All right. Hello everybody. Welcome to episode 8, nine. I probably should know which number it is. Uh of the Dirty Pool podcast. Uh we're expanding again to what we are covering. And this time we have a weird hybrid in the best possible way. I'm joined by Tony. Help me pronounce your last name. Shabar. I'm joined by Tony Shabir from What's Brewing in San Antonio, Texas, and he is the owner and operator of an enormous roer and also arcade. Welcome. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. All hell. All praise the great pyramid. See, this is exactly this is the this is the kind of uh great spread of the glory of the Great Pyramid that we love to see. Uh so I have a abundance of notes as we talked a little bit in our little premeating. the amount of info available on what's brewing is is not immediately apparent on the internet. Um, but I your list of games is enormous and one of the things I asked you is how long you'd been in this. Can you please just give us a rundown of of where what's Brewing came from again and and who you are and its involvement? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um, well, I'm I'm a I'm a guy from North Texas. I was born in Witchaw Falls, but how I got there was a little bit um I went the long way. Uh my dad's a Lebanese imbe and he's from Beirut and he met my mom in France. They were both traveling uh after college in the early '7s. So they uh they met there and they ended up falling in love and mom moved back to Beirut uh with my dad's family. You know, it's Lebanese culture. Everybody's in the same building. You know, it's kind of like it's just like a a wild family life. And uh they my sister was born there in ' 72 and they ended up you know leaving because there was a civil war in Beirut and Lebanon and the it started in about 75. Things got heated in 76 and 77. So my my family ended up moving where it's safer to North Texas where my mom's family's from. So that's where I was born and uh we didn't last long there. A tornado got us in 79. You know, we're in Tornado Alley in North Texas and we ended up going through a safer place. We're going to move to the coast of Texas at Corpus Christi. And on the way down, we stopped at a mall for lunch uh in San Antonio. And dad ended up striking up a conversation with the owners there. They were way before Gourmet Coffee was, you know, San Antonio was ready for Gourmet Coffee. So, uh, dad ended up, you know, finding this out and made made him an offer and we ended up staying in San Antonio and we just plopped right into the coffee business. Not with a like dad didn't have a lot of, you know, experience with coffee other than drinking it. Like in Middle Eastern culture, coffee is very important. So he had that aspect of it, but he got to dive into it and started roasting coffee in ' 84 and, you know, we moved to bigger and bigger locations until we're finally like in 99 moved to our Nothing like learning how to run a business after buying it, right? Yeah. You just go in the deep end. So yeah, he he's he's that kind of guy who's, you know, he's inquincisive and he he wants to learn about things. So he coffee was kind of a perfect um avenue for him because there's so much to know about coffee and there's so much people don't know about it. So he was able to you know share that knowledge with coffee and he still does. He comes to the warehouse every day and hangs out. You could almost say that without the natural disaster event of the tornado that what's brewing would not exist as a company. Yeah. Thank you. Uh you know thank you Tornado. There wouldn't be pinball in San Antonio without without you. I I feel like not just any tornado. It was like a It was called Terrible Tuesday. There was four tornadoes that and it was an F5. They all joined up and they formed one giant tornado that kind of like destroyed the whole city. So, a lot of people don't know this, but I'm actually kind of a expert about tornadoes, specifically natural disasters, because I've seen both Twister and Twisters. So, Oh, okay. Yeah, you're covered. So, basically that's like having a PhD in it. Really, it's a very educational thing. As long as you know how to like cut up soda cans and make Dorothy fly, you know, you're pretty safe. Then you're good to go. Um, for those who haven't experienced a tornado, the middle of America has kind of one of the most terrifying natural disaster events that I think a lot of people don't know and don't experience. Um, and also don't really know what to do in a tornado. What could you give like the top three kind of what to do for like safety in a tornado event if someone happens to get stuck in one? Yeah. Well, when the wind starts kicking up real bad and we we get tornadoes down here too. Um but usually I tell the kids like go to an interior room like the northwest side of the house is usually where they hit. Uh so like southeast is safer. So if you have a southeast bathroom with a tub, you can get in the tub, cover yourself up with like a small mattress or pillows. And that's just mostly to protect from the debris is usually what gets you. It actually, you know, it'll take your skin off with with those winds and the the amount of like stuff that's in that and that. It's like sand blasting. So, keep yourself covered. That's really terrifying. Yeah. It's wild. So, yeah. You know, open your windows. That's some That's a big one, too. Your house will depressurize. open your garage door because the roof will have a higher pressure or a lower pressure than out or rather a higher pressure than outside because the funnel is sucking all the air out. So your roof will literally lift from your house and those walls depend on the roof to stay sound. So you know the roof's gone, the house goes too. So wow. Okay. Hope you never need that info and uh and nobody probably logged in today expecting to hear about tornado. Oh, this is probably the most educational uh at least from a natural disaster sense uh episode of the podcast we've ever had. So, thank you for that. Um, all right, but diving back into coffee. Yeah, that's a good idea. I've, you know, it's a shame. I I had my cup of what's Brew legitimately what's Brew coffee earlier today in my cappuccino, but now we are drinking uh I believe this is Albert's or Alfred's. Yeah. What What are you currently drinking? We got a This is a blend of Colombian organic and a natural Ethiopian. It's kind of like my blend. I just There's not a real ratio. It's usually half half a little bit more Colombian. But I'm a drip guy. And if you see me at the warehouse, I usually have a cold brew in my hand or I got the hot mug. No sugar, no cream. I'm just kind of a an old captain at this point. Don't put stuff in your coffee. You don't need to fill it up with foams and sugar syrups and all that. Just enjoy the beer, man. Yeah. Yeah, I mean there's a place for that and I I can appreciate it. But if you're drinking good coffee, you don't need the masking of the sugars and the syrups and the milk. There's a place for that, but um you know, I just need the pure drug at this point. Hear you, Miss Miss Diggles says, "Speak for yourself." That's because she likes to put a bunch of horrible stuff in her coffee. Um okay, so your dad your dad owned you purchased What's Brewing in in the mid 80s or started really running it at that point. At what point did Pinball become a component to Roz Brewing? Sure. So, we uh like I said, we're in a 10,000 foot warehouse. When we moved to that building, it was kind of just a sprawl. All we were doing was wholesale. There was no retail customers in there. So, the back of the warehouse was just pallets flat on the ground. There was no racks. We kind of just filled the space with whatever. and and you know the mid teens we'd been in the warehouse about 16 years. Dad was moving further and further away from operations and my brother and I, my brother Sammy and I were moving more, you know, forward with our ideas and we wanted to kind of clean the place up, reimagine it. So, we started putting up I-beams uh for the pallets. We kind of ripped out the whole front. It was just a cacophony of like little tiny offices. So, we just ripped it all out like you know, think home remodel show. We kind of got the sledgehammer, knocked walls down, put stuff up and um made it more brewery, like when you walk into these modern breweries and you can see the operation where the guys are like stirring the kettles. I wanted that for coffee. I wanted people to see kind of what's going on behind me. I wanted them to be able to see what I usually would only be able to do with like wholesale customers when I give them the big tour. Like this is how the sausage is made. And I would I wanted that to be kind of like the taffy machine just like people could see it passively, you know. So we I you know I wanted that to be a big part of the business model. And once we started getting stuff off the ground and we ripped out all of this office space to make it a more flowy uh situation, we kind of had a bunch of empty space and we we decided to start putting pinball in. partnered with some local guys and who become like our primary pinball partners, Chris Doyle, Mike McKenna, and we, you know, we share the space with them, uh, for the pinball. Um, and, you know, it's just a really good synergy with coffee and it grew over time from the five original machines that Chris brought in. We moved up to 10, 15, built a new room to accommodate. Um, that that filled up as well. We're up to like 27. Then we move. I have the list pulled up here. This is quite the the list of of games. Like oh my lord. And it's not just like I frequently talk about how I think that having just the wall of the latest games is kind of a disservice if you have the space and you are an arcade and you have everything from you know got wedge heads to some system 11 games up to you know DMDs. Yeah. And I think are you looking at pin maps or you looking at or what's brewing? I'm looking at your website. I don't know if pin. Yeah. So, that's pretty out. Some Some of that stuff's outdated, but we're up to 56 machines now. So, I think that that machine that list might not be pin maps might be better. Um, but we, you know, eventually we just kind of I air conditioned the whole warehouse because we were just had sections of it cooled off and we wanted to open up the main facility to to everybody so you could kind of just walk through without being in shorts. Um, and now we're able to uh use the whole warehouse for for pinball space as well that uh that doesn't affect operations. We're obviously there's a limit to how much we can put in. But um yeah, 56 is kind of our number right now. I mean, just the square footage alone it takes that 56 pinball machines take. Like I feel like the fact that you're dedicating so much space to that as opposed to being having that space dedicated to the roaster, the the pinball person in me respects that. I mean that's Yeah. Well, I mean I think all good pinball places kind of have something weird going on like free gold watch and you were just at the bar Korean barbecue place for Shane from On Tilt is like pretty much the reason that one of the reasons why this channel got started. So yeah, which is a Korean barbecue hybrid place which also has a ton of pinball machines is a nice There's the Weteria in New York City. I know. Uh I forgot the name of it, right? It's out of my head. But I think all kind of cool like when you walk into a place and you're like, "Ah, this place is special." That's kind of what the reaction we get a lot of time with what's brewing cuz you've got like you can see all this like coffee roasting stuff that people have never seen before. And then on this side you've got all this pinball stuff and you've got like it's up on the it's up on the screen. People being able to see what you're doing. The competition aspect. Um there's just a lot for them to kind of like geek out on, you know. You mentioned the ball's kind of like the it's like the most exotic fruit of like the nerd tree, you know, like you've got art, you got sound, you've got competition, you've got, you know, you're it's a personal, you know, it's always a personal journey, you know, you're kind of playing against yourself. So I I think there's a lot for people to latch on to. Totally. There's so many different reasons to enjoy pinball. It's not just like I don't know man feature films or music where you're just I like movies I like music but with pinball you can explore it and enjoy it in in multiple different ways but you had mentioned that you had followed the kind of formula of a brewery making the commercial and the residential space kind of like one experience and I think that that's both really smart and there was another channel that I think was on Logan Arcade uh that was talking about how they had a roaster and that they had started putting pinball machines in it too. I feel like you really started this this initial trend, but it's nice to see with such an obscure hobby and such an obscure thing that it's starting to find spaces that normally wouldn't have existed like in the past. Like in the 80s, you would never see pinball machines in a rotary. No. And I mean, you wouldn't even see you might see pinball machines like in a bowling alley, but I don't even think and I might be misspeaking here because I didn't grow up in like a a pinball