A Man’s Journal oldalán készült egy kis promó anyag Anthony Kiedis saját kévámárkájáról, a Jolene-ről, amiben az énekessel beszélgettek leginkább a kávéról.
On stage performing with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, lead singer Anthony Kiedis is like a kinetic pinball of energy and excitement. He bounces from one side of the stage to the other—a blur of dance moves and catchy lyrics. Expending this much effort naturally leaves him drained but that’s the goal.
“I want to feel annihilated and unable to do anything properly after we play,” he says. “I want to be both beat to shreds and wired to the gills.”
But on a recent sunny weekend afternoon in New York, Kiedis is in his socks padding around his downtown hotel suite and is in a contemplative mood. There’s no dancing today. No energizing drumbeat from Chad Smith or funky baseline from Flea to set the tone. Instead, Kiedis is passing out cold cans of his Jolene Coffee brand. He drinks the oat milk latte expression ($3.99 per can), so I do, too. While the coffee has some organic coconut sugar, there’s just a hint of sweetness, and the oat milk is impressively creamy. The most surprising thing is the rich coffee flavor.
The brand’s co-founder and his good friend Shane Powers has a can of the brand’s other expression, cold brew ($3.99 per can). Powers is best known for appearing on a season of the hit TV show Survivor, which was set in Panama. He managed to last 33 days before his torch was ultimately snuffed out.
Sitting across from Kiedis and Powers talking about coffee, music, and life in general, gave me a good sense of how their brand was formed. For years, the two friends would regularly meet in a Los Angeles coffee shop.
“It wasn’t until Shane and I were both full-grown men that we had an occasion to sit weekly without fail over coffee and share our life’s tragedies and conquests and everything in between. And it was almost like a Pavlovian response. Like you put the coffee down, tell me what’s going on. How’s your girlfriend? How’s your mom? How’s your dad? How’s your dog? How’s the band? You know, how’s life? So, just the smell of coffee kind of gets the juices flowing in terms of communicating,” says Kiedis. “And the ritual became very powerful and very meaningful and very soulful and important to both of us. And our mental health got better. Our spiritual health got better.”
After one of these caffeine sessions, as they were saying goodbye, Powers mentioned in passing that he had a friend who was interested in starting a business with them. Kiedis’ first reaction was thanks but no thanks. But after he took a few more steps, “I yelled back at him down the street, ‘You know, what about coffee?’ And he turned around, he’s like, ‘Done’. And that was that.”
While you might be tempted to dismiss the brand as just another celebrity cash grab, this is seemingly different. For one, the names of neither founder is on the can. When I point out that the brand might arguably be more successful if it was called “Red Hot Chili Pepper Coffee” Kiedis doesn’t hold back and immediately admits, “I can’t think of anything less appetizing.”
The two insist that this is a real business and not just a hobby. “It’s not a celebrity-driven brand. This is a brand that happens to be owned by a celebrity,” says Powers. “We want the brand to live on the liquid.”
Kiedis is not interested in telling name-dropping stories about his life and escapades, instead he’s eager to share his research about how the original espresso machine was created and when humans first started drinking coffee in Ethiopia.
He speaks about coffee knowledgeably and soulfully but with an intensity that’s familiar to fans of his music. This is particularly impressive given that he didn’t start drinking the beverage until relatively late in life. “I lost my virginity very late in life when it comes to coffee,” Kiedis says. “I sat with people for ages, watching them order coffee, going, why do they order coffee?”
Finally, he gave it a shot. “I used to sit in a little place called Duke’s Cafe below the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard, which is a very popular hangout for touring bands that play clubs. Pete, Flea, and myself would get a lot of breakfast there. And we were all 17 or 18 years old. And Pete was just pounding the Joe like he was 42 years old. We couldn’t quite understand it. One day, I was like, you know, let me just try that. And then, like so many other beautiful things…off and running.”
Perhaps, one of the reasons why coffee resonated with him was because Kiedis might likely be a super taster. “I have a real visceral response to smell and taste. I get memories. I get feelings. I get emotions. I get excitement. I get, you know, nauseous, depending.” At times, his senses can be overwhelming, including when he smells cologne or perfume. This is why he’s “never worn deodorant,” he says.
On the other hand, Powers was introduced to coffee when he was growing up in Omaha, NE. “We have very different palates. I started drinking coffee when I was 16 years old and it was like a pot of Yuban,” says Powers. “So I just got addicted to that kind of really heavy, dark, almost commercial coffee.”
Their resulting beverage had to satisfy them both. “The thing that’s really great about us is that he’s got this other sort of elevated sensibility about coffee,” says Powers. “And then my palate, which is a little bit more like Templeton the rat in Charlotte’s Web.”
But agreeing on the coffee’s flavor actually turned out to be the easy part. “We took five years failing miserably to get the taste in the can correctly. So we were prepared to go to our graves as failures with the coffee attempt rather than put out some half-baked bullshit that just wasn’t delicious,” says Kiedis. “We knew what we wanted cause we could make it in the kitchen, but we couldn’t put it in the can.”
One of the breakthroughs for Jolene was finding a network of female-owned-and-operated coffee farms in Peru to supply Jolene with rich and flavorful beans. These farmers are part of the fair trade coffee collective Café Femenino, which not only provides distribution but also a host of services and different kinds of support.
As we finished our canned coffees, I finally asked the most obvious question: What’s the perfect soundtrack for drinking coffee?
“There are 1,001 soundtracks, from the New York Dolls to Frank Sinatra,” says Kiedis. “Give me some Sun Ra on a good day. I’ll sip some fricking espresso over John Coltrane. Yes, I would.”