Fresh Cup Magazine | August 2016

SLOW-BAR BREWERS | FINANCING FOR FARMERS | COFFEE & TEA SODAS | CHINA’S CAFÉ CULTURE | SALAMANDER

August 2016 » freshcup.com

POCKET CAFÉS Itty-bitty cafés make the most of small spaces, like this freight elevator shaft.

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Sydney’s GROUNDS OF ALEXANDRIA Page 38 freshcup.com | November 2014

T H E M AGA Z I N E FO R S P E C I A LT Y C O F F E E & T E A P R O F E S S I O N A L S S I N C E 1 9 9 2

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FEATURES

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54 40 DO YOU KNOW TIM HILL? The green buyer and quality manager at Counter Culture Coffee.

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BY CORY ELDRIDGE

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TURN YOUR COFFEE AND TEA INTO SODA

POCKET CAFÉS

CHINA’S GROWING COFFEE CULTURE

MELTY, CRISPY, BUBBLY

Sometimes you need something more refreshing than iced coffee or iced tea. Sometimes you need something light and fizzy— like soda.

These pint-sized cafés sacrificed the luxury of storage, but successfully designed an experience for customers.

Independent Chinese café owners are remaking café culture into something inherently Chinese.

The salamander broiler is a mainstay of cafés bringing better food to their customers.

BY KETTI WILHELM

BY CORY ELDRIDGE

BY ELLIE BRADLEY

BY CODY KIRKLAND

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DEPARTMENTS August 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine » Vol. 25 » No. 8

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32 38

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Coffeemonsters Book; victory in Dublin; Beanstock; Bob Curtis.

The Meaning of a Name

by Rachel Northrop

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32

THE FILTER

BEHIND THE BAR Phil and Sebastian Calgary, Alberta

by Cory Eldridge

THE WHOLE BEAN

NINE BARS Under Pressure

by Ali Mohammad & Ethan Miller

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CAFÉ OUTFITTER

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Slow Bar

ORIGIN

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The Financing Problems

by Cory Eldridge

IN HOUSE How to Name a Café

by Kaitlin Throgmorton

38 28

CAFÉ CROSSROADS

Too Much Tea

by Jeffrey McIntosh

Grounds of Alexandria Sydney, Australia

by Ellie Bradley

WHOLE LEAF

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12 FROM THE EDITOR

16 CONTRIBUTORS

Articles in Conversation

62 COUNTER INTELLIGENCE People and products

66 ADVERTISER INDEX

64 CALENDAR Trade shows and events

FROM THE EDITOR

Articles in Conversation

ONE GOAL OF FRESH CUP IS TO START CONVERSATIONS.

CONNECT WITH US

Fresh Cup Magazine

@FreshCupMag

@FreshCupMag

ON THE COVER: Pocket Cafés Mudd Works Roastery’s Half Pint Café in Portland, Oregon is in an old freight elevator shaft.

CORY ELDRIDGE, EDITOR cory@freshcup.com

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Photo by Cory Eldridge

P HOTO O F CO RY BY CYNT HIA MEADO R S, TO P R IG HT PHOTO BY C ORY ELDRID GE

Our articles are most successful when they make the reader jump up and say, whether in physical life or online, “You’ve got to read this!” I’m thrilled by that response, whether the follow-up line is “this will change your life” or “it’s kind of cool” or even “look at what these idiots are doing.” Any of those responses mean that article has become part of the dialogue you’re having about coffee and tea, and that’s basically why we do this job.

As often as I can, I try to have our articles be in conversation with each other, offering an expansion of a previous idea, tendering a rebuttal, or simply rotating a concept to provide a different view. This month, two articles take on the issue of how much info you should give customers about a product, and they come to essentially opposite conclusions.

In the Whole Bean, Rachel Northrop argues single-origin coffees need more information than the name of the farm or co-op it originated from. The label “Finca La Esperanza, Colombia,” is the equivalent of “Springfield, USA”—it doesn’t really tell you anything. She believes a bag or menu should offer enough info that a customer could find that farmer or co-op online (something increasingly likely for any farmer with a smartphone). Roasters, café owners, and baristas should have access to much more information, and if they don’t, they need to demand it. That’s the only way to know where your coffee came from; it’s the only way to have transparency in your supply chain.

In the Whole Leaf, Jeffery McIntosh argues that too many options and too much info is stifling the tea industry. American tea drinkers have never had the collective education about tea that their coffee-drinking counterparts received from companies like Starbucks. They see a hundred teas on a menu, each with a bevy of details about it, and they cramp up. McIntosh, who owns Teabook, believes small tea companies should limit their menus (he has just twelve teas) and restrict the info about them. He argues this will welcome more customers into specialty tea, and from there the industry can reveal the expansive variety of tea.

Even though these articles approach the separate industries Fresh Cup serves, both tea and coffee struggle with how to present customers with the backstory many value, without alienating those who want a simple, uncomplicated beverage. While Northrop and McIntosh make strong cases, they both know their stances aren’t universally applicable, and you’ll have to decide what is best for your customers. I’m sure these articles will help you make the right decision.

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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FRESH CUP MAGAZINE THE MAGAZINE FOR SPECIALTY COFFEE & TEA PROFESSIONALS SINCE 1992

-FRESH CUP FOUNDERWARD BARBEE 1938-2006

-ADVERTISINGAdvertising Sales JAN WEIGEL jan@freshcup.com

-FRESH CUP PUBLISHINGPublisher and President JAN WEIGEL jan@freshcup.com

Ad Coordinator DIANE HOWARD adtraffic@freshcup.com Marketing Coordinator ANNA SHELTON anna@freshcup.com

-EDITORIALEditor CORY ELDRIDGE cory@freshcup.com Associate Editor ELLIE BRADLEY ellie@freshcup.com

-CIRCULATIONCirculation Director ANNA SHELTON anna@freshcup.com

-ARTArt Director CYNTHIA MEADORS cynthia@freshcup.com

-ACCOUNTINGAccounting Manager DIANE HOWARD diane@freshcup.com

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD DAVID GRISWOLD Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers

ANUPA MUELLER Eco-Prima

CHUCK JONES Jones Coffee Roasters

BRAD PRICE Monin Gourmet Flavorings

JULIA LEACH Toddy

BRUCE RICHARDSON Elmwood Inn Fine Teas

COSIMO LIBARDO Toby’s Estate Coffee

MANISH SHAH Maya Tea Co.

BRUCE MILLETTO Bellissimo Coffee Advisors

LARRY WINKLER Torani

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PLEASE ALLOW 6–8 WEEKS FOR DELIVERY OF FIRST ISSUE. Copyright ©2016 by Fresh Cup Publishing Company Inc. Contents may not be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. ISSN: 1094-8228

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CONTRIBUTORS

CODY KIRKLAND Hand-crafted sodas can be a great way to bridge the gap with customers who don’t like coffee or tea. Cody Kirkland gives a short course in mixology in “TURN YOUR COFFEE AND TEA INTO SODAS,” on PAGE 42, showing how you can transform the ingredients you already have on hand into inspired creations. Kirkland is the manager of the Rose Establishment in Salt Lake City.

JEFFREY MCINTOSH While many support more detailed labeling in coffee, Jeffrey McIntosh advocates for a “less is more” approach in tea. “Tea never had a Starbucks, there was no industry trailblazer who put thousands of teahouses on corners around the US and taught people tea.” In WHOLE LEAF, McIntosh describes how a streamlined menu and limited details will help cultivate a new population of modern tea drinkers (PAGE 28).

