When it comes to coffee I think many places that want to improve service tend to take inspiration from restaurant service, but people come to a cafe for different reasons, expecting a different experience and if we just crowbar restaurant service into a cafe setting then it is going to be very awkward.

Success, from a commercial point of view, requires selling coffee to a great many people every day. It also requires selling coffee to a lot of people who really just want the nicest way possible to get caffeine into their system. They want little more than to exchange money for a cup of something both caffeinated and enjoyable, and to go about their day. Outside of coffee we are just like them when we buy lots of different things.

When it comes to interaction, one key idea for me I would call the “opt-in” moment. When you go to a high end restaurant you (knowingly or not) agree to a number of conditions, from how you are expected to act to how you are expected to interact.  You understand that the portions may not be very large, and they may be hesitant if you ask for ketchup.  For the server to detail ingredients in great length is acceptable (if interesting!) where it may not be in a small neighbourhood place.  Through a series of cues (both verbal and non-verbal) we have an expectation of the experience before we commit to it.¹

With a cafe we will struggle to really interact with consumers, to talk to them about the coffees, the producers and nuance until they agree to let us. If I am working a bar I can’t just start talking to someone excessively about the coffee without their consent. The problem for many cafes that want to push service forward is that they don’t have an “opt-in” moment or space.

Whether we like it or not, a lot of the public’s expectation comes from their experiences with larger coffee chains.  The process of queuing, ordering and collecting is a familiar one – it is routine.  Many cafes choose to model the experience of buying coffee on the same process.  Very rarely, in a branded outlet, will anyone say anything other than the bare minimum to you – you know what the barista will say, and when they will say it.  If they didn’t know what was going to happen, it is unlikely they’d be brashly yabbering into a mobile phone as they queued.

A question from a customer is a great opt-in moment, but without that it is a very dangerous assumption that the customer wants to know anything. By choosing to start talking about the coffee you are assuming a great deal about their mood, their needs and their level of comfort interacting with strangers. I wish I was always in that mood where everything is fascinating, but sometimes I just don’t care. I want that piece of steak/usb memory stick/that shirt without needing to know any more than I do about it.  Getting more information than you want, especially without asking for it, can be an irritating, incredibly annoying experience and can permanently damage a relationship between a customer and a business.

One of the best pieces on coffee service was by David Schomer. It was wonderfully practical and demonstrated a great sympathy for how his customers felt when they walked in the door. He has doubtless served more cups of coffee to customers over the years than just about anyone writing about coffee today and I think it shows through.

I think there are many opportunities to create other opt-in moments. We can create areas in a cafe where customers can clearly see that they are going to get a different experience, and by sitting there they agree to us doing something a little different. If you walk into Tea Smith in Spitalfields and sit down at the long bar, read the menu and chat to the staff then it is pretty clear that it is not going to be builder’s tea with 2 sugars, but a more involved tea experience. You understand that it is absolutely fine to ask your server anything about the tea, you can ask for guidance without feeling stupid and that as they brew the tea they may tell you more about it, pass you lids to smell after the brew and throw out little bits of info about what you are drinking. Watching them prepare the tea right in front of you, dialling in brewing temperatures, carefully monitoring time, almost invites you to question the process.

Giving people a little taster is another good opportunity to get their permission to talk to them a little more.  You could argue that this kind of persuasion is a little manipulative (I’m sure you’ve all read Robert Cialdini‘s book), but if you are asking for nothing more than their attention for a few seconds then I think that is fair.

As an industry we are desperate to inform our customers.  Their increased understanding is essential to the success of our businesses.  We must, however, give them opportunities to give their consent for us to do this.

1. As a fun exercise – next time you visit a cafe, try to take note of what it is that gives you an impression of what they do: bottles of syrups, syphon bar, sugar on every table, baristas yelling out drinks, a display fridge full of cans of soft drink etc. etc.

I’ve really enjoyed the discussion going on after this post.   One comment that stuck in my mind was Aldo’s Fazenda Kaquend COE Vs Maxwell House experiment. It definitely affected some decisions I made when I was choosing coffees to take with me to a public cupping I did in East London as part of a charity fund raiser.

I knew I would have two separate groups, of between 10 and 20 people each time.  I had agreed to do a cupping, rather than a tasting of brewed coffee (which I would prefer to do with the general public usually), because they were paying for a bit more of an experience.

So which coffees to choose?  I ended up taking a pre-ship sample of the Herbazu, a 2008 Costa Rican CoE sample¹, some Takengon, some Tegu AA and some store bought, preground coffee from Panama².

