Buffy Maguire Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. I'm the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe magazine.
Today's guest is Buffy Maguire. She's the founder, chief tastemaker, and master roaster of Lady Falcon Coffee Club, a coffee and tea company born in San Francisco. If you've spent time in the city, you might've seen Lady Falcon's vintage 1948 truck rolling around. Buffy joins me to talk about her coffee journey, her life, and how a personal tragedy shaped what she does today. Buffy is a hugely inspiring human and I can't wait for all of you to meet her. Stay tuned for my chat with Buffy Maguire.
Today's episode is presented by Kerrygold. Kerrygold is the iconic Irish brand, famous for its beautiful cheese and butter made with milk from Irish grass-fed cows. I am a Kerrygold super fan and I had the good fortune to travel to Ireland with the Kerrygold team a few years ago. I met farmers, cheese makers, the folks who inspect the butter and grade the cheese, and I even met the cows. It was an unforgettable trip and I loved getting to know more about the world of Kerrygold. I learned the differences between the Kerrygold cheeses and I'm going to share some of my favorites with you. There's Kerrygold Aged Cheddar, classic and rich. Kerrygold Reserve Cheddar is sharp and bold thanks to an extra year of aging. Kerrygold Dubliner is a robust aged cow's milk cheese that's nutty, sharp, and sweet all at once. Then there's Kerrygold Skellig, which is tangy and crumbly with a butterscotch like sweetness. And one more to shout out, Kerrygold Cashel Blue Farmhouse Cheese. It's a perfect blue in my book with that signature creaminess and tang. I love it for everything from snacking to salads. I highly recommend visiting Ireland, but you don't need a trip to Ireland to figure out your favorite Kerrygold cheese. Just a trip to your local supermarket, gourmet shop, or cheese shop. Visit kerrygoldusa.com to learn more about Kerrygold's iconic cheese varieties, to browse recipes, and to find a store near you.
Today's show is also supported by Johnnie Walker. Johnnie Walker is the world's number one Scotch whiskey brand and has been responsible for lots of happy hours and convivial moments for more than 200 years. That tradition continues today in Edinburgh where Dr. Emma Walker Johnnie Walker's first female master blender leads a passionate team of whiskey makers. I've had the pleasure of interviewing Emma and she is so dedicated to her craft. I know some of you love having a well stocked liquor cabinet or bar card at home. So two options to consider. First, Johnnie Walker Black Label. Its nose, as Emma would say, features the bold scent of fruit with a touch of sweet vanilla. Your tongue will pick up creamy toffee, sweet fruit and spice, followed by a warming smoky finish. If you want to experience the pinnacle in scotch-making, there's Johnnie Walker Blue Label. Its nose features waves of spice that give way to vanilla and honey. You'll experience notes that build from caramel to hazelnut to dark chocolate, then a luxuriously long, warming signature smoky finish. You can learn more about Johnnie Walker blended scotch whiskey at johnniewalker.com. You'll find a deep dive into the brand's history and legacy, cocktail recipes, and info on the Johnnie Walker Princes Street brand and tasting room experience in Edinburgh. I'm putting that place on my bucket list right now. Of course, always drink responsibly.
Now, let's check in with today's guest. Buffy Maguire, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Buffy Maguire:
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Kerry Diamond:
We're going to start at the beginning and how you got into coffee. I looked at your LinkedIn page. You got your master's in Belfast in comparative ethnic conflict.
Buffy Maguire:
Yes, political science.
Kerry Diamond:
So interesting. How did this all come to be?
Buffy Maguire:
That was the first year of the peace process, the Good Friday Agreement, and I had studied government and art history at Smith College. I had gone really deep into political science there, which they called government. I had toyed with different ways that I wanted to do that, and one way I thought of doing was going to law school. So I thought of that and then I worked with this really famous, awesome lawyer in San Francisco called Tony Serra, and we worked on a death penalty case up in Ukiah and he just mentored me like, "Do you really want to go to law school? What are the other things that you might want to do?" So we had this sort of open-ended conversation over the course of months. We would take these road trips from San Francisco to Ukiah and back, and we lived up there with a group of people working on this case.