KAITLIN THROGMORTON What’s in a name? Quite a bit when it comes to your business. In this month’s IN HOUSE, Kaitlin Throgmorton takes us through the practical steps of naming a business, starting with some soul searching to establish your brand identity (PAGE 26). Throgmorton is a freelance writer based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

ETHAN MILLER AND ALI MOHAMMAD Ali Mohammad is a scientist turned coffee geek; Ethan Miller is a coffee geek turned engineer. Together, the two put their experience to work at Nuli coffee developing espresso technology. In NINE BARS, they examine the role of pressure in extraction and discuss recent trends in pressure profiling (PAGE 32). Is a nine-bar shot of espresso really the only way to go?

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RACHEL NORTHROP How much information should you be giving customers about the origin of their coffee? In this month’s WHOLE BEAN, Rachel Northrop argues that detail is a way of showing how coffee originates from specific and nameable mills, communities, farms, and people (PAGE 30). Northrop is the author of When Coffee Speaks: Stories from and of Latin American Coffeepeople, and a sales rep with Ally Coffee’s specialty importing division.

KETTI WILHELM Ketti Wilhelm is a freelance writer and journalist who taught English in Jinan, China. In “CHINA’S GROWING COFFEE CULTURE,” Wilhelm discusses the rise in the country’s café culture, and the corporate and local influences (PAGE 54). With such a large population, China has the potential to become a major part of the specialty coffee industry as its café culture grows.

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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The FILTER A Fine Blend of News and Notes

Coffee Monsters he human brain (maybe all animal brains) are wired to see faces, and we often see them where they don’t exist. Put two circles and a line near each other and we’ll make it a face. That’s why most of us see a face when we look at cars, trains, phones, and these two pieces of punctuation : ). For a few, this impulse is hyperactive, and faces appear where most of us see just, say, a bit of spilled coffee.

Many artists have used coffee or tea as a medium, most often using concentrates as paint or stains, but none has produced something as distinctive and charming as Stefan Kuhnigk, an artist from Hamburg, Germany. His Coffee Monsters project began in 2011 when he saw a coffee stain on a paper at his office. With a

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pen, he created a creature with a few strokes of ink. The goofy, rolly, squiggly thing captured Kuhnigk’s fancy.

The first monster went on Instagram.

More than 500 followed.

Not only are the drawings irresistibly delightful, they are a premier representation of café art: compelling, highly skilled, informal, and complementary to coffee. Outside of the type of coffeehouse that has oversterilized corporate branding, it’s hard to imagine a shop Kuhnigk’s drawings wouldn’t fit perfectly.

The best 100 monsters are now collected in the Coffeemonsters Book, and it would certainly be a wonderful addition to any café’s coffee table. Published in Europe by Gudberg Nerger, the book is available on Kuhnigk’s website, thecoffeemonsters.com.

—Cory Eldridge

EXCELLENCE AWARD WINNERS

BERG WU

TESTU KASUYA

Victory in Dublin

PH OTO S CO URTESY O F: GUDBER G NERGER (O P PO SITE PAGE); WO RLD O F C O FFEE (THIS PAGE)

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he 2016 World of Coffee event and SCAE expo concluded late last month in Dublin, and a selection of attendees headed home with new awards and honors to add to their resumes. Over 6,500 people attended the three-day event, which served as the site for the World Barista Championship and the World Brewers Cup. In the barista championships, competitors from sixty-two countries presented their work to a judging panel, preparing four espressos, four milk drinks, and four original signature drinks in a fifteen-minute performance set to music. After three rounds of competition, Berg Wu of Taiwan took home the title of World Barista Champion. The remaining finalists (in order of finish) were Yoshikazu Iwase of Japan, Ben Put of Canada, Lem Butler of the US, Charlotte Malaval of France, and Lex Wenneker of the Netherlands.

The Brewers Cup required participants to prepare and serve three individual beverages for the judging panel,

consisting of both a compulsory and open service. In the compulsory service, competitors prepared three beverages using beans provided by the competition. The open service allowed competitors to brew beverages with beans of their choosing. Tetsu Kasuya

education, innovation, sustainability, and entrepreneurship. Perfect Daily Grind’s founder Henry Wilson received the Young Entrepreneur Award; Chiara Bergonzi was given the Passionate Educator Award; Pete Southern won the Innovation Award

After three rounds of competition, Berg Wu of Taiwan took home the title of World Barista Champion. of Japan took home the first place prize. Finishing second was Mikaela Wallgren of Finland, followed by Chad Wang of Taiwan, Benny Wong of Hong Kong, Todd Goldworthy of the US, and Odd-Steinar Tøllefsen of Norway.

The SCAE also announced their Excellence Awards, which recognize leaders in the SCAE community, and those who have contributed to the success of the industry through

for his creation, the Push Tamper; Benjamin Weiner of Gold Mountain Coffee was awarded for Working Towards Sustainability; Urnex’s Tony Overbeak took home the Ambassador’s Award; and Edy Bieker of Sandalj was given the SCAE’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Budapest will host the 2017 World of Coffee event.

—Ellie Bradley

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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A New Way to Get Green

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sually, when a roaster wants to try samples of different green coffees offered by various importers, she’d have to contact each of them individually, find out what they had, and make her requests. A new online platform is cutting down the leg work of finding coffees. Beanstock.ag, which just launched, allows roasters to explore the green coffee offerings from multiple importers. Roasters can search by specific criteria (a la “I need a Washed El Salvador Pacamara, stat!”) or browse casually (a la “What are the newest African coffees on the West Coast?”)

Roasters can use Beanstock to request samples of the coffees listed or to contact importers directly.

Each coffee’s profile shows as much information as importers choose to provide, including certifications, varietals, processing, farm, and tasting notes.

For example, you could find a particular coffee by scrolling through that country’s offerings, searching for the producer by name, or by querying coffees with a certain process.

The more specialty coffee zooms in on small lots and single farms, the more options become available to roasters.

“Our goal is to tell the most comprehensive stories about coffees out there,” says Nick Spilger, one of Beanstock’s founders. “The more complete story roasters are able to share with end users translates to increased value.”

The more specialty coffee zooms in on small lots and single farms, the more options become available to roasters, who then have to dedicate more time to selection and sourcing. “Beanstock aims to make this selection process as effortless as possible,” says Spilger.

David Perreira, COO at Yellow Brick Coffee in Tucson, looks for coffee that fits the company’s traceability model. “One of our customers is looking for an organic single-origin that they can use as cold-brew,” he says. “I can do specific searches for organic coffee with flavor profiles that I think might work well. In order to hit price points for our customers, I can contact importers directly with specific pricing and sourcing questions.”

The core concept driving the platform is to open dialogues between participants in the green coffee supply chain.

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Nate Van Dusen, owner, green buyer and roaster at Brio Coffeeworks in Burlington, Vermont, thinks Beanstock will help promote accountability. “One of the first pieces of information I look for is crop year.

If some importers list it and not others, then maybe those who don’t will be motivated to list it as well. Seeing that information up front saves me having to make a phone call and the importer having to take one.”

Both Perreira and Van Dusen have used the platform to communicate with importers they already source from and to explore new partnerships. The internet has already transformed coffee by digitizing commodity trading at one end of the spectrum and making it possible for smallholder farmers to be Facebook friends with small roasters at the other.

Beanstock sits somewhere in the middle, working to streamline green coffee offerings information most relevant to specialty roasters.

—Rachel Northrop

Farewell to Bob Curtis

P HOTO C OURTESY O F THE WILBUR C URTIS CO .