I love watching the public cup.  They don’t know the rules, the etiquette that we tend to abide by in the industry.  They pull faces, they talk a lot, they think out loud about what they are tasting and are easily distracted.

So – what was the reaction?  As they were cupping many people were surprised by the acidity in the coffees.  Some found this, initially uncomrfortable because it was so novel.  The strangest reactions were around the past crop and stale samples.  They didn’t use positive words to describe them (dusty, bitter, cardboard, nothing, flavourless) and yet before the reveal a quick poll showed them to be oddly popular.

As I revealed each coffee I got them to taste them again, to look for the positive attributes and to notice the negative attributes.  I did my best to explain why each key flavour/taste was there (in general terms – high growing altitude, light roasts, terroir, processing).  People agreed that the past crop tasty unpleasant and like wet jute.³

People also agreed that the stale coffee wasn’t very pleasant.  A couple of people seemed borderline outraged at the suggestion that they actually had to grind their coffee just before brewing to get a fresh cup.  I asked if they had a pepper mill.  They said yes.  I asked if they used it and if they considered it worthwhile.  They said they did, and I tried not to flog a dead horse.

When we cupped the coffees with explanations and revelations of what they were the overall preference of the group shifted away from the ‘bad’ coffees – as you would expect.  Nothing particularly surprising in people not wanting to admit they like something that is clearly ‘wrong’.  What remained interesting was the reaction by all involved to the Tegu lot.  Some loved the fruit, and others were almost offended that a coffee dared to taste so little like coffee.

I guess the only thing I can read into it is that we should be careful using the extremely unusual/super premium lots as conversion tools.  At least half the time they’ll probably reinforce the consumer’s original preference for stale, preground past crop.  In hindsight I wished I could have brought something very simple, very clean and sweet to put on the table.

1. I am not going to say which one, in case the roaster is still selling it!
2. Again, I am not going to say exactly who/where because I am not out to tarnish anyone’s name
3. Despite this sample sat in ziplock bag for 12 months – I can’t help but wonder what term we would use instead of baggy if coffee had never been shipped in jute – a subject for another post perhaps

For me this talk was a moment of crystalisation about how I feel about coffee right now, and what I want to focus a lot of my energy on.  I had initially planned to talk about how quality focused businesses were doing well right now, but in the process of writing the talk that seemed to shift.  I should add a final caveat to this by saying that I do love making and drinking espresso.

My talk was titled “How the coffee industry lost the public’s trust, and how good coffee can win it back again.”

My feelings about espresso changed dramatically around the time I first experienced coffee in Italy.  A few things struck me initially – the coffee was prepared reasonably well, it wasn’t astonishing or delicious and it was cheap.  I would later learn that the price of espresso to be consumed at the bar is regulated and never more than €1.  When I first made espresso for Italians I was initially confused by the fact that they never asked for espresso, they just asked for coffee.  Non-specific, without customisation – just coffee.

Like many people I had held a fairly romantic notion of espresso in Italy.  This was swept away and replaced by disappointment.  This has since given way to respect.  I think what changed my mind was a little perspective, and a better understanding of espresso’s history. ¹

This poster is probably familiar to everyone in coffee.  For me it summarizes pre-1948 espresso.  The innovation that espresso offered at this point was speed.  Suddenly a cup of coffee could be brewed very quickly.  So quickly, in fact, that you could grab a cup whilst hanging out of the side of a moving train.  The cups of coffee are full to the brim, and have not even the vaguest whisp of crema upon them.  This was nothing like espresso as we know it.  This was like having a big tank of water with which to make multiple moka pots.

Then of course we have post WWII espresso, we have Achille Gaggia’s espresso machine and we have the first mentions of crema.  Again – at this stage espresso didn’t suddenly become perfect little 25ml shots, full of thick dense crema.  The real revelation for me about this period was an almost throwaway sentence in one of Kenneth Davids books on coffee.  Post WWII Italy was not an economically strong place.  It is unlikely that the coffees bought during this time, during the birth of espresso’s tradition as we know it, were anything other than cheap and readily available.  It is no great surprise that naturally processed coffees from Brazil and robusta became the bedrock of the traditional espresso blend but we’d do well not to assume they were chosen because they tasted the best.  Espresso is pretty good way to brew these coffees.

The point that I am slowly working towards is that for all the romance, history and tradition, espresso is not special.  It is not luxury.  It is not gourmet.  It is just a way to brew a small, strong cup of coffee.