In that process, I thought, "Oh, this is wonderful. This is awesome, and yet I don't want to be a lawyer." I had sort of thought I didn't want to be a lawyer, and it confirmed that although I have a lot of respect for the craft and I had a lot of respect for social justice items, I wanted to do something that would make a difference, and I saw that the peace process was unfolding. And so believe it or not, I had applied for some sort of fellowship to cover this, and so I wrote this whole plan out why it was such a great idea and I didn't end up getting that. And then I thought, "Well, why don't I just do it anyway?" I was trying to convince somebody else to do it, but why don't I do it? So I went and moved to Belfast and studied the first year of the peace process and I got to do some of the most amazing things, but the most amazing thing I did while I was there is I made a small film about the victims of what they call the Troubles.
It's very neat and tidy how they talk about things, and it was the first time that people had talked about people who had died during the Troubles and they created a quilt in the genre of the AIDS quilt, and so everybody had a square. So I got to interview a whole bunch of families about the person that no longer was with us that had never really had a proper memorial, and it's called the “Remembering Quilt.” It was all about the power of remembering people and telling your story and telling their story. Some of it was 20 years later.
Kerry Diamond:
Why Belfast? You could have gone anywhere in the United States to study.
Buffy Maguire:
It was where the Good Friday Agreement was being played out. They said that it was like the Industrial Revolution. One day, everything was one way, and another day, it was a completely different. It was political science unfolding right before my eyes and I was with the professors that were writing and advising on the policies. They were forming governments that had never been formed. They were forming coalitions. And in the streets, it was... Everything was happening all at once. You could report on it from London or from New York, but there's nothing quite like being on the streets.
Kerry Diamond:
Had you ever left home before aside from college?
Buffy Maguire:
I had never lived abroad.
Kerry Diamond:
And what an emotional project to tackle. I mean, how did it change you as a person?
Buffy Maguire:
It continues to change me. It's something that I've revisited many times. At the time, I could feel the power of the oral history and the need to document it and the need to remember people and honor people even if it had been for a very long time. It changed me just in the ability to actually interview people. When you really sit down and ask people questions, a lot of our conversations just in life in general are surface level, but when you actually ask people and you take time to connect with people, there's a wealth of knowledge to share.
Kerry Diamond:
You head back to the United States, when does coffee start to-
Buffy Maguire:
Oh, coffee, growing up in San Francisco, generations deep in the city. In high school, I would go to North Beach, which was the epicenter of what we might call the second wave of coffee, Caffe Trieste, Vesuvio, and that was where we would go and hang out and you could sit and chat and feel very grown up with some bowl of a coffee drink. I fell in love first with coffee culture. And then when I was in college at Smith College in Western Massachusetts, there was The Coffee Connection, which was George Howell's first coffee endeavor. And it was where I had tasted a coffee from Kenya and where I had really started to think about coffee past this big bowl of mostly milk.
Kerry Diamond:
Who was George?
Buffy Maguire:
He was a forerunner in specialty coffee movement and he still has a bunch of shops I think in Boston. The specialty coffee movement started to concentrate on single origins. And so we were talking about farms and we were talking about origins, whereas the second wave would've been more about Italian roast or French roast, to the point where people will ask, "Is that coffee from France?" And there was such a disconnect from the roots of the coffee.
Kerry Diamond:
When you talk about the waves, that's what you're talking about?
Buffy Maguire:
Yeah, so the first wave is considered Folgers and Maxwell House and that sort of thing. The second wave is more of the smaller roasters and even sometimes Starbucks is put in that, where it's at attention to quality and attention to details and where the coffee comes from. Typically, dark roast. And then the third wave is traditionally considered the specialty coffee movement, which hit San Francisco in about 2006, but it had been in Portland before that and George Howell was doing it in Western Massachusetts on some level, and Scott Rao in Amherst, and then Intelligentsia in Chicago. So it has this sort of trajectory.
Kerry Diamond:
What wave are we up to now?
Buffy Maguire:
That's controversial. 3.5, 4.0. I'm not sure.
Kerry Diamond:
You're not ready to put a flag in the sand?
Buffy Maguire:
Well, I would just say that my contribution has been to add to the conversation always and to add value and something new and different. So what I concentrate on are high end blends. Blends in the third wave are very controversial. It's very pure. It's only the single origin. That single origin, that dedication really got us a lot as a movement as a coffee industry. We now have access to farms and names and places and taste profiles that we didn't have before. And so I think that we're always moving forward and so what can we add to that? And so inspired by the wine industry, like the red blends and different ways of approaching it. It is sacrilegious in the third wave to have high ends coffee blends. So I call them single origin blends, which is an oxymoron.
