JIMSEVEN

As an industry we often talk of our need for criticism, that the lack of it holds us back, stunting our development, leaving us somewhat immature. Inevitably this leads to emotionally charged conversations and discussions, but these discussions never really see to progress anywhere. I believe it is because we haven’t fully decided what we believe criticism to be.

Dual definitions

The umbrella word fosters two different but intertwined meanings: it is the expression of disapproval based on perceived flaws or mistakes, and it is also the analysis an judgement of something (typically we might use this meaning when discussing art).

Our emotional responses to the idea of criticism will vary according to whichever of the definitions we are referring to, though this is often lost in our discussions

The other issue I see is that when we elicit feedback we’re often not clear on what questions we are actually asking?

How was your coffee?

Let’s divide critical negative responses into two different camps: Criticism based on the failure to meet the expectations of the customer (a service based failure first and foremost), and the failure to meet the expectation of the business (primarily a preparation based failure).

When I ask you how your cup of coffee was then I should be looking to interpret your answer through one of these two ideas. When I ask you this question I might be asking “Did I serve you something that met your needs?” or I might (rarely I hope) be asking “Did I/we brew this cup of coffee properly?”. Tensions arise when you intend to ask the first question, and your customer answers the second one.

My own personal experience, where people may want technical criticism on brewing, and I can answer honestly without causing great offence, is not one available to many people. Imagine pulling a customer you’ve never met before an espresso, you ask how it was and they explain that it tastes a little fast and a little long. You thought the shot looked ok, and now you are left in a dilemma of not really knowing the validity of the criticism. Does this person know a great deal about coffee, or are they just an overconfident amateur looking to use their experience to bolster confidences in their own skills?

We say want criticism but we really have to be clear who we want to get criticism from – I know I have written a little about another aspect of this recently.

I am am aware that this question is often used as a tool to start a conversation, to open up a little dialogue with a customer – I see the value of this opening gambit though I wonder if this is the best question. If it isn’t meant – as so many disinterested mid meal “So how is everything?” check-ins are  - then the effect on the customer’s experience can be quite negative.

This roast is way too light

There has been an increasing amount of discussion and negative commentary on an increase in the number of companies trying to roast coffee lighter. This is difficult criticism to interpret. The negative response may come from the taster’s expectations – their idea of how coffee is best presented. This opinion may have been the result of repeated exposure of a specific level of roast,e.g. thirty years of drinking French Roast. This is usually rather unhelpful criticism as it fosters homogeny. We are surpringly unwilling to accept that there is more than one way to present coffees. I don’t believe my preference for roasted oolong teas is grounds to dismiss, on a technical level, the greener ones available.

This doesn’t mean that light roasts are above criticism, but valuable criticism does require an understanding of both the technical roasting process as well as the raw materials and their capacity also.

What are you owed?

This is a slightly more awkward aspect to the discussion. You might ask someone in the industry for some feedback, and in many cases you might really be asking to be taught something, to be given information. In some cases the critic may feel they have an obligation – they might be the supplier, they may be a good friend – but often they may not be. They may even be a competitor – should they feel they owe help and assistence to a competing business? (the recipient may also devalue and distrust the information based on the competitive nature of the relationship rendering the entire transaction an awkward valueless experience).

We’re generally a friendly and inclusive industry, with strong community, but we can’t continue to pretend that all knowledge is valueless especially when people incur significant costs of time and effort to attain it in the first place – and may even rely on it for their livelihood.

Food writing

In thinking about coffee criticism I inevitably looked at food criticism, which sits within the broader aspect of food writing. Food writing, the really good stuff, is often a form of criticism in that it is often assessment and dissection of an aspect of food. This kind of writing often helps shape ideas of food within culture, its place within our lived and of its wider value beyond nutrition or a delightful gustatory response. These can sometimes offer benchmarks for more technical criticism and feedback to be anchored to or measured against.

One might argue that coffee lacks the breadth of depth and topics required to foster writing like this, but I don’t really agree. Especially considering some of my favourite food writing often evoke broad ideas from narrow subjects. The little coffee writing we’ve had we’ve reacted negatively to – not seeing its value in buiding up an validity to our coffee culture and industry’s fascinating complexity.

And your point is….?