That of course changed, and in no small part thanks to Howard Schulz.  It is worth noting that in any description of his epiphany moment in Italy, where he saw a barista craft both an espresso and a cappuccino in a convivial and charming manner, does he describe being blown away by the coffee.  It was the experience that stuck with him, and the experience he thought he could sell. ²

He was, of course, quite right.  He could sell the experience, he could package it up and replicate it almost exactly across the world.  I have no idea how many different stores they have worldwide, but with 700 in the UK it is hard to argue with him.  However we did something else as part of this process.  We made espresso expensive.

Let’s say a single espresso in London costs £1.50, which is a little high but not by any means unusual.  Assuming it is a 25ml shot that works out at 6p/ml.

If you were to go to a pub and buy a pint of espresso it would cost you £34.08.  Or you bought a wine bottle of espresso it would cost £45.  That is a phenomenal amount of money.  Think about the drinks you can buy for that sort of price.  They are either extremely delicious or extremely alcoholic.

The problem is that a price tag like this is a pretty hefty promise.  Selling an espresso for this much implies that the experience will be of equal value.  Sip for sip it should be as satisfying as a great champagne.  The problem is that in this country, in London, in the vast majority of businesses – it isn’t.

Charging this much and delivering something so awful as the average high street espresso destroys any trust between the coffee industry and the general public.  This kind of price/experience discrepancy makes people feel stupid.  It makes them resentful.  It turns them into the kind of people that get very angry and leave vicious and dismissive comments at the bottom of news stories about speciality coffee posted online.  We’ve all seen those comments online, globally I might add, that follow a news story about speciality coffee.  Angry, bitter comments about what a waste of time and money this ‘fancy’ coffee is, that it is nothing more than the emperor’s new clothes and that coffee is just coffee.  These opinions come from specific experiences, we – the coffee industry – have created some very angry consumers.

As soon as the economy started to dip there were a glut of articles on ways to live more frugally, how to strip unnecessary spending from your day to day habits.  In every single list was coffee.  By and large lattes on the high street are overpriced, they are worth cutting out of the budget.  The frustration is that they don’t have to be. ³  I wouldn’t advise dropping the coffee from your routine, I would advise finding a place that makes one that is worth the money.

Yet still the industry persists in telling us that espresso is better.  At the Allegra talk I listened to to Rebecca Hemsley, the head of coffee for Pret A Manger, talk about how they offer (for the price conscious) a cup of filter coffee for 99p.  She added that they weren’t cutting corners – they used the same blend as they do for their espresso.  I should add that a single espresso at Pret is £1.25.  What message does that send to the consumer?  How does that affect their expectations of both the espresso and the filter coffee?

So I’ve written quite a lot already about espresso, and haven’t really gotten onto the subject of brewed coffee.  At this point in the talk I began brewing a small press of coffee.  I wanted to talk about where I thought coffee could go.  In the first talk of the day Darcy Willson-Rymer, the MD of Starbucks UK, had described value as being a combination of price, product and value.  I quite liked this, and say what you like about Starbucks but they’ve cleared managed to price their experience right for it to be the success it is. ⁴

I chose a coffee to brew that had very distinct and interesting characteristics.  I talked about where the coffee was from, and how it had gotten to the UK.  I described the coffee as having strong notes of blackcurrant, cherry and blueberry.  For me this makes an obvious promise, whereas a price makes a slightly less direct one.  A promise like this is a fairly big one but they pay off is also potentially huge.  We all have a salesman in our life that we completely trust.  They might not be an obvious salesman – they could be a bartender, a waiter, a sommelier or someone who sells stationary.  We trust their judgement, and we are loyal to them.  That trust was gained through making promises and keeping them.  Making a promise like this with a cup of coffee was what pushed us to work with Marco on the Uber Boiler but that is a slightly different topic.

As the coffee finished brewing I explained how much I’d like to sell it for a cup:  £3.  This wasn’t because it was vac-packed, or because it was airfreighted, or because it came in a nice bag with a nice logo.  If you like coffee, then I think that that combination of price, product and experience is good value for money.  Buying and drinking this cup of coffee is worth every penny.  I offered that one 8oz press to the audience for sale, and I am very grateful (and was somewhat relieved at the time) to both Darcy and Louie Salvone for paying £5 each (to charity) to split the press between them.

Brewed coffee is capable of such flexibility, such a range of experiences – from the satisfying, to the interesting, to the exciting, to the downright weird – that I think it is the most overlooked and underestimated weapon in the arsenal of those of us trying to build consumption of great coffee.  I am not saying it is better than espresso, but I do think a great cup of brewed coffee is less elusive than a great espresso.