Kerry Diamond:
Before Lady Falcon came about, you had pivoted to coffee?
Buffy Maguire:
My first job in coffee was in 1994. So I'm 30 years into coffee. It started as coffee culture and then I met my husband and we opened cafes that are still in San Francisco, Java Beach, and Java Beach At The Zoo. And then I had opened a third one, which I sold, but that was Beachside Coffee Bar & Kitchen. So I had been in the coffee industry. It was a side job. I always had other jobs.
Kerry Diamond:
What were your main jobs?
Buffy Maguire:
Well, I had done some private investigation where inspired by my master's degree, I went to death row and reinvestigated death penalty cases and then did some other investigation work for the law offices that I discussed. And that was something that I had thought it was so emotional and so raw. And then I taught and I was writing, and so I was doing all of these things all at once.
So I started with one with my husband, one cafe, and he was there and it's part of the neighborhood that we grew up in and we knew everybody. And so it was a beast, but it wasn't impossible. So then after I decided really what I call myself sort of a mompreneur because I wanted to be a mom and I just couldn't visualize how I could be a mom doing what I was doing. And so I had to sort of reverse engineer that. Then I started opening more cafes.
I guess I like to do a lot of things. So I just ended up having three cafes and then opening little things and helping people open their businesses. And so the responsibilities were different. They shifted. I mean, the responsibility of people being in a criminal investigation and death, just going to San Quentin is just a very heavy experience physically. You're either sort of in it... I have a really good friend who does it and she's been doing it for a long, long time. You're either that person who can then kind of go on with the day or you need to go home and take a nap. And I was discovering that I was the person that had to go home and take a nap. So I was like, this isn't going to be sustainable. I mean, didn't go home and take a nap, but my body was... It was an overload.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you want to tell folks what happened next and what led to Lady Falcon?
Buffy Maguire:
By the point at which I had three cafes and I had different opportunities on the way, I had just opened my third. And I had three sons. This was in 2012. Kevin, my oldest, we were on our way to a birthday party and he had scored five goals. I had these beautiful ruddy little boys with freckles and sparkly eyes and everything you could hope for. So Kevin was eight and Connor was six, so it was very little. And we were on our way to a birthday party and he collapsed. And before I know it, we were in an ambulance being driven backwards. I was being driven backwards at high speeds to Stanford where they performed a brain surgery on Kevin, eight hour brain surgery. He had a mass on his brain, which is also a way of saying a brain tumor. It was just the most shocking, whirling, disorienting thing that could ever happen to you.
But then he underwent numerous, numerous, numerous treatments, chemotherapy, more brain surgeries, everything you can imagine, and it was just a living hell for him. It was not working. So Kevin, at a certain point, we realized he was going to pass away. I don't think we realized that very early on at all. Kevin passed away when he was nine years old at August 4th, 2013. So it was however many months that is, 14 months or something of just... It's sort of like a free fall with no bottom. Imagine falling off a building and just sort of like that was what... It just kept getting worse.
Kerry Diamond:
So you had Kevin to take care of, you had the boys to take care of, and you had yourself to take care of. And to get yourself through it, if that's even the right term, you just started daydreaming?
Buffy Maguire:
I did. I did. It sounds so crazy hearing it told back to me. So at first, I thought I would read books because I'm a big reader. And there was a lot of time, I hope no one listening to this has ever gone through any sort of cancer treatment. But if you have, there's lots of waiting and there's lots of time and there's lots of moments. And in the beginning of those times, it was with Kevin, we were together and I was that mom that was not going away. And we would watch movies. We really did have some of the most beautiful poignant moments you could ever recall. But at the end, he started to sleep, which was actually much better for him. I wanted him to have his rest because when he was awake, he was in a lot of pain. So I started to doodle and daydream and I created this crazy coffee company in my head, and I had tried doing other things in my head truthfully.
It had to be light and it had to be fun, and it had to be sort of an escapism, and yet it had to be rooted in something that I cared about. And I had been in coffee for a really long time and I had been roasting coffee. I had a coffee roaster in my garage and I had felt like I was part of the coffee world, but I wasn't in it and I never felt part of it. And that's actually not my go-to feeling. I'm from big families and my kids are one of 29 cousins and I know a lot of people in San Francisco, and so it's not my go-to feeling. So something in that just didn't feel right. So I started to play with all the rules in coffee and I started to examine them and I started to sort of freestyle this manifesto of things that I would want in a very personal coffee company.