I’ve wanted to write about criticism for a little while, to throw my 2 cents into the debate. My ultimate point is that if you think criticism is vital and lacking then you need to be more precise about exactly what you think is missing. When you wish to elicit feedback from individuals then you need to be very clear about what question you are asking them. You must also accept that if they’ve paid for their coffee then they owe you nothing, the transaction is over and ideally the necessary value realised for both parties. You should be on even footing and demanding more puts the cafe, the barista, or the roaster into debt. What is that criticism then worth to you?

I’m at a point where I quite regularly wonder if we are worrying about the right thing. Tonight I decided I would run some very simple/simplistic experiments to look at the effect of what we do when we cup coffees.

Typically our cupping methodology is to weigh the whole bean coffee, grind, and then add water just off the boil. We tend to wait 4 minutes per bowl before stirring the crust that has formed (“the break”). The residual foam and grounds are then skimmed off while the cup cools to a temperature where we can begin to taste. Tasting usually last until the coffee is close to room temperature.

This may end up being a fairly long post so you can skip down to the ultimate conclusion of the whole thing here.  (I won’t be offended….)

Sang Ho and I stayed after work tonight and ran three little experiments. The first was mostly a failure due to bad method. The idea was to track how quickly a cupping bowl was extracting. For the sake of replication – or more likely correction – here is the method we used:

Experiment 1 Method

- 12g of coffee per bowl. To ensure consistency 70g of coffee was ground and then coffee weighed into bowls. This prevented any variation due to grinder retention.

- The bowls were filled with an identical weight of water (there were small fluctuations due to human error that were recorded) with a target of 200g.

- Water was exiting a short, custom Uber boiler font at 97C.

- Filling was staggered to allow measurement to take place at a desired range of times: 30s, 60s, 120s, 240s, 300s & 420s.

- Measurement was done by sampling 5ml of liquid from 1cm below the crust. This was then filtered into a vessel and allowed to cool before being measured with an Extract Mojo.

- Variations in brewing water weight were factored in when calculating extraction.

- The same coffee was used for all bowls ((I’m not going to spam you with the coffee name, but if you want to know it is here.)

Experiment 1 Results

This was something of a failure as the timings had not been worked out well, and some timings markers were missed. I would consider this experiment pretty much garbage but we did get the following results:

Experiment 1 Conclusions

As you can see the results don’t match the planned method. This is a bit embarrassing and I plan to run this again and organise myself a little better. Shame on me…

At best I am going to offer hypothesises that can be tested further by other people.  It would appear that most of the extraction happens very quickly in the first 30s in an infusion type brew, and then the rate of extraction seems to decrease and then plateau.  Coffee does not continue to extract to the point of overextraction if you leave it a long time without breaking.  I don’t really find this to be valuable data but I’d love other people to have a go at this and see what results they get.

These results are more interesting in the context of the next couple of experiments.

The next experiment was about the break in the context of time.  How important is it that you break a bowl at a consistent time?

Experiment 2 Method

- 12g of coffee per bowl as before.

- The bowls were filled with an identical weight of water as before.

- Water was exiting a short, custom Uber boiler font at 97C.

- Filling was staggered to allow the break to take place at a desired range of times: 30s, 60s, 120s, 240s, 360s & 480s.

- Two measurements would be taken:  One when all bowls had reached 10 minutes of brewing, and then again at 20 minutes of brewing.  The reason for this was to see if extraction would continue after the break.

- Variations in brewing water weight were factored in when calculating extraction.

 Experiment 2 Results

In the end the extraction data was so similar at 20 minutes to the data at 10 minutes that is isn’t worth posting. Here is what happened:

* This bowl had an accidentally higher dose of water in it – 212g instead of 200g. This is relevant when looking at experiment 3.

Experiment 2 Conclusions

For me this was really interesting.  Even when you got stuck into the break after only 30s you still had a reasonably extracted cup, and waiting a long time didn’t mess things up either.  Most people are breaking around the 240s mark (though obviously with their chosen grind/extraction preferences).

Most shocking to me was that the break really does seem to stop the coffee extracting further.  The TDS of the cups measured 10 minutes after this had barely changed – by 0.01% in most cases.

Secondly the bump in extraction due to breaking is notable.  This was the same coffee and grind setting as the previous experiment.

It would seem that being accurate to the second isn’t hugely important in brewing coffee, and that there is a fairly large window in which you can break and not have a large effect on the coffee.

Problem:  Each bowl was skimmed clean after breaking so we could taste after sampling.  This meant that some ground coffee was removed from each bowl, so not all bowls had the same amount of total grounds in them for the duration of their brewing.  How much this impacted the resulting strength/extraction is unknown.