Most operators believe espresso is somehow better than brewed coffee, and that brewed coffee is a second class experience that is suitable only for bulk brewing the nasty, weak coffee they serve at events where people aren’t paying for coffee.  Restauranteurs insist on having espresso machines even though the flow of a restaurant and its layout make serving great espresso virtually impossible even if the brewing is impeccable.

So I should wrap this up by saying that in the next year or two the proliferation of great brewed coffee, ideally by the cup, is a big goal for me – both personally and professionally.  If you are reading this and you can help then I really hope you do because I think everybody, from grower to consumer, wins.

1. Though I should say that my espresso history is far from authoratative!
2. Can I just take a moment to have a quick rant about the constant use of the word ‘theatre’ around espresso.  Theatre is entertaining, but there are only so many performances of the same thing that I am prepared to sit through and pay for.  If you have bought a commercial espresso machine mainly because of the theatre then your business may be in for some difficult months ahead.
3. That said, a large part of me is enjoying a market with more value focused, quality conscious spenders.
4. I am aware that is a childish and snarky dig at their product, but the whole point of this post is about serving great coffee which I don’t think they do.

No one in the coffee industry really likes decaf.  We excuse its taste, we get annoyed at how fast it stales, we treat it as a second rate coffee experience.  I was in that camp too for a while.  Coffee no good?  Well, it is decaf…..

Stumptown ruined that for me.  During our West Coast trip in 2007 we were hanging out with the former roaster Joel, chatting about the UG15 he was roasting on (we were just buying ours at the time), and having a great time.  Joel disappeared to the bar and came back with a shot for Anette and one for me.  It was very tasty, sweet, full bodied and clean.  It definitely wasn’t Hairbender.  I was nearly floored when he told me it was their decaf.  That caused a problem: I no longer had an excuse.

Anette does a great job roasting decaf, and I think that experience is one of the many reasons high.  As our memories improve and elevate that particular espresso it means our own bar will constantly be lifting.

I think we make a grave mistake alienating decaf drinks with tonnes of pre-ground, nasty coffee brewed without much care.  These are people who are buying coffee because they like the taste.  We are supposed to love these people – they aren’t the ones suffering through awful espressos or instant coffee just to get their caffeine fix.  And yet they are the people least catered to in the industry.  A shame.

In recent conversations someone has said to me that they love a certain coffee, but not first thing in the morning.  Maybe mid-afternoon instead.  Initially I didn’t get it.  My very narrow mind assumed that good coffee was good coffee and that the rotation of the earth in relation to the sun shouldn’t have too much impact on how that coffee, my tongue and my brain all got along.

I remember doing an espresso tasting for a wine magazine a year or two ago now.  We tasted the espressos blind – the coffees rushed quickly into our room from the roasters themselves, set up on their own machines just outside the door.  I was excited to taste coffees like this, with other professional tasters and I remember my frustration when the journalist kept asking which espresso we had tasted would go best with chocolate cake, or would be best after dinner.  “This is irrelevant!” I thought, “I want to talk about how these espressos taste!  I want to talk about which come from clean, tasty green coffees, about which have been carefully and intelligently roasted.”  Except they weren’t interested in that.

I’ve written before that sometimes independent cafes are so desperate to be nothing like the chains they despise that they occasionally miss out on some of the smarter ideas and concepts that the chains use very effectively – having spent a lot of time and money researching and developing them.  I know a lot of us in the coffee industry are acutely aware that we drink coffee with a slightly different mindset to most consumers, and that we buy coffees in a different way too.

Does it devalue a great single varietal, single estate coffee to say that is great with breakfast?  If we say that it is a great morning cup are we missing a chance to say that it is an heirloom bourbon, a honey process coffee, part of only a 10 bag lot or that it has really nice red apple and red grape flavours in it?  Which is the most important piece of information to most consumers?  How are they going to enjoy that bag of coffee?  I’ve talked before about how the size of the promise we make is linked to the speed we build up trust with the consumer, but what about when we lose control of how the coffee is brewed?

I have become aware recently that I often talk about coffees in a different way, based on my own choices.  There are some coffees that almost require a little intellectual engagement – they are challenging and interesting and worthy of discussion.  There are also coffees that I drink when I don’t want to think about it, I just want to be satisfied and have a simple delicious cup. ²  Instead of talking about morning coffees – is there any value in talking more about why a coffee might be appreciated in the morning, to emphasize the tasting/sensory part more than the ritual part?

Last of all – what is your favourite coffee to drink around lunchtime and why?

