Transcript

Aaron Nemoyten (00:00)
Well it finally happened. Make Games Drink Coffee finally has a whole segment about actually drinking and making coffee. So

My guest this week is Lauren Ash. And she’ll introduce herself in a second. But I just wanted to let you know that the first half of this episode is about a whole bunch of interesting topics. But the second half of the show is just about coffee. So if you’ve been listening to episodes of this podcast and you kept

Thinking, sure, video games are cool, but when you’re gonna talk about coffee, now’s your chance. Let’s get to the episode.

Lauryn Ash (00:46)
Hi, everyone. My name is Lauryn Ash. I currently live in sunny (?) San Francisco. I’m a narrative designer and writer, and I’m currently working on my own projects. And I’ve been consulting for indie games and AAA for about 13 years now.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:01)
lot of your background is more, don’t know, I don’t want to say conventional because I don’t know if that sounds good or bad, but you went to school to learn game design at some point and you worked your way up doing game design, but you have some other experiences that are

a little bit further afield than that. And one of them I wanted to ask about was being an assistant director of a children’s theater program.

I have heard some people who are really into theater and video games talk about how strongly their theater experience actually relates to game design because it’s about building an experience for people. you know, there’s stuff about immersive theater and interactive theater that people that are into that stuff get really excited about when they relate it to video games.

But also you mentioned on the little LinkedIn blurb about it that you’re working with a kids theater camp and you know, you’re teaching them a lot of things, but I started thinking designing video games is often like directing children’s theater, but like across time and space. So.

Lauryn Ash (02:08)
I love that depiction so much, Aaron, and it’s so true.

Aaron Nemoyten (02:14)
So do you consciously relate those experiences together or is it just sort of like a back pocket thing?

Lauryn Ash (02:14)
⁓

So it’s actually a really interesting question. ⁓ I sometimes forget that I was the assistant director of Children’s Theater for quite a time because it was so long ago, but it was one of those experiences that definitely transformed the way I think about probably managing people, ⁓ like you mentioned, but it’s actually something that I brought into kind of the level design and kind of game design experiences that I took into more cinema design, or I should say cinematic design or conversation style design.

in video games.

Aaron Nemoyten (02:51)
So I’m thinking about this from the perspective of a lot of game design involves trying to get people to do something without making it too obvious that that’s what you’re trying to get them to do. So it’s a sort of.

Valve game design philosophy when they decide to make a game every once in a while of directing attention and hinting about what you’re supposed to do in a given situation or about teaching by demonstrating something in a non-obvious way. You’ve mentioned a bunch of times in your professional stuff on LinkedIn how interested you are in first time user experiences and tutorialization and things like that. So I’m wondering if you feel like there’s any relationship

between the world of theater and of direction and of creating those experiences and of building games in a way that teach people what they’re supposed to be doing and how they’re supposed to be having fun without being too direct about it.

Lauryn Ash (03:52)
Theater and game design are so interconnected for me. And I love that you mentioned about how it’s the first time user experience or getting people to do something that they’re not quite sure they want to do. Because when I look at my game design philosophy, I was in theater all throughout high school, all four years. So I was in a production twice a year, both in the fall and in the spring. And every…

semester, it switched off, whether it was going to be a musical or it was going to be a play. And since I was also doing that, I was also in competitive drama. It’s like debate. So if people are like, I’m a debater and they go to debate tournaments, well, there’s also the drama kids and they go to the debate tournaments as well, but they do…

drama performances? There is a term for this, but this was a long time ago in the galaxy of Lauryn’s youth.

And I think that when it comes to theater and it comes to these experiences, because I was a participant in theater and because I was a participant and I was also someone that wanted to get into theater originally, particularly about playwriting, which is what I originally went to school for, I wanted to kind of produce plays. so becoming the assistant director of kind of children’s theater was kind of a way to try to test out assistant directing. What did that mean? How did it operate? And I think that where

we look at game design, we look at a lot of these places in the world as kind of sets, kind of themes. And I think that’s why it relates really well to the first time user experience, because it’s not so much about when the curtain opens, are the first time, right, the audience is going to see, what’s the first line of dialogue they’re going to hear. It’s, you can translate all of that into as soon as the player puts their hands on the sticks.

that’s when I consider it the first time user experience versus you could say what’s the first cinematic opening of the game because sometimes those are two different things but both I think need that type of immersive kind of theater experience. I think one of my funnest anecdotes for you is I was actually studying abroad in the UK and I was cast as ⁓ a side character in Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors.