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he coffee community lost another longstanding pillar last month. Robert A. “Bob” Curtis, CEO emeritus of the Wilbur Curtis Company, passed away on June twenty-four. Curtis was second in the fourth-generation lineage that has built one of the world’s most respected and innovative coffee brewer manufacturers.

Bob was instrumental in the company’s growth, serving as executive vice president after his mother Margaret took over the company in the early 1960s, then taking over as president in 1989. He originally joined Wilbur Curtis as part of the sales division, following in the footsteps of his father, who founded the company in 1941. Curtis lived by the creed, “Always be humble. Don’t boast about what you do. Appreciate the people you serve. Take care of your family.” These were the values that helped him lead the company and transform coffee drinking into a truly memorable experience.

Curtis’s son Kevin joined the firm in 1985 and is now president and CEO. His son Michael serves as executive vice president of the firm, and daughters Katie and Meg both hold positions within the company.

—Ellie Bradley

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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Push-button Americano: Alongside the Modbar is a Marco single-button, portion-controlled water font, which is connected to its own under-counter Ecosmart boiler. Robertson says that when making americanos it “cuts down the seconds.”

Over-counter Interactions: Modbar was chosen to remove any barriers between barista and customer.

Steamwand and POS: With a steamwand near the POS, two baristas can easily cover the bar and register.

The Scale: A My Weigh iBalance scale was chosen for its accuracy and toughness.

To-go Tubes: Plenty of cups in three sizes tuck into these dispensers.

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One Espresso Per Side: A Nuova Simonelli Mythos grinder sits on the outer edge of each bar.

Each side has a different, rotating espresso.

Co-owner Phil Roberston says, “If café owners are honest, they will admit that one espresso is more dialed in.”

August 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

Future Plans: The space under the pastry case is wired to include a refrigerator if they ever need one.

The Aussie: A rare sight in North America, this Juggler dispenses milk from two taps. Phil and Sebastian had to persuade a local dairy to use tenliter bags for the milk. And they had to heavily modify the system to make it up to code. They plan to put one in each of their cafés.

Harder than Marble: The countertop is quartzite stone, a natural stone. It has the beauty of marble but the durability of granite.

BEHIND the BAR Phil and Sebastian Calgary, Alberta

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» by Cory Eldridge «

hen Calgary’s Phil and Sebastian Coffee Roasters moved into their new headquarters in the summer of 2015, they also opened a new café.

The whole setup was located in a hundred-year-old building that lay in the middle of a massive, seventeen-year, multi-billion-dollar urban renewal project that owners Phil Robertson and Sebastian Sztabzyb believed would eventually provide a steady stream of customers to the new shop.

In the meantime, they would make a café unlike any of their others. “We wanted to be a bit radical here,” says Robertson. “This is our flagship location. Our roaster is here.” A single line sends each customer to one of two espresso stations or a manual brew station. The customer orders, and then waits while the barista prepares their drink.

There is no separation between point of sale and pickup.

The concept inspired a mirrored espresso bar, which is manned by two baristas and two barista-cashiers who steam milk. The close proximity between barista and customer led Phil and Sebastian to install their first Modbar. It’s also a setup that requires high customer service IQ, not just to offer great service but to guide the customer through this unusual experience.

It’s worked, but it’s been a challenge. “The whole premise was that we didn’t expect to be really busy,” Robertson says. “We hoped that, in time, we would, but we thought we had time to get our ducks in a row. We were wrong about that.”

Lines can go twenty, even thirty deep at the café, but the station-based setup and a few time-saving pieces of tech keep customers and baristas happy.

Warming Boilers: Mugs are kept warm on top of the Modbar boilers.

EK 1: All batch-brew and manual-brew coffees are ground here.

EK 2: This EK 43 is reserved for grinding beans bought by customers.

Batch Below: The dual Fetco is placed under the counter and decanted into carafes.

PH OTO S C OURTESY O F PHIL AND SEBASTIAN

Stowaway: Saucers are hidden here.

Pour-over: Three coffees are available for manual brew, and each is dialed in for a specific brew method. “We found it more successful if you fix one coffee to one brew method,” says Robertson.

Tea Tower: A multitemperature tower from Fetco is used for teas, which are steeped to completion at the bar.

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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Café OUTFITTER: Slow Bar Stylin’ How do you like to slow bar? Whether you like to press, pour, filter, or immerse, you have lots of choices when it comes to stocking your home or café bar. These single- and multi-cup brewers show that functionality doesn’t have to come at the expense of aesthetics. With so many design-savvy options, why limit yourself to just one method?

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1) SCIENCE RULES Step back into the days of science class with the Erlenmeyer-inspired G-Drip from Goat Story. Copper fittings support the metal frame, while coffee drips down into heat-resistant, borosilicate glass. The team at Goat Story designed a special spring inside the funnel to facilitate faster extraction and prevent overbrewing. goat-story.com

3) BREAKING BAIRRIERS BairroAlto eliminated the walls from pour-over brewing with the AltoAir, promoting unrestricted flow and consistent extraction. Pair the woven frame with the complementary conical flask, crafted from borosilicate glass and wrapped in a leather handle for a comfortable grip. Choose from standard and single-cup sizes. bairroalto.co.uk

2) HIT THE HIGHWAVE Highwave took inspiration from their ocean side location in the design of their TEAfish and JOEfish singlecup brewers. The intuitive press works for any grind or loose leaf; a patented shut-off prevents coffee and tea from over-extracting. Double-walled, borosilicate glass keeps drinks hot and your hands cool. highwave.com

4) SLOW JAMS The Slow Coffee collection from Kinto celebrates the relaxation-factor of pour-overs, allowing time to appreciate the artistry of brewing. Find your own style among glass carafes and stainless steel filters, choosing from single- and multi-cup sizes. Stacking parts save space, including a plastic holder for your filter after brewing. kinto.co.jp

August 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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In HOUSE efore a café ever opens its doors, it all starts with an idea, and then a name.

The task of naming a shop can be as tricky as it is important. Café owners should think about their brand’s personality and characteristics, think about the idea that drives their business, even before brainstorming names. “Ask yourself: what do we stand for as a company?” says Sunny Bonnell, co-founder and creative director at Motto, a comprehensive branding agency. “That’s really something we push companies to get clarity on. Work through those things before working on a name.” Once you’ve established an identity, Bonnell recommends looking for inspiration just about anywhere: lists of names, history, music, and so on. “There’s not a wrong place to look. Maybe the only wrong place to look would be to your competitors,” she says.

According to Bonnell, names usually fall into one of three categories.

Functional names are simple, describing exactly what the business does. Experiential names “make a direct connection to something real, a human experience,” Bonnell says, citing internet browser Safari as an example. Finally, evocative names, such as Target or Virgin, evoke the position of the company with images or connotations.

In addition, Bonnell listed naming criteria to follow. First, make the name meaningful and positive, “not boring.” Second, aim for something short that’s easy to pronounce and spell. Third, choose something with a visual element. Finally, the name should be distinctive and protectable, meaning, it should be original enough to set you apart from your competition and different enough that you can secure branding, an online presence, and potentially a trademark. Even at

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this early stage of the business, Bonnell recommends conducting a trademark search on the name you choose.

“When you have a name that has these kind of qualities, you’re able to design a more robust brand, because you’re able to connect with something of meaning,” Bonnell says.

One simple place to start is with your surroundings.