And I designed the logo with a guy on crowdsource. I did like 25 different iterations of it. I mean, that's like a Rihanna stance. And the wings, they were inspired by the bicycling club that I named the coffee company, this mystical, mythical coffee company after. A lot of the elements were just about feeling very free and light, but also sensual. I felt that specialty coffee was too cerebral. I say that Lady Falcon is a taste-forward company. And I mean that very empowering in the sense that you know what you like to taste. So why would I tell you what you want to taste? I can provide guidance on thought processes and why something tastes like this and where the process is and how we get to that. But you should drink something you want to taste and you should honor what you like and how that is.
Kerry Diamond:
You build out this entire brand.
Buffy Maguire:
The whole brand. Well, I didn't call it a brand. I just thought it was a daydream. Honestly, I didn't think of it. A brand seemed so legit. It was just a daydream.
Kerry Diamond:
And you tucked it away.
Buffy Maguire:
Tucked it away.
Kerry Diamond:
How long did you tuck it away for?
Buffy Maguire:
Three years.
Kerry Diamond:
We'll be right back with today's guest.
This episode of Radio Cherry Bombe is supported by OpenTable. I'm excited to announce that we'll be back on the road later this spring and summer with OpenTable for our Sit With Us Community Dinner Series, which highlights amazing female chefs and restaurateurs and the Cherry Bombe and OpenTable networks. It's been such a treat meeting so many of you at our dinners across the country. Our next series of Sit With Us Dinners will take place in Dallas, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Portland, Oregon. We'll be announcing the restaurants and dates of the Sit With Us Dinners soon, so stay tuned. Keep an eye on our Instagram and make sure you have the OpenTable app downloaded.
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What made you tap back into the daydream?
Buffy Maguire:
Well, I had been wanting to create something in the coffee space. I had been part of the Rip Curl ocean beach surf contest. And I had done a mobile unit, not a car, but I had brought coffee that I roasted and all of that, and we served it and it was when Kelly Slater won the 11th something, world title. Very nice. I mean, no disrespect to him, but when he won it, they lost power, Rip Curl. All these lovely Australians turned not so happy with us and took our power away because they needed to broadcast the moment that everyone had waited for. So I had done all this setup and I couldn't make coffee. So I had a line of people.
Kerry Diamond:
Uh-oh. When people want their coffee, they want their coffee.
Buffy Maguire:
I had said in my head, if I ever do this again, I'm going to have my own generator, I'm going to have some sort of mobile thing where I just drive it in because it was a lot of setup and breakdown. It always takes longer than you think it's going to take. Something always breaks. So after Kevin passed away, I had doubled down on roasting because roasting to me is a meditative process and it's creative. I promised myself that I would have to do something creative. That was a given. But I didn't really articulate what I was doing. So I found this, what became the Lady Falcon Vintage Mobile Coffee Truck, and it is a 1948 GMC bread van.
Kerry Diamond:
A 1948 GMC bread van.
Buffy Maguire:
Bread van. Yes, yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Just that.
Buffy Maguire:
Just that. And so I found it abandoned in a parking lot. For a few years before that, even before Kevin had gotten sick, I had looked at VW buses as part of the surf beach culture that I love, but I could never really figure out, because I work in this space, how someone would work in one of those. It just didn't seem very comfortable. And I know that if my team's not happy, I'm not happy. So I thought, "Well, they need more space." I bought this red van and I bought it for $1,800 and I had it towed to these guys who were in the burning man shadows of West Oakland, and our interview was over the phone and it was the anti-interview.
I mean, he said, "Yeah, well, I don't have time for you." I'm like, "That's fine. Do you have a place I can park this? Because actually I don't know why I bought this. I don't know what I'm going to do with this." And so he's like, "Yeah, but you're going to have to wait." He has only a flip phone and he only works on cars pre 1970, there's no computers. It had a long laundry list of things that he didn't do. I said, "That's fine, that's fine." So we went. Fast-forward, he calls me, "You're up." And I think he was really shocked when I said, "Great."
I went over there once a week. It was either cheaper than therapy or more expensive than therapy. We'll never know. And we had this very tactile relationship with the truck. I mean, he and his crew, we sawed off the roof one day. He's like, "I don't think it's tall enough." And I said, "Yeah, I don't think so." So we sawed it off and we put the VW windows all around it. We did have a nod to the VW bus and then we re-welded it.