Aaron Nemoyten (05:48)
Mm-hmm.

Lauryn Ash (06:09)
And this entire performance was done what would be considered as in the round. Are you familiar with the term? Okay.

Aaron Nemoyten (06:14)
yeah, yeah. So

you’re surrounded by audience.

Lauryn Ash (06:20)
you are surrounded by audience on every side and there are kind of aisles. So for us, there were four aisles, which kind of means there were kind of four quadrants. Yes, one, two, three, four of audience members. And the round is a really exciting, it’s kind of like, it’s 360. So when you’re performing, you’ve got your front to some part of the audience and you will absolutely have your butt to other parts of the audience. And this kind of transformed my way thinking of theater, to be completely honest with you, because…

even though I had been in at that point probably like six productions and it was all just really fun, main cast, side cast, understudy, so kind of cast, but really the person in black like doing the stagehand things in the back. And I’d been the assistant director for a couple of summers at that point. But what I had never really understood was that you can have such a more dramatic.

performance when you actually allow the audience to fill in the gaps of maybe what your facial expression is and it’s just your voice and it’s almost freer as a performer. And so when I look at my game design experiences, I never design an experience in isolation or from a fixed perspective. I always try to kind of think about, well, if the player turns around, what are they going to see? And I think so many level designs

from linear level designs can benefit from this kind of reverse perspective. So for example, when you’re running down right a level in Tomb Raider, it’s a very linear game. ⁓ If you turn around, knowing what you see, is something going to break? Is your immersion going to change? What’s the experience?

And I know a lot of really great game designers in the industry also play the level backwards after it’s been completed to see what they’ve missed. Or if there’s potential for, an optional Easter egg, where there’s something you can only see if you look around. And I think that not only does Tomb Raider do this really well, but the team at Respawn does this really well in Jedi Fallen Order and in the Jedi games, because there’s a lot of opportunities where you have to actually turn around, and that’s how you get out of the level.

And it’s just, it’s really, really simple things. Right. And so I think that it’s understanding perspective and kind of where people are coming into the level designs or understanding how do you want that first experience of the game to actually form in the player’s mind, set the tone for say the production of the experience. That’s where I think theater really, really shines and really comes in. And I’m excited. We’re talking about it in the game design perspective, Aaron, because so many people go, Oh,

theater. So obviously character and plot and maybe placement and setting, right? It feels like it has a one-to-one with cinema, but I think theater has so much more to offer in the terms of immersive sim design, ⁓ open world level design, particularly open world level design, where I think that can take so much more from from modern film and TV shooting sets, which also we have to remember movies came from plays.

Aaron Nemoyten (09:26)
level design is one of the areas of game design that I think I have the most fun doing, but have not had the opportunity to do much professionally because my first professional gig was doing cutscenes and that was like a one-off thing. And then I went back to film school and then I ended up getting in through software engineering and it was Facebook games. So it was basically web app development.

and then game design for free to play on Facebook and then on mobile and mostly on games with no sense of levels, right? It was a lot of character collection battle games. And so when I decided to start working on my own stuff, one of the first things I did was I worked on a Metroidvania puzzle platformer project. I worked on it for a while and my initial…

Lauryn Ash (10:02)
Right, of course.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:17)
idea about how I would handle the level design was actually to pack everything really, really close together because I thought it would be fun to make it sort of feel really efficient and tight and it would be clever and all that stuff. But I ran into this really big problem that Metroidvanias had already solved in a different way, which is that if you’re going to have people explore around, get stuck,

Lauryn Ash (10:39)
Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:44)
then go find the right way, get a new ability, and then go use it where they need to use it. You have to create a space that’s memorable enough that they will be able to say to themselves, ⁓ this is the place where I probably would have needed the high jump to get to that thing that I couldn’t get to. And I think people take sort of snapshots in their minds of different places that are different because they’re different, because we remember novelty. And I…

had to redesign all the level design in the game to pull things further apart so that I could create more memorable spaces with more negative space so that people could remember where they had been more clearly. And later on, I decided to finally do something I’d wanted to do my whole life, which is just make and release levels for the original Doom games, which is so much fun. I highly recommend it.