Experiment 3 Method

There is a lot of focus on the break for many people, but there is rarely a focus on the weight of water used.  We wanted to run a simple experiment to see how the ratio of coffee to water would effect extraction.

- 12g of coffee was used in each bowl.  It was weighed ground as before.

- For each bowl we varied the weight of water added, from 170g to 220g in steps of 10g.

- Each bowl had an identical break time, an identical skimming clean time and we also measured the temperature of each bowl at 7 minutes using an IR thermometer.

- Samples were taken at 11 minutes for each bowl, filtered and tested.

- Different coffee was used in this experiment to previous ones (explaining the change in extraction range).

Experiment 3 Results

Represented graphically:

Here are the temperatures we recorded at 7 minutes of brewing, for each weight of water:

Experiment 3 Conclusions

The extent of the relationship between brew water and extraction in an infusion was a little shocking to me. If this had been a percolation then I would have been less surprised.

The temperature was an interesting side effect, I guess down to thermal mass. All bowls were identical temperatures at the start of the experiment, and were taken from shelves at room temperature and had not been used in previous experiments.

It would seem likely that the increased extraction is a combination of increased solvent present, as well as more energy in the form of brewing temperature. It implies that mass of water is perhaps of more concern in a cupping environment compared to brewing times and break times.

Important: All bowls are not created equal. Nor do all coffees bloom equally. I would be confidant that most people (including ourselves) have a 10g swing in either direction of their average brewing weight when cupping. This means a fairly large swing in their extractions, which may be influencing their roasting or purchasing decisions for the worse.

Overall discussion

Some could, and maybe will, argue that they don’t worry about brewing weight, never have, and they’ve found their cuppings to be useful and effective QC or buying tools. I would say that it feels like we go to great pains in certain aspects of cupping – such as the weight of the coffee itself being targeted to 0.1g – but we ignore other hugely important variables. We have a cupping setup that would allow identical water temps and in theory identical weights of brew water. I don’t mind admitting that we haven’t zeroed the scale on every single bowl we’ve cupped. There is, however, a lot of received wisdom and ritual around cupping and I’d like to strip some of it back.

My final disclaimer is that the above isn’t very good, nor methodical, science. I hope it encourages a few people to experiment and test out the effects of their own protocols. It has certainly made me rethink what we prioritise when we are cupping and fixing our method that we teach and train.

I’ve missed doing geeky stuff on here. I’d love to see people post their own experiments on their blogs, improve my methods (shouldn’t be hard!) and see what results they get.

I don’t write as much about coffee brewing as I used to, mostly because (if I am honest) I don’t brew as much coffee these days. Work demands time and attention, and my specific role has drawn me to many and varied topics that my inexperience has shown to be gaping holes of knowledge.

This has led to a fascination with the idea of “cross training”. Cross training isn’t quite the right term, but it is basically the idea of looking at other businesses/industries and their solutions to challenges that we might share. For example, I’ve recently become interested in the ideas of Lean Manufacturing. You could argue that making cars is a very different world to roasting coffee, but I think that these ideas have applications all the way to the coffee bar level. If you read the summary of the Toyota Production System (the ideas upon which much Lean Manufacturing theory is based), it doesn’t take great leaps of imagination to see how this kind of thinking could be valuable to a coffee shop.

We have a relatively simple production line at work, and what looks like a simple workflow but reading about this stuff has led me to better understand our weaknesses and also give some direction to the conversations we have about how to increase our productivity and efficiency to give us more time to do cool stuff at work.

I thought about trying to write-up ideas like this like I used to with things like the Maillard reactions or Foams, adding a coffee industry focused twist on there but I think I’d quickly be way out of my depth. I do think that there would be some great events/conferences based around this kind of idea mashup. I’d love to hear someone a major clothing retail company talk about staff retention, and progression. They face different challenges around staffing, but there are enough commonalities that their solutions may be applicable or at least push an attendee down a line of thinking that could be extremely fruitful. I worry that most coffee events I attend have a lineup of speakers from the coffee industry. I think we have some great thinking within the industry (if you’re not paying attention to what people like Colin Harmon are doing and saying then shame on you), but I think we’d benefit from external speakers on the condition that we ask them the right questions (an entirely different subject I guess.)