Kerry Diamond:
So you were literally helping with the labor?
Buffy Maguire:
No, but I mean I was... No, I made that sound like I was... No, I was just giving the, yeah, I think we should saw the roof off without any sort of sense of that that should really happen. But yeah, why wouldn't you saw the roof off? And then you have to pass all sorts of inspections. And then we got hit with a... It took 14 months. We get hit with this walkway. We were three inches short. And this was a really dark moment. I was just thinking... I mean, obviously, I used dark, pretty light because of what was going on, but I thought, we've done all this and now we're not going to pass the inspection because-
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, I wasn't- I didn't know what you meant by dark moment.
Buffy Maguire:
Three inches. Three inches, we were short. So Chris Carney turns to me, and by the way, he used to be a magician, of course, and he's so handy and so... And he said, "Got me thinking, what if we turned nothing into something?" And I was like, "Chris, I hope you have a punch line really fast because this now needs to work. We're in too deep here." So he created the crank out, it slides three inches so we have this custom seafoam blue La Marzocco 3 group espresso machine, and it was taking up too much room. So we move it. So when we get there, we crank it out three inches to give-
Kerry Diamond:
So almost like one of those camper vans.
Buffy Maguire:
Exactly.
Kerry Diamond:
You've got to go back a little. So you just threw yourself into this as a way of dealing with your grief.
Buffy Maguire:
So I think this was in 2015. So it was two years after. I had a lot of cleaning up to do. I had had a cafe that I had opened a couple months before Kevin had gotten sick, and I had opened it up as a coffee bar because of my passion, and it turned into a full-blown restaurant. So I was an accidental restaurateur. And I had a chef who quit the night before we opened-
Kerry Diamond:
At the same time you're taking care of Kevin?
Buffy Maguire:
No, that was a couple months before. So I went back and got that space together and I realized very deep in my soul, I have so much respect for restaurateurs, but it's not my calling. And so I got everything together and the problem was that it was so successful, there was just lines out the door constantly. I had used some of my grandfather's recipes. It did fill a need in the neighborhood. So I sold it in 2018.
Kerry Diamond:
So when you say you had to clean up, you had to deal with that?
Buffy Maguire:
I had to deal with the messes. Even though that was what I was physically doing, emotionally, what I was doing was doubling down on my kids. Connor and Dylan were so little, and so my thought process was I want to show them that we're going to honor Kevin by living and by thriving. We're not going to fall apart even though it's okay to fall apart for a few days and pull the covers over your head and then we're going to get up and we're going to do this because the way I looked at it is I had them here. They were here, and I wanted them to live their lives really fully. And I knew very, very deep in my soul that they would do as I was doing and not as I was saying. And so I had to live it. That was always my inspiration.
Kerry Diamond:
Are you still roasting in your garage?
Buffy Maguire:
No, I do-
Kerry Diamond:
I was going to say basement, but it was the garage, right?
Buffy Maguire:
It's the garage, yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
You're still roasting in the garage?
Buffy Maguire:
No, I roast... Right now, we're building out a space and I roast right now in a collective in Oakland.
Kerry Diamond:
You said you're building out a space. What can you tell us?
Buffy Maguire:
Yes. Well, actually, this is the first time I've spoken about this publicly. We're building out a space on Wawona Street in the Outer Sunset, and I've come to find out that the building that we're building it into, it was originally a bike shop. It's on the block that Jack O'Neill invented the wetsuit. It's the home of the first surf shop called Wise Surf Shop ever in Northern California. It's a really cool block.
Kerry Diamond:
A lot of good karma.
Buffy Maguire:
It's a lot of interesting stuff going on there.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell people the connection again to the bike club because they might not realize.
Buffy Maguire:
Oh, right. Part of this story of Lady Falcon Coffee Club is about the neighborhood that I grew up in and that my family's grown up in, and my husband's grown up in, that my children are one of 29 cousins in, and it's called the Outer Sunset. It's home to a really eclectic group of people, and it's right on the Pacific Ocean. And I say that the ocean is all of our center points. It's got a very eclectic group of people, and there's a synergy of creativity that's always been there. It's a little zany in the best way possible. I like zany, so I find that to be a compliment. And what I noticed from really a young age was that the people who were attracted to that neighborhood were always super creative and super free thinkers. And I had started to hear a lot of the oral history from the grandchildren of the people that had lived out there when it was sand dunes.