At Olympia Coffee Roasting Company in Olympia, Washington, co-owner Oliver Stormshak says, “Every business owner has to look in the mirror and decide who they are, and who they want to be. I know for me, I’m a pretty serious person, and the name is serious.” However, Olympia is more than a place on a map. Stormshak explained that Olympia evokes its Greek roots, conjuring mythology and Olympians, as well as the entirety of the Olympic region in the Pacific Northwest. “Our town can be transported anywhere in the world and have meaning to everybody,” says Stormshak.

However, when Stormshak came on board in 2009, he struggled with whether to keep the name. After trying various marketing campaigns with different names, his team created an experiment in which they sent out five coffee bags, each with different branding, to friends and family throughout the US, and asked them to select the best coffee. All the coffee was the same—nothing was different but the look of each bag—but the exercise provided insight into what worked for their branding. Eventually, they reached a point where “we felt like this is who we are,” says Stormshak, and the name stuck.

For the lucky few, sometimes inspiration just strikes, as it did for Bow Truss Coffee Roasters in Chicago. As they built the location for their first café, they noticed its original bow truss ceilings. “We look at this beautiful building, this space is so cozy and

this is what we’re all about: wide open and inviting,” says Darren Marshall, co-founder at Bow Truss. Now with eleven stores, not every location has bow truss ceilings, but Marshall says the comfortable aesthetic evoked by the original trusses remains a feature of every café. Even though in the beginning, the name plan was more drink-oriented, “You don’t always have to lead with coffee,” Marshall says.

Another place to seek inspiration is your personal interests. “I’m more than coffee,” says Dale Donchey, coowner of Spiller Park Coffee in Atlanta. “If there was anything that would come in second to coffee, it’d be baseball,” he says. Drawing on his baseball love and an appreciation of Atlanta’s history, Donchey named his café after Spiller Park, a baseball stadium home to the Atlanta Crackers in the early 1900s. Donchey found symbolism in the park’s history and his own journey with coffee. When the stadium, then Ponce de Leon Park, burned down in 1923, RJ Spiller rebuilt it into one of the most advanced stadiums in the country, and it became known as Spiller Park. When Donchey’s first coffee shop fell apart, he viewed his second attempt as his own version of Spiller Park—a chance to start over and build something better than before. He also doesn’t see coffee and baseball as so different. “Both of them are about bringing people together, having someone to root for, and that team bravado,” Donchey says.

Once you’ve sought inspiration wherever you can find it, whether around the corner or back in time, and you’ve narrowed down your list of names to just a few, Bonnell offers one last piece of advice: “Create something you feel can be the linchpin to a larger story.”

Kaitlin Throgmorton is a writer based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

PH OTO BY P RISC ILLA WESTRA

How to Name a Café » By Kaitlin Throgmorton

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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The WHOLE LEAF ne of the incredible elements of tea is its vast breadth and depth. The range of flavors and experiences within my favorite category of tea, pu-erh, is almost unending, and the amount of knowledge available to a student of puerh is ocean deep. For those of us who have made tea not just a passion but a vocation and career, it’s common to provide customers as many opportunities as possible to encounter new and exciting teas. A customer enters a teahouse, either in person or online, and is presented dozens upon dozens of beautiful teas. Surely, they will find the perfect tea in this bounty.

They won’t.

We jumped from crush, tear, curl right ahead to specialty tea, and we left most Americans behind.

When handed a multi-page menu of teas, the average customer who enters a teahouse or an online tea seller will feel overwhelmed, lost in a sea of unfamiliar names, long tasting notes, and details that mean to offer transparency but only leave confusion.

In the United States, the loose-leaf tea market is very niche. The number of customers who have the knowledge to ask for a pu-erh or high-mountain oolong, let alone a particular one, is limited to thousands of consumers.

There just aren’t that many people who can walk into a shop, see a menu of 100 or more teas, and not feel wholly overwhelmed. That segment of the tea-

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drinking populace is not growing as fast as the competition for their business.

That’s why I think it’s important to have a small number of teas and to limit the amount of information we provide about each of them.

At my business, Teabook, we sell just twelve types of teas, but most of our customers don’t even know we offer that many. Most think we have just white, green, oolong, and red—and they’re more than happy with them.

They love the teas they have. And, I believe, part of that enjoyment comes from the experience being simple.

Tea companies should focus on cultivating modern tea drinkers. I think of these customers as people who want something beyond supermarket tea but aren’t interested in the details, and there is a huge opportunity to turn many more people into modern tea drinkers. If we offer smaller menus with fewer friction points (those little things that complicate a buying decision), I believe we can build a larger specialty tea industry, which is what most of us want.

I’ve made the mistake believing that it was best to offer customers as much as I could. I thought they needed a huge variety of tea and as much information as possible to make educated decisions about what they’re drinking.

But that’s not true.

Why do most people begin to drink loose-leaf tea? Because it’s healthy. The terroir, the history, and all the other amazing details about tea that make it so cherished by those of us invested in specialty, all that’s just alienating to a new tea drinker.

Most people need a small amount of information because they are making split-second decisions (mostly to do with price), and any additional information needs to be applicable to their daily lives. At Teabook, the most detailed information we provide customers is the city, province, and country of each tea, and we only offer that because

they can tell their friends when they share a pot of tea. How it’s grown, how it’s processed, who the farmer is? That’s too much. We have found that our customers care about the genre of tea (oolong, green, etc.) and if it’s pesticide free, but the tea has to be affordable before they show more interest.

My take is at odds with where many other food industries are going. Restaurant menus tell you the rancher who raised the cattle, and in the Whole Bean this month, Rachel Northrop argues for a deep, deep level of information to be available to coffee drinkers (see page thirty).

That’s great, and I want tea to reach that point—but we haven’t yet. Tea never had a Starbucks, there was no industry trailblazer who put thousands of teahouses on corners around the US and taught people tea. That core understanding, that foundation of education, was never laid in America. We jumped from crush, tear, curl right ahead to specialty tea, and we left most Americans behind.

If you’re an American, you think of tea as being in a teabag you buy at a grocery store to make into sun tea.

That’s tea. You don’t know there’s a 3,500-year history, that there are plantations all over the world, that the soil matters, that it could be more complicated than wine. For that person, a wonderful oolong and a beautiful white tea could be enlightening and inspiring. Telling them it was a bai hao and a bai mu dan could break the spell.

Make tea simple, easy, and welcoming. Get those consumers as committed clients and as time goes on, you can educate them slowly. I believe the goal should be to convert 10 to 20 percent of them into advanced tea drinkers. If we can do that on a large scale, our industry will thrive.

Je ffre y McIntosh is the owner of Teabook.

P HOTO BY CYNTHIA MEAD ORS

Too Much Tea » By Jeffrey McIntosh

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The WHOLE BEAN The Meaning of a Name » By Rachel Northrop offee has never really been just coffee: it’s been Sumatra Mandheling, Colombia Excelso, Guatemala SHB, and Tanzania peaberry. But now we know so much more about most coffee we sell, beyond merely provenance or type. Today there is enough connectivity and transparency throughout the supply chain that we can call single-origin coffees by their names. But what name? The name of the town, of the farm, or of the farmer? What if we know the name of one but not the other? How do we clearly share the information we do (and don’t) have with our peers and consumers?

When we identify a coffee by name—on a retail bag, café signboard, or a company website—we have to make sure we know why we are calling it by that name. Let’s take a moment to ask ourselves if the names by which we call coffees are just interesting ways to identify each SKU or if they actually indicate from where and whom each coffee comes.

Ikea has continually demonstrated how much more connected consumers feel to products when they can call them by name rather than descriptor. Ordering the Rissna feels more personal than buying coffee table 873. This kind of naming works for furniture because there is no risk of misrepresenting its origin by calling a table Rissna (a village in Sweden). We must take care with coffee, though; it does not all issue from the same warehouse.

