#1 Overwhelmed
I want to talk about my Auntie,
Not in a family gossip way, but in a way that pertains to our industry, specialty coffee.
Let me fill you in,
Upon arriving at a family engagement with her sisters, my Mum was asked how ‘the boys’ were going; that’s me. She proceeded to tell them all about my job at the coffee roastery and the beautiful coffees she had been able to drink in order to help me narrow down a true beauty for the barista competitions I was to take part in. Mum described a specific coffee we had both been enjoying through milk which had intense and undeniable tasting notes of, chocolate ice-cream and strawberries fruits.
It was at this point that my Auntie interjected and said she was over all the ‘hype’, explaining she thought all the coffees didn’t taste like any of the flavours the baristas claimed. My Auntie explained that she just went to the coffee bar downstairs from her work, because she always got ‘a good coffee’.
Now, my Aunt is NOT just a passer-by to coffee. She is, if anything, the complete opposite. My Auntie got us all hooked on coffee in the first place, she travels to Italy and drinks coffee by the bucket load. She was the first person to expose me to the Melbourne laneway coffee scene, her drink of choice is a long macchiato and so hearing her reaction I was shocked. How could someone who had once hunted high and low for the best, smallest, exquisite little bangers of venues have fallen so far as to just getting a quickie from downstairs. What’s more, she works in Melbourne’s CBD- in a huge government building right in the heart of the famous Melbourne coffee community- within walking distance of famous stalwarts like Patricia, Purple Peanuts and Higher Ground. But she had given it all up for a shipping container with a single grinder and worker, serving a relatively small-fry commercial coffee brand.
She wasn’t just another grab and go, here was a woman that perfectly fitted the kind of coffee consumer we as specialty coffee professionals purportedly aim to attract, a dedicated coffee lover through and through.
So what happened? The way I saw it she had gone full circle, within the space of our first coffee experience in 2010 to the family catch-up with my mum she had gone from seeking out and trying new places to thinking the entire Melbourne coffee scene was a load of bunkum!
I thought long and hard on this, here are my thoughts.
My Auntie has always loved coffee; she loves to drink it, that hasn’t changed.
What my Auntie didn’t need on her excursions downstairs was rotating singles that aggressively change flavour from week to week. Salty green coffee pulled long from EK’s and aggressive lectures from baristas about how to drink her coffee.
Her plight is becoming the new norm; Melbourne cuts more and more ground with its shops. Our scope for firepower on coffee bars seems endless. But as we put more and more brewing equipment in our workplaces, equip our baristas with gravimetric profiling, huge pressure profiling machines to hide behind and schmick looking tasting note cards to accompany our blends, we get further and further away from what our customers want: a good, consistent cup of coffee.
People are feeling overwhelmed by the ‘education’ side of the third wave, the way I see it most people want to know information that directly relates to their cup of coffee. What they are getting however is a whole lot of farm level information which either overwhelms them so much they shut down completely or worse still aggravates them because they can’t see how it relates to their latte and choose to go to another shop were “the barista doesn’t talk to me and just makes my drink” While our micro roasters/companies may collectively give themselves a pat on the back about how much money we give back to farms, or how many schools we build I believe we as an industry need to remind ourselves that these are our passion projects and are not engaging our customers as much as we like to think. In a world were almost every company has a feel good charity angle geared at showcasing the brands wider sympathy, our coffee based support of farmers is struggling to standout. And on top of this our tasting note cards, an idea that started off rather well, have morphed into advertising fluff with very little affiliation with the tastings in general.
On the other side of the coin I have had wonderful success generating engagement by asking customers what they like about the coffee. I still find many an avid coffee consumer is still gobsmacked when they see a refractometer behind bar or even the moment of realization that we weigh every shot. These are grey areas of the barista experience we still seem unwilling to share which would lead to a more engaged customer pool.
Make the best coffee you can, and aim to have that open up the dialogue. Instead of telling them how good the current origin is and talking it up with cards. Cut the chatter; make the coffee lightning fast and y’know what? It might just be so damn good the customer elects to linger a moment longer and ask you what makes that specific cup so memorable for them. Then after they have opened that line up you can start with the barista spiel on the coffee’s processing, tastings etc.
Coffee first, it’s what they are paying you for.
Education second, after you have satisfied their patronage.
In a lot of ways what I’m getting at is that in our intense desire to educate we are, to be frank, doing too much educating. These people don’t want to be talked down to about the minuate of processing, they are here for coffee. They definitely don’t come to be told the way they have been drinking coffee is ‘wrong’. We need to be reverse engineering this equation; we need to be quite friendly and attentive, hand over the coffee with a smile. And our first point of entry into ‘educating’ the customer needs to be the coffee. This cannot be the last point in the chain, instead of opening up a huge dialogue on the coffees excellence then handing it over to the customers we need to serve excellent coffee, I hear you out there “Bro, I already serve the best coffee” but do you really? It needs to be better, it needs to be so good that after the customer enjoys it they are motivated to seek you out, linger a little longer at your bar and try and coax some answers out of you about what made that cup so good.
Education needs to start after demand for the product, not before. And the best way to increase demand is the same as it has been for the past 100 years: make the best product you can.
Perhaps one day my Auntie will find herself seeking out new places for her brew again, perhaps this time a new one will smash through the hype and engage her taste-buds. It might be so good and be made so consistently each day that she has no choice but to change her local,
Or perhaps she could spread her patronage around.
Keep brewing, Cal