On our first week we sold both a Kenyan and a Guatemalan coffee. What was remarkable is how much quicker and easier it was to sell the Guatemalan coffee. We used words like round, smooth, balanced, nutty, and chocolate to sell it. With the Kenyan, we used bright, snappy, exciting, acidic, winey. Before I usually had time to say anything else, people would say, “Oh, the Guatemala!”

Smooth and balanced seem to be buzz words with anything, including coffee.

A lot of what you say makes intuitive sense – and not just in terms of understanding what it is that new-to-coffee consumers percieve in the cup, but (perhaps even more importantly) what turns them on to good coffee in the first place.

I think I remember you (apologies if i’m misquoting / misattributing someone else’s opinion to you) pointing out that, to the ‘good’ coffee industry, it’s a much larger gain to ‘convert’ one instant-coffee-drinker than it is to fight over those customers who already ‘get it’. Additionally, since there are so many instant-coffee-drinkers out there, you only need convert a tiny % to really grow the market for good coffee. Whereas a fixed pool of well-informed customers get a better experience if the main players cooperate to some degree.

Anyway – this highlights the importance of understanding what someone new-to-good-coffee thinks – and from what I’ve seen, it’s mostly texture, not flavours, that pull people in. (There’s a good reason I’d offer someone who “doesn’t like coffee” a single shot capp rather than an espresso – it’s approachable, and up-front delicious).

You’ve even made me re-evaluate what attracted me to good coffee in the first place. And as soon as I do, I realize – it was primarily texture, not taste, that did it. A good capp, with nondescript coffee, but good milk technique, was what started me searching and learning about good coffee. And I certainly remember the texture, far better than the taste of the coffee.

Since then, I’ve come to appreciate the beans. So I’d agree that a french press in every home, for good brewed (black) coffee, is an excellent goal – but perhaps texture in general, and milk drinks (with good texture, not 20oz pails of scalded cow juice) in particular can have a role to play in popularizing good coffee?

Thanks, I’m guaranteed a wierd nights sleep. Again.

I was thinking about this post over the weekend when I picked up a new beer at the supermarket. It was an IPA, which I like, from a brewery which I like. I wondered what made this beer different from their other IPA and what I might expect in the bottle. On the side of the six-pack package, there was a rather lengthy piece of text, some 400 words or so. I started reading expecting to see flavor notes, brewing techniques, something that would tell me what was in the bottle. As you might have guessed by now, there was nothing until the very last sentence which had a single word about flavor. Instead the copy was a story describing the high desert country where the beer was brewed. It was evocative and certainly made me want to go visit, but it literally had nothing to do with the beer. And it’s not even like the hops or malt were grown in the high desert, it is a desert after all. And yet nearly the whole marketing effort (from a descriptive standpoint) was trying to sell me on an experience or evocative image instead of on the beer itself.

Of course this isn’t a texture versus flavor interpretation as you’ve elaborated on here, but it struck me as perhaps even more relevant for the coffee industry as both are selling liquids and therefore have fewer texture descriptors to work with.

By the way the beer was quite malty, a little less hoppy than most IPAs, and very tasty.