Lauryn Ash (11:36)
That’s,

that sounds amazing. That sounds so, so, so much fun. I absolutely love the original levels for the Doom or the original Doom game levels ⁓ because I just feel like they’re so tight. And when I say tight, what I mean is they’re so well enclosed to create a sense of that high stakes, high tension need to play the game mechanics over and over again. And yet at each turn, there’s some sort of surprise.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:49)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yes, and.

making levels for doom once you learn it. So I would imagine if you come from, for example, like a 3D modeling background, then making levels for doom is really weird because it is not a 3D game. It’s a 2D game that’s like extruded into a 3D space. So you’re basically building a blueprint only and then playing inside it, you know, and you sort of click on each part of the blueprint. Those are sectors. And you say like the floor is here, the ceiling is there and you, that’s how you create height variance. So it is weird for people coming from 3D.

but

it also means that you can make levels really fast and you don’t lose much without having the ability to put rooms on top of other rooms because you gain that back in the efficiency at which you can build your levels.

I tried to bring the lessons of those original levels and of what I’ve learned from other projects and think I want to make spaces that are distinct, that are interesting. I want to use the advantages of having it be more abstract to say like, yes, you can create a space. It doesn’t really make any logical sense, but it looks cool. And looking cool is actually something that has utility because then people will remember it and they’ll remember where they’ve been. And

So then I tried to bring in a lot of that directing attention and foreshadowing. There’s a lot of things that you can see before you can get to them. And I feel like that’s the sort of thing that is easy to forget when you’re doing game design and level design because you get focused on, let’s say, an encounter or a mechanic or a system without being able to zoom out and go.

Am I directing the players attention properly? Am I giving them something memorable so that when they come back here, they’re not lost? Things like that.

Lauryn Ash (13:54)
you actually brought up three very awesome points between theater and level design. And I say theater and I probably more specifically, you could say the set design and the way in which you kind of create the set so that the audience can kind of see not only what’s happening on the stage, but also what’s about to happen.

And so kind of going back to your metroidvania example for a bit here, I really liked how you say you have to create something that’s memorable and about it has enough difference and there wasn’t enough difference in your levels and they were all really close together. But what you probably ended up doing and what I wanted to just ask you really quickly is you actually create a lot of distance between those spaces now as well. Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (14:35)
Yeah,

and that turns out to be important because the time that you spend not doing anything interesting, you’re still playing the game and you’re still thinking about what you’re seeing and what you’re doing. And the space between the exciting stuff is still important.

Lauryn Ash (14:58)
It really is, and it’s that silence.

Okay, it’s the distance between spaces. A lot of times when we talk about open world or exploration design in video games, we kind of get this kind of, I don’t know, get hung up on how fast are people moving from, like you mentioned, encounter to encounter. But I actually had the opportunity very early in my career to not only have done kind of the assistant theater direction, but I kind of also was a part of kind of the anime convention scene. And when I say that, I mean, I actually hosted anime conventions. I hosted kind of live experiences in those spaces.

I players, but those are like community members, volunteers. Those are people that want to role play. They want to be immersed into that environment, into your life in a hotel convention center, right, for three days. And I mentioned this because it’s all about reusing your space and it’s the distance that people have to cross. Even if it’s a, one hotel room to say the next panel, or if it’s one panel room to the next, it’s this kind of design thinking about experience design. What’s the best way

to get a bunch of anime cosplayers for Naruto from one end of the convention to the next, because Inuyasha is coming in for their photo shoot. And I know that sounds like such a weird thing that sounds like it might not have anything to do with theater, but Inuyasha and Naruto are totally different properties. They’re gonna want both their own backdrops and sets, right? And there’s gonna be 5,000 detaches, which is fine.

Okay, but you’ve got to move these people from one to the next. And I feel like in video games, what you’re looking at here is that you also mentioned foreshadowing and direction. And so when we look at things in the real meat space of our humanity and our world, right, is that we have lots of signs, right? Lots of things on the road even. Stop, please stop. There will be a stop sign here. Okay, stop ahead.

And I love it when I see that overt iconography and level design, but I love it more when it is that sense of the 2D to 3D space of Doom where you just create a cutout or you create something that is like a red sign that players are like, ⁓ what is that? I should come back to it. And I don’t know why yet.

And in theater, you see this actually a lot. If anyone does go to a play or maybe you go to a film, you’ll see something that you can’t use yet or a door you can’t open. And it’s as easy as having a closed sign at the beginning of West Side Story, right? Then you know there’s gonna be a shop because you see the word closed. You see a storefront that says closed. You know it’s going to appear. And so it’s just going, okay, well, when the sign flips open, now it feels novel.

even though you’ve actually seen it in the back of your head throughout the entire play or musical, the almost the entire performance.