central place like Portland or Seattle or Chicago. Um, but I don't even think you really saw him in bars too much until this newest, you know, iteration of pinball, this like early 2000s onward. I think it was mostly just like smoky maybe smoky bars. I know during like when it was prohibition of pinball, there might be, you know, they have to take refuge in like pornography shops or whatever, but I think it was mostly just, you know, arcades. And then once, you know, arcade cabs came out, it started killing pinball. And we're kind of lucky that pinball is still around at all. It's It's not it's it's a loss leader as far as like anything you put a quarter into if you want to really maximize your space. You really want to go like claw machines, pusher machines, um even even just traditional shooters or, you know, joystick habs are the way to go because you don't have all the moving parts and you don't have to Right. You took the words out of my mouth. I was just about to bring up the the claw machine word. If you look at businesses like uh like a Chuck-E-Cheese, like I have kids, so like we have to go to these places for for family parties and whatnot. And you know, they've really changed their model to be maximum value and preying on the gambling aspects of what kids don't realize that they're getting sucked into. There's not a single pinball machine or really a coin op game that is like a classic arcade in any of those locations. So, you know that a place like yours where you are just having pinball machines that you're doing it because you want the hobby and you want pinball machines to be more common cultural and not just a financial like you're not making money on people putting coins in pinball machines at a roaster. I think it always has to be a passion project when it's not if you can't just throw money. I mean, if pinball was making money in that way, you'd have like guys in suits putting pinball machines everywhere, right? But they can't do that because they have to get in there and get their hands dirty. Always have you always have to have a pinball guy attached to it. Um, you know, you have to have a guy that's like wants to keep them working because eventually they're going to deteriorate and and grow old. Rubber's going to break off. One flippers. I mean, the old joke is the old operator joke is like if the coin mech's working, it's just fine, you know? And that's kind of that that's kind of okay for an arcade, but for a pinball, that's only going to get you. so far. So, look, thank God we've got like Mike, he's our, you know, he's an electrical engineer and he comes in every morning way before the rooster crows and and starts working on on the list. And during the day, during my shift, I'm kind of in there in the in the early afternoon until we close. And I'm kind of following up and just doing, you know, mop-up maintenance, you know, rubbers, flipper rebuilds, um, you know, tracing down stuff and I can usually get it figured out, but Mike can get it done a lot faster and he's seen a lot more. He can do the old solid state boards. He can do chip work. There's a lot of stuff he can do that I could do if I get on Pinside and spend 10 hours on it, but he can do he can look at it and get it done in 30 minutes. So, we're thankful for him. the it's funny how pinball people uh the quality of the games and how they are functioning at a location like really from a pinball perspective makes the reputation of the place like uh Vegas the Vegas Museum gets a lot of flack because they have such a large amount of games and are understaffed in order to keep them in maintenance that they're frequently broken so it just has the reputation of just being like not a great pinball place to go if you care about pinball and that's unfortunate and I don't right I don't think that like they're not to blame Like I'm sure there's operators available, but like it's nice to see a place that's actually taking the time to keep their games working. Miss Dickle has a really great question. Have you ever named one of your uh bean roasts after a pinball like concept? No, we haven't fully embraced like the um pinball branding onto the coffee yet. Uh I my my wife Kim recently took over like our social media. She's an artist and you know, she just knows how to make things look like they need to. So, she makes things beautiful. So, she's kind of been bringing more of the pinball stuff into our feed and you've probably seen that like on our Instagram and Facebook posts for sure. But, I keep trying to get my wife involved to like ask questions and stuff on stream, but it's it's just I don't know her interest in that way. So, one day she'll ask a question on stream for for stuff. Um Well, I see her dancing around behind you sometimes. Yeah, sometimes she dances. She gets involved. Yeah. So, yeah, we we haven't really we haven't really branded the coffee. uh so much onto the pinball. I think it's more the other way. Like we we start out as coffee and the pinball's attached to the coffee, but we haven't gone the other direction with it yet. But I mean, you could see some of that in the future for sure. So, you spend a lot of time pushing both. It seems like working on both the machines and the pinball aspect of it as well as the coffee. I know that recently you were involved in the cup of excellence and I talked to Lee about what exactly Cup of Excellence is and that each uh nation kind of has their own like kind of like trophy system for that concept. Can you talk a little bit about your involvement in Cup of Excellence and what it is? Yeah, it's it's a it's a coffee competition. Essentially, every every year the the participating countries will will assemble their their top coffees. They'll be judged and then they they'll be available for purchase. each lot will be a will be ranked one to let's say 20 and they'll put on a put it on a live auction um that will go on on a certain day from you know starting at 10:00 a.m. and it'll go until it's over like I think the the bid the bids have to stay static for like 5 minutes for a single lot before they close. So basically, you spend the day kind of watching this stuff after cupping carefully cupping and choosing which coffees you're interested in and then you it's a wild ride because you you know the one that you want might you might get outbid and there is a threshold especially in San Antonio for what our customers will pay for a pound of coffee. So we might have to, you know, have several chosen that we can bid on. And basically at the end of it, you get this lot shipped to you and you're the only one that owns it. So you can kind of um put your name on it and and it's a great program. My brother does cupping for them. He's curator. So he goes and travels to these countries to judge the coffees. And then, you know, we also bid on them. We've got uh I think you got the Cup of Excellence Mexico. That's the number three pick. I did. We haven't opened it yet cuz we have been rocking the uh Oh my god. Columbia San Pita Verita. San Pitus. I think that's the one that we have. That's been our normal espresso bean. That's amazing. Uh this kind of links to that, but Stitch has a question. She says, "Where do you find your roast?" It sounds like this is one method that you find beans to kind of like stock your selection. Yeah. So, absolutely. We We work with a lot of uh coffee brokers and the way that works is we'll get you know they know what we're interested in because we've we've established these relationships so they'll know that we're going to need this much Brazil. What's brand's going to need this much Mexico. That's what they bought from us in the past. So they'll send us samples that we might be interested and these are you know one pound samples 500 gram and we'll take 100 grams and we'll we'll roast them on our little tiny sample roster. I wish I was at the warehouse cuz I could take I could go I could be your man on the ground with a mobile cam and I could show you. But But essentially if you look at our Twitch, you can see that we've got coffee roasting stream. So you can see that roaster. Imagine that one10enth size. That's our sample roaster. So we'll we'll roast the coffee samples. We'll wait 24 hours then cup them the next day. And that's that's basically a wine tasting. You use a lot of the same verbiage to describe the the different characteristics of coffee that you do with wine. So, there's a lot of slurping and spitting because you don't want the caffeine to affect your the way you're sensing the coffee. And once we pick these coffees, we'll we'll purchase them and we keep the other 400 g for a reference sample. And when we receive the coffee, especially if it's higherend, we'll use that reference sample to make sure that we're getting what we bought. So, it's just a way to How long does the reference sample stay? I mean, because beans don't have an infinite shelf life in terms of, you know, making sure that they freshness and flavor. The green coffee generally if you're keeping it in an air conditioned environment will um you've got about six months before it really starts losing that water content. So that's made that's really when the coffee starts tasting like straw, hay, you know, you lose a lot of the essential stuff. It's the sugars inside of there drying out and it affects the way the coffee roasts them. They're They're what you want that water is actually a barrier to the heat when you first start roasting coffee. It's about a 15-minute process on a dark roast, 12 minute on a light roast, and it's a lot of exothermic heat that's being absorbed by the coffee. If you don't have that water, the the sugars will start caramelizing too soon essentially, and you'll get like you'll over profile those sugars and they'll get it kind of messes it up. So, most good coffees are going to be between 13 and 15% water content when you purchase them or receive them. And then after about six months, if it's just in a regular bag, it might go down to 12 and you run into problems. So those reference samples are good until we receive the shipment. It usually takes about from cupping to, you know, getting it off the dock is about, you know, 2 or 3 months, sometimes shorter if it's in stock, if it's already in port in a place like the Annex and in San Francisco or Dewee here in Houston. Right. So that's wild. I didn't realize that the bean shelf life was as long or longer than than that. I thought that the flavor would have died off or much quicker. But I mean, this makes sense. I mean, coffee has been around for how long, right? Yeah. We're very we're way up here now. And I think, you know, in the post-apocalyptic future, we'll look back nostalgically about, you know, when we could whine about, you know, how fresh our green coffee was. But the roasted roasted Yeah. When we're huddled under the underpasses and burning our pinball machines for warmth, you know, we still have the memory of freshly roasted coffee from what's brewing. Sure. What's the right brew method for the apocalypse? Is it pourover, you think, or cold brew? Or is that a different one? Reverse osmosis. Just hot brew, right? It's global warming, so it's got to be just a just a perk. Just put it out in the sun. Yeah. I have to give a shout out. Coffee flipper 4 is here. Uh this is Lee. Lee is a legend in the LA area. He does both coffee tours of Los Angeles. Uh, and is just a mean barista and it's and and he's been on the stream a few times. Uh, but I'm so glad that he he hopped in because we have been sharing our love for coffee. And one of the reasons why I was like, "Oh [] I got to I got to pick up a bunch of what's brewing and see what's up. Uh, so what's up, um, I have a question about poop coffee. I've had it." Okay, you know what I'm talking about. If people don't know, there's a there's a bean that comes out of an animal's ass and that the chemical process of being digested changes its flavor. Uh, and it's a it's a fad, let's be honest. Right. Yeah. Well, it's a I think at the base of like the coffee luak, which is like the civic cat coffee. It's a it's a marsupial that lives in these, you know, mountain sides where coffee has a tendency to thrive. And what they it's not I don't think it's necessarily something that they evolved to eat, but it's something that they eat now. And the I think mostly you'll find them on like old Nestle plantations in the Dutch Indies. That's where you find a lot of these civic cats. Um but they found that if you followed them around and picked up these droppings, the coffee was uh tasted a lot better than if you were just like stripping it off the branches. And the reason why is the animal has a nutritional incentive to pick only the ripest cherries off these trees. So they would pick the red ripe cherries and they eat them to get the mucelage which contains the sugar. There's two. Think of the my hands are like the coffee what you see rotating behind me. They sit together like this and then in between them and around them is the fruit that we have to remove before roasting um and even drying. So the animals after that it'll lightly chew the the fruit and then it won't break through the the barrier that kind of protects the bean. So the the coffee what you see doesn't really touch the digestal tract of the animal, but it it's more about the animal picking the best fruit uh and eating it because they want