Did you know ECS launched a podcast? Coffee Talk: From the Ground Up is meant to be educational, entertaining and encouraging with practical advice you can apply directly in your work and life. Listen and subscribe now on Anchor, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts.
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Introduction
Steve Gosselin:
Welcome to Coffee Talk: From the Ground Up, an ECS Podcast. Where we strive to provide a more personable way to communicate with employees. I’m Steve Gosselin, but you can call me Goose. And I’m part of our senior leadership team. And I’m joined here by Julie Smith, who is part of the marketing communications team, and our resident chocoholic. Say hi, Julie.
Julie Smith:
Thanks Steve. Hey everyone. I’m glad you’re joining us today. So, Steve, what are we doing here?
Steve Gosselin:
Great question, Julie. One of the struggles with a company our size is getting a message to the masses, without it being diluted along the way. From projects and people, to services and career insight, we hope this podcast helps provide an avenue to communicate the stories that are worth sharing. It’s to learn about our culture and feel more connected, and to have some fun along the way.
Julie Smith:
So what you’re saying is, we hope this podcast is educational, entertaining, and encouraging. With practical advice you can apply directly to your work and life.
Steve Gosselin:
Well said, Julie. And that’s why you’re in marketing.
Julie Smith:
So grab a cup and settle in.
Our attorney makes us say this. This podcast is for entertainment and informational purposes only. Nothing here in shall be construed as providing professional engineering services or used to establish the standard of care. This podcast and the comments contained therein represent only the personal views of the participants and do not reflect those of ECS. While we make every effort to ensure that the information we are sharing is accurate, we welcome any comments, suggestions, or correction of errors.
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Steve Gosselin:
All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Coffee Talk. Today, we’re going to be talking to Derek Stetler, who’s in our IT department. He sits in Raleigh. Not only we’re going to talk about information technology and computers and software and all that stuff, we’re also going to be talking about coffee, because one of Derek’s hobbies is coffee roasting. As always, before we get started, we’re going to start with a Safety Minute, and Derek’s going to provide that for us this morning. So good morning, Derek.
Derek Stetler:
Good morning, everybody. Good morning. I would say this time of year is starting to get cold. My Safety Minute, or advice would be clean your gas logs, clean your fireplaces there. Make sure there’s no soot, and cleaned up because you don’t want to burn your house down. And I’ve seen it happen.
Steve Gosselin:
Tanks for that. I could couldn’t agree more. We appreciate that. Derek is the Network Manager for ECS. He’s based in our Raleigh, North Carolina office. He joined ECS in 2008, about 13 years ago. And when he’s not working, you can find him spend time with his wife and dog on their boat. All right. We’re going to start out with our rapid fire session. Derek, what’s your favorite food?
Derek Stetler:
Smoked ribs.
Steve Gosselin:
Are you a North Carolina boy?
Derek Stetler:
Yes. Vinegar-based.
Steve Gosselin:
There you go. Okay.
Derek Stetler:
Vinegar-based.
Steve Gosselin:
Absolutely. And your favorite movie?
Derek Stetler:
Anything Star Trek.
Steve Gosselin:
Oh wow. Cool. Favorite sport or hobby?
Derek Stetler:
I can provide both. Baseball’s my sport. I like to wakesurf.
Steve Gosselin:
Where do you do your wakesurfing?
Derek Stetler:
Jordan Lake. We keep our boat about a half a mile from there.
Steve Gosselin:
What job would you be terrible at?
Derek Stetler:
Oh, that’s easy, singing.
Steve Gosselin:
Singing.
Derek Stetler:
That’s not even a difficult question at all.
Steve Gosselin:
I could appreciate that. And what are you addicted to?
Derek Stetler:
Sports, in general. And my wife would most definitely confirm that allegation.
Steve Gosselin:
I resemble that.
Derek Stetler:
And it doesn’t matter if there’s a ball, a stick, a bat, a net that’s involved. Male, female, makes no difference to me.
Steve Gosselin:
Cool. Tell us your ECS story. What brought you here? Tell us a little bit about what you do, how you chose your career path. We want to hear about Derek.