Aaron Nemoyten (17:42)
John Romero figured this out in 1993, doom levels are exceptionally good about showing you things you can’t get to yet in ways that are obvious enough that you go, how do I get that thing? And then you just keep thinking about it.

It’s such a useful tool, especially in games that want replayability, is like teasing the thing. And it’s not super obvious about it. It’s not the telltale, you know, character will remember that, right? It’s not hitting you over the head with it. It’s just letting you see it and then not letting you get it.

Lauryn Ash (18:15)
with the telltale thing there’s like two things about that. Like one is that the, the characters actually ever remember it? And then it was kind of like the whole controversy that came out where it was like, sometimes they didn’t, like they actually didn’t. It was just a part of the experience to make players feel like their choices mattered. Because they did matter, but it may not have actually mattered in that moment.

Aaron Nemoyten (18:30)
⁓ yeah.

Lauryn Ash (18:35)
Right? can only have, they Telltale only wanted to have so many branching, right? Canonical storylines, I think it was less about the character will actually remember it. They didn’t. It was that the game state was like, Hey, you’ve created a choice here that will change your outcome. But they didn’t want to say that. They didn’t want to say, by the way, choice matrix detected, check, check.

Right? They said character will remember this. And I think that’s actually a part of the theater of it. That’s the part of the first time user experience that we were all tricked into thinking those characters remembered. They did not. They remembered nothing, but we remembered it. And I think that’s what’s important.

Aaron Nemoyten (19:14)
Yeah, it is, it is a way of conveying to the audience that something is important and that they should remember it. I mean, it’s, it’s also much better than saying like, our producer might cut the thing that is related to this in our, you know, two episodes from now, because we don’t have the time for it. That’s it’s much better than that.

Lauryn Ash (19:30)
absolutely.

It’s much better than that. Yeah, I wish TV shows would have that too, right? Where like you could introduce a character as a cameo because you don’t know if they’ll be able to film like what you originally wrote at the end of your season. Like that would just be fantastic. ⁓ Actually, speaking of that, it does connect to screenwriting because that’s a lot of the reason why I’ve been writing a lot of TV pilots lately. And when you write a TV pilot, even though I do have some main characters, such as like the main character’s best friend,

Aaron Nemoyten (19:52)
Ooh, nice.

Lauryn Ash (20:00)
⁓ But that person doesn’t actually come up frequently enough for me to include them in the pilot, because if the pilot never gets greenlit, we have spent more money on more characters than we really needed to tell the story of the pilot. And so it’s actually all interconnected now, Aaron. Like it’s all the same kind of philosophy and designs when you think about

the economic use of kind of the creativity and the assets that you have available to you, which all really did kind of boil down to all of my time as either assistant directors of children’s theater, because maybe the child will get sick ⁓ or kind of, yeah, it was great. I’m really glad we talked less about kind of maybe the childcare aspect of it only because I absolutely loved working with the children. ⁓ But I would never say that.

Aaron Nemoyten (20:36)
no.

Lauryn Ash (20:48)
I would never want to start equating that to maybe other experiences I’ve had in my professional life.

Aaron Nemoyten (20:53)
Yeah,

sure. ⁓

Lauryn Ash (20:57)
At least not maybe right now.

Aaron Nemoyten (20:59)
Yeah,

Aaron Nemoyten (21:02)
Make Games Drink Coffee is brought to you by me, Aaron Nemoyten I’d love to grow the audience for this podcast to the point that it can pay for itself in some way. To that end, it would really help if you left a review, if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts Spotify, or like and comment if you’re watching on YouTube. You show that algorithm who’s boss. All right, back to the show.

Lauryn Ash (21:26)
was going to say I’m so excited to be talking about coffee that’s really what I should have put in my bio is that really I know things and I drink coffee that’s really really kind of my brand my cats are called Mugi-cha and Kupo-chino so Mugi and Kupo for short which are Final Fantasy references if anybody is curious because Mugi is a little moogle ⁓

but she’s also named for like barley tea. So I kind of really just love that I’m here because I saw a lot of your episodes and was kind of watching them to get a sense of what to talk about. And then, yeah, everyone is very professional. So I will try to be professional today, but I really love coffee. And so now we’re actually going to be your kind of like drink coffee slash make coffee, which will be really exciting.