the most amount of sugar. And this is what unpaid labor kind of situation. Yeah. Except they're animal labor. Yeah. They're pick they're picking they're picking the the best the best of the best because they want it tastes good. It' just be like us if we were walking through a peach orchard. We're not going to pick the green peaches. We're going to pick the ripe ones. So, fortunately, there's nobody following me around in a peach orchard. But, you know, that would be a little suspect. Yeah. With the civic cat, you know, what's happened the way it's the way it's changed is now they're they're often caged and they're they're being fed what's put in front of them. So, they'll strip off the branches and they the cat will eat everything in front of them because they're starving and then they'll collect their poop. And so, not only is it cruel, sad and way, way less, it defeats the purpose of them picking the berries by themselves. Yeah. You're not, nobody's happy now. The civic cat's not happy. Uh, I think the only people really happy are are going to be the people that are actually, you know, taking advantage of of, you know, the the original intention, which is, you know, this this is a cool product that we can, you know, we can offer a wage to these tribes that are kind of following them around in the jungle collecting the stuff and selling it. Um, but now it's just become industrialized just like so many other things, right? But as soon as someone gets the whiff of money from it, they're going to try to optimize it in a way that makes money. I mean, it's I don't know if that's kind of the whiff that you want, but you know, it's definitely It It does sound like the origin of this was that somebody was just like, "Man, picking these berries is a pain in the ass when all of these ones on the floor have poop and beans on them already, so we could just grab these." So, you know, aren't all great inventions the result of just being lazy? There there's So, there's a lot. There's a lot. I wouldn't disagree with that. Some of the best inventions involve the toilet, too. Like the bedet. Come on, America. Where you at? get on board. I mean, we're still wiping. We're still I'm not I'm sitting on mine right now. Yeah. If I could have a bedet right here while I could do my work. I If I could So, I had an idea for a pinball machine for the toilet where you like cut the legs off, right? And it just sits at the correct height so that you could have a pinball machine in front of your toilet. Like, you know, I'm assuming you have a bathroom at What's Brewing? Like do you have a game that you might be able to test this theory with? Yeah, we we might we'll look into that. Yeah, we'll revisit. Doesn't sound like you're actually going to look into that. I have to be honest. Maybe not. Okay. So, back to Thank you for giving. So, I thought for sure that you would know about the the uh marsupial what's the name of the the cat again? Civic cat. So, it's a civet a nd then the the civet cat. Civ. And then the the you know the what they call is copy luak. C K O P I L U W A K is the Yeah. So, if you need to Google that, you can get all the information you need. It has an interesting like tang to it. Like I've had it before. I think it is interesting tasting coffee. I don't think it is like better coffee. No, not anymore. I've had good I've had good copy luak but it's been a long time because it's just somebody was asking me the same question the other day and they said you know I I don't even think I could source that properly. I could not find the good copy luak. It's all kind of been bastardized and you know it's played out. So where have you been so many so many better coffees that you can get for you know way less than $200 a pound. This is a good leadin to so you travel a lot for coffee. You've drank a lot of coffee all around the world. You've been involved in these Cup of Excellence competitions. What's a coffee that you tried that you were just like absolutely blown away by? Well, I mean, there's so many unique coffees that you can taste and and cup and and have experiences with. I I it really depends on what you're looking for. Like, you tend to seem like you like mostly espresso based. You're drinking shots. I like I like medium to light roast and I like complex flavor in the bean itself. Like I want I want like an experience when I sip it, right? And I mean it's kind of like there are a lot of great coffees that you can taste that have a lot of bright acidity and a lot of cool fruit flavors and you can you can roast them hyper light with a cinnamon roast and you're going to taste all these really interesting things in coffee. And that's why when we're when we're cupping coffee, we actually use a lighter roast level than we'd ever sell because the the defects and the nuances often get lost when you go into darker roast. Even like a a full city plus roast might take away some of these fruity notes that we're using in our descriptors. Um you'll taste them, but they won't be right on top. And the reason being it's like it's rough on your stomach. Um and it's kind of like an IPA. An IPA um is really interesting. It has a lot of cool flavors, but I don't know if I want to drink like 12 of them. You know, it's not an everyday drinker. But, you know, I like I like a natural processed coffee, and that's when you know, like that fruit I was talking about, there's different ways to remove it. There's a wash method where you basically ferment it off in a water bath. Takes about 24 to 48 hours. And that's what most coffees that you receive. You know, any any given day, 80% chance you're drinking a washed or a semi-washed coffee. And then you're going into like natural territory where the original way that you handle coffee off the tree is you dry the whole fruit and then you grind it off once it's once that fruit is dried off. You run it through rollers like grains through when you're I don't know if you brew beer, but they'll Yeah. Yeah. They'll run the grains through to kind of break them open. And it's kind of the same thing with the when they're milling the the natural coffees. And those are going to give you a lot more fruity flavors like stone fruit, citrus, a lot of floral notes. But I always, like I said, what I drink, I blend that with some Colombian because it gives you like the chocolatey flavors that that everybody associates with coffee. A lot of the same receptors in your mouth are uh similar with like what you taste with chocolate. You know, body, mouth feel, acidity, you know, the the floral notes, the cupping notes are going to be similar to chocolate. But there's there's so many great coffees out there. Um it's really hard to pinpoint like this is one. But the ones that we sent to you recently, the Las Peritas that COE Max, those are the kind of like the ones that we put out front. Those are the ones that we are the proudest of, but our everyday drinkers are are very very good. you you see us roasting and and what one of the things we're trying to do with bringing the streaming into the what when we're roasting the coffee is to show people when we roast this it's it's daily and we're shipping it out daily. We're trying to get you the freshest po possible coffee because at the end of the day, you can start with the best bean and you can give it the best roast, but if it's not fresh, um, you're really letting your customer down because you have about two weeks, maybe three before things start to kind of go down on the flavor profile. You're going to start drinking. It's going to become more and more like folders the further you get away from that roast date. So really the most important thing aside from starting with quality quality coffee and having uh you know somebody that's got the expertise to roast it properly is also the handling after it's roasted. That's really when it becomes a delicate product. Like you can't leave wine in the sun. You also can't leave roasted coffee in the sun. Your three major problems are going to be uh UV. Yeah. You know temperature, the heat and humidity. If you can avoid those three things when you're storing coffee, it's going to extend the life of it and you're going to have a much better cup of coffee when you grind it up in the morning. Nice. So, I think that this kind of answers Miss Dickle's question about what's the worst coffee. I think you dropped a folders in there. So, yeah. Well, I mean I I somebody brought me a cup of their they brought a cup of drip um what was it? The gun roasters. What are they called? Oh, if you have a Mac black powder black rifle. Black rifle. That's the one. Yeah. They brought me a cup of black rifle and that is some super dark roast coffee and it's Yeah. It's really strong, but you've also lost the essence of the coffee. All those all those sugars when you roast them that dark. Anything that might have been good in there is now lost. And usually that's by design. You can buy much cheaper coffee and cover up a lot of this with, you know, this dark roast where everything kind of turns to molasses. You kind of can't pick out the defects, but you also can't pick out the good stuff. So, um, you lose something and it's harder in your stomach, too. It's just not It's not fun to drink. No, I don't think Dark Roast is fun to drink on any level. Um, so so walk me through. So, say you you receive a shipment from wherever you've sourced your beans. How do they come and what is the process from going from being roasted to being served in the cafe at what's brewing? Yeah. So, what we usually receive coffee every week. So, we get, you know, truckload shipments from California. Most of our coffee comes out of Houston. Um, some of it comes out of New Orleans, just port cities. That's where coffee is mostly you purchase it from these big annexes. So, uh, when we order the coffee, it usually will take about three or four days to get from, you know, where they where they're shipping it from to get to us. And then we receive it, put up on a rack, and that coffee usually only stays with us for about maybe a month, maybe two months. We're we have limited space with all this pinball, so we kind of rotate through the the coffee pretty fast. Um, but uh once it's in the warehouse, we'll we'll have it on the floor. or we'll open up the bag and then we'll put it into we'll weigh it primarily. It's important because even though we're doing 60 70 kilos at a time, it's important to start with a consistent weight. So, our pan scale is on a cart. So, we fill the cart, it weighs the coffee, tears out, you know, the weight of the the buckets and everything. So, 60 kilos goes into the roster, it's loaded up top by vacuum, and then dropped into the roasting chamber, which is essentially a close dryer. You're throwing a cake in the co. You're throwing cake batter into a clothes dryer because you want to run that water off so you can start caramelizing those. The fruit's already been removed. You're You're buying a uncooked bean at this point. Yeah, of course. Yeah, we've got the the green coffee. It's already been dried on patios and packaged into the juke bags. Like if you ever have seen coffee on a pallet in pictures, those are 70 kilo bags. These days, they usually have an inner layer as well, plastic layer, and it kind of helps with that. uh moisture loss that kind of will destroy the green coffee eventually over like six or eight months because at that point you want to hold on moisture. Yeah, you want that to stay in. Um and then we we'll open the bag, we'll we'll put it up on top and then we drop it into the roster and it's just kind of a it's keeping the coffee rotating. There's fins in there that kind of turn the coffee so it's not just all like on the bottom of the drum rotate, you know, kind of sliding around. It's actually in the air. the heat's coming up from the bottom where the roasting uh the basically the furnace is. And what temperature do you cook a bean at? So the the burner temperature, it's it's a force atmospheric burner. So we're blending oxygen with natural gas. It's pushing out at like um I think 15,000 BTUs. And that we're not necessarily using all of that. We'll charge the roster at the beginning of the roast. We'll heat up the drum with a full blast once it's ready to be dropped in. We will start with a higher maybe 80% of that and then we'll drop it down as that water runs off because again the sugars are being exposed as the water water absorbs so much energy um in any aspect if you're if you're dealing with I mean there's a reason why they put it in your car radiator absorbs all that heat so well. It transfers heat very well. So uh as we get rid of that water the sugars become more on the top and they're going to be affected by that. So, we'll drop down to the end of the roast. We might be dealing with like 5% of our of our temperature. And we'll actually right before it comes out, we'll turn off the burner completely. It'll drop into a cooling tray. And I wish I had pulled up uh wish I had pulled up on OBS like one of our old streams so you could see what I'm talking about. But it's actually a cooling tray has uh arms that turn the coffee and we pull all the cold air in the room through it. It's a it's a huge three-phase motor. It's the biggest motor around the machine. pulls air through the coffee to stop the roasting process. Okay. It's like cooking a steak. It's like the