Derek Stetler:
Well, I can tell you how I got here. It’s actually through a mutual friend, Dwayne Ayscue. I was playing golf with a buddy of mine, and Dwayne met us out there, and we just started talking about IT and networking, and things like that. And at that time, Dwayne was looking for somebody. And after about 12 or 15 holes, I told him I’ll interview for the job. And lo and behold, that was it. I left a company I’d been with for eight years, actually doing pretty much the same thing. The network management installation of network and software for hospitals, doctors’ offices, places like that. And that’s kind of how I got in.
Derek Stetler:
As far as the career path, it’s kind of strange. I actually started as an accounting major at NC State. And after about six months of macro and microeconomics, I instantly learned that accounting wasn’t about numbers. It’s about theory and discussion and talking. It’s not about adding and subtracting, like I thought it was. I had been interested in computers pretty much my whole life. My dad had a TRS-80 back in 1983, and that was the first computer I ever saw. And ever since then, I got my own Commodore 64, and it just kept graduating and graduating. And from there, I switched fields, started in a little bit of programming then networking, and got certified, and it kind of just went from there.
Steve Gosselin:
Wow. The Commodore 64, man. That brings back memories that-
Derek Stetler:
Man, does it ever?
Steve Gosselin:
Holy cow. The first computer Karen, I bought, I don’t remember the brand, but I think it had 10 megabytes of memory and one megabyte of RAM, which was pretty much unheard of for a personal computer back then. And I remember when I bought it, and the who guy sold it to me said, “You’re never going to need any more than that.”
Derek Stetler:
Oh gosh. It’s hilarious that you say that. And I think about the old 5 1/4 floppy drive with the giant gate that took up half your table. And you think now, that you’ve got chips inside of your finger nails, that can store more than that entire computer. You think about the Apollo 11 capsule, your iPhone has, I think I’ve read somewhere, a couple of a hundred times more processing power memory than the entire computer system on the Apollo 11 capsule.
Steve Gosselin:
And that’s actually one of my favorite movies, is Apollo 13.
Derek Stetler:
Great movie. Tom Hanks was really good.
Steve Gosselin:
And the scene after the explosion, and they’re in the spacecraft floating along in space, and they start pulling out slide rules. And the kids looked at me and said, “Dad, what are they doing?” It’s like, “Well, they’re trying to save their lives, but they’re using the slider rule.” “What’s that?” They really-
Derek Stetler:
[inaudible 00:07:42] tell them anything. Steve Gosselin:
Essentially they really had no computing power at all. So, it’s pretty amazing. So tell us a little bit more about Network Manager. Network management is what you do? Is it installing hardware, and hard wiring things?
Derek Stetler:
That’s a small piece of it. Most of it is configuration monitoring, making sure the systems are up and operational. Making sure every office has connectivity to the ECS backbone, the ECS network, to run their applications, phone system as well. It also includes instant messaging on the phone system, making phone calls, forwarding. Making sure those systems are operational for the entire company.
Derek Stetler:
All of those systems, like our phone system, are co-located in single facilities. So, it’s a pretty big piece. And a lot of it now is migrating to cell phones too. So you can forward calls, you can do single number reach, and things like that. People that want to be reached constantly, can be reached constantly, but that’s a matter of opinion, I’d say.
Steve Gosselin:
And I don’t want to leave this just yet, because it is an important part of what we do. A lot, especially you and network management, a lot of what you and your team does is behind the scenes. People don’t know that it’s there. They take it for granted. And the only time that they know it’s not there is when something drops, something goes wrong. And pretty quickly you all get right on it, and get it fixed. So, tell us a little bit more about the command center, how you monitor stuff, how many people are on your team. Just go in a little bit more detail about what you all do.