Aaron Nemoyten (22:12)
Yeah, and I, well, depending on how much of a coffee snob you are, you may be somewhat horrified to learn that I am drinking a combination of just brewed coffee in a pot from today and also the leftover brewed coffee in the pot from yesterday that I microwaved. Well, so it’s funny because for a while when I was

Lauryn Ash (22:28)
my god, Aaron, we can be better than this. We are better than this, okay?

Aaron Nemoyten (22:39)
living in Sacramento, was working at an EA studio and my wife went to pharmacy school in Stockton, which is far enough away that commuting either direction would be a big pain in the butt. And so after living together for a while, we lived separately and I lived in a tiny cottage and I would make myself fresh pour over cup by cup every morning. And it was really great. And then time passed, we moved in back together.

You know, we had kids and at some point you just go, you know what? We both want coffee. I’m going to brew a pot with the Pete’s coffee I got from Costco and it’s going to be good enough for now and I’ll have the fancy coffee when I go out.

Lauryn Ash (23:19)
You know, everyone actually gives the Peet’s Coffee from Costco such shit, so…

Aaron Nemoyten (23:23)
Thanks

Lauryn Ash (23:24)
Let me start by saying I am a coffee snob. I am. And the reason why I say I’m a snob is because I have what some people would call taste. That’s not to say you don’t have taste, Aaron, or people that are drinking the Peets coffee from Costco don’t have taste. I think it’s all different and it all depends on the type of style, brew, and what your life needs. Coffee is meant to fit into your life. You aren’t meant to necessarily change your life for the coffee you drink. I think that’s something that people just really get wrong a lot of the times when they start to say, well, I’m getting into

coffee.

Aaron Nemoyten (23:55)
coffee’s getting into you.

Lauryn Ash (23:56)
Yeah, coffee is getting into me as fast as possible. And that is why I moved from a meditative pour-over practice every morning to just shots of espresso.

Aaron Nemoyten (24:05)
Nice.

Lauryn Ash (24:08)
⁓ yeah, so I actually like the Pete’s coffee from Costco. ⁓ so everyone who is a coffee snob and you’re only drinking, ⁓ I did say I was in the San Francisco, ⁓ Bay area, ⁓ but I actually do live in San Francisco proper. So I think I could walk to two different blue bottles and like two different rituals, totally varying differences, distances, excuse me. ⁓ totally varying distances, but at the same time, like I am actually drinking, ⁓ this is still a local roaster, so I guess it’s not the Pete’s coffee from

Costco, but I got my bag at Target. ⁓ It is Peerless Coffee Roasters out of Oakland. And pre-pandemic, they were one of the, if not the largest roaster in the Bay Area for hotels and diners and restaurants because they just do large batch production. And this is one of the first bags they’ve ever done that’s small batch production. And their small batch is a two pound bag of coffee. ⁓

So for me, my life is now, I just want a lot of coffee and I make a lot of coffee at home. So it does need to be what snobs would say are like a little higher quality, but it’s also a local Oakland roaster, right? It’s someone that I’m actually contributing to in a small business. And I’m contributing to those people being able to actually continue to roast coffee locally in San Francisco and in the Bay area versus say maybe Pete’s, which is a huge conglomerate. ⁓ But I…

At that point, it just comes down to the amount of coffee you need, how frequently, and also, do you have time, Aaron, in your busy life to pour ⁓ over every day? I would argue you do, since this is an episode about making coffee and drinking games. ⁓

Aaron Nemoyten (25:49)
there are days when I probably do. What happens often is that, um, so I, I’ve been working from home since 2016 and, uh, my wife has a hospital job where she sometimes works from home and sometimes doesn’t. And we have two kids and she tends to get the baby ready in the morning while I get our son breakfast who’s he’s older. And so.

making a pot of coffee so that I can have some before I have to drive the kids to school and daycare and then I bring up a coffee for my wife like just doing it all at once. It’s about efficiency right now. That’s the important thing and I imagine you know as time goes by and things get a little easier and the kids can actually get themselves ready for school then I can slow down then I can you know get back to maybe some some nicer pour over coffee.