If we title an offering Colombia La Esperanza, for example, we have to make sure we are clear whether we are just giving it a name to make it more personal than Colombia Excelso and as memorable as the Rissna, or if we are actually trying to tell the consumer something. Customers are not mind readers; they will assume a name

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is just a name until we explain otherwise. (Try to remember when you first learned that Yirgacheffe was a place and not a plant or an animal.)

Identifying a coffee online, on the shelf, or on bar as Colombia La Esperanza with no supporting information in the form of a coffee bio, an info card, or a chalkboard blurb is completely fine. It simply indicates a way to identify the product. But understand this name alone does not actually communicate any information to the customer. Without supporting information, “La Esperanza” could refer to the lot, the farm, the community, or Colombians’ general attitude of optimism.

Colombia La Esperanza could come from anywhere within Colombia’s borders—just like a Colombia Excelso.

For decades, Colombia’s mountains were ravaged by civil war and made unsafe for agriculture; as a result, there are an untold number of farms in Colombia named esperanza, which means hope. To explain which Colombia La Esperanza a given retailer is serving requires more comprehensive information, in the form of packaging, signage, info cards, videos, podcasts, farm photos, or something else.

A customer who grabs a cup of Colombia La Esperanza on the way to work is about as connected to her coffee as she is to the Rissna she ordered online. But if that customer was provided a blurb on the chalkboard and a map attached to the airpot, she could learn that she was drinking a cup of coffee from Finca La Esperanza outside the town of Pitalito in Huila, one of Colombia’s southernmost departments.

If we want Colombia La Esperanza to really speak to consumers about provenance and origin in a more meaningful way than Colombia Excelso does, we have to figure out how to share the rest of the details that give the name meaning. Companies

who value minimalist design in their shops and branding might worry that maps, charts, or paragraphs are overwhelming or off-putting to consumers. I argue that those in-depth details are exactly what we need to share if we want to fully communicate a coffee’s roots.

We invest quite a lot of time, money, and passion sourcing and serving a specific Colombia La Esperanza instead of Colombia Excelso, and it is worth fostering invested, interested customers by sharing what we learn from all that work. A customer who knows not just that her coffee is called La Esperanza but why is the customer who understands that her morning beverage holds a unique value, the kind worth seeking out, telling her friends about, and paying a premium for.

As an industry we must challenge ourselves to use the names we assign our coffees not just as product differentiators, but as commitments to teaching staff and consumers that these lots of coffee originate from specific and nameable mills, communities, farms, and people.

When I read a detailed provenance like “Miller Olaya’s coffee from Finca La Esperanza in San Isidro de Acevedo, City of Pitalito, Department of Huila, Colombia” on a bag of beans, bulletin board, or website, it gives me hope that the industry is genuinely committed to responsible, transparent sourcing, rather than just to exciting names.

If we name a coffee after the person or place, we have to remember to show that it’s more than just a title for the bag. If we don’t, a name is just a name, and we’re right back at the Excelso we were trying to move beyond.

Rachel Northrop has traveled extensively at origin and is now a sales rep with Ally Coffee’s specialty importing division.

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NINE BARS Under Pressure » By Ali Mohammad and Ethan Miller

Pressure modifications are more of a dark art than, say, up-dosing or pulling a shorter shot. a long brew time. Drip and filter coffee use high temperature to access hydrophobic compounds, while espresso uses high temperature and high pressure to speed this process up and—at least initially—confine the aromatics into the espresso shot.

But the question is, how much pressure do you really need? Depends on who you ask. Historically, the industry standard has been nine bar of pressure.

Baristas have been experimenting with pressure for decades: lever machines put pressure at the mercy of the barista’s biomechanics, and more sophisticated pressure-profiling machines allow controlled manipulation of both temperature and pressure. Despite these technological advances, it is becoming more popular to experiment

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with line pressure (the pressure coming in from your municipal water line); with no standard for line pressure, values can vary widely by city.

This prompts another practical question: how much can you manipulate pressure until you no longer have, in a strict sense, espresso?

Our takeaway is that all coffee beverages lie on a continuum. Espresso is uniquely situated in that we get to manipulate not only grind and temperature, but also pressure. But pressure modifications are more of a dark art than, say, up-dosing or pulling a shorter shot.

An interesting example is the Swiss caffè crema, which falls on a gray area of the spectrum between what we think of as drip and espresso. Coarsely ground coffee is lightly packed into a portafilter, from which a six- to nine-ounce beverage is yielded. Generally speaking, espresso machines are designed to offer nine bar of pressure as a maximum condition. If the coffee cannot offer resistance to the machine, as is the case with caffè crema, there will be little or no pressure generated. While the drink is produced from a modern espresso machine, the coffee isn’t experiencing the high pressure of a traditional espresso. The resulting drink, though, is not fundamentally different from an espresso in how it was made.

Espresso is unique in that high extractions are required in short time periods. This requires a grind finer than filter coffee to provide the appropriate resistance for the water. You can think of the coffee and portafilter like a resistor in an otherwise free flowing channel of water. Hence, higher pressure usually mandates finer grinding to mechanically achieve a tasty beverage. (Finer grinds pack more densely, making it more difficult for water to pass through, in turn facilitating more surface interaction to extract flavor compounds.)

Aside from this important mechanical role, there are other plausible hy-

potheses about the role of pressure in extraction. One is that pressure alone increases the extraction rate. Another is that it has a physical effect on the texture of the brew; particularly appealing is the idea that it makes the crema foamier. The presence of pressure helps dissolve desirable fats and oils (hydrophobic compounds) from the grounds, a requirement given the very short brew times. Higher pressure espresso tends to display larger bubbles in the crema that settle to the top like a tiny pour of stout beer, while lower pressure offers finer, silkier bubbles that settle quickly.

This could be due to the flow rate out of the portafilter, or it could be due to the chemical makeup of the coffee: work still needs to be done here.

Assuming we’re right, the major differences you’d expect to see between low-pressure (two to five bar) and highpressure (nine bar and above) extraction have more to do with the other variables—the grind, time, and temperature. We then return to a central question in coffee: what tastes better? Well, low-pressure espresso shots typically have longer water and coffee contact time, yielding an increase in solvation of everything: yields go up, for better or worse. It is coffee dependent and the recipe needs to be adjusted accordingly.

In our experience, line-pressure espresso isn’t better or worse than ninebar espresso. Line pressure may vary depending on your source of water and the plumbing in your building; in the worst case, you might find that it changes from day-to-day. On the other hand, it may be a more consistent source of pressure than the pump in your espresso machine, and it’s definitely quieter.

Like everything else, this is about your taste: pay attention to what you’re brewing, be systematic, and enjoy.

Ali Mohammad and Ethan Miller put their science and engineering brains to work at Nuli coffee developing espresso technology.

PH OTO BY CYNTH IA M EAD ORS

offee is, simply, a beverage made by using water to extract compounds from roasted coffee beans. Some of these compounds are hydrophilic and readily dissolve in water, but some are hydrophobic and don’t want to dissolve as easily. These hydrophobic molecules solvate like oil in water; in coffee, they provide texture, or are entirely excluded from the water as aroma.

The methods of preparing coffee can be categorized by how they deal with these compounds. Instant coffee tries to capture them, but they are typically lost in the dehydration process, where cold-brew uses patience to extract them, but has to combat the long evaporation period that accompanies

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ORIGIN The Financing Problems » By Cory Eldridge

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credit and access to financing, I mean transactions that resemble the sort you’d expect when seeking a personal or business loan: one involving an institution that’s part of the legal economy. For a smallholder, a decent loan would be in the hundreds of dollars.