emergency stop button on wherever you've got the beans roasted, too. Yeah. Exactly. You know, you pull a steak off the grill like before it's going to continue cooking. It's going to coast to a finish. We don't want that happening with coffee. We want it to come out exactly when it's ready and we stop that roasting process. A lot of places will use water again to quench it, but water is an enemy of coffee. So, we we air cool all of ours. It's not as efficient, but we're after quality, not like how many roast we can pump out of this thing an hour, which is about three roasts an hour. How what is the temperature though inside of it? Like what is like what is a bean actually being cooked at roughly? If you put a thermo probe on the gas, I mean, you're probably talking about like 1,000° 15. So, it's pizza. It's like pizza oven temp and not not like making a a banana bread temp. That's those are the two things I can come up with. The air temperature where the beans are not touching inside the drum is probably around 500 600 degrees Fahrenheit. The as the beans absorb that um we lower that temperature down but the beans only get up to maybe 420 430° maybe the darker roast you might get up to like 440 like that's like really oily stuff. So, you know, it's it is very much, you know, it's you can trace the temperature to exact almost exactly what the bean is going to look like if you follow kind of a basic roasting curve. It's pretty accurate on determining like how dark it's going to get. Okay. So, you hit the stop button. You've got a whole set of beans that are perfectly roasted to whatever uh kind of dness you want. How do you how do you determine when you get a batch of green beans, you're like, "Oh, this is going to be a light roast or this should be a dark roast." like what how do you commit to the to the future of what that bean's like destiny is? I mean altitude has a lot to do with it. The altitude the coffee is grown at is going to determine how compact the cell structure is and that's going to affect how you approach getting the water out of there. So if it's got a a tighter cell structure that's going to be higher altitude coffees, they have a tighter cell structure to kind of keep the moisture in. It's going to affect the way the water comes out of those cells as well. It takes a little bit more heat, a little bit more time. If it's a lower grown coffee, something grown at like 2,000 ft, which is kind of on the the lowest range of what you would consider to be gourmet Arabica coffee, um it's going to take less time for that water to come out of the Does this also affect mostly softness? cuz I noticed like uh for coffee to coffee, right, we have to change our grind size and sometimes like the amount of coffee that'll come out of like our espresso, you know, pull, not pull, I'm sorry, grind is like so much more or so much less depending on which bean it is. It is it's it's more concentrated. Um but it's it's, you know, I'd say what really affects espresso and and that's really zooming way in on one aspect of coffee. Espresso is so finicky because you're dealing with like seven atmospheres of pressure. you're dealing with like these wild temperature variations and you're, you know, your puck has to be completely uniform or otherwise you get under under extraction, over extraction. There's a lot of different things that can come on go on. But it really starts out with um how much water's in that coffee. They have devices that you can put your coffee into, even roasted coffee, green coffee, whatever, and it'll tell you the water content. And I bet you you would be able to see um those discrepancies between what you're seeing in one type of coffee and the other. It would probably correlate with how much water softer the bean is. Exactly. But it that that also correlates to the cell structure and and the altitude that the coffeey's grown at. Le wants to know Oh, you do not? Okay. Yeah, I do not. I used to have an espresso machine at home, but mostly I mean honestly I'm gonna tell this might get me into some trouble, but I actually grind my coffee at work um about twice a week and I bring it home because it's the last thing I do before I go to bed is just kind of fill the filter, set the timer. I use reverse osmosis water. Coffee is still pretty fresh. I, you know, I ground it up to like maybe a max like three or four days before I drink it. But I think if you're within that range, it's hard. Unless you're actually like cupping coffee or doing something like espresso, I think you're safe to grind three or four days. It's not going to be the most ideal peak way. A lot of people are chasing like the perfect cup of coffee. But um yeah, I preg grind my coffee. I bring I don't think anybody's going to criticize you on coffee. You sound like you know more than 90% of the entire population. I just been I've been doing it for I Let's see. I'm 47. I started when I was working for dad when I was 16. So, I mean, I've been doing it a while. I had to get out at the actual roasting game around the time we started doing pinball because it's a physical job. I mean, I don't have roasting logs, but I've probably roast a couple million pounds of coffee and dragging that card around for 30 years kind of takes its toll uh on your body. So, I kind of limit myself on what I can lift. It's just I can lift exactly one pinball machine and that's that's about it. And as someone who has two slip discs and it has that from just sitting in in front of a computer, I can't imagine what you're you're dealing with actually doing physical labor all the way. So you're down at the bottom, man. I'm a C6C7 guy myself. That's why you're wearing the the brace. I'm sure that's why I've got the dumb neck healthcare journey getting that taken care of. So, for people at home that are wondering, the L6L7 is the lumbar vertebrae, whereas the C6C7 is the cervical vertebrae, which is up top. Uh, that's right. When you get old like us, your body starts to hate you. But were you doing too much of this? Is that what was going on? I mean, I was I was absolutely celebrating at every game of pinball that I played. It didn't come from music. I'm headbanging celebrating the Great Pyramid, obviously. Uh, but yeah, that's how I threw my neck out. In service of Yes. Yes. as as I do. All praise. Uh so, but you are a pinball player. So, let's reel it back to pinball for a little bit. Uh how long have you been in the hobby? Well, you know, it's it kind of goes back to that mall. Uh when we when dad got into What's Brewing, right next door, there was a there was a chain arcade called Gold Mine. They I apparently there were they were all across America. It was you could buy a franchise for this, but we had one next door. And on the back, the smoky back wall, there was probably still there was still like, this was 83, 84, there was still uh a pinball culture in arcades. So, there was probably still five or six machines back there. And that was like the best place to crawl under and find quarters on the ground. So, you know, that's where as a kid, you get under there, find quarters, and play all the games. So, we grew up pinball adjacent. Um, it was always there and I was always into it like all the way through high school when it started disappearing from arcades in in South Texas. We kind of had a pinball desert here post like 1996 1997. There was like Theater of Magic might have been the last pinball I played in the wild in San Antonio. You had an amazing range. I mean 8687 is like system 9 system system 11 games Williams and then I mean theater magic that's the papaduke end of the papaduke era in the like early 90s. So yeah I mean that was like the peak of DMD art everything was kind of coming together for pinball but it was also right before everything tanked you know like uh pinball 2000 was kind of like the last gasp of Williams before what an absolute disaster. Of course. Of course, a Star Wars movie of a prequel would tank the future of Pinball, at least temporarily. I mean, you can blame Jar for a lot of things. The death of Pinball was He almost killed Pinball, too. So, yeah. I mean, I hate that guy. Can you say I always had that? Is it? I mean, it's it's He's CG. He was the original CG character, wasn't he? Kind of. He was I don't think there was ever a practical Jar. Can you imagine a practical Jar Banks? What a night what nightmare fuel is that, right? Thank you. No, thank you. Yeah, so we always I mean I always loved pinball and then um you know I I kind of reunited with pinball. I I had kids. My My youngest was born in 2004 and so I I did that whole journey and then you know when they were getting a little bit older I started visiting friends that had moved out of state. My friend Yoni lives in Portland, so I spent a lot of time up there uh visiting him on stints two or three times a year. So I went to place like ground control and hard to avoid how to avoid pinball in Portland. You can't any bar that you go into like has two pinball machines and they're always they have great tech, great operators. So you know everything works. So, it was kind of my reintroduction to pinball. And that was like uh 2012, 2013. And that's when I started thinking, you know, hey, I'm tired of driving to Austin. I I think I still have some like Facebook memories that pop up like, hey, what do you think about pinball in San Antonio? Like, would that be something that people would be interested in? And I mean, I never really at that point was thinking pinball at our warehouse, but when we were ready to make that jump, you know, I had I the fuse was lit from being reintroduced to pinball and um and with the space opening up, it was kind of like all all the, you know, all the coins were flipping heads and we, you know, everything came up pinball. So, we were we were ready for it when when San Antonio was also ready for it. there's a group of people that that have coalesed around us and we have a great pinball community here in San Antonio and honestly just starting from like amateur level so many people have like rose up through the ranks uh because we we were a pinball desert for so long there wasn't that culture so a group of us that kind of like Yeah exactly that that we were looking for pinball in San Antonio when there wasn't really there might have been one or two machines at these new kind of revisited bowling alleys where they're kind of like jijing it up and adding bars to them and kind of trying to make them trendy. You might see a broken ass pinball machine in there with one working flipper and, you know, a sling rubber uh over the the, you know, the trough, but we have a bowling alley of Star Wars that's in absolute disaster repair. It's at such an angle where it just it's like maybe four degrees to the side. Sad rocking and there's like a layer of grime. We've all seen those sad pinball machines in the wild, but we we were, you know, kind of like lucked out and we had the right group of people with the right location and with the motivation to get it done and and keep it operating at the same time. And the the community that I mean, if it's not making money, if there's no interest, it wouldn't it wouldn't be there as well. So, yeah, big thank you to all of our What's Brewing patrons from San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Dallas, and you know, we're right next to the airport. We get people from we had a guy from Spain um that is in Barcelona and they've got a private arcade and he was telling you know one thing about pinball is like the people that are passionate about pinball is just like they're super passionate about it and they want to talk about it and they want to share their origin story and they want to like let you know that they're they're so into it and I think there's so many of us that found our joy. I think it's just the invitation to play that pinball gives you that kind of grabs people. It's not something necessarily competitive. It can be. It's not a personal thing, but it can be. You can do it by yourself in your house or you can do it at a packed arcade where there's 80 people competing for like a $200 pot. There's a lot of different things that are going on with pinball, but it all I imagine you've converted a number of people. Well, it's got to feel good to be seeing people experience pinball. Or maybe they come into the cafe and kind of [] around and then all of a sudden you see them showing up at your tournaments and you're like, "Hey, we we've converted somebody." Yeah. No, many many times like like when we first started getting on the news uh back in 2016 2017 for having pinball at what's Brewing like there's Collier who now works for Tim uh Turner Pinball was one of our first like customers and it's you know I I go back and I look at that footage now of him getting that interview and I'm like this guy's like one of the he's top 500 in the on IFPA now he's you know definitely top 10 in is and it all started from from that. You know, he he just started coming in and playing pinball. And sometimes it's something that you'll you you know, you want to become the best at. And sometimes it's you're you're okay with just kind of chilling out and and hanging out and drinking a few beers and playing some pinball. Sure. Do you guys have beer at What's Brewing as well as coffee? It's It's Bob right now. We We kind of have a cool thing going on because it's