Lauryn Ash (26:40)
I agree. I think especially for new parents, like I’m the oldest child. And so I didn’t actually grow up in a household where coffee was a really big kind of important part of the morning ritual. But even I remember having to write pour the orange juice for your little sister. Like you’re getting yourself ready. Mom’s trying to make breakfast, but your sister is really young and doesn’t want to get her shoes on. So like I kind of remember taking on just small responsibilities, nothing what a real parent would. But what I’m trying to at least get it get across here is that like I’m not one of the coffee

ritual snobs that will have to say like well do you know there is an individual pour over a machine you could just buy for you know a nice cheap like $3,000 like yes yes use the plastic thing you can get at Daiso like it’s gonna be great I was actually going to ask now that we’re talking about rituals or after we talk about rituals I did want to talk about ⁓

Aaron Nemoyten (27:19)
Nope, I’ll use the plastic thing that I can get at Daiso.

Lauryn Ash (27:34)
like hardware, like what you actually would use, right? Versus what you’re currently using ⁓ and things like that.

Aaron Nemoyten (27:38)
Yeah.

Lauryn Ash (27:40)
What is your brewing contraption?

Aaron Nemoyten (27:42)
We had a housemate for a while and it just happened to work out that we all moved in together. It was like me and my wife, our son, daughter hadn’t been born yet, and our housemate in March of 2020 decided to get a place together to save money. My wife and him worked together, so they could.

Lauryn Ash (28:00)
That’s amazing

though, like the timing on that could not have been better.

Aaron Nemoyten (28:03)
Yeah, so we were all stuck together and he had a coffee machine. He also was getting Death Wish coffee. And he would always make an entire pot in the morning and however much we drank, we drank and then the rest would just be left over and we just drink it the next day and then you know. ⁓ So around COVID was also the time I found out that I was prone to ⁓ acid reflux and the Death Wish coffee. Did not help.

Lauryn Ash (28:32)
that is the worst for you. So I would say that even as a coffee person, I’ve been technically been making pour overs since I was, since probably 20.

like 10s, 20, 11s, like I have been making pour overs. And it is because my roommate was Japanese and had a little thing probably from a Daiso. And at that time, I didn’t even know what Daiso was. So like my little backstory here is that I grew up kind of all over America, ⁓ but on very kind of rural, like adjacent communities. So yes, they were suburban. If you would consider the next urban destination to be three hours away, suburban, then yes, absolutely. ⁓ And when I went to college, I obviously

right? Everybody’s kind of coming from all these different places, but that’s when I found out about like what I assume is the replica of the Hario, right? The Hario V60, or it’s really just the cone, right? So it’s going to be shaped like, yeah, like a cone. Everyone will actually be able to see my video and I keep forgetting that. So it is shaped like a cone versus a flat, right? Which is what you probably have for your coffee machine. Is that correct? Like your drip coffee.

Aaron Nemoyten (29:40)
⁓ it is… Is it? It’s a cone. Yeah.

Lauryn Ash (29:40)
So is it a cone or is it a drip? And like, this is important.

Okay,

it’s a cone. Okay, so the reason why it’s important is that your grind size between flat bottom and say cone is different than it would be for, is slightly in the coffee world, right? We’re talking about coffee and making coffee would actually be different. And so for example, I would say that.

Honestly, for beginners, you can use whatever grind size you want. The reason why this connects to Death Wish, however, is because Death Wish has such high caffeine content, which makes it have such high acidity that it also comes pre-ground. And so if it’s on a flat bottom, you’re going to get a little bit more of an even distribution in your drip. So more water is going to pass through because it is an automated drip machine versus if it’s a cone, just think about the way physics works. How much fits here, right? How much fits here? What’s the point?

right, of kind of it gets concentrated. So you’re like, it’s not just about the death with coffee. You can have less coffee and more water and make something. It’s not gonna be quite less acidic. That’s not how it works. But for basic make coffee drink games podcast, ⁓ I’m gonna keep doing this. It’s amazing. ⁓ For the basic, you know, let’s making our coffee. ⁓ That’s the basic kind of like ratio to think about is that when you have the cone burner, it’s gonna make things more acidic.

Aaron Nemoyten (30:54)
You

Mmm.

Lauryn Ash (31:05)
So what did you switch to though? So you switched from Death Wish to Peets? Is that what happened? What was the journey there?

Aaron Nemoyten (31:10)
So what happened was that our housemate just moved out. He left the coffee machine because he moved to a tiny apartment in San Francisco that’s up like three flights of stairs. So he just left a bunch of stuff here. He’s like, whatever, keep it. So.