Derek Stetler:
Absolutely. So there’s two people on my team. We just hired someone about a year ago to take Tyler Worley’s place, who’d been with us for quite a long time. And then Rizzie Gale, who’s in the Chantilly office, she’s a pretty big part as well. She oversees… And we all know this, Chantilly offices is the biggest office, our major money making office. So she oversees anything and everything that goes on there, as far as monitoring goes. We use a system called PRTG. It’s a Paessler Network Monitoring system. I think they’re based out of Germany, but it gathers information from every networking device, every system that runs in the company servers, phone system, network gear, everything. And lets us know if a single piece is down, up, not performing the way it’s supposed to be. If your internet is down, it will tell us. We pretty much know, within a one to five minute window, if anything goes down. The help desk will make initial calls. Unless it’s something that they can’t handle, that kind of stuff gets forwarded to myself.
Derek Stetler:
And there’s, obviously the other guy, whose name is Derek as well, and Rizzie. And it goes through the chain, and if they need me… I kind of let them try to do and fix whatever they can fix. And if they can’t, they come to me and ask me, “Hey, what do we do?” But we use that. We also just employed a product called Datadog, that actually gathers logging information from all of our servers and does real time statistics; failed login attempts, security breaches, that kind of thing. So it keeps up with that as well.
And we kind of keep an eye on a lot of stuff. And we hope to never see anything go down. It’s kind of a no news is good news. Any news is bad news.
Derek Stetler:
And that’s usually the case in networking. People don’t call you to say, “You’re doing a great job.” They call you to say my so and so is down. I can’t connect. My Internet’s broken. My wireless doesn’t work. I can’t log in. Big, now, of course, VPN doesn’t work. And that is because so many people work from home now, that’s a big deal. In this company, you can do 95% of your job remotely, unless, of course, you’re in obviously a technician, somebody has to be on site. A manager or someone like that can do pretty much their entire job remotely. And we have to provide that service these days. Because a lot of competitors, there are some people taking jobs that never go into an office ever. They just don’t anymore. Which, has its advantages and disadvantages. But that’s enough a discussion, I guess.
Steve Gosselin:
That’s great. Gives a little bit more insight about what you and your team do. And you mentioned some of the software and some of the things you use to monitor all the network systems. Being an absolute novice, can you give us an idea or order of magnitude of what you measure? Is it number of, I don’t know, number of bits, number of-
Derek Stetler:
Absolutely.
Steve Gosselin:
… What do you guys monitor? Give us an idea.
Derek Stetler:
I’ll give you a quick example. With our new networking setup, we’re basically using, what’s called SD- WAN. We love acronyms in this world, for some reason, I don’t know why, but we do. It’s just software defined-WAN. Basically, these devices can prioritize traffic. So if you’ve got voice traffic, gets priority over, say browsing the internet traffic. Or ECS 360 apps get slightly more priority over browsing internet traffic. So it’s stacked in that manner.
Derek Stetler:
As far as connectivity, say, we monitor two connections in every office. One is a backup connection, one is a primary internet connection. Whether it be some type of fiber, broadband cable, DSL, whatever the case may be. And we use wireless as a backup only if the primary goes down. So we monitor each one of those circuits. So when your primary circuit shows zero bandwidth, or less than 0.01 or 0.1% bandwidth usage. And the other connection is showing uses, that tells us that the primary connection is down. So we know to contact whatever broadband or fiber provider there is, that’s operating that circuit. That’s just one of the ways. The other way is a simple connectivity test. Every device has an IP. We are constantly pinging each device, every 30 seconds to see if it’s up. So we know within one to… Like I said, between a one to five minute window, if something, at all, is offline.
Steve Gosselin:
Well, thanks for sharing all that with us. And hopefully that gives everybody listening just a basic idea. Not even a general idea, just a basic idea of what you all do and what you try to hold together for us each day. And a quick how out to Rizzie, I’m glad you mentioned Rizzie. For those of you listening today, if you don’t know Rizzie, you need to get to know Rizzie. Just what a fantastic job. Just one of the heroes in ECS, absolutely every day.
Derek Stetler:
And I will throw an extra compliment to her. She is one of the hardest working people that I have ever been around.
Steve Gosselin:
Without a doubt. If you don’t know Rizzie, reach out, get to know her. What a great attitude, positive attitude. And she does, she works hard. She is an unsung hero in this company, that most people don’t know.
