I love a dramatic title…. However, the question remains valid! I have barely posted in the last three months, and I can’t just place the blame on Square Mile commitments. In truth lots of little things have contributed – no more internet at home, a broken macbook that I keep forgetting to buy a new battery for, and just having less time.

I remain a little torn about continuing this blog. There are a lot of things on my mind that I would like to put to a public forum, to discuss and perhaps even opinionate upon! However I have to acknowledge that my previous compulsion to blog has gone.

When I started this blog it was mostly because I was struggling to learn and develop and it was a way for me to advance my learning. Let me be clear here – I am not stopping writing because I think I know all I need to know. Quite the opposite – I am confronted with new challenges and opportunities to learn and develop every single day.

Still – there are a few things I want to post about and maybe get some discussion going on. This may turn into a very long post.

Coffee, Labels and Descriptions

I am going to start with labeling. Labels have been a bit of an issue for me since I started to have to write them. I felt it was very easy to slip into a formula, one created and maintained by the industry as a whole. I felt that I was writing very generic sentences, even though the descriptions were precise and accurate to the coffee (I hoped!).

So I started to look around for inspirations. I did have some reservations that we write descriptions like this because this is the best way for the public to receive the information we are trying to deliver, and that in stepping away I would break a line of communication. If anything this was only re-inforced when I looked at labeling in wine. Here was one industry that we are jealous of, in terms of increasing consumer awareness and (ultimately) spending. Wine labels are still very much the same. I didn’t find anything particularly inspiring or interesting there so I moved back to the web.

Tag clouds always appealed to me as a method of delivering weighted information. I felt that with espresso in particular labels needed to embrace the multitude of flavours coffee is capable of offering and how brewing can influence the cup and change the emphasis on particular tastes. The problem I had with tag clouds was that they are generally pretty ugly.

I am grateful to our designers for being patient with me as I demanded beautifully typeset tag clouds from them, and more grateful for the hard work they put in on their own time. I am delighted with the results, and I hope that customers respond to it. It is by no means perfect but if it works then it may be something worth developing. Right now we are only using this on our seasonal espresso labels because it is such a time consuming process to typeset everything.

New Square Mile Autumn Espresso Label

I am curious as to how customer reaction will be, and I hope they like it!

French Press/Cafetiere/Plunger

I have never been more in love with this little brewer than I am now. I think anyone who is a coffee professional has been both saddened and heartened at the same time that just about everyone has one of these at home and most people rarely use them, and when they do – they use them badly.

I love the Bodum 1 cup Columbia

We’ve been brewing the ‘Wendelboe’ way – there will be a short videocast of this very soon – and it is about as sludge free as it gets. And I hate sludge. I really do. I hate that when I get to that last mouthful, and the coffee is usually at a perfect temperature, that I am put off it by the fines lurking at the bottom of my cup. I hope to get my hands on a Mahlkoenig Vario home grinder very soon, and I am hopeful that the burrs do a good job at this grind setting, more than I hope they do a good job for espresso. Which is probably wrong but hey ho. I just can’t help but look at an espresso machine and worry that for all we spend and how hard we have to work, compared to how often we are satisfied. (Not that I am have fallen out of love with my Synesso, it still makes me worryingly happy).

Environment, Ethics, Sustainability and Business

For a long time now it seems that just being organic, or being fair trade was a good enough reason to be in business. This may seem a harsh judgment but I think the service sector jumped to supply the growing consumer desire for ethical produce and in focusing solely on that forget the rest of the customer experience.

We never wanted to be labeled as a “green” company, or an “environmentally friendly” company. We wanted to be labeled as a high quality speciality coffee roaster first and foremost. Of course this doesn’t mean you can’t be green, it just means that we don’t try and trade on it. This doesn’t just apply to coffee. As a customer of any company I driven primarily by product and customer experience. I won’t buy from somewhere just because they are a green company. In a way I am glad of the growing omnipresence of certifications of ethical or environmentally sound trading, because it has the two-fold effect of increasing the benefit from people working like this, along with removing it as a USP. I hope this makes sense, though it probably doesn’t.

For this reason we’ve been pretty quiet about the whole coffee bucket thing. That and we wanted to check the valves we put in were working, and that the coffee was aging properly and there were no ill effects in the cup. These days I feel quite bad whenever I pack coffee into disposable packaging, it feels so wasteful – and yet I completely believe and rely upon the benefits of proper packaging for coffee.

Roast dated buckets waiting to go out

This brings me onto another subject.

Freshness

I worry we’ve shot ourselves in the foot as speciality coffee people. We’ve used “fresh roasted” as a tool for sales for so long that I think it might have started to backfire. I really don’t like very fresh coffee. I hate brewing it, it’s a complete pig. I like coffee 7 to 10 days old, I really, really do. Yet the consumer would likely be very disappointed that the coffee was a week old if they bought a bag and it arrived that far off roast. I’ve yet to find a way to brew very fresh coffee that overcomes the challenges of that much CO2 (we are talking espresso here) that I’ve had the acidity where I wanted it very quickly. Then again being this close to coffee so much, and being so analytical, one begins to worry if I even like coffee… (I do – and people like Gwilym are making me happy by pulling shots I can just sit back and enjoy.)

Cascara

Last one for now – this post is easily long enough already and I don’t want to overdo it…

I am staggered at how good this is. In truth part of me expected it to be ok, but to be more of a novelty than anything else. The first time we brewed it I was a little surprised, and every time since then I’ve come to love it a little more. Having this available is the only reason we left the description of “coffee fruit” in one of the labels because it really is there in the coffee, and being able to taste that – even in a very unusual way – I hope makes a really nice taste connection for people. If we had been opening the cafe sooner (we’re not – perhaps another post when the economic climate doesn’t irk me so much) then we definitely would have been serving this as our ice tea. Aida did an amazing job and I am sure we are one of many companies hoping to see more of it next year.

Delicious dried coffee cherry flesh and skin

Ok. Rant over. Maybe there will be a new post tomorrow, maybe in 2009. Who knows…

Harangue me in the comments….