I’ve tried the generic business books, and they bore me to death. I find specific stories much more interesting – reading Derek Sivers write about CD Baby had more inspiration/idea generation for me, even though so little about his and our business were in common. I think this is what pulls my interest into the world of design and tech so much, and I admit to being jealous of the amount of those industries for the amount of peripheral thinking and writing they generate. Granted, there is a lot of ridiculous, wasteful, linkbait nonsense around those industries too but there are some great writers who make me interested and involved in the innovations, the direction and the meaning of events in industries that are nothing to do with mine.

I’ve gotten off topic a little here, but I just wanted to throw this idea out there. I’d be interested who people would like to see talk at an event, and about what – as long as it has nothing directly to do with coffee. (It doesn’t have to be a specific, named individual – you can make it a generic position of a generic company like my clothing retail example above.) If you have an idea then tweet it to me and I’ll put together a top 10 list of my favorites and add it to this post. Maybe we could even make it happen one day!

I read way too many blogs online, and some of them review coffees. Sometimes I’ve tasted the coffees they are talking about and we’re clearly having very different experiences. Don’t worry – this is by no means a rant about reviews or other people’s coffee, though I am sure that would probably get more traffic and discussion than this post!

I’m currently of the opinion that there is a before and after in the coffee tasting world. I’m going to use baristas as an example, but please don’t see this is negative commentary. By and large when baristas get hold of a new coffee they look for positive characteristics to talk about. This is to be expected, their role is a mixture of sales and preparation. This is purely anecdotal, but I’m interested in the reaction from those who’ve moved from being a barista to having a formal QC role. I’m also aware this viewpoint is wildly simplistic.

Cupping coffee regularly, from a roaster’s perspective especially, is a different exercise. The game changes from what you like, to looking for the things that you don’t like. By cupping the same coffee regularly and comparing to other roasts and profiles you learn the tastes associated with defective or undesirable roasting (such as underdeveloped tastes). Over a period of time you also clearly come to learn the taste of coffee ageing and starting to degrade. (I still really like the term “loom-y” proffered by Trish and Colleen on the portafilter podcast a while back, short of Loss Of Organic Material. This is preferable to “baggy” which does jute a disservice because coffee that has never seen jute will taste “baggy”)

These tastes don’t really stand out as sharply to those who haven’t learned them because they don’t understand their significance or meaning. Roast level, to some extent, does get assessed by a typical consumer but even that changes for many people when tasting regularly and assessing roast success.

My point here is not that I think those who QC are “better” tasters than those who have never had formal training because I think that change can have some issues – especially when it comes to communicating experience. (They have functional taste skills specific to their job requirements. Some days most probably wish they could turn it off.)

More than just communication to our customers, I want to discuss the idea of how this might impact a coffee reviewer. There’s been a lot of talk, online and offline, for a long time now about the need for reviewers in coffee. I think there are two camps of people who want a reviewer: Those who want someone to be able to call-out those who are doing a bad job with their coffee and getting away with it, and to perhaps praise those doing a good job. There are those who want a reviewer to guide consumers, to add to the perceived value of the category, as well as to help drive quality up through aspiration and feedback.

Taking someone who thinks like someone in coffee QC to be a reviewer means that the language and perspective of the review will end up being quite technical, and while this may change over time the language and content of the review will be alien to many who want a review to guide them into which coffee they should buy, as interested but not overly knowledgeable consumers. Do those who’ve worked in film production make the best reviewers, as they more aware of the technical aspects of a film? Their technical analysis would doubtless spill into the review of a film, and may not be directly correlated into how enjoyable the film is to people who just like watching films.

The challenge a non-industry reviewer will have is gaining acceptance from the wider industry if they don’t think and talk in our language. Perhaps this is why there is no effective coffee review with any impact on the market. I should clarify that in all of this I’m talking about reviewing coffee itself – either whole beans or cups of coffee (more likely the former) rather than cafe review which is a whole other animal (though still done pretty badly).

I don’t read reviews for much other than films, music, restaurants and cafes. I put limited stock in all of them. I don’t actually mind the lack of a coffee reviewer, though in the past I’d probably have been in the angrier camp once or twice. I can’t actually conceive of how an effective review would look. I’m not sure of the language – perhaps if a professional wrote with the goal of being engaging and helpful, rather than constantly being technically correct.

