All right. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Cat and Cloud copy podcast. This is Chris Baca and Jared Truby, and we are sitting on a Skype call with the magical

Brandon Paul Weaver. You might know, Brandon, from Slate Coffee. He's also a bartender at Liberty

Bar, which coincidentally is the best neighborhood bar in the world. So just think about that

for a second. What's up, Brandon? Yeah, I'm doing good, man. Zach, dude. You sound great. You sound great. It's a good cruise out here in Seattle right now. Dude, Seattle's deep in the game. Is it beautiful right now? Because Seattle in the summertime is epic. Yeah, I'm going to tell you, it's like 75 and I can't see any clouds. Yeah, that's awesome. The first time I ever went to Seattle, it was during the summer and it was that kind of weather. And I was like, holy shit, why don't I live here? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we try to hide that from people. It's a secret. Yeah, secret. Don't tell anybody. If you're listening to the podcast, forget about it. We're going to men-in-black brain wipe you afterwards. I had a pretty hot four trip in a row sunny time,

and then the last two have just been mega rain.

But, I mean, it was hot for a minute.

I had a real hot time.

So let's just jump on in.

I've known you for quite a bit of time,

and especially coffee scene.

And most people will know you from

slate coffee, but you worked at Zoka prior to that. What's your background? How did,

how did you end up in this industry? Where are you even from? Where are you from? So,

I was going to University of Washington way back, right? And I was working at this cool independent

cafe called Parnassus. Parnassus? Yeah, it's an art building in the basement. All right.

And like they had a whole university at a contract with Tolis. So that was like the only spot

where you could get some coffee that wasn't Tolis because it'd been that way for 50 years.

We were slinging Toneys up in Bellingham yeah tone tone tone yep and uh i moved across the street from university

zoka uh while i was going to school there and they happened to have this really killer bar

crew there uh zoka was kind of on top of things at that point and

I kind of had my magic coffee moment

there. A natural Ethiopian

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