With that money, a farmer can make

ing, those investments can make quite a difference to the yield and profitability of the coffee farm,” he says.

The problem is getting that money.

The biggest obstacle to credit or financing for farmers is they have zero access to banks. International banks are limited to major cities, and even

The biggest obstacle to credit or financing for farmers is they have zero access to banks. major improvements to her farm, says Nate Schaffran of Root Capital, a financing firm that provides loans to farmer associations. “Putting in things like irrigation, new cultivars, investing in inputs and labor to do proper prun-

local banks don’t have branches in rural, agriculture communities. The financing farmers need and the collateral they posses (likely just a small spot of land on a far-flung mountainside) aren’t worth the hassle for a bank.

PH OTO BY DID IER WEEMA ELS

ne of the critical factors that determines whether a business can improve its performance and product is its access to affordable credit. Without the ability to take out a loan, a roaster’s growth might plateau for want of more drum capacity. Without a credit card, a busted espresso machine could bring down a café. In coffee consuming countries, we fret over the terms and interest rates of credit cards and loans—it’s the affordability that makes us sleepless— but we rarely have to worry about access to credit.

For the vast majority of smallholder and even medium-sized coffee farmers, access is the main problem.

Let me define a couple things before we dive in. A smallholder is a farmer who, generally, owns only a few hectares of land (a hectare is roughly two and a half acres). Most farmers receive one, annual payday, which they have to stretch for a year. When I talk about

Even with no banks, most farmers have access to small loans, but in the guise of a loan shark or coffee buyer offering what’s essentially a futures contract, often a highly disadvantageous one. In this second scheme, farmers will sell their upcoming crop, or a portion of it, to a local buyer for upfront cash.

Regularly, this payment is a fraction of what the farmer would get even from commodity prices during harvest. The farmer does this because it’s often the only way to get cash during the thin months, the meses flacos discussed in last month’s Origin column on food insecurity. The farmer loses money, but the family eats—just one more example of the adage that it’s expensive to be poor.

Loans from family and friends are common, like everywhere, but there are few rich uncles in these communities.

To deal with these limits, many rural communities organize savings and credit cooperatives, which operate essentially like credit unions. Schaffran says they can be quite sophisticated despite their small size.

These co-ops are often the safest avenue for loans, and farmers use small loans for anything from wages for off-harvest labor, school tuition, or inputs like fertilizer. A bigger loan could finance an irrigation project, drying beds, or switching to rust-tolerant

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PHOTO BY DAN LEIF

Even if they had access to a bank, procuring a credit card is impossible except for the wealthy in most developing countries. Again, it’s a collateral problem. I can take out a dozen credit cards because banks know they can garnish my wages and they’re pretty sure I don’t have the wherewithal to disappear into the gray economy (and they are very right about that); economies and infrastructures in poor countries can’t protect the lender this way.

trees. These are the equivalent of a roastery buying a new roaster or a coffeehouse owner opening a second café.

Not all improvements available to a farmer are available to her as an individual, and major capital investments often require collective action. If a group of farmers, likely as a co-op since the number needs to be in the dozens, takes out a loan to construct a small wet mill, Schaffran says there’s a benchmark of 20 to 30 percent increase in the price they’d get for their coffee. Going from hand-pulped to centrally pulped, they see a higher and more uniform quality. They can also sell in bulk earlier in the year rather than storing it as parchment on the farm, where it would degrade.

This type of loan would be in the tens of thousands of dollars. Even at that amount, it can be difficult for the group of farmers to acquire the loan. A capital loan isn’t worth it for a bank until it crests $2 million. If

Another source of financing has been ad-hoc loans by direct-trade roasters. When you hear about direct-trade relationships that include roaster-financed projects like raised drying beds or even wet mills, these are small numbers for the roaster’s books but major capital investments for the farmers.

It’s a relatively small amount of money, but it’s money they couldn’t get otherwise; it’s money that could change their fortunes.

Cory Eldridge is Fresh Cup’s editor.

For a great resource for information on financing at origin, checkout the Council on Smallholder Agriculture Finance’s website at csaf.net

the group wanted less, they might be able to access micro-financing, but the problem is in the “missing middle” as it’s called by the Council on Smallholder Agricultural Finance, a group of eight financial organizations that includes Root Capital, which offer financing in the $25,000 to $2 million range. For the lack of what we’d call a small loan (what many café owners have put on credit cards), dozens of farmers are missing out on a life-altering increase in their coffee’s value.

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Café CROSSROADS

Grounds of Alexandria » Alexandria, New South Wales

By Ellie Bradley » Photos by Damian Flanagan

Guests of the Grounds can enjoy coffee roasted on site, paired with plates featuring vegetables, herbs, and fruits harvested directly from the gardens.

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n an industrial suburb of Sydney, where a warehouse and parking lot used to stand, the culinary wonderland called the Grounds of Alexandria spans nearly an acre. Lush gardens pervade the property, boasting vegetables, herbs, fruits, and flowers. When you walk onto the Grounds, you may be greeted

by Kevin Bacon, the pig in residence. You may see chickens, goats, and sheep—all while strolling through expertly manicured greens, sipping a latte, and pondering which eatery to visit (the venue boasts a café, restaurant, and barbecue).

But the menagerie of plants and animals isn’t to distract from bad coffee or substandard table service. It’s all part of a greater experience designed by the entrepreneurial team of Jack Hanna and Ramzey Choker.

Hanna started his coffee career as a teenager, spending time training in Canada before returning to Australia and joining the competitive barista circuit. After winning the 2007 World Latte Art Championships, he decided to launch his own coffee label. He met Choker in the process, forging a friendship that later evolved into a business partnership.

The Grounds of Alexandria opened in April of 2012. The original design didn’t include animals, or even gardens for that matter. The plan was to build a mid-sized café to showcase the coffee, then wholesale to other cafés in the area. But in the midst of building the café, Choker came to Hanna with an idea. “I have a nervous shudder whenever he says, ‘I have an idea,’” says Hanna, describing his panic when Choker first told him the plan to transform the old parking area into a garden and bring in chickens. Hanna agreed, and they haven’t looked back. “It turned out honestly to be one of the best things we’ve ever done.”

Hanna says that Australian coffee culture is so robust, simply having great coffee and great food doesn’t cut when you’re trying to launch a successful business. “We wanted to provide something else. And that something else was an experience.” They took advantage of the sprawling square footage they’d acquired—a rare opportunity in the city— and began transforming the old industrial warehouse into a pastoral escape.

Guests of the Grounds can enjoy coffee roasted on site, paired with plates featuring vegetables, herbs, and fruits harvested

directly from the gardens. The menu at the Potting Shed, the venue’s restaurant, features a selection of cocktails, three-course meals, and small plates. The Garden, a more casual dining area, offers fresh juices and Aussie-style barbecue, as well as pizzas baked in a clay silo.

The coffee program includes a roasting and education facility. Two twelve-kilo Probat roasters currently manage the demand for both the café and wholesale, while a warehouse nearby handles production for outside accounts. The café offers full table service, for both breakfast and lunch.

A 1971 La Marzocco GS three-group, customized and reconstructed by Espresso Parts, handles drink orders for the stay side, along with a selection of Mazzer Robur and Mythos One grinders. A three-group Synchro is the workhorse of the takeaway side, where guests can order drinks to sip as they wander the property. The café also boasts a filter coffee bar. Customers can choose preparations from Oji cold-drip towers, Aeropress, Kalita Waves, and a Steampunk.