I’m always interested in the experience of tasting with untrained tasters, especially when those untrained tasters are passionate, and interested in coffee. I hope people don’t dwell on my use of “untrained” and take it as negative commentary, it isn’t meant to be that. It doesn’t mean I don’t think people can taste, or shouldn’t taste or that their opinions don’t matter. They simply haven’t been through a formalised process of developing specific language and learning the correlations between specific tastes and issues of roast or raw coffee viability. It isn’t meant to be patronising in the slightest, but I worry that language is working against me here. I just thought I’d throw this idea out there for a bit of discussion.

Warning: Cosimo Libardo is up a for a bet, and will call your bluff. If you nonchalantly arrogantly / foolishly / teasingly claim that you and a friend could build a new Aurelia II T3 without having done it before¹ – then beware, you might find yourself in Itlay surrounded by timelapse cameras! This was a lot of fun for John and I to do, thanks to Nuova Simonelli for letting us loose on a Saturday morning…

Edit: Need to point out that there is no way I would have made this bet without John Gordon!

1. Though we do have one of the machines at the roastery [↩]

So everyone is talking about iced coffee and I had a couple of quick thoughts that I want to share:

- First, I haven’t tried the hot bloom method Lorenzo Perkins wrote about in barista magazine
- I really don’t like room temperature toddy style cold brews.
- I had some tasty cold brew in Dwelltime in Cambridge, MA. I also had the weirdest, craziest and most unique cold brew ever at Barismo later that same day.
- I generally like brewing hot onto ice but I have a small issue with how we’re doing it:

I don’t think the 50/50 split works very well. I will offer a few reasons why, aside from the fact that I think we went there because it is conceptually easy to understand and explain and it is quite neat.

Problem 1: We don’t have enough solvent.

I think it is very difficult to extract correctly using half the amount of water we typically do. Especially with lighter roasts that don’t really want to give up the goodness. We can grind finer but we tend to get to a point where the water isn’t interested in passing through the coffee without additional pressure. So we’re pretty likely to underextract the coffee.

Problem 2: The maths doesn’t work for me.

So let’s say we’re aiming for a litre of coffee (so to speak) so we have 60g of coffee, and we have 500g of hot water and 500g of ice. So far so good. Here’s the problem – the 60g of coffee is going to absord about 120g of water, leaving us only 380g of liquid. (Approx 24% of our brew water never makes it down below).
Typically brewing a litre only 12% of our brew liquid would get stuck up there. We then dilute our 340g with 500g of ice. The resulting brew is typically quite thin/weak/tea-like if we’re being polite.

This obviously assumes all the ice melts, though we often tend to serve this with a little additional ice too.

Why not brew with a little more water, and use a little less ice? I’d encourage people to try a 60/40 or 75/25 split and to see how it goes. The ice should still perform its ultimate function – making the coffee cold and refreshing – but hopefully we end up with a more balanced, fuller and more satisfying brew.

I’m probably making some mistakes here, because I’m super tired after attending Camp Pull-a-shot which I will try to write about soon. Feel free to harass me on twitter, though I’m about to jump on a plane. Expect a possible retraction….

Like many people I enjoy Malcolm Gladwell’s writing though he does drive me insane from time to time when he tries to back up an argument by disagreeing with himself. (see ‘Blink’ where he suggests that we should trust our immediate reactions except, of course, when they’re wrong…)

The reason I bring this up is because I am about to commit the same annoying crime against reason and suggest that it is important for coffee businesses to think about the needs of the market, except when it’s not. I’d had these two different thoughts that I wanted to post and I realised that they contradicted each other so it made sense in my head to post then together. This is perhaps somewhat connected to what I spoke about at SCAA symposium…¹

LOOKING TO THE MARKET

There is an idea that was posted by Kevin Kelly back in 2008 that I love and talk about a lot, but I realised that I’ve never written about it on here. It is called 1000 True Fans. I’d strongly recommend taking a break from this post an going to read it, as my very quick summary won’t do it justice and it is a great idea.  Obviously this was an idea targeted initially at artists, and focusing on how to do what they love in an ongoing and profitable way. Regardless, it has been incredibly influential on my thinking and makes everything seem so much possible, and exciting.

What I take away from it is this: you don’t need to appeal to everybody. In fact you don’t even need to appeal to a particularly large number.

From a cafe perspective having 1000 regulars would make for a very successful business. Not many cafes are actually able to deal with that much volume do their requirements are a little lower.  The point isn’t the number itself, it is thinking about how many customers you actually need. Coffee is wonderfully varied and no aspect of it is universally appealing. For the coffee experience you want to sell – how many customers do you need?