1. That still does make me angry, and a bit frustrated.  It is probably the most common misconception – that the coffee itself has something to do with the strength of the cup.
2. We’ve touched on chuggability before…

Nonetheless it has been interesting to see what they industry press are writing about, what advice is being offered, what strategies are being deemed wise.  A word I am seeing more and more is ‘diversifying’.

Starbucks are in a mess right now, and they have been for some time.  To me the problems are linked to a gradual loss of identity over the last few years.  Right now they are putting out mixed messages – on one hand promoting better coffee, on the other hand discounting it. Worrying about breakfast sandwiches, selling CDs, whilst still trying to claim that they are all about the coffee.

Photo by tonx

For a while, in the UK anyway, McDonald’s were all about salads.  Big money on big advertising campaigns telling us what a good idea it was to buy a salad at McDonald’s.  It didn’t work, that isn’t why we go to that place and walking past a branch on my way home I didn’t see a single salad image on display and I have no idea if they even still serve them.  The saw salad’s as a way to help stop declining sales, instead of actually making the food they had served very successfully taste, and be, better.

We’ve all visited businesses that have scrambled for turnover through diversification – coffees, teas, smoothies, soft drinks, pastries, panani are only the beginning.  Every item added seems to drag the average care and attention for each item down a little.  Nowhere does a huge range of things exceptionally well.  In the end, desperate to catch all consumer demands the business looses all identity.

Imagine I showed you a menu for two different Chinese¹ restaurants.  The first has a typically huge menu of maybe 50 or 60 dishes.  The second menu has a total of 15.  Would you expect a difference in quality between the two?  Would the smaller menu imply a lack of imagination or greater care and attention to each dish?  If each restaurant does two dishes incredibly well – in which menu do you have a better chance of a great experience?

Starbucks do the desert in a cup very well.  They brand it well, they sell it well and if you have a sugar craving then it probably tastes pretty good.  The gingerbread latte has become weirdly iconic, and endlessly imitated.  Those drinks built the Starbucks expansion, and for many consumers they justified the premium price. ²

Starbucks have done a poor job of redeclaring their own identity and it continues to hurt them.  Businesses are looking at a bleak year ahead and I think having a strong identity is key.  You need customers loyal to your business, customers that have a connection with what you do, with the positive experience they associate with you.  Diversity may be a way to sneak up the average customer spend, and I am not saying it can’t be done well, but often it reeks of desperation or overreaction to a natural dip in sales (such as in January…).  Coffee is still a long way from being written out of people’s budgets – as long it is worth the price per cup.

Dropping coffee sales say more about what people think your cup is worth to them than it does about your customers think about the size of your range of products.

1. Or any cuisine with a typically very large menu
2. I justify that simply by the numbers they sold!

First and foremost – we don’t drink coffee like we drink wine. Broadly speaking we buy wine in two different circumstances: to enjoy ourselves and to enjoy with others. Generally we spend more, buy better, buy more interesting when we are enjoying it with others. We want to know more, want a little story, want something worth discussing. Wine’s great success was making it culturally acceptable/desirable to discuss what you drank at some length. Coffee isn’t quite there yet. We drink coffee in different circumstances – mostly it is a solitary affair, though sometimes shared but rarely the focal point the way a stellar bottle of wine can be. We experience it in different environments, with different goals and different focus on the sensory experience.

I also want to look at the route to wine’s success. In the UK certainly a higher spend may have been achieved but the real successes of the wine boom were producers like E&J Gallo. The £5 bottle of acceptable, non-descript, reliable wine. Compared to what had been easily available at that price range in the decades previous these wines were really pretty good. More than that – they made wine extremely accessible.

I recently attended a chocolate and tea pairing, at Tea Smith, with the chocolates by William Curley. There were some toe-curlingly, giggle inducingly wonderful moments and flavours. Talking to both John from Tea Smith and William it is clear that these two commodities could fall into the wine model the way that coffee could. However do push them into that model wouldn’t bring to the fore the most interesting things about them. Microlots of astounding tea don’t fit into the wine model, despite coming from one estate and being one particular type of tea and having an interesting processing method, and listening to William talk about chocolate you felt you could swap chocolate for coffee and it would work as well – from sourcing to vintage machinery!  Yet high-end chocolate has adopted a different approach when it comes to marketing and consumer understanding.

We, as an industry, have yet to find the hook that will encourage the broader public to delve deeper into coffee – to discover the captivating and broad range of sensory experiences available in what is considered a humdrum, everyday drink. It is clear, however, that we can’t settle on trying to piggyback wine because it just won’t work. We must keep looking but I have no doubt that accessibility will be the key.

UPDATE:  Steve Leighton posts on Coffee and Wine.