So it was developed in World War II, but when it was sand dunes, these people had created a neighborhood out there. So the streetcars downtown changed to electric, and the mayor at the time also lived out there was also sort of eclectic guy, Adolph Sutro, he bought a whole bunch of these abandoned streetcars and plopped them down and rented them out to beachgoers. He's the first deed holder on all that property out there. What formed there were all these, the first Buddhist monks were out there, Jack London was out there, the Falcon Ladies Bicycling Club was out there. And I always had heard about these women. And as I grew from a young girl into a young woman, into a full-blown woman, I started to have different visions of these women. And I thought, "Well, wait a second. Why did these women need a bicycling club and what were they doing?" It was the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s.
And so I thought as I was naming this mystical coffee company, San Francisco had been changing a lot, a city I love very deeply. A lot of our history was being sort of, shall we say, not written. They have a mural in Belfast that says history is written by the winners. And I thought, "We're losing something here." Around that time, I started to hear that people were writing a book about this neighborhood, so there were more details about these women. I thought when I was naming this coffee company, I'm going to pay tribute to the people that came before me and I'm going to honor them. I thought, "Well, just like Duke Ellington and the jazz musicians and even hip hop artists, Queen Latifah, I'm going to own this street credibility. I'm going to own this as nobility." So I switched the name around a little bit to be Lady Falcon, to just own that sense of royalty.
So that's how the name was born to honor the women that had this bicycling club and rode through the sand dunes and had their moment. And then after I had named it Lady Falcon, I came to find out that women's bicycling clubs were part of a whole movement from the US through Western Europe. Susan B. Anthony said something to the effect of nothing liberated women more than the advent of the bicycle. And so this was the pre-dawn to the suffragette movement. And a lot of people believed that these bicycling clubs were the dawn of that, of those women getting together and sort of comparing notes and saying, "Wait a second, we couldn't even vote in 1860s, 1870s." That was the origin of the name. It was a tribute to an underdog neighborhood, a neighborhood that had often been dismissed, was originally full of working class, middle class people. It wasn't a fancy part of town when I was in high school going two buses across town to neighborhoods where people said, "Is that in the city?" There's a lot of sand dunes, there's a lot of fog, and it's very beautiful.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us about the space you're building out. Will it be a coffee shop and a roastery?
Buffy Maguire:
We will serve coffee. Our community has been so amazing. So it's time to get a brick and mortar as they say, or I think of it as just more of a landing spot, a hearth, a homecoming. The coffee truck's beautiful, wonderful. And yet we're always sort of moving, even though we are in Alamo Square.
Kerry Diamond:
We should explain this to folks.
Buffy Maguire:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
You are a mobile coffee business and an e-commerce website.
Buffy Maguire:
Yes, yes. And in COVID, the e-commerce has become an equal percentage, if not more than our day-to-day. That and wholesale.
Kerry Diamond:
We already talked about the truck in the park. Where else can people find the truck every week?
Buffy Maguire:
No, we go from the Outer Sunset area, from the Pacific Ocean area to Alamo Square on Thursdays, and we come back on Sundays. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday we're-
Kerry Diamond:
At the park?
Buffy Maguire:
Yeah, across from The Painted Ladies.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay, got it. And The Painted Ladies, for those who don't know?
Buffy Maguire:
Are the iconic San Franciscan, Victorian, Edwardian houses.
Kerry Diamond:
You see them in every TV shot, every TV commercial, every postcard.
Buffy Maguire:
They have been branded as San Francisco.
Kerry Diamond:
Weren't they in some famous TV show?
Buffy Maguire:
The question we get at the coffee truck is which one is the “Full House” house? My mom, who was born and raised in San Francisco, when I told her excitedly we got the coffee truck across the street from The Painted Ladies, she had no idea what I was talking about because she's an old hippie and she doesn't watch TV. So then when I said Alamo Square, she knew exactly where I was talking about. It's sort of just become a piece of San Francisco. And I think it's a beautiful piece of craftsmanship and details and-
Kerry Diamond:
I love the truck so much because it reminds me of the San Francisco I fell in love with. San Francisco really used to be the place where you could let your kind of freak flag fly. Still is to a big extent.
Buffy Maguire:
Depends on what kind of freak flag, but yeah, I think so.