Derek Stetler:
And you don’t have to tell her to do anything, her initiative is second to none. She’s always one to learn. I mentioned the Datadog Monitoring project. She single-handedly set that entire operation up by herself.
Steve Gosselin:
Well, on behalf of me and Julie and all the listeners today, we personally want to thank you all for what you do for us. Like I said, it goes on behind the scenes and we don’t notice it until there is a problem. But you all are on it right away. So, thanks to you and your team.
Derek Stetler:
Absolutely.
Steve Gosselin:
Okay. So, let’s shift a little bit, and appropriate for coffee talk, and I know this is Julie’s idea, picking this. We’re going to talk a little bit about one of your hobbies, which is coffee roasting. How did you start roasting your own coffee beans?
Derek Stetler:
It’s funny. Kevin Ryan, who works a couple of doors down. He told me, he is like, I actually use this little old Jiffy Pop or one of these old popcorn makers, that have the plastic hood on them from the eighties and nineties, they get really hot. Well, he found this article or this video online, how you can use those to do roasting at home.
Derek Stetler:
And he brought some of it in, and it had, I think, maybe been a week since it had been roasted. And as soon as I drank that coffee, I looked at him and I said, “You need to tell me how to do this, because that is the best coffee I’ve ever drank.” And ever since then, I’ve been… I started with a small roaster and now I graduated to the one that’s a little bit bigger. And I started experimenting and it just got deeper, and deeper. And as soon as my wife tasted my first batch, she said, “We’re not buying cake cups anymore.” And I haven’t bought a cake cup since.
Steve Gosselin:
Wow. That’s pretty cool. Tell us a little bit about the process. How long does it roast? How hot? You were telling me earlier about some of the experts out there that do certain temperatures for a matter of seconds. So just share with us a little bit about the roasting process.
Derek Stetler:
Certainly. The machine I’ve got is what they call a drum roaster. So basically it’s just that, it looks like a toaster oven with a spinning drum on the inside. And there’s heating elements in the back. So basically you’ve got a light roast, medium roast, medium dark, and dark. And you can… Use the terms, I think people use the term full city or they’ll even use New England-type roast, which would be a lighter roast. But the time you roast, and the length of time at the specific temperatures is what creates the differences in the flavors. For example, your lighter roast is going to have more of a flowery smell, a flowery taste, a little more acidity in the taste. And it’s going to just have a fruity smell to it.
Derek Stetler:
Whereas, your dark roast have more like a chocolatey smell. Then sometimes you’ll actually see, if you look at the coffee beans, you’ll actually see oil on the outside of the coffee beans. Because, the oil actually comes out of the bean the longer you roast it. So a good long roast, you’ll see oil come out of the beans. And that’s the way I like mine, is medium dark to dark. As far as the length of time, my drum roaster takes about 14 to 18 minutes, depending on the type of coffee bean. And that’s to get a good medium dark roast. There’s peaberry beans, there’re standard beans. Some are hard, some are soft.
Harder beans take a little bit longer to roast, so you can’t roast them as quick. Because if you roast them too quick, you’ll burn them. So you basically go through a process. The drum will cook them at a certain temperature to dry them out.
Derek Stetler:
Then it automatically hits a higher temperature by about 50 degrees, starts that specific period of time for say five minutes, then it’ll cool for 30 seconds. Then it’ll run for another five minutes, then it’ll cool for 45 seconds to a minute, then it’ll come back up at a lower temperature. And that’s when you start seeing the color coming to the beans. So, anywhere between 25 to 35 minutes would be a complete roasting and cooling cycle in my machine.
Steve Gosselin:
Holy cow. I had no idea. That’s-
Derek Stetler:
And there’s even more steps. I promise you. There is more. There’s a lot…
Steve Gosselin:
Where do you get your beans?
Derek Stetler:
Amazon.
Steve Gosselin:
Is that right? Is there a particular kind of be you prefer?