not the I think once you start selling beer at a place, it kind of changes the texture. It It becomes a less of a family location. Even if you're like open to the public, there's always going to be a dude in the corner like with a picture by himself. And you know, having a three-year-old like weaving in between the legs of potentially drunk people is, you know, you're a parent. The fear is real. Once you have something that you are like genuinely responsible for that does not have any interest in self-preservation, it's uh it's it's a trip. Yeah. And so we're, you know, like we're we don't sell alcohol, but people come in and they'll bring a six-pack and a cooler and they'll especially during tournaments at night, they you'll have some guys drinking beers, and that's we're okay with that. Um, sure, we haven't really crossed the line of selling alcohol yet. It's something we've looked at. There's insurance problems because we're a lot of different things. We're We're a production facility, our insurance covers that. We're a retail facility, our insurance covers that. But once you start um putting alcohol into it, it kind of changes the formula. Oh, for sure. I wasn't implying that what's Brewing needs to be serving alcohol. I was just curious since you mentioned that there's a guy having a beer and it's like, oh, I do you do both? Like Yeah. Yeah. No, we we've we've definitely considered Sorry, I'm just going to turn off my my floor vacuum here. It just started uh going. Bear with The good news, the good news is we cannot hear it at all. Uh, as a quick side note, I will mention if you look at the background that uh, Tony's got pulled up there, you can see the actual like roasting process when it comes up. I'm sure that all of you have been noticing it as it as it spins around. This is There you go. You're holding a giant cup of coffee. That's amazing. Wow. No, the milk is pouring out of your ears. Oh, that'll be excellent for later. Um, so how do you determine what games are in what's broing? Like are they your personal collection? Do your texts tell you like, "Hey, we got to do this. There's a deal." You find the games locally? Like what what makes a game show up there? Yeah. Well, we there I mean there's a lot of different ways to find pinballs. Of course, there's like, you know, Pinside, there's the New Inbox Sterns, there's Facebook, there's, you know, a lot of different paths to what's brewing as far as pinball's concerned. But as far as like the things that we choose, of course, it's what's available. There's always going to be our uh grill machines. We've got a lot of those. You know, your your magic, your Adam's family, your Indiana Jones, the good one. Um you know, that's exactly how I refer to that Indiana Jones, too. Everybody always says the good one or the bad one. Yes. Yeah. So, we've got the good one. Um and it's got gold rails and it's beautiful. Um, but you know, I'm a wedge head fan. I've got we've got, I think, five Wedge Heads, uh, at What's Brewing. I own Atlantis, one of my favorite games. Um, I love early solid states, but I mean, the money makers are always going to be the newest Stern. You know, King Kong's killing it right now. We just had our launch party on Saturday. Uh, Dungeons and Dragons did really well for us, but we've got, you know, we don't say that, we don't say that name on the channel here. Oh, right. I do not like D and D. It is a it is a uh it's a hot topic. No, I mean I think it it definitely attracted a new kind of pinball player and I I think I became a better player trying to get through Dragon Spear Castle. It really taught me a lot of like, okay, what am I doing? Especially before they nerfed the the difficulty, I spent about a month trying to get through Dragon Spear. I'm not the greatest pinball player, but there was people in the arcade, like some of our good players, they weren't getting through it as well. But anyway, you know, I I think that there's a lot of different things that, you know, make people want to play a pinball machine. We We could maximize things and just be like a stern location with some, you know, all modern machines. I think it's really important to show the evolution of pinball. And I think it's important for all of our tournaments that we hold that we have like a wide assortment from all eras. About the only thing we don't keep, you know, you'll see some wooden legs come through. We've had bingo machines like in the past um and just as a novelty to kind of let people mess around with them, but um I think right now the oldest machine we have is from 74 abracadabra. Um, and then we we go up all the way to the most modern. But it's a I think it's a pretty wellbalanced between DMD, LCD, and you know, like old solid states, old EM. We've got a really wide selection. We got people um that come from Austin to play our older games just because um all you know after co they lost kind of their what's brewing. They lost their location that was their tournament location RIP Buffalo Billiards. Um but a lot I think a lot of pinball locations closed during COVID because they were attached to bars and bars got shut down first. Sure. It's a communitydriven game. Like you can't have if you're not allowing people to congregate in any kind of density, then you cannot have certain activities occur. And pinball is absolutely a fatality of that, right? But it did blow up the home market, though. More people own pinball machines at home than ever now. It's definitely sent the direction of pinball more towards the collectors rather than arcades. But I you know Gary always Gary Stern was always like in he was always for the operators. It's like you got to take care of the operators. That's why the first run pros were always printed first and shipped to operators first. And I think that was for a number of reasons. It It was operators kind of already know how to fix problems out of the box and there's always going to be problems out of the box. Yeah, we'll see how the the new model works. Um I think pins's going to be pinside. So, I think it's just going to be more so now that the Ellies are going out first. I was going to say, what do you mean new model? Because they are they're still they run Pros on the line at the same time as the LE for the most part, as far as I'm aware of. Oh, I thought they I thought they were shipping LE and premiums. The Pros's last run came out last, right? They They ran them out at the same time as premiums. The Ellies went out first. Yeah, the Ellies went out first. We got ours out uh we got our pros after the premium started landing. So, it was pretty far. This is the first one that we really had to deal with the Ellies coming out first. Um, but you know, trying to give value to the LE because the people that are purchasing those are starting to get frustrated that the separation between models is becoming I I mean, this is an unavoidable problem with their business model of having three tiers. somebody's going to feel that they are not getting something that somebody else is, no matter which tier they're interested in going after, right? And the squeaky wheel is going to get the grease. And that's usually going to be your your loudest um your loudest people are usually going to be the homeowners. And that's not a dig. It's just because for them, it's honestly a toy. It's It's just it's it's just for them. But as an operator, it's kind of a different we we use a different metric to kind of like figure out what what works for us and you know what kind of problems were willing to deal with like if um you know there's I can go back all the way to my first uh new and box which is Iron Maiden and there was there was problems out of the box of that. There was switches that, you know, my my flippers were staged incorrectly. Like you stage flip and the top one would go up and the bottom one would stay down there. You know, it's just there's always going to be stuff like that because everybody's having a there's 100 people touching that machine. Somebody's going to be having a bad day. I don't think so. way more complicated than games were back when they were well I I was going to say wedge heads, but I think maybe the the EM nightmare that is the inside of a sol or of a EM machine is not a good example, but the games now are obviously so much more complex. Uh my Godzilla had its inlane and outlane switch reversed, which was really hilarious cuz we could not figure out what was going on. You're draining on an end lane, correct? So every time it would go down the in lane when you started it would it would release another ball and it was just like what's happening? This is bizarre, but you know, the solution was obviously way more simple than the problem seemed to be. Yeah. So, yeah. And then the question becomes, do you have somebody at home that's uh comfortable taking a soldering iron out, desoldering something, soldering it back on, knowing what a cold solder is, knowing how to properly, you know, you know, put flux down. You know, there's a lot of different things that people aren't comfortable with, and we try to get them there. you know, we we do a lot of especially Mike. He's He's not just an operator here in San Antonio. He's our main tech, but he also does repairs. He also does rentals. Um he helps people buy machines. And um when we get calls like that, usually Mike's trying to be like, "Okay, calm down. This is what you can do, you know, and and walk them through it." But it's mostly just about building how much confidence do you have doing something that you're uncomfortable with? And luckily, we live in a day and age where you can literally get on Penside, look up um what your Tom Cat's doing, and there's probably a whole topic stream about that one particular problem. So it's not like back in the 80s where you had to be have a background in adding machine technology which is what EMS are to in order to fix these older machines you know and if you didn't you would use the machine until it was broken and you throw it out in the back lot which is what pinballs that was what was happening the production cycle was so much larger they were companies like got were making like a machine a month they might have been you know reusing a layout But they were doing different rules on it and they were doing new art on it and the chimes would sound different. But when a lot of the time if you didn't have an operator that know how to fix these things, they could just throw it out back cuz it made its money back three times over and then they would just point which was great because then you could pick up a pinball machine for a couple hundred. I remember back in the early 2000s when you could actually get games for reasonable prices instead of now where it's the good old days. Yeah. I think pinball people love to tinker in general like in like the hobby itself brings a certain kind of ilk of people and the reality is that there's not much in a pinball machine that's going to hurt you or kill you. Like you cannot you're going to do more damage to your game by by shorting a connection that shouldn't be shorted than than you are going to be electrocuting yourself. Um I mean tinkering is one where there's a lot of people that are just like hacky with it. You know like they'll just take wires and kind of like throw them together and see like does this work? You know, there's a lot of things that you can do at 2 in the morning when you've had too many shots and you're like, "Everything's a good idea at 2 in the morning." Yeah. Never. But, uh, you know, we we see a lot of machines come in where it's we've got these maker marks, but they're not good makers marks. You got to figure out they're hackers marks. You know, what did they use hot glue to fix this thing? They um used a button off of their coffee maker as a toggle switch. And it's not rated for 110, so it's melting now. You know, there's a lot of You learn a lot about people that might be dead, you know, but they might be alive, but their memories what they did to their pinball machine. Exactly. Yeah. This Lord of the Rings right here, the uh the Vuck on the left was like barely strong enough to get up and I thought it was either a coil issue, alignment, dirty sleeve, whatever. The reality was it was so much simpler. They had put a spring from a coil or from a flipper return like end of switch spring on the vuck which is way stronger than it needs to be. So we just removed that. I actually just cut a quarter inch off that spring and it's a piece of cake now. But yeah, somebody didn't have the right spring so they put that one in. What's that? That's a good tinkering that that's a good tinkering situation. Mo, you know, like you were dealing with bad tinkering and turning it into good tinkering. you can just cut the spring down and that's going to reduce the strength the strength of it. So, or someone who's running like a speaker wire from inside the head box to some connection point that shouldn't be and then it goes to some surprise location inside the game and you're like why is this even here? I think I think we had an EM come through sometime where somebody had rewired the entire game with um the same wire. There was no like same color identifier you mean or same color. So if you had a problem on that machine, you would literally have to go through and test end to end just and then I don't even know how