Kerry Diamond:
But it's so original.
Buffy Maguire:
It's original. That's the biggest compliment.
Kerry Diamond:
What can folks order when they come visit you?
Buffy Maguire:
Well, I roast all the coffee since we've talked about. Our most popular drink is what we call a petite latte. A succinct latte.
Kerry Diamond:
How's it different from a cappuccino?
Buffy Maguire:
Well, a cappuccino would be more foam. This is essentially like a cortado but filled with milk. Everybody reinterprets these drinks, so if you go somewhere and that's not what they serve, that's just how they interpreted it. But a ristretto shot of espresso, it's six ounce cup, and then most cortados are probably just equal parts, whereas we tip it all the way over to the top.
Kerry Diamond:
So a petite latte?
Buffy Maguire:
A petite latte.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Do you have a signature drink? I think when I was there, you had an interesting-
Buffy Maguire:
The Pink Crush. One of my joys of being in the coffee world is sourcing coffee. And so I source a coffee cherry tea that's basically coffee is a cherry. And so the pit is what we roast, what I roast at high temperatures. Coffee roasters are essentially just very large popcorn poppers, but with more airflow hopefully. So that softens it and that's what you grind in your morning brew or whatever. And then the pulp on the outside is being sort of rediscovered. It's sort of like Columbus discovering America. It's very well discovered in coffee producing countries. But I've gotten to rediscover it with a lot of joy and gone to a lot of coffee cherry farms and they have a particular way of de-pulping it. And then there's different processes, but the one that I bought is sun dried, so I have all these beautiful videos of women. It's all women because it's a highly skilled job that they train them at. They're moving the pulp in the sun and it dries. Obviously, it depends on which bean it is, but it's really full of a lot of polyphenols and it's a superfood.
Kerry Diamond:
Is that called cascara?
Buffy Maguire:
Yes, exactly. I've moved away from calling it cascara because in Ayurvedic Medicine there's a cascara sagrada, which is a laxative, even though cascara just means husk or shell. So I call it coffee cherry.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. But it's not cherry cherry? It's not traditional cherry?
Buffy Maguire:
It's not a traditional cherry.
Kerry Diamond:
Does the coffee cherry have a single flavor profile?
Buffy Maguire:
Each season, each bean will have a variation also, depending on the process. There's a cascara farm that I visited in Costa Rica, and they pasteurize it. And so that has a certain taste profile. If it's sun dried, it has a certain taste profile, it has to be done right, because if it's not done right, it won't taste good at all. But traditionally, it's got a sort of fruity. A lot of what you taste in coffee is due to the roast, the coffee roaster imparts a flavor into it and heating it, whereas that tastes more like herbal tea, slightly sometimes a little tobacco-y in it. That's a good attribute in coffee, it can be.
Kerry Diamond:
And all your teas are built around the coffee cherry?
Buffy Maguire:
Mm-hmm. That I sourced from a woman farmer that I went to visit in Nicaragua.
Kerry Diamond:
I've read about her. Tell us about Rina.
Buffy Maguire:
She introduced herself to me at a coffee conference, a coffee fest in San Francisco, and I had always had an interest maybe dating back about 10 years in how this Cascara coffee cherry shows up. And so she started talking to me about it and I was immediately engaged and wanting to know more. I was already going to Oaxaca where I source one of my favorite beans. I was going to Costa Rica already to also source beans, and then she invited me to Nicaragua, and that was in a couple of weeks. And I said, "Okay."
So I just planned the trip around that. I think she was a little surprised actually when I showed up. She took me to the tippy top of a mountain. It was quite a drive, and I got to see the farms and the process and the whole arrangement. And typically, in coffee, even when you direct trade, you have to go through an importer to go through customs, and then it goes through the annex or whatever your port is for us. And it's the annex in Oakland. She has her own license. I get to buy the coffee cherries from her, and each season has a different taste and she's got the different process. It's natural, it's washed, and so we do a blend of that.
Kerry Diamond:
You have several direct relationships. Why are they so important?
Buffy Maguire:
I have a background in social justice, but as being part of a community in a neighborhood, I know the ecosystems that exist in neighborhoods and countries and towns. I re-envision that in these coffee communities. Once you've lived in a community, you understand the value of that, and so you just need to go to a new community and see that small ecosystem as a witness. And I like to have a direct trade, I like to understand where the coffee comes from. I want to know what the climate's like, what the cliffs are like.