Derek Stetler:
I do for… Because we have an espresso machine at home, I usually use Colombian or any type of African, like Kenyan or Tanzania, or somewhere around there. Because, their beans are just higher quality. And for the money, it’s just cheaper. You can get green coffee beans for anywhere between $6 to $7 a pound. Whereas, you go to a grocery store and buy a pound a roast of coffee beans, that’ll cost you anywhere between $12 to $15 for a good bean. That’s a lot less expensive. I buy five pounds at a time, and usually it cost me about $35 for that five pounds shipped to the house. That $35 bag of beans will last me six, eight weeks, almost two months. And that’s drinking coffee a lot.
Steve Gosselin:
Man, I tell you, I’m getting more and more intrigued. I’m thinking there might be a new hobby in my future.
Derek Stetler:
I love sitting out back. I will literally set the roaster on a table, sit outside, drink coffee while it’s roasting, let the dog out. And I’ll just sit there and just watch it. You can’t do it inside, because it smells awful. As soon as it hits, what we call, right after the first crack, and starts to get into the second crack, it’ll start smoking.
Derek Stetler:
And I don’t care what kind of smokeless technology, it tells you as, like mine, it smokes like a freight train and smells like burnt popcorn. And it will smell up your entire house. But 30 minutes after it’s done and you shake them up and you smell it, there is nothing in this world to me. Nothing in this world. I love the smell of freshly-roasted coffee beans.
Steve Gosselin:
How long have you been working at this? How long did it take you to master your roasting skills?
Derek Stetler:
Master. That is a loose term. But I have been doing it now going on about three years, and every time I do it, I try something a little different. I’ll roast it a little cooler this time, a little shorter, a little longer, just to see what kind of flavors I can get. Because 30 seconds to a minute is a huge difference in roasting coffee. It can go from medium to dark in about 45 seconds. And you have to kind of really watch it, depending on how hot you’re roasting the coffee.
Steve Gosselin:
What advice do you have to all of our coffee drinkers out there, and especially Julie and I, who are Starbucks aficionados?
Derek Stetler:
Buy a coffee roaster. Order some beans, experiment. It’s worth a couple of $100 to invest. Because, honestly you can, what I call, a four ounce roaster, which is… It looks like a blender, almost. And you can do four ounces of beans at a time, that’s what I started with. And it’s probably 150 bucks, at the most.
And you can get a… It’s not as great as mine, obviously, because it’s a more expensive roaster, but it’s really good. And it does what it needs to do. A couple roasted half a pound of coffee is good for a single person.
Derek Stetler:
You can make 10, 12 cups of coffee out of it, easily. There’re places online, videos online, that’ll teach you the simple steps on how to do it. But if you’ve never had a cup of coffee that has just been roasted three or four days ago, there’s so much difference in what it tastes like, what it smells like, when you grind it. The entire house smells. If you like the smell of coffee, it’s smells nothing like it, in my opinion.
Steve Gosselin:
What kind of grinder do you use for your beans? Do you grind them in different ways?
Derek Stetler:
No. I use a Burr grinder, and I burr them. I usually go to about near the finest setting, somewhere between medium to fine, trying to stay away from course. If you grind it course it’s good for just doing a pot of coffee, if you don’t have a Keurig or a machine that can grind it for you. It’s really good to do them that way, if you’re going to… Medium to course is good for our coffee pot or coffee maker.
Derek Stetler:
If you have a Keurig, and you have the reusable cups, I usually do medium to fine, somewhere in there. I never go all the way to the powder because it can clog up those systems. A Keurig, it can really be tough to pump the water through it. So anywhere close to fine, but not quite a fine grind. But I use a bar grinder, because they’re just better. The blade grinders, chop them all to pieces, and you’ll get big hunks of coffee bean that aren’t really ground up the way they should be.
Steve Gosselin:
And for our listeners, any recommendations on coffee pots?
Derek Stetler:
Oh, for just a regular coffee pot?
