#batch brew

Holm, Auckland CBD. They have free wi-fi, so I like to go here with my laptop once in a while and do some work. Used to get their batch brew, but lately, I’ve been switching it up for the flat white.

I enjoy coffee, but I’m super picky, and I will happily drive 2-3 hours for a decent cup! Weird to most, but I know what I like 🙂

I moved to Japan for cars so a couple of hours for s great coffee is nothing 🙂

Anyway, here’s some of the coffees I had in August..

Coffeewerk + Press – Galway, Ireland

Reference Coffee – Dublin, Ireland

Oh! Donuts and Coffee – Belfast, Northern Ireland

Thru the green X…

Happy Brew Year! Just wanted to share my experience of a little experiment I conducted with my customers on Sunday.

As is the case within our industry but perhaps even more so here in Sweden, customers tend to be very reluctant to adapt to new ideas as far as how they'll accept their coffee. At Lanthandelns Espresso this challenge faces the added complication that overall, people have not quite accepted the idea that we are a coffee bar that also happens to serve quality food as opposed to a lunch cafe that also happens to have coffee. So for the most part, as is the tradition with typical lunch cafes, people tend to expect the coffee to be included in the total lunch package.

Usually, in these sort of everyday cafes, those running the shop place a thermos full of coffee where customers just grab a mug and help themselves during the course of their stay. At L.E. we never included coffee in the price of the lunch but we did have the thermos where people could grab their coffee as well as their "på tår" (refill) whenever they wanted. This, of course, resulted in people who had NOT paid for a cup of coffee helping themselves to a cup or two.

So we moved the thermos behind the counter and, like most coffee shops serving batch brew, we would fill the customers' cups and if they wanted a refil they have to bring their cups to us and we refill them.

Despite the fact that we do offer "hand brewed" or pour over coffee via Hario V60 or Chemex, most customers tend to take the safe route and order the "dagens brygg" (daily brew) because it comes from the thermos and really doesn't require that customers make any choices.

The most intimidating aspect on the retail/service end of the specialty coffee business is that sometimes we bombard our customers with too many choices. Even if they walk into a cafe that is known to serve "great coffee" most customers don't really know -- or care to know -- the difference between a washed coffee from Kenya and a honey processed coffee from Panama. In all honesty, we shouldn't expect them to either, nor should we expect them to care that much. That's our responsibility. But at the same time, our survival depends on the concept that we do and that we can translate that passion into what they consume, somehow.

Personally, I may prefer a V60 to a batch brew coffee but that doesn't necessarily mean that one is "better" than the other. I've had some batch brews that were better than their pourover counterparts, and vice versa. So even if our instinct may be to react a bit "snobbishly" to coffee prepared via batch brew, we're not doing ourselves any favors by showing it. 

I was inspired by a conversation with my friend Jesper Bood, in which he recommended presenting our single origins via a "coffee flight" in which small portions of all the coffees are prepared via pourover and presented all at once to customers. For my experiment, however, I altered the idea to remove both the intimidation factor of hand brewed coffee as well as the authoritarian notion of the barista being the sole distributor of coffee. 

I brewed all four of our single origins (from Costa Rica, Panama, Kenya and Burundi) into thermoses and placed them on the counter where customers could fetch their own coffee. In front of each thermos I placed small glass dishes with the whole and ground version of each corresponding coffee.

If you've ever been to a 7-11 or highway truck stop anywhere in America, big thermoses featuring that establishments coffee varieties is not that strange a concept. The coffee isn't necessarily good but it does give the customer the option to pick what they prefer. You never see anything like that in specialty shops. Why?  Cost control. Neutralization of baristas' authority/"expertise." All of the above. The thing is, though, the largest struggle we have is getting customers to accept the idea that all coffees are different. Just because we use a set of fancy descriptors on our menu doesn't mean that our perceptions of how our coffee taste will translate into the customers' own experience. So I democratized the process and put the power of choice in their hands. 

This put a whole new twist on the "på tår" concept as everyone was encouraged by us to try as many of the four coffees as they want. I asked their opinions, answered questions about how the coffee was processed. People really seemed to be into it. Milk and sugar was readily available right there beside the airpots.

What was interesting was that the coffee that I knew would probably be more likely to scare people away if I tried to describe it (the Kiziba Mountain from Burundi which has a very decidedly earthy and "grassy" flavor) is the one that seemed to get the most positive response from customers. 

I was very pleased with the response by customers. There was one lady who seemed to be a bit unsure about the whole thing but for the most part, people were totally into it. The biggest lesson I learned from this is one that I think every specialty shop should take to heart: in order to get customers to trust us, we need to be able to trust them too.