The Post-Christmas Coffee Break

The end is in sight! We’ve been doing holiday episodes for almost two months now, and the last one is finally here.

I decided that taking a day to tour upstate dive bars with Dave was a bad idea (Cathy let me know it would be a bad idea (but not totally bad, so maybe just postponed…)), and instead dug into my store of saved interviews and found this one. Back in October, when I did my Midwest book tour, I stopped at State Line Distillery in Madison, Wisconsin and interviewed the owner/founder, John Mleziva. And since the key of his story was the incredible success of their Coffee Liqueur, I decided to spin the whole episode on coffee, and added the story of my 2010 press trip to Mexico to see a coffee plantation and how Kahlúa is made. (And here’s the 2011 article I did for Massachusetts Beverage Business magazine on the trip, a lot more details, if you’re interested.)

Of course I know that I already did a coffee episode (Episode 24)! But you know, I interviewed Jason Ufema at Shy Bear Brewing twice, and you didn’t seem to mind; in fact, you liked the second one better. So maybe this will all work out.

Here’s the hook. I’m going to drink coffee through the whole episode. I’ll be drinking mugs of Fresh Roasted Coffee from Sunbury, the Blackbeard’s Revenge blend, from the start. I’ll be having some of those coffee chocolate cookies Cathy talked about last episode. And there will be five What I’m Drinking Today interludes, all of them coffee-based. So if things sound like you’re running the episode at one and a quarter speed by the end…no, that’s just me.

The Smack-Dab In The Centre plug for our sponsor, Happy Valley Adventure Bureau, is about coffee too, the three coffee roasters you can find in Centre County: Rothrock Coffee, W.C. Clarke’s Coffee Company, and Idou Coffee.

That’s it for 2025. Next episode will be an interview with one of the best rye whiskey makers in Pennsylvania, Herman Mihalich of Dad’s Hat Rye, in Bristol, PA. See you in 2026!