It's also an adventure. It's fun, but I don't need that for the coffee to taste good. But I think it does taste better because I've gone to the source and they really respect that. Every coffee farm I've ever gone to has been the most generous experience. The last time I went to Oaxaca and to the hills, it took a 17-hour drive into the mountains and they served me a feast. What they shared in proportion to what they had was just incredible. And they tell the story about the coffee, and I'm interested in storytelling, but I'm also interested in the roots of what impacts our cup.
Kerry Diamond:
All right, Buffy, we're going to do a speed round.
Buffy Maguire:
Okay.
Kerry Diamond:
What beverage do you start your morning with?
Buffy Maguire:
I start my morning with coffee. I do. I make myself a pour-over and my house is full of a lot of coffee. I'm always drinking different combinations and I roast everything single origin so then I taste it by itself so that I know what the components are. It's like a building block. But while I'm making my pour-over, I do drink water first as I got older. That seems like a good thing to do.
Kerry Diamond:
And do you put any milk or sugar in your coffee?
Buffy Maguire:
I drink the first sips black because I just want to get to know the coffee, and then I always put a little half-and-half in.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. No sugar?
Buffy Maguire:
No.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. What's a treasured cookbook or book on food?
Buffy Maguire:
“How to Be a Domestic Goddess” by Nigella Lawson. I just think she nailed the intuitive, voluptuous, soft power of cooking for people, and she owned it in a way that was just really dynamic for me at the time when she did that. My grandfather was the cook in our house and he taught me how to cook from a young age, but I never actually saw my mom or my grandmother cook, and she's so intuitive and I used to just live for her Wednesday New York Times recipes. She just made you feel like you could do it.
Kerry Diamond:
Favorite childhood food.
Buffy Maguire:
As I mentioned, my grandfather cooked, so I would always go into his kitchen. There was always something on the stove. So sometimes he'd be frying a meatball and you'd get one before it'd go in the sauce or the steaming pastina or always his pasta. So those were my favorite. And still the foods that I prepare.
Kerry Diamond:
Snack food of choice?
Buffy Maguire:
I'm in a trail mix phase. I'm just always sort of mixing different things. I like sweet and salty, so that's always something that I gravitate towards so that... I actually really like chunks of chocolate rather than the M&M'S. I'm progressing past the M&M'S because I really did like the M&M'S for a long time and raw almonds and cashews and seeds.
Kerry Diamond:
What's always in your fridge?
Buffy Maguire:
Well, I do always have half-and-half because I like half-and-half. But I always have a garlic butter. I use my food processor and I take fresh garlic and I puree it and I put salted butter, often Kerrygold butter, actually, real and olive oil, and I make a big vat of it. And so if my kids are hungry, I'll just throw that in a frying pan. I'll fry up some chicken or put some pasta in there. So it instantly makes something-
Kerry Diamond:
Just raw garlic?
Buffy Maguire:
Raw garlic in there.
Kerry Diamond:
Genius. Okay. That sounds great. What's your favorite smell?
Buffy Maguire:
I do love the smell of the coffee in the morning.
Kerry Diamond:
I knew you were going to say that.
Buffy Maguire:
I do. I do. And I guess my kids do too now.
Kerry Diamond:
Last question. If you had to be trapped on a desert island with one food celebrity, who would it be and why?
Buffy Maguire:
Darina Allen.
Kerry Diamond:
Great answer.
Buffy Maguire:
Yeah. I feel like she's a matriarchal Irish woman and she seems very unflappable. She's from Cork, where my dad's mom was from, and I've been several times and I feel like she would probably be able to make some food out of nothing. Right? And she'd be very reassuring and tell me everything was going to be fine and I would believe her.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, Buffy, thank you so much for coming by. We love everything you're doing, and thanks for being such a great member of the Cherry Bombe community.
Buffy Maguire:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
For so many years now.
Buffy Maguire:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Buffy, you're the Bombe.
Buffy Maguire:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. I would love for you to subscribe to Radio Cherry Bombe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and leave a rating and a review. Let me know what you think about the show and who you'd like me to interview on a future episode. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Joseph Hazan is the studio engineer for Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center. Our producers are Catherine Baker and Elizabeth Vogt. Our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu, and our content operations manager is Londyn Crenshaw. Thanks for listening, everybody. You're the Bombe.