressure profiling. so there’s that and then…

Part of what’s allowing that is we’re also using a slightly more modern basket as well. So we use the Flare HU Basket, high uniformity. yeah, so the Espresso’s different for sure. So we didn’t fully go back to a normal trad shot.

Garrett Oden (51:12.873)
Gotcha. I really like the puck press and the KB90, the way you can insert the portafilter. I had a lot of wrist pain when I was behind bar and the doctor told me I’ve got sharp bones going up my arm that would irritate my wrist. When I saw that in 2019, I think at Expo, I was like, this would have kept me working behind bar longer. So I really appreciate that. Okay. So what’s the takeaway here? This went on for a few years.

You know, is this, you know, where does this kind of instant service set? Like where does this belong? You know, do you see a role in this and other settings that, you know, maybe just not this one.

Bailey (51:54.956)
I think that the thing about freeze-dried coffee is that it’s about convenience. So when you’re saying, where does this belong? I think you’re looking for problems where you need a more convenient solution. And so I think that probably the biggest opportunity is going to be for decaf for people because a lot of places need to have decaf because it matters. You get enough

guess that require it.

But it’s hard to allocate an entire grinder to it and that spend, that space, you know, everyone wants more space in their space. And to say like, have this grinder permanently on the counter and I use it this many times a day, like often it doesn’t, the case is not strong. So I do think there’s a huge opportunity for decaf, freeze-dried coffee to be more common. We certainly use that in a lot of events where it’s like, okay, we

want to be able to, when somebody says, but can I get decaf? Especially if it’s like the event is in the afternoon, we don’t like to have to say no to them. And decaf is a great way to do that. And then I think just in general, again, like the little single serve opportunities of, for travel and other convenient scenarios where you just need it really quickly. And

We also do sell it to wholesale partners as ingredient. There are things that other people make with freeze-dried coffee as an ingredient that are just, it’s the best solution. And it’s pretty expensive. That can be certainly prohibitive, but that’s another way is like getting coffee into other things with it.

Garrett Oden (53:44.115)
Hmm. Yeah.

Bailey (53:45.228)
Yeah, but I mean, we’re going to see more coffee bars where the flagship offering is freeze dried. I think probably not. And again, that’s largely like. If you’re if you’re if your customer base values the bespoke quality of espresso, it’s going to be hard. And if you’re in a remotely humid environment where you have to worry about the hygroscopic quality of of instant, like that’s also going to be a barrier.

Garrett Oden (54:13.193)
So you see a lot in terms of new products that are coming out, new ways people are serving guests in your role. Where do you see specialty coffee going, given the coffee price roller coaster and consumer preferences are for all sorts of wacky things and there’s so much diversity now in what people are looking for? I’m curious, what do you see happening and what sticks out to you?

Bailey (54:39.846)
well, we have lots of ideas and I see lots of things happening. I would be hesitant to put money on much.

I think especially when like you’re saying with coffee prices and the economy and the uncertainty that I think a lot of people are feeling right now, it makes it even harder to place bets. But some things that we do see in our own sales data, for example, is the growth of cold, right? So cold is just like so popular and growing. And we have…

one coffee bar specifically where it already has Eclipsed Hot, where it is more than 50 % of the drinks we sell year round are cold, and the others are trending that way, and the signature drinks. So we didn’t have them for so long. I wanna say that our first real signature drink offerings in like the, I don’t know.

I don’t know. We had some back in the aughts, but we didn’t really do much in the teens. we were like around the turn there, like what people think of as like when Intelligentsia was competing. We didn’t do many. And so we started gradually in the mid-teens, probably 2015 or something like that. And…

Right now, it just seems like the more we add to the menu, the more people want. And we’ve tried to do a better job of getting more creative and engaging more with trends and things like that. We’re not gonna do what Starbucks did and release too many every week or something like that, but we’re on basically a quarterly pace and we release anywhere between two to five drinks at a time.

Bailey (56:22.44)
it’s been big and so we’re leaning more into that and cold is a big part of that. And then I think we’re all trying to understand service models. know, like we’re seeing Starbucks and a lot of these a lot of food places, restaurants, like shifting people to mobile orders and drive-throughs and we’re curious about that. We also see, you know,

places reverting and trying to get people to be back inside and sitting down and ordering in ceramic. So I think right now the industry is just a little bit confused and we’re all just kind of open to everything and we’re trying to push all of it. And we’re just trying to be ready for whatever catches and we have our perspective and what we value. We’re always gonna be pushing our single origin coffees, filter coffee, we’re trying to promote that where I’m in the middle of project

right now trying to revise that and that’s what we’re most excited about usually and that’s what our coffee team is most excited about usually and so

We’re always going to have our values and things that we want to push, but customers, I guess, are a little bit unpredictable in a lot of ways right now. And we’re trying to just meet people. I think Intelli has been on a pretty wild journey of being the first in lot of instances and having

rubbed people the wrong way, you know, so many years ago and as competition grew and there you could get specialty coffee on every block, you know, people got nicer and we’ve been on our journey to get nicer and more friendly and more approachable and.

Bailey (58:07.566)
we really focus on that every day, all day long. Like that’s our thing is leaving that 10 year old reputation behind and just trying to be a very welcoming place for people, whether that’s, you know, ordering via e-comm and getting whole being into your kitchen or coming into our cafes and engaging with our baristas. Like that’s kind of what we’re also focused on.

Garrett Oden (58:32.797)
What about you personally? there any fun projects that you’re working on or things you’re excited about?

Bailey (58:38.606)
Yeah, for sure. You know, the signature drinks are a big lift for me, so I do spend a lot of time on that. I have a couple other things that I’m working on. One that I’ll keep. And then we have like some RTDs that are coming back. So we have our Black is out now. Our lattes are running a trial tomorrow. So those will be out again soon. And then…

We got a new coffee bar coming. So that’s exciting. We don’t open a new coffee bar all the time. It’s been a while since we opened our last one. That’s been a major project for me and trying to, it’s going to be very different. It’ll be different, more different than any other coffee bar we have. so, yeah, we’ve also, you know, if we had this expansion in Seoul over the last year, there’s coffee bars over there now and it’s just been wild. So yeah, there’s a lot in the pipeline always.

Garrett Oden (59:35.623)
Lots going on. Well, Bailey, this has been a phenomenal conversation. You’re sort of fulfilling my dream here of wanting to talk to you ever since I first heard the news about illumination bars. So thanks for being on the podcast. I appreciate it.

Bailey (59:48.564)
Yeah, I’m really happy to be here. I’m excited for all the guests that you’re going to be having on.

Garrett Oden (59:54.025)
Well, where can people follow the work that you’re doing or new things you all are experimenting with?

Bailey (59:58.988)
Yeah, I generally stay off the social media stuff, but you can follow Intelligencia and they’re posting about things off and on. So yeah, we got a new person on the team who’s been managing that recently and they’ve been doing a really good job. So excited about what they’re posting there.

Garrett Oden (01:00:17.609)
Awesome. Well, we’ll have you back someday when you’ve got some new white wreck experiments to deep dive again.

Bailey (01:00:24.307)
That sounds good. Thanks.

Garrett Oden (01:00:25.833)
All right, thanks, Bailey.