Though the Grounds started with coffee as the plan, it’s clear that the collective experience at the Grounds is just as important as the coffee itself.

“We still bid on the Best of Panama auctions and we still buy direct,” Hanna says. “We still want to focus on amazing quality and amazing things that we serve—that’s just part of the bigger experience.”

He says that many cafés get caught up in the minutiae of extraction and roasting, forgetting that customers want coffee that tastes great without having to wait fifteen minutes for it. “People are so focused on detail that they miss the big picture.”

The big picture is certainly forefront of mind for the team at the Grounds. A designated staff member roves the property solely to interact with guests, inquiring about their experience and providing information about the venue’s offerings.

Visitors also have the opportunity to engage in educational classes offered by the Grounds, such as courses in cooking, gardening, and coffee. “Because our coffee culture is so strong in Australia, we have the most amount of domestic coffee machine sales in the world,” Hanna says. “We try and teach people how to make a great coffee at home.”

The Grounds will soon open a new café in downtown Sydney. Hanna says that rather than spending time planning, they allow their business to evolve through innovation. He says, “Great food and great coffee, ambience, and smells, and sounds—we touch upon every element to make someone’s experience here at the Grounds really unique and memorable.”

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DO YOU KNOW Tim Hill?

BY CORY ELDRIDGE

T

im Hill had been in North Carolina for less than a month in 2004 when a new friend mentioned he should come to a coffee tasting. Hill was working at a Starbucks, the same gig he’d had while going to school in Chicago. His manager at that first café had been really into coffee, and regularly schooled Hill on coffees and preparations, introducing him to just how complex coffee could be. His new friend had said to him, “You like coffee, you work at Starbucks, you should come check out this company I work for.”

Less than a month later, he was working on the production line at Counter Culture Coffee.

From bagging coffee, Hill moved into roasting and then into quality control and then into purchasing before taking his current role as the roaster’s coffee buyer and quality manager. As he progressed up the company’s ladder, he never really interviewed for the new jobs. “Even the production job was a marginal interview,” he says, laughing.

In all of these positions, there’s something that grabs him. “Every piece of the industry, and every piece that I have worked on at Counter Culture is a beautiful blend of hardcore thinking, creativity, and mindfulness but also very hands-on,” he says.

Now, he’s working on projects as varied as producing better natural coffees in central Africa, fighting the potato defect there, and using electronic color sorting and UV lights to improve the evaluation of coffee.

This interview has been edited for clarity and space.

YOU CAME OUT OF COLLEGE WITH A DEGREE IN FICTION AND FINE ARTS. HOW DID A PRODUCTION-LINE JOB KEEP YOUR ATTENTION?

I became interested in the different things I was bagging. It became, oh, you can tell the coffee that you’re bagging not just by the label, it looks different from another.

It was intriguing from the start. I never went into any of the positions thinking, “Yeah, this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.” But it kept being something that kept me interested.

P HOTO BY CH RIS TY BAUGH

DID A SENSE OF EXPLORATION REMAIN IN LATER JOBS?

I had some great mentors, some of the most interesting and best people. You look at Peter Giuliano, Kim Ionescu, Cindy Chang, people who have gone on, and during their time at Counter Culture were working on everything from barista competitions to really in-depth looks at sustainability and how coffee works on the agronomy side to the culture,

production, and facilitation of contracts. I was surrounded by people working on very different facets of coffee. I certainly love coffee and don’t see a future where I’m not doing something in coffee. It’s keeping me interested, keeping me engaged. You can keep digging that hole, keep gathering as much information as possible. There’s just no bottom.

HOW MANY OF THE POSITIONS THAT YOU’VE BEEN IN EXISTED WHEN YOU STARTED AT COUNTER CULTURE?

As we’ve grown, there are a lot more specialized jobs.

When I was bagging coffee, you’d go blend coffee for a little bit, or if the delivery driver wasn’t there you’d deliver coffee too. If it needed to be done, there was someone who wanted to do it. Today, we have people who have a single focus. But you can still see the possibility of making coffee a profession.

WAS THERE A MOMENT WHEN YOU REALIZED YOU WERE IN COFFEE FOR THE LONG HAUL, OR WAS IT A GRADUAL REALIZATION?

It’s been this gradual thing, and it continues to be. I get involved in projects. I tend to be mindful of what is going on in the industry, the big ideas and the big concepts. But I also really love working on these really finite problems or ideas that haven’t been fleshed out fully. Something I’m entrenched in is potato defect in Rwanda and Burundi.

Burundi was the first origin I was asked to source from.

I’m involved in the sourcing and purchasing of these coffees from this challenging origin that has lots of political issues, tons of infrastructure issues, and this defect that is unique and rare and totally unique in the world of food.

So I’m talking to people at the embassy, people in logistics and the business side, and I’ve been involved in research the past year. You can start a project that is a kernel and it becomes much more grand.

HOW HAS YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO COFFEE CHANGED?

A lot of what my job is today is trying to develop our supply chain. That means a lot more intense work with growers around the world. So I’m getting more and more entrenched on the supply side, what working with a producer looks like, how you make that long-term and sustainable, how you develop a good model for working with someone. I’ve been traveling to a lot of these places for seven or eight years now, but I still don’t have a firm understanding of theses origins or cultures. That just takes a lot of time.

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ome people don’t like coffee or tea. I don’t get it, but it’s true. Having a very focused menu comprising only coffee and tea—or even just coffee—may be desirable and cool, but it can be alienating for folks who would otherwise visit your café. Plus, sometimes one needs something more refreshing than iced coffee or iced tea.

Sometimes one needs something light and fizzy—like soda. I’m talking about scratch-made drinks that you can easily make yourself, using ingredients that you probably already have lying around your home or café.

In order to illustrate my methods, I created, on the fly, a few brand-new sodas as examples. I gave myself a rule: I could only use ingredients that I already had on hand and that the average café might have as well. I could tell you how to make one of the Rose Establishment’s signature sodas called the Amethyst (a mixture of blue pea flower, gentian root, wild cherry bark, turbinado sugar, soda water, Scrappy’s Orleans bitters mist, and edible calendula petals), but you probably don’t have many of the ingredients. You can get started with as little as soda water, sugar, and a loose-leaf tea or tisane, like I did.

First, I made a syrup. I picked Art of Tea’s blend of rosehip and hibiscus because it has a potent flavor and a pleasant tartness. Unlike a traditional 1:1 simple syrup, I used a 1:2 sugar to water ratio. Otherwise, the drink would end up being unbearably sweet. I simmered 20 grams of the tisane in 500 grams water for ten minutes. I added 250 grams turbinado sugar and simmered for ten more minutes. I let it cool, strained it with a fine-mesh strainer, and bottled it. I mixed an ounce of rosehip and hibiscus syrup with ten ounces soda water, topped it with ice, and enjoyed an instant summertime soda.

You can use this same recipe with practically any ingredient as the base flavor, keeping your sodas very basic.

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With a couple more ingredients, though, you can create some unique and impressive flavors. SerendipiTea’s Remember Rosemary blend (rosemary, gunpowder green tea, orange peel, lemon myrtle) was begging to become a soda. I made a syrup using the same recipe as the rosehip and hibiscus and mixed it with soda water. It was good, but it didn’t pop—the green and herbal blend lacked the tartness inherent in the rosehip and hibiscus before it. Every summer at the Rose we can and preserve a bunch of local produce, and we use citric acid to adjust the pH. I had previously made a 50 percent solution with this powdered citric acid and I added ten drops of it to the rosemary soda. It instantly balanced out the flavors and upped

the refreshment factor. It was still one step from perfection, so I added a couple dashes of my go-to flavor enhancer: bitters. Scrappy’s grapefruit bitters, to be exact.