Steve Gosselin:
I guess, or for… You grind your own beans, you roast them and all that stuff. You want to make sure-
Derek Stetler:
Honestly, if you’re a cup at a time, the Keurig still is… It’s hard to beat a Keurig. It really is, because it pressurizes each individual cup you make, and you can make that one cup as strong or as weak as you want it. And we still have a Keurig.
Derek Stetler:
I was lucky enough, my wife allowed me to buy a DeLonghi. That’s basically an espresso machine that grinds the beans for you, puts it in the machine, you press the button, tell you what you want, and it makes the coffee for you. I’m lazy, I guess. I’ve gotten lazy.
Steve Gosselin:
I wouldn’t say that. So you load your own pods, and use the Keurig most of the time? Derek Stetler:
We normally use the Keurig, because it’s just easy. You’ve got the gram of coffee, you dump it in the refillable cup, shut the lid, hit the button. I usually use the strong check box on the Keurig, and just let it go. The Keurig works great, it really does. Unless you’re going to drink one cup or five cups. If you’re going to drink five, you need a new pot. If you’re just going to drink one or two, Keurig’s perfect.
Steve Gosselin:
Well, there you go. That’s great to know. Thanks for sharing that with us. We’ll shift a little bit right now. One of the questions we’d like you to answer, and tell us in your words, what does ECS do?
Derek Stetler:
It took me probably 10 years to actually understand what we do. When I first started, what was it, Robert Holt used to tell me, just tell people, we play in dirt. I sat there for a minute. I said, “What do you mean?” He’s like, people in the field would understand what you said when you say, we play in dirt. But I usually give this spiel. We are a geo-technical engineering firm that specializes in testing soil samples, nuclear density. I know we use ground-penetrating radar. That’s about all I know, unfortunately.
Steve Gosselin:
Now, that’s a great answer. Tell us, what’s your funniest memory from your time here at ECS?
Derek Stetler:
I have thought about this and thought about this, and I don’t know of anything that stands out. You would think, after 13 years, something would be funny. I cannot think of anything.
Steve Gosselin:
That’s okay. You don’t have to rack your brain on that one. You guys work so hard, you’re focused on the task at hand.
Derek Stetler:
And a lot of the stuff is just stuff that happens on a day-to-day basis. A lot of it is some of the help desk tickets we get, and some of the verbiage that’s in them. That probably wouldn’t be so kind to the people [inaudible 00:28:07] the tickets in. But we get funny stuff like that every single day.
Steve Gosselin:
It’s best to keep that to yourself.
Derek Stetler:
We keep those to yourself. I will say this, we used to have, and it was obviously a joke, but we would have a board of what we called ‘those users’. And every once in a while we would put a name on that board of the people that we really enjoyed helping. And I’m speaking facetiously, obviously. But we just simply called it the board. We don’t have the board anymore, but we used to have the board. Now, it’s been a few years since we had that.
Steve Gosselin:
I like that. And we’ll keep that private as well too.
Derek Stetler:
We don’t do that anymore, because… Well, we just don’t. We’ll leave it there. No one’s perfect.
Steve Gosselin:
In today’s world of social media, that’s probably not a good idea to get a picture of the board posted somewhere.
Derek Stetler:
We don’t want to offend anyone easily offended, that is for sure.
Steve Gosselin:
Absolutely. Before we wrap up, give you one final question. What fills your cup? What makes you happy or brings you joy?
Derek Stetler:
Being with my family. Honestly, being out on my boat is… I love look forward to that. It’s a heartbreaking time, every October, when I have to put it up. And it’s the joyous time, in April, when we get it back out. If I could live on the lake, that will be my next move. That will most definitely be my… It may be 20 years from now, but one day that is the one thing that I will be doing. Because, we really love being out on the water. Even if we’re not wakeboarding or surfing, skiing or anything. If we’re just out riding around, I’m happy with that. To me, there’s nothing like being out on the water. It’s a feeling like no other.
Steve Gosselin:
Couldn’t agree more. That’s a great answer. Julie, anything you want to add or any final questions from you?
Julie Smith:
So Derek, when we were talking earlier, I asked, what should I be asking you? And you gave me some advice of smelling and tasting your coffee before you put anything in it, can you say that for us?