Mike got around that. But yeah. yeah. Trying to repair something when you don't know the color coding on the wires, especially these older machines, it's nearly impossible. True. You can't trust the color coding all the time either because manufacturers do mess it up sometimes that the reported or even the schematics if they were written as one and the they ended up changing the color of the cable later on down the production line. Yeah. If they ran out. Yeah. Right. [] it. We'll do red off yellow. Who cares if it's supposed to be red and blue. What What are the worst things that could happen here? Yeah. This thing's going to be on the back lot in, you know, a couple of years anyway. So they they didn't anticipate these things lasting uh 40 50 years. It really was not. And it's great. Yeah. No, it is great. And um hope hopefully the ones that have survived this long I think at this point are probably have a good chance of like lasting until you know the end of days. It's just um we lost a lot of pinball machines just because they ended up being put out in the barn and the moisture got to them and they're they basically just sat out there for so long that they weren't usable any longer. That's why I support remakes. Like, I'm I'm down with the remakes. Like, I get it if people want to have authentic original versions of it, but the fact that companies are especially since the Bali William components are still making most of the pinball, like you're using the same flipper mechanics in most games that many of the games from the 80s and 90s used originally. Like, this is the technology hasn't changed at all. No, I mean, and when you and people talk about like, oh, well, you know, what's the difference between these old machines and the new machines? It's just the amount of memory and between the EM and solid states, it's how fast, how many rules you can have. Um, you know, when if you've ever seen inside of the bottom of an EM cabinet, I mean, there's reels that are this big down there. The reset reels are like this big. And each one of those, they'll have layer on top of that cylinder, they'll have layers of EM switches, like hundreds of them. And if there's one that's misaligned or if it's not touching when it's supposed to, um, the game won't operate. Um but it's really incredible what they were able to do with that technology back in the day. It was they they squeezed so much rule um expansion and some of those like grand like Grand Prix one of the last great solid states EM has I mean that thing weighs an absolute ton because you can literally you can see how much how many rules is going to have a weight. It's going to be like right there's like a rule to weight ratio. Yeah. Uh, and that game's got a lot of rules and it weighs a metric ton. Um, but we're able to do so much more with the solid state. We're able to do with the modern speakers, with the modern screens. There's a lot of stuff that you can do. I don't know if we need all of that, but I think it brings it. It's just it's a larger net that's being cast. It's a bigger invitation to play because at the end of it, I think why pinball grabs adults in the same way that it grabs a kid. It's got that kind of like childlike fascination like come touch me, interact with me. um put quarters in me, you know, like you you want to play it, you want to beat it, you want to beat your high score, you want to see what happens next. And a lot of the things in our life, the devices don't really do things in that. They're trying to get the dopamine out of you. Um they're trying to get hit pleasure centers without you actually having to be part of the equation. And pinball, it get has that addictive quality because you want that rush, but you're also having to manipulate it. You have to physically touch it. you get you got to work for that dopamine. I like that. Yeah. You got to do research if you really want to get into it. At least read the scorecard and kind of figure things out. And And it it's also a social thing. People can walk up to you and be like, "Hey, I don't know if you know that that last ball, if you would have just hit that thing, it would have done this." And that's where the ball starts rolling for a lot of people. It's not just the keeping the ball alive. It's when their eyes are open to what else is there. There's rules to this thing. there's ways to beat this game. And they're not used to that going like this. It's just like scrolling, absorbing, consuming technology rather than interacting with technology. And absolutely, I love that about pinball. I love it. Tree Farmer put a a block of a of a statement here. And I think this is true for a lot of us. He says, "It's funny how a lot of us gravitate to the style of games we grew up with. And I think a lot of pinball is nostalgia. A lot of pinball is memories. You know, you think about growing up and having a favorite game in an arcade." He says he loves the games from the late ' 80s and and late 90s and feel like modern tables are more like video games than pinball. And it's true. There's a lot more software that goes into a modern game and they are more complex at some point the that you always have to iterate and make it better than the previous version. Right? I was talking with Bowen saying that the golden age of pinball is always whatever age you're in. It just is right because there's always going to be a best game of that time period and the latest advancements and whatever rule technology and what they think is going to improve it. But right does do you have what's your grail game from any time period? I mean if I have when I walk in after a few days off I usually play like Joker poker. It's a five ball solid state. It's you know it's actually Joker Poker came out in June of 78. I was born in June of 78. I didn't know this until after owning the machine for several years, but I gravitate towards that machine. It's got great rules. It's just complicated enough and I push people towards it cuz it's 50 cents. You get five balls. Um, and there's just a lot of enjoyment. I like drop target games. Drop targets are great. We had a discussion with Electric Batcave talking about which of the pokers was better, whether it was Alien Poker, Joker Poker, or I forget what the third one was. There was another poker. Those are both really good pokers. I mean, I I play both. I I like Joker poker. I think the solid state's got an advantage over the EM just because it score like if you hit a drop target while it's still scoring, it won't necessarily catch that second drop. I think the solid states have the advantage in like that quickness, the response time. Um, but yeah, I probably that's the one that I play most when I'm walking through. But I I love playing the latest games. The The that King Kong is is great. We've got the pro and it just it flows really well. They have I really love King Kong. I uh I felt a little burned on D and D which was my own fault because you shouldn't buy a game that you haven't played first which is another reason why having arcades is important because you can let someone else take the financial hit knowing that they're going to make some sort of return on it having it on location, right? But you offer the ability for people to test out games before they play it. You can't go to a stern showroom, you know. Um but I was pleasantly surprised with Kong. Kong is great. They were both great games. I mean, they they probably earn about the same from us from an operator standpoint. Um, people pumped quarters into to D&D. It's just a different it's a different kind of game. And I think that's that goes back to um what's your personal style, what you grow up with, you know, when you're going back to something like Highspeed 2, you know, ramps, lights, it's pretty linear. Yeah. I mean, it's you understand what what you need to do. You don't It's not a calculus pinball, you know. It's not like X-Men, uh, where you have, but there's modern games that play that way, too. I mean, look at TNA. Total Nuclear Annihilation is a good example of a game that is not like overly designed in terms of rule set, but it's just like super fun. Like, it's, you know, yes, it'll kick your ass. Like, you got to bring a bottle of lube to play that game, but it's short playing in a really satisfying way. Yeah, absolutely. Um there there and all the remakes, the popularity of the remakes just goes to show what the nostalgia factor will do. I mean, you can sell games like Cactus Canyon. Um is it Attack from No, Attack from Mars. Yeah, which I have been streaming recently. It's the game that's currently in the rig, the Chicago remake. We've got we've got the We've got the old one, but I mean the remake's great, too. Um I like the bigger screen. It flips a little bit different, but I mean it's still the it's that simplicity. hit this shot three times. If you hit them all three times, you get to the mini wizard mode and then you you have the ability to go on and and do the Here's Here's my criticism. The last shot, right? Ouch. Oh, ouch. That's savage. Oh my god. Tony's talking about yesterday because I had gotten to the final shot of Rule the Universe and uh I I what did I flub it? I bricked it I think three times until I finally center drained on it. It was Oh my god. Anyways, back to back to the remake thing. The one criticism I have of people that are saying like, "Well, but Attack from Mars, the remake, flips differently than the original, right?" Doesn't every game, whether you're at on location, like there's going to be whether it's the flipper strength, the rubber power, whether it's at a slightly different angle, whether the manufacturing, the diverters are just at a slight like different alignment from game to game. Every pinball machine plays different than every other of the same pinball machine. It's so true. I think the most succinct way I've heard it described is like it's like playing the same golf course on a different day when there's different weather conditions. You know, the grass is a little wetter um or you know the wind's coming from a different direction. You can walk and you can play you can play a game at What's Brewing and then you go up to Austin, you play it um at Cider Cade. same game, but I mean, forget about the pitch and, you know, if you go into the settings, you flipper power and everything else. It's just the way that the the inserts were put in that day. Which guy was on the line? Sure. Was he hung over? You know, like there's a lot of different things that um can affect the way that the games play. Now, even like things like um the ball qual, you know, like which balls you put into it, um how old are they? When's the last time the play field was, you know, they're all going to play different attack. My Attack from Mars had been, I don't know, cleaned a month or two ago. It It certainly wasn't dirty by any means, but I had the glass off cuz I was fixing something on it. And I was just like, I'll give it a quick wipe, but Novas won. And uh I mean, the amount of speed, like the balls were flying off the ramps from the same power, I had to turn the flipper power down. And it's just wild that like a simple small adjustment like that can completely change how the game plays. Um Pat the weirdo gave a call out shout out that he loves your customer streams, which is something that you do. You run the you run your Twitch stream while there's just people playing it during the day. Yeah. Just seeing people interact with the the machines kind of like almost always like for the first time. We've got a couple of guys that come in if they see the stream going they'll they'll come over to like show off and and you know and they enjoy the exhibition of it. But a lot of time it's just like a kid playing for the first time or a a dad playing for the first time with his son. and and you get to see those like kind of moments that we're as operators or people that are seasoned in the pinball world, we we've we've gotten a long way from, but it's a reminder of like, hey, this is still like this is still new and fun for a lot of people. Like it's not as it's not like pins where, you know, like if you told people about what what's people are talking about with pinball, their eyes get glassy. You can't try to drop them straight into the defend. It's just a game for a lot of people and and you don't get to see that on a lot of streams because it's people mostly tournaments or playing at home where they're, you know, they've been playing pinball for a long time. So, yeah, I I really like that aspect of it, too. Pinball people live in a bubble where they think pinball is like very popular. And it is true that pinball is more popular now than it was, I don't know, 30 years ago or so. Maybe not 30, but like early 2000s, mid 2000s, back when it was like the dark ages of Stern, you know. Uh, but I still have people that come over like to my house and they're just like, "Oh, you have pinball machines. Like, I didn't know they still made those." And it's like I hate hearing that because I want people to know the pinball exists. Yep. It's so true. Um, it people are surprised that they're still making them, you know? They're like, "Oh, I thought they stopped making pinball machines in the 80s." And you're like, "No, it's still it's still a thing. I can re-educate you. Come on in." And you kind of you have to have a feel for you have