Within your business catchment area – do you believe that there are that many people who would love what you do?

Perhaps a more important question: if you work your prices out backwards, starting with the number of drinks you want to sell, work in your costs of goods and overheads, and some profit – how much should things cost?

When you have that number the last question is: are you able to deliver product where the value and price match up?  If the answer is no then a piece of the business puzzle is wrong. Wrong place, wrong offer or just not a viable idea.

Looking at things this way we can start to assess ideas for other ways to retail and present coffees. If I wanted to do fine dining coffee, maybe 50 covers a day, short hours and meticulously prepared drinks and food – how much would in the average cheque have to be? If the answer is £30 a head then we have to decide if we can make a coffee experience worth that.

Looking at the pool of consumers we can ask whether there are enough people who would love this. This brings me to my contradictory point:

IGNORING THE MARKET

Traditionally we determine the preferences of a market by observing its habits. This makes sense; lots of people are buying product x so that must be what they like, and this must be the best product available.

The problem here is that the market is working with very limited data. This is mostly out of necessity; it is impossible to be deeply knowledgeable about every product category that you have to make a decision about.

I firmly believe that people buy based on quality and accessibility. In many cases people don’t buy better because they don’t know that better is available, or it is too difficult to buy (be it price, convenience or intimidation around the experience).

I don’t see people sending steaks back to the kitchen because they’re not sweet enough.  We don’t expect steaks to be sweet, because the world has given us no reason to expect such a thing.  As an industry we often get angry with the consumer for not rejecting bitter, poor quality coffee.  When life has taught them that this is how coffee tastes, why should they reject it.  Great coffee is still barely available – and I mean truly great coffee.  The fact that they are not asking for it does not mean they wouldn’t enjoy or prefer it.

If I had looked at the market when it came time to open a roastery, then we should have abandoned the idea of focusing on coffee quality because the market for it in London (a city of 8 to 12 million people).  The smart business choice would have been to focus on soluble coffee – because that is what everyone drank, or maybe dark roasted coffee , or perhaps coffee imported from Italy.  The market showed no apparent demand for light roasted, characterful coffees.

I maintain my mantra of “people like nice things”.  Of course there is preference, but then (as I said before) we’re not trying to capture everyone’s attention.  We believed enough people would be interested to create a viable business.  We still hope to be right….

1. My excuse is that Niels Bohr said this was ok, and perhaps even helpful so I am going to go with it.

   If you hold opposites together in your mind, you will suspend your normal thinking process and allow an intelligence beyond rational thought to create a new form.

   I should add that I just like Niels Bohr quotes and I am not going to claim to create a new form here… [↩]

You hear this a lot among passionate people who start businesses, particularly coffee ones.  For many of us coffee is compelling, fascinating, satisfying yet frustrating in equal measure.  It is huge, it’s complex and it easily becomes something of an obsession.

Working with what you love is a goal for just about everyone.  In any industry there are people stuck, hating where they are and dreaming of turning their hobby into a living.

Within the division of the artisan, of the craft, of the quality focused, there seems to be a pervasive idea that to be in business with the end game of making substantial profit is at odds with the very reason they got into the business.  They’re there for the coffee, and not for the money.  It isn’t about profit, it is about quality.

Perhaps I fell into that group initially.  I don’t really want a lot of stuff, I’m not hugely motivated directly by money.  (I’m motivated, I can’t deny – but it isn’t the primary decision making factor.)  It took me a little while to realise that profit was not the antithesis of being quality focused, but was actually a requirement for being sustainably quality focused.  I can’t continue to work within coffee enjoyably unless the business I work within can support that, can grow and evolve itself and that requires money.

I might see some strong disagreement here, and I’m not picking on people – I am pointing the finger at me as much as anyone else.  I haven’t sold out, I haven’t become money obsessed.  I am extremely interested in a sustainable business that can support those that work within it, and allow them to grow and progress and to earn what they are worth.

Where I might really get into trouble is where I suggest that our industry’s tolerance, and proliferation, of not-intentionally-profitable businesses has lead to a marketplace with undervalued and underpriced product.  This in turn is somewhat debilitating for new businesses opening into that market place.  It makes the challenge of succeeding in coffee even harder.  I could well be wrong, but I am still struggling to understand an industry where dramatically better product sells for barely a premium against mass market, commoditised coffee.