Derek Stetler:
That is the thing about roasting your own. You buy coffee off the shelf and it smells like coffee. When you start roasting your own, you start picking up smells and senses. If you take a snip of a light roast versus a dark roast, and it’s fresh, I can sit two cups beside you, and they will smell like two completely different coffees. It’s no different from smelling a Pepsi, than smelling a Mountain Dew, in my opinion. So, if you start drinking fresh coffee, and little by little, putting less cream, less sugar, you can wean yourself off of all of that stuff, and you won’t ever put it in there again. Because, you’ll actually enjoy what coffee brings you, what the flavor brings you. My wife used to put two of those little individual serving size creamers, and a half a pack of sugar.
Derek Stetler:
She’s down to half of one creamer. That’s all she puts in her 12 ounce cup of coffee. That’s it. Just to make it change color. That’s my advice. Just try it. Just try cutting back. Like I say, I’ve got nothing against having a nice macchiato or something, every once in a while, but coffee’s coffee. That’s a dessert in my opinion. And if you want a cup of coffee, drink coffee. If you want a dessert, go get a dessert. Have a macchiato with some caramel in it, I have no problem with that. It’s not coffee to me, but if that’s what you like, that’s what you like.
Steve Gosselin:
Well, that puts a smile on Julie’s face.
Derek Stetler:
I know it does.
Julie Smith:
Nope. I think that’s great. And sounds like we’re going to have to start a coffee club here at ECS, and maybe you can help train us up, those of us that want to start roasting our own coffee. And we can create our own ECS coffee blend, or I don’t know.
Derek Stetler:
To tell you, YouTube was fantastic. The first video I ever found was a company in Oregon, I think it’s called Green, something, Coffee Roasters. I cannot remember to save my life, what his was. But he did four and half minute video. That was the first video I ever watched. And I have followed his mantra ever since. I used that one video and then… Obviously, I read all the time about different ways to do it, different temperatures, and that kind of thing. To really get into detail, temperature stuff, you can spend $200 on a roaster. You can spend $2,000 on a roaster. It’s no different than any other hobby. You can spend as much as you want to spend, or as little. But I’m in the middle ground, and I, I think I’m good right where I am. I can make the coffee exactly the way I like it. And it works perfectly for me.
Steve Gosselin:
Excellent. Well, Derek, we want to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to spend time with us ,today and talk a little bit about yourself, what you do at ECS. And your coffee-roasting hobby, and your love for the outdoors and water as well too. We really appreciate everything you and your team do for us here. Make sure you tell your folks, we say thanks as well, too.
Derek Stetler:
Absolutely.
Steve Gosselin:
And we just want to say, thanks. Keep up the great work and continue doing what you’re doing. You’re a great part of the team, you’re part of the pack, and you make a big difference in everything that we do, Like I said, a lot of it’s behind the scenes and we don’t see it, we don’t know it until there’s a problem.
But there’s so many unsung heroes out there, and you and your team are at the top of the list. So, thanks a lot.
Derek Stetler:
We really appreciate it. And I will definitely pass the word along to the team. It’s good to hear that stuff, and they need to hear it too. I’ve been here so long, 13 years, and I understand what goes on and I know people get frustrated sometimes when things happen. So, these are the times when things are going good, that it’s good to hand out a compliment or two, to your team. And my team works hard, they really do. They make it easy and make me look good.
Steve Gosselin:
All right. Thank you.
Derek Stetler:
Thank you. Appreciate that.
***
Outro
Steve Gosselin:
Thank you for listening to Coffee Talk: From the Ground Up. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you have an idea on future topics, guests, or up for round of call, you can call me, text me, email me, just get in touch with me. And I’ll get it to Julie, and we’ll get it set up.
Julie Smith:
And for those of you that don’t want to play golf and you may hate talking on the phone, that’s okay. You can send us an at ecsmarketing@ecslimited.com Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to this podcast, so you never miss an episode.
Steve Gosselin:
Thanks, Julie. Here’s to having a great day.