I feel it is about time I broached this subject. With an eye to the last posts, as well as to the response to my Chemex videocast, I feel the need to make something very clear.
The internet is full of information, though it is also full of keyboard heroes, and has something of an issue with its signal to noise ratio. Identifying who is a useful purveyor of information is tricky and, while there is growing use of indicators in forums, often it is he who shouts loudest that wins.
This morning I spoke to a journalist on the phone who is writing about coffee in London, as well as the antipodean influence on our coffee scene.
One of the questions he asked was about the influence of Italian populations on coffee cultures. In Australia a good chunk of credit for the early rise of coffee culture there stems from the high standards of the Italian communities that quickly spread to a relatively small population and increased expectation.
Stumptown are the source of one of my most troubling coffee experiences, one that still haunts and nags at me today.
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…..
I think everyone in coffee knows deep down this is true. The wine model only works for wine, we can’t transplant it to coffee and expect some immediate understanding and increased sales of quality coffees.
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.
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On January 2nd this year I made five predictions – you can read them here – and I guess before I put up my predictions for 2009 I should probably decide how well I did last year. Or better still – you guys decide!
1 – The spread of the Clover.
I could be really brave and predict that Starbucks will start using
them, but I think the guys at Clover would curse me for jinxing them!
I think I did pretty well here – though no one predicted Starbucks buying them outright. You could argue that Starbucks haven’t really spread them around, but as I am not in the States I don’t know how often they are cropping up.
2 – World Barista Championships
I am not going to be as bold/stupid as to try and pick a winner but I
think the shift away from a Scandinavian-heavy final will continue.
2 of the 6 finalists were Scandinavian, but neither placed in the top 3. I feel pretty safe claiming this one! Congrats again to Stephen!
3 – Coffee prices continue to rise
I am not sure I am going to be able to claim this one. Whilst things did look good (briefly) for this prediction earlier in the year prices seemed to have slumped at the end of it. (Don’t worry – I am not going to go on about the media exaggerated financial issues).
4 – Pressure Profiling in Espresso
I am not sure on this one. Synesso released the Hydra – the first machine with a pump per group as far as I know, LM released their new paddle group, John “The Awesome” Ermacoff kindly built me a pressure profiler that makes my head hurt but makes me happy, and the new Slayer machine also is big on pressure profiling. All the above says yay, but I don’t feel we’ve come much further on understanding it all.
5 – The continued rise of the Microlot
Again I feel the need to plead my case here. Certainly this was the year of the Ethiopian microlot – the numbered lots from Aricha and Beloya getting everyone very excited for good reason. This was the year that Esmeralda divided their crop into micro microlots for the auction. This was also a year that my understanding of microlots got a little more nuanced, and I felt less sure that they were all I had wanted them to be 12 months ago. From this point on I leave it up to you dear reader – how well did I predict the year?
(You can add your own half point answers if you feel the need)
Would love to hear your comments on this. I think I’d like to claim 4 out of 5, but that is up for debate! Look out for my next set of hilarious predictions come January 1st!
This is the first in a series of posts on quite a broad topic within coffee, that covers not only elements of brewing but sales, consumption, successes and failures and the challenges that lie ahead for anyone in the industry.
I am going to start with trust. This might seem an abstract word, but I hope at the end of this it will earn its place as a fitting title. What I really want to talk about is the state of relations between the average consumer and the average cafe. In my eyes we have, by and large, lost the trust of the consumer.
To start with I want to use the example of restaurants: Let’s put you in the situation of being stranded in a strange town, full of independent restaurants and you are very hungry. You scan the menus outside of three or four places and from this you will make some judgments on those businesses. Two key factors here will influence your judgement – what dishes they serve and their price.
The first is really quite obvious – from the dishes you’ll know whether to expect home cooking or whether to expect Michelin level cuisine. However this won’t really give you a very strong indicator of the quality compared to the prices.
Now let’s skip to the end of the meal. You chose the place with the fancy cooking, and you’ve racked up quite a bill. What’s more the food wasn’t very good. In fact it was terrible. How do you feel? Angry? Taken advantage of? Disappointed? Betrayed?
When restaurants do this they completely lose our trust – we’ll likely never spend any money with them again, and probably go out of our way to make sure family and friends don’t fall into that trap.
Hopefully you can see where I am going with this – think about the coffee you’ve bought in the past, and the prices you’ve paid. How often has the price been correctly tied to the quality? How often have you had your trust abused? I am sure I am not alone in being extremely distrustful of most places selling coffee (globally I might add).
If you own a cafe then ask yourself if your customers trust you. I mean really trust you. If a regular came in and you had an unusual (but excellent) coffee in your grinder, or to drink as a french press brew, would they buy it on your recommendation? If you found a coffee you thought was worth £5 a cup, could you sell it to them?
The advantages of trust are obvious – increased loyalty, increased customer spend, easier ethical/helpful upselling and a win/win for you and your customer.
I’ll aim to continue this next week…..