I started having to buy my own coffee and we started shopping at Costco a lot because it’s cheaper and you know, we have kids and to make one giant trip for buying stuff multiple small trips if you can do it. So I just started getting whatever was pre-ground and on sale at Costco and that’s how we end up with Peet’s. I did at one point get a few pounds of this brown sugar cinnamon coffee.

and my wife hates it so I just make it whenever I’m alone and I remember that it’s there but it’s been it’s been like a year so I might just have to throw it out at some point.

Lauryn Ash (32:05)
So I’m not a flavor coffee person, but I’m super curious. Brown Sugar Cinnamon Coffee. Do you remember the brand?

Aaron Nemoyten (32:15)
I don’t. I could go get it if you want to wait.

Lauryn Ash (32:18)
Yes, okay, I actually will go get the coffee that I drink. You get the coffee that you like, and then we will like compare the current coffees that we have. No, exactly. So we’re gonna talk about it, right? It’s gonna be great. Okay.

Aaron Nemoyten (32:25)
Okay. Well, I bought it. didn’t say I like it. I think it’s okay. Okay, I’ll be right back.

Lauryn Ash (32:33)
Okay, so show me this brown sugar cinnamon coffee. it’s a Cafe de Oya. Okay.

Aaron Nemoyten (32:42)
Okay, this is first time I’d seen it.

Lauryn Ash (32:44)
Okay,

so this is something that I also just recently discovered despite probably needing to have known about it more. And I am gonna look up the actual definition here for So a cafe de olla is a traditional Mexican spiced coffee brewed with ground coffee, cinnamon, piloncillo, which is unrefined cane sugar and cloves. is historically prepared in an earthen clay pot.

Aaron Nemoyten (33:07)
I was gonna mention this before. I love food, I love coffee, I love trying different things, but I think in general, my sense of taste is like baseline, I will like almost anything. So I am not picky, even though I do like fancy stuff. Like.

Lauryn Ash (33:24)
Yeah.

No, I think that’s great. I think that’s how more people should be, Aaron. Like you can be a foodie and still love everything. If anything, you’re more of a foodie because you actually love food.

I do want to share with you today the peerless coffee I was talking about that I got from Target. ⁓ They actually won the Roaster of the Year in 2019 for Roast magazine, which I didn’t know about. ⁓ I am currently drinking their espresso blend because I mentioned to you I moved from pour over to espresso and it really kind of came down to the same reason you moved from Death Wish to Peets. ⁓ The acidity of a pour over is just a lot higher.

Aaron Nemoyten (33:41)
Mm.

Nice.

you

Lauryn Ash (34:04)
And when you start moving into enjoying coffee for taste, would say, rather than function, sometimes, and I do think this is true even in myself, though I prefer medium and dark roasts, is that you do move to lighter roasts, or you at least try lighter roasts. And so I tried a lighter roast, and it, in fact, when you make lighter roast coffee, it has more acidity. It’s not a lot more acidity than a dark roast, but it’s enough. Versus say decaf being kind of…

could say hyper roasted and kind of the caffeine has been pulled out of it. That has like the darkest kind of color, the darkest roast. ⁓ But this is a medium roast. It’s whole bean because I grind my own coffee beans ⁓ and it has tasting notes of milk chocolate, roasted nuts, and a smooth finish.

Aaron Nemoyten (34:36)
Mm-hmm.

Lauryn Ash (34:52)
So if anyone is listening to this and wanted like an educational dive into coffee versus maybe just like Aaron and Lauryn talking about how amazing coffee is, ⁓ I mean, obviously I recommend James Hoffman, but I also recommend reading the tasting notes on the bag and just going, can I taste the notes? And if not, why not? And a lot of that’s really going to come down to whether or not what your brew method is, how long your extraction time is, and extraction time is how…

Aaron Nemoyten (35:08)
Mm-hmm.

Lauryn Ash (35:20)
how long water sit with coffee. That’s really it. I like to explain things like I’m five because when I wake up in the morning, I am a five-year-old and I need that for myself.

Aaron Nemoyten (35:35)
And that’s the end of today’s episode. ⁓ an abrupt stop, I know, but it was fun, right? Don’t miss the next episode. We will go deep on screenwriting and talk about the matrix, among other things. Thanks for listening to Make Games Drink Coffee. You can find out more at make games drinkcoffee.com and you can email me at makegamesdrinkcoffee at gmail.com. Remember to like, follow, subscribe, leave a review, and tip your barista. Allright, I’ll see you next time.