to read the room and know how far down the rabbit hole they want to want to go because I can sit and talk to you about pinball for two hours easy. If you want to just hang out and talk about pinball, we can sit. But you're that guy. If you start doing it to somebody who is just like, I don't really care about this conversation. Yeah. They're They're like slowly backing away. You know, you gota Yeah. You got to watch out for those verbal cues. And sometimes if you had too much coffee, you you know, you can you can overdo it. So Lee and I were pretty chatty when we played Ghostbusters. Uh after getting pretty hopped up on both your brew and his brew that he brought over. Uh but whatever. Like if you're not tuning in to hear people talk about pinball on a pinball stream. I'm not sure why you're hopping on that to begin with. Yeah. No, there we have our people here, right? But it's it's fun. you know, we got a QR code on the rig and kind of a lot of the time you'll see people dropping into chat are they're like family members of the people playing for the first time that they're trying to share it. And so hopefully some of that I mean you can't expect it to be 100% retention rate, but sometimes you'll get people in the arcade. They're like, "Oh yeah, my nephew was in here playing and I he shared this link with me and I wanted to come check it out." So, you know, I think once you get a person in there playing pinball, I wouldn't necessarily say you've got like somebody that's going to come in seven days a week, but they might be like when they're thinking about something fun to do, it might be you over miniature golf or you over pinball over bowling because at the end at the end of it, we do like we do party rentals after our party rentals where you can like rent the arcade for 350 bucks and people are like, "Wow, I just spent 350 bucks for a birthday party of bowling and it was like, you know, that's just an hour of bowling. That's all it. That's an insanely good deal. Anybody who's rented a bounce castle knows what I'm talking about. That shit's ridiculously expensive. And to have an entire arcade available to you for however long that value lasts for is amazing. That's incredible. Yeah. So, people are really surprised with that. And And again, it's all about kind of like you might get a 100 people at a party and maybe you'll see two of them come back in and be regulars, but hey, it all adds up. And And now, you know, we have tournaments. I think on our launch party this weekend, we had uh 50 people, which is I mean, it's not it's not huge. It's not electric batting t their Tuesdays are like 100 people, but at some point there's too many people for a tournament like where it's cumbersome to to manage it, get everybody to know what they need to be doing, where they need to be playing, like you know, 50 is a great number. We put a limit. Yeah. For our size, the amount of room and and then the general public that's also in there, we kind of limit things. I don't I don't like to have more than 60 people in a tournament. gets just packed in there, especially if everybody gets drawn into the same room and it just You compete in your own tournament. Yeah, I do. I I've taken a little bit of a step back. I used to, you know, we we started doing Tuesday night tournaments last year and it was mostly to get um have a different day for some of our hardcore guys, but also we needed to get our streaming off the ground and that was a way for us to prepare and make all the mistakes before we got to SCS. We still made mistakes at state finals, but um but once we got Tuesdays off the ground, Tuesday's my day off, so I kind of now I'm not doing that. Everybody's like, "Man, you still play pinball? Where you been?" Because they'll just come in on Tuesdays and I'm not there. Did you quit? No, No, I'm still here. I just don't play on Tuesdays anymore. Doing the interview on your day off. Oh, no. no. It's my pleasure, man. Hey, I'm such a big fan. you you've come such a long and I know your background has a lot to do with it, but just the way that you bring your joy of pinball in, it really translates. Um, people I I'm excited about your stream and and the things you're doing and and your background is is fascinating. Like I think a lot of artists gravit artists and scientists tend to gravitate towards pinball and you see a lot of that and um yeah, I love seeing the sound aspect. I mean, you're you're a composer and and you're you're interacting with pinball and you're talking about uh your career and the way that it's interacting with pinball. And there's also, you know, what's the gentleman's name? I think he's also in California, The Simpsons. Uh he worked for the Simpsons and he I know who you're talking about. Um uh it's not my it's not HUP, but it has a similar H uh anagram to it. I talked to him. He actually he moved he moved uh north mid north midwest now after co unfortunately that he works as a animatorcompositor for pinball or for Simpsons not pinball. Yeah. Uh and just hearing that aspect of things you know as him as a digital art graphics artist and you as a you know working with sound and music and and composing and everything else. It's It's great to have that that aspect. And then, you know, and then there's guys like me that have nothing to do with making pinball, but you know, coffee now has something to do with pinball. So, it's kind of fun. I first of all, thank you. I appreciate that. I think that it is anybody who loves pinball and has the ability to share it with people. uh you know it's do the do the great pyramids good work by helping to spread the gospel of pinball and you do it through coffee and it shows just how like uh glo not global but like diverse the pinball community can be that there are people that are you know I know people that are look at our league right our league is everything from like accountants to you know people that are artists that work in the creative industry just like there's every single walk of life of of an individual that is into potentially into pinball. It doesn't have any kind of like special niche of only being this kind of person. It really is for everybody. Yeah. And I there's things there's countless things I've learned just conversations I've had talking to pinball people um you know from pilots like artists um engineers uh politicians you know uh news anchors just all kinds of people come in. are gravitating towards pinball these days and it's a and then everything else in between. So you've kind of got everybody in there in the same room and it gives you you know sure there's always a chance that you know you've got people with different political views arguing in your arcade but mostly you don't see that. You just see people kind of like having fun and it's a safe place for people to interact. And as much as I kind of worry about the worst case scenarios of things that can go wrong in the arcade when you've got a hundred people in there, it's not usually because of like differing views on things. It's you'd like to think it's not pinball. That was a [] call and I'm going to go report that to if that's usually the kind of drama that you have, right? It's not about um I would be more afraid of somebody spilling stuff onto the game. Like I've heard horror stories of of people that own bars that have pinball machines and they have to like pry the bar off with a like a crowbar because it's just glued with the amount of drinks that have just like come down the glass. Yeah. A A double vanilla shot latte spilling on top of joker poker is not necessarily good. It literally glues that beer tape to the glass and you have to scrape it off. You have to cut it off and start. Do you think games that have left your arcade that have moved to some new owner, do you think that they smell like coffee forever? They absolutely do. When we deliver a machine for rental, it goes out smelling like coffee. And when I open that door up, you know, usually when you open up an old game, it smells like old books and, you know, maybe some cigarettes. You know, you have that kind of nuance, but definitely our games smell like coffee when you brew. Have you thought about making like aroma packets that you could put inside your pinball machine to give that like, you know, what's brewing aroma? Hey man, don't burn all the good ideas on the I'm just saying I feel like I'm I'd want a percentage of this if that if you start making that. You heard it here first, folks. Uh, so as we do always on the show, I have to ask this question. So, if you were going to add one of these games to your lineup, right, we're talking fresh fresh into the what's Brewing community. I know you've got enough games there now, but from these three games, can you tell me which of these that you would absolutely maintain and put in your in your lineup? Raven, have to go with Raven. It's a tough choice, though. you know, everybody picks the same game. I don't know why. It's really strange. Um, you know, Bowen said that he would add it to Raven, you know, or that he would add that to his lineup. Bowen actually only has one game in his house, which blows my mind. Uh, Bowen is probably one of the granddaddies of streaming. Uh, absolutely. Yeah. But no, he has towards him. I still point uh people towards his his you know like how to play pinball tutorials are legendary. Yes. I mean he he really broke it down in a way that nobody had up to that point. And that's way before people were like building rigs and moving stuff around. So So he he has one game in his place. Can you I don't know if you saw the the podcast. This isn't a this isn't a test, but can you guess what the one game is? Oh man. Um I'll give you a clue. This is not It's a DMD game. I know that World Cup soccer was his first childhood game that he got into. He's talked about that before, so I'd have to, if I had to guess, World Cup soccer. That's correct. Amazing. Yeah. Hey, that's hilarious. I just expected him to have like a massive wall of games, you know. No, sometimes it's those old uh it's those old DMDs that kind of get you. It gets you right in the feels of it's something that you grew up with and it's got good rules. I mean, you can beat that game. It's not It's a Papaduke game. It's uh I think all the Papaduke games are amazing in their own right, whether you like the themes or not, but uh they're all weird in in a way that is unique to pinball for that period for sure. Um yeah, absolutely. No, I think that that's like as a designer like you you've got guys uh you know like Jack who are pushing the envelope constantly and that's something that I almost touched on earlier is like these when you've got new technologies whether it's like LCD screens or like magnets on the playfield or even things like flippers on pinball machines. Like those were all things at one point or another that were cutting edge for gaming. when you come up with like something new, it's usually going to be used for military and it's going to be used for gaming, some type of entertainment. And um pinball was like the first arcade. It was the first like way to use electricity to manipulate a something to have fun and uh it was the first child of technology that we kind of interacted with in that way. And so I think as you move for, you know, like things like insider connected Wi-Fi, you know, um 3D technology for uh virtual pinball, you know, like wearing the goggles and being able to like move your head and and seeing the way that the the game changes from your perspective. These are all things that get spent on uh entertainment. Um and it's more towards you see it more towards arcades and home consoles these days because that's where the money is. But pinball still does dip in there when they have to. You are you are so right about uh the military being a source of that. My dad was a fighter pilot and did A10 pilot testing and the technology that went into those. One of my favorite games and so much Oh, you were a DCS fan. Yeah, we played the A10 Warthog Thunderbolt, whatever that game was called on the old PCs. We played that hell out of that game. It's a good game. But a lot of that technology, you know, with targeting pods and a lot of their like terrain scanning and stuff like that has ended up in phones and like it's just that stuff was the groundwork for where it ended up later on, you know? Yeah. The inspiration's there. I mean, it's just we as humans, I think one of the the processes that we go to when we see something new is like eventually once you percolate on it, maybe sleep the next day, you're like, "Oh, I can use this for that or I can make that better." Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, we we use these things. We we're tool users and we always try to fit the tools into our toolbox, whether it's like roasting coffee, fixing pinball, designing pinball, producing music. We're always using inspirations and things that we see around us. And unfortunately, the the easiest ways to use this technology is like, how do we blow things up or how do we like make people buy this game? Yeah. Exactly. So that's I think the for the biggest enhancement or the the thing I would love to see to come to pinball as the next great uh improvement is maybe like some completed code when the game launches. That would be my like if I could have lived in a fantasy world that could have that that would that would be what I want as a new you you're an early adopter of of pinballs. Um so as far as like you know you're buying new and boxed stuff a a lot of the time or at least these last two Yeah. Yeah, even last I' been my last four or five games were new in box, but the the other two or three had been out for like 10, eight years cuz I had been out of the hobby for quite a while. I think watching the evolution of these things in real time also has its value. I think if you did flip a switch and you did have games coming out with 1.0 code, um there would be some nostalgia for it. Yeah. You remember like when games used to come out, they were all broken and they didn't like 007 didn't have any there was no speech like they didn't have the rights to these IPs all the way still working its way out. I think there would be a certain amount of nostalgia like yeah back when I was first starting to play pinball code evolved and you know you you know the game would change monthto month and I think that's that has some kind of like that has some value of seeing things grow but as a home as a home use person I can see that aspect you don't want that you want the completed if what you're watching grow is like rules game more interesting and the game itself like becoming more fun to play because of design decisions, that's one thing. But if we're talking about just straight missing features out the gate, like modes not being included in the game, there's just some stuff that I think is there needs to be a communicated baseline of what the game should ship with. And if that criteria hasn't been met, the game should ship. And I know that things are more complicated than that with IP owners. the, you know, business, you know, Stern's got metrics and dates that they need for their shareholders and whatnot. Right. Exactly. So, some of this stuff is unavoidable, but like, you know, like that's also on the producers and managers that are getting the game shipped to make sure that it is at a certain state before it leaves the factory. But yeah, I agree with that. I think it should I think I think somewhere I think we're we need to land somewhere in the middle of like yes games should be like ready to um be competitive right out of the box but um I I think we can get better. I think if there is more pressure then the bar might if if there is a company that comes out and and everybody isn't dropping 8 code um right then you'll start seeing things change but right now the demand's so high people are buying it just because the FOMO absolutely and Stern's business model is based on FOMO I I think that the saturation for the amount of games that are coming out is going to surpass the amount of buying power that that consumers and locations are have available. It's just there are so many I mean Predators coming out in two days you know obviously Harry Potter just came out from Jersey Jack I mean companies in general are trying to put out two or three games a year and there are more pinball companies than there ever have been currently so right that's a lot of games and not an infinite amount of consumers that are going to purchase them so to complain about but we're going to complain about it godamn I'm glad there's a lot of games I'm just saying that I'm I'm fearful that some of these companies are not going to make it long term because there's not going to be enough people buying their game. And I, you know, I said this a million times on the channel, like there Jersey Jack and Stern have plenty of money. Their business models are doing quite good. The smaller pinball companies are making really interesting games and should not be like passed on. Like you should absolutely check out, you know, Spooky or maybe not American Pinball, but like you know, Turner and for sure like Barrels of Fun. Like all these companies are making fun games that should be taken taken a look at. Yeah, I I 100% agree. I mean, we're so lucky. I mean, of course, you're going to have um companies that don't make it because they're it's so difficult to start without huge amounts of capital um to make these operations work. We walk we walk through Deep Route um when they were closing down shop because we're going to be uh getting stuff off the auction lot. And just seeing the amount of investment, the amount of stuff that they were selling and they hadn't even put a game out yet. Uh it's it's really incredible the amount the sheer scale of things. I think the the ones that do make it the the outfits like Spooky Shop like Spooky that start doing games like 100 runs and then moving growing it organically from that grow the model, right? I completely agree. But then you then you've got like I mean we got we had the chance to do a barrels of fun tour uh for when Houston's expo was going on in October and it's just incredible what they've come how far they've come and it's just such a streamlined process and I think you have to be that's the crucible that um determines if you're not going to be able to make it or not. Are you able to scale this thing up? Are you able to put out like 10 machines a week? Are you able to put out 50 machines a week? And that's really when the rubber meets the road on a lot of these operations. And sometimes the bottom just falls out. Sometimes it's a scam and sometimes it's just a a great marketplace. Yeah. Well, hey now, the great pyramid takes great offense to you even applying that that the cult of pinball would be a scam. That's absolutely not true. Get out of here with that. Not a pyramid screen a gate. We're talking about American Pinball. If we're going to talk about scams now, they've had a bad bad run, but we'll see. Cuphead maybe. We got a Hot Wheels. That's a I mean I I agree that recently what they've been putting out, you know, it's it's been a little bit lackluster and I I we really can't tell what's going to happen. It doesn't look great though. Um well, they said they're not making any more games. The CEO got removed and now they're basically being run by an investment firm. It's not a good fit for pinball people. Yeah. It's just it's a it's a real shame when you see because we want everybody to succeed. We want more pinball. It's only good for everybody. And the people working on those games were great. Like Steve Bowen did the rules for a lot of their games. And Steve is not only a great pinball person, a great person, and a very good rules designer. Like Barry's Barbecue has awesome rules. It's a great tournament game. But wow, what the [***] Yeah, we you know, funny thing is like Mike, our our main tech was really really good friends with Barry. He was at Deep Root when he passed or you know, Deeper imploded right before he passed and he was he was a great friend of what's Brewing. He came in all the time and and hung out and we had a we still have a bunch of his games and you know him and Steve lizard one of my favorite 11s. Yeah, just I mean what didn't he do? He made so many games. Um I think probably he made more he produced more games or designed more games than anybody since then. It's It's a huge amount of work. But just like it was like having pinball royalty come through because you just hear all these stories and then Stephen comes in and like he's talking about how to play these games and how to approach them and you know it's just it's incredible the amount of information you can get from from these people coming through. Pinball people. Pinball people love pinball. Pinball people. Yeah. Well, Tony, thank you so much. I mean, we're almost pushing on two hours. It's been such a pleasure to gab about pinball. Learned so much about coffee and the coffee process. I thought I knew a lot about coffee, but I have learned a lot about coffee from from this chat and I really appreciate that. Is there anything uh happening at What's Brewing or in your life that you would like to to share with the pinball community that you think's relevant? Uh I mean, tasty coffee, new coffee you got. As far as our Twitch, like we've got Tuesdays and Fridays are always going to be pinball. We have uh Tuesday tournaments. Friday's league um first Saturdays of the month are going to be our big monthlies. Those usually happen like on Saturday afternoons. Um coffee, stay tuned. We've got um some new Ethiopians coming in for from Cup of Excellence. We've got one really really good one and I'll I'll make sure that you get a sample of that. Um we've got Yes, Sammy, my brother just got back from uh El Salvador. He did the Cup of Excellence there. He was cupping for that competition. So, we should I think there that auction's happening um in July or August. So, we should have the El Salvador's coming in early fall. And, you know, all of our coffee is fresh. You can watch it being roasted. So, so tune in. We usually, right now, we're taking a little high. We have some technical difficulties in the roasting room, but we've got uh the the daily coffee roasting streams. I understand if you don't want to hang out and watch coffee roasting for three or four hours, but you can pop in and just kind of see how the the how we make the sausage at What's Brewing. And of course, if you have a layover, if you're ever at coming through San Antonio, uh, come by and check us out. We're we we're like the home of pinball in San Antonio. We've got really great community, a lot of good people, and we try to have fun. It's a and we keep it safe, clean, and fun. That's That's our motto. Nice. I hope that I can make it down to San Antonio. I would love to uh both take a tour and play some of your games. Uh, and I'm hoping to be at TPF. Uh, I don't know if you do Texas Pinball Festival, but uh I'm hoping to be there next year. though. Yeah, me too. I want to It'll be my first time. Maybe we'll see you there. And um I'm definitely going to Houston again. I just bought my tickets, so I'll be at Houston and and trying to do a little bit more pinball traveling. Do the do the circuit. Same. I feel like once you start a streaming channel, you pretty much have to start doing the pinball the pinball expo circuits. You know, content creators, we got to the public needs us, right? Well, I mean, you know, people need to know about pinball. We got to do our business. got to do our best, right? Yeah, that's it's just about spreading the joy of pinball. I mean, no, like I said, nobody's really getting rich on pinball. Maybe the big manufacturers maybe, but even then, it's kind of like there's better ways to make money if you're going to invest millions of dollars probably than starting a pinball operation. But yeah, really, we're just trying to help pinball companies make more money just so they can make more pinball, which is uh But the more pinball part is important. That's the good part. theme. What is that called? Yeah, it's like a a hyper cube pyramid. I don't know. Threedimensional. Yeah. But yeah, man. We're I I I'm excited to watch uh what what you're doing. We We always like tuning in and I I throw you up on We got two big screens at the warehouse that we watch pinball stuff. So, I always throw you up when I see you pop on. Very cool. Well, I'll plug myself then because uh in a few hours uh Carl from IE Pinball is going to be here uh literally in my house since Carl and I are both buds and he lives local. Uh so we're going to be playing probably some Attack from Mars. I promised I'd roll Lord of the Rings in for him, but I just I don't have the time with with what's going on today. So sorry Carl, you're playing a remake and I know you don't like remakes. We'll probably talk about that on stream. So yeah, I will definitely tune in. I always like watching Carl. He's He's just such a a pioneer and you know I don't think pinball streaming or pinball sports would be quite the same without him having he's really humble about it but he wrote the software that almost all tournaments or at least the high level tournaments play operate with I mean he's been streaming for forever and is essentially you know he's not Jack Danger but he is he is a pinball streamer on the level of exposing pinball to people probably bigger than Jack and just in the tourn tournament circles for sure. Um yeah, definitely. I agree with you. Yeah. But yeah, Carl's a cool dude. And then um yeah, tomorrow we'll take a look at the Predator uh release stuff since that's coming out. And then Daniel will be here on Thursday from Pinball Brothers. So we'll be talking with Daniel about that. And uh yeah, hopefully it's a good game. It's a hot summer. There's just so much so much new pinball. It's a good time to be in the hobby. And if you're not in the hobby, go go get in the hobby. Go play Summit. What's Brewing if you're in Texas? Yeah. Get to an arcade. Support local operators 100%. Amazing. All right, Tony. Thank you again. Thank you, chat, everybody, for watching. This is uh I guess 8, nine, I forget which number it is for Dirty Pool podcast. It'll be available on all the uh whatever places that RSS feeds go to. Um yeah, come check us out next Tuesday. I've got uh Kale and Rachel from Electric Bat, I think, is next week, which would be pretty cool. And we've got some more stuff in the pipe. Yeah, they're cool people. They run a 24-hour arcade. It's crazy. Yep. And they have one of the best podcasts. I mean, great operator perspective. Yes, absolutely. Uh, all right. Thanks everybody. See you later. Thanks, guys. So much fun.