We could stop here in terms of complexity, interchanging the base flavor and bitters ad infinitum. We would be ignoring one obvious on-hand ingredient, though: coffee. Coffee, namely espresso, has such intense and complex flavor, which can provide a savory element to more complicated sweet drinks. I had a crazy idea to recreate the flavor of cherry cola—using only ingredients that I already had. I got the idea from Jordon Strang, one of our baristas who created a coffee cola the year prior. His recipe used several herbal blends that we no longer carry, so I had to start from scratch.

Crafting a finely balanced concoction of flavors might not be how you’re able to spend an afternoon, but you can still create unique, interesting sodas for your customers. Sodas are a great chance to see what crazy flavors your favorite syrup company has to offer.

MONIN offers flavors like acai and even a basil concentrate that would make fantastic sodas. DAVINCI has a peach chipotle that could be paired with a tea concentrate to great effect. 1883 has a roasted red pepper that would shock (in a good way) any soda lover. And TORANI’S Signature line could stock a line of soda fountains.

If you’ve been intrigued by a syrup but avoided it because it didn’t pair with espresso, now’s your chance to bring it in.

I swiped 50 grams of dried tart cherries from our kitchen and chopped them up and tossed them in a saucepan, I added one split and scraped vanilla pod, 10 grams wild cherry bark from my weird ingredients kit, three star anise from my chai kit, and 500 grams water. I simmered it for ten minutes, added 400 grams turbinado sugar, and simmered it for ten more minutes.

After cooling and straining, I had the barista pull me two espressos—60 grams total of Four Barrels’ Friendo Blendo. I mixed an ounce and a half of this syrup with two dashes of Workhorse Rye’s aromatic coffee bitters, ten drops citric acid, ten ounces soda water, and ice. I nearly wept. It tasted exactly like cherry cola.

This is something that you can easily do, and modify to your heart’s content. If you were to serve something with bitters and citric acid, you can add them to the syrup itself instead of adding them to each individual drink—you’ll have to figure out how much of each, since I didn’t get that far with the above examples. If you feel like squeezing fresh lemons every morning instead of using citric acid, go for it—our barista Austin Wright did this in a lemonade soda using Scrappy’s lavender bitters, Workhorse Rye aromatic coffee bitters, and the Remember Rosemary syrup. Whether you use four ingredients or twelve, whipping up a soda or two is a painless way to refresh and impress your guests—especially when you already have the tools right in front of you.

If you’re wary of unleashing an unknown drink on your customers, every syrup company has a raft of tested recipes that are easy to produce in a café. Once you get your feet under you, you’ll be mixing and matching flavors and making something no one anywhere else offers.

Bringing tea to these sodas simply requires brewing concentrates of two-, three-, or more times the amount of leaf of a normal brew. Play with herbals and refreshing oolongs and greens for the best results.

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Y

SQUEEZE through here to get inside.

UNCONVE NTIONAL REAL EST THE LUXU ATE CAN L RY OF STO EAD TO U RAGE, BU NIQUE BU COMMUN T SUCCES SINESS O ITY, AND SFULLY D PPORTUN GETTING E ITIES. THE S IG N ED AN EX COMFORT SE PINT-S PERIENCE ABLE IN T IZED CAF IGHT QUA FOR CUST ÉS SACRIF RTERS. OMERS FO ICED CUSED ON COFFEE, August 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine 46

A

n old freight elevator.

An unused alley between buildings. A tiny house.

An ideal space for a new café might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about these locations, but for the owners of pocket-sized coffee shops, non-traditional venues offer a certain charm that you can’t get in a regular-sized retail space.

The design of a small café brings a unique set of challenges. In addition to the usual questions—how the bar will flow, where to put the point-ofservice, where customers will pick up drinks—you also have a much more practical set of questions to answer, like do you even have room for a threegroup espresso machine?

Maybe you can only fit a two-group onto your bar.

You may have dreams of an extensive signature drink menu, but where will you put the crushed-ice machine and the bottles of house-made syrups? Do you have room for a dishwasher to wash plates for the food you plan to offer?

Successful execution of a pocket café requires a bit of strategy, patience, and at times acrobatics. There are benefits, though. A small square footage can be a great opportunity to enter the café world with reduced risk.

Overhead for a small space is typically lower: it requires fewer employees, energy consumption is lower, and rent is less expensive.

Larger cafés have the luxury of designing layouts without triaging equipment like ice makers, refrigeration, or dish washers. With limited real estate behind bar, decisions on equipment and layout become crucial to workflow. Pocket cafés (small spaces that can still accommodate customers indoors) offer practicality and charm for staff and customers, but require bespoke solutions in order to be successful. Here you’ll meet five cafés in three countries that made the most of their small stature.

ABOUT LIFE COFFEE BREWERS: The owners of Onibus Coffee converted an old bento shop into a pint-sized café in Tokyo.

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

47

ABOUT LIFE COFFEE BREWERS, TOKYO Coffee in the Spotlight Many tiny-café owners come to run small shops by coincidence or convenience. The team at Onibus Coffee in Tokyo opened their newest (and busiest) café in a closed-down bento restaurant in the Shibuya district. The location serves as Onibus’s multi-roaster shop. Though owner Atsushi Sakao wasn’t looking for a new location, when he saw the space he thought, “This is the kind of destination that should be a coffee place.”

Sakao likes the intimacy of About Life because it allows the coffee to shine. A window wraps around two sides of the shop, allowing customers easy interaction with the baristas and a view of the action behind the bar. Sakao says that with a small shop, customers get to see every aspect of the preparation—a vantage point that’s difficult to offer in a larger café.

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August 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

PH OTO S C OURTESY O F ONIBUS CO FFEE

ABOUT LIFE

With only nine square meters for their baristas and customers (less than 100 square feet), About Life makes the most of their space. Eliminating any sort of kitchen from the layout freed baristas to focus on the coffee and the customers.

All drinks are served in take-away cups, and pastries are delivered pre-packed from a selection of local bakers. Sakao prioritized the espresso machine and grinders, which meant having a really small refrigerator and ice maker. Fortunately, the shop has a full-size fridge in the back storage area, which helps meet the cold storage needs.

Two baristas work the bar, which includes three pour-over stands, a twogroup La Marzocco Linea, and a Mahlkönig EK 43. Of the 250 customers that come through the shop each day, only three to four can fit inside at a time.

Benches on the outside expand the shop’s seating, and hooks for hanging bikes make it convenient for commuters to stop in for a coffee.

“Having a small space is more interactive,” says Sakao. “When you’re really close, you can speak more easily and there’s more conversation with the barista.”

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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GRADE COFFEE

Dishes are a big deal when you don’t have much room to store them. Brooklyn’s Grade Coffee decided to stock only one size of ceramic cup, offering customers cortados and espresso to stay, otherwise accommodating drinks in disposable cups. “Even before we had a space I was pretty set on wanting it to be very, very specific,” says Grace Lowman, Grade’s co-owner. Grade occupies a portion of a barber shop, with an entry from the shop, and a door and serving window that open onto the street. Three points of entry keep the shop connected to the surrounding community, which is crucial to the survival of a small café in the city. Lowman says they do a lot of business through the front window, serving passing customers on bikes and with dogs. “New York is just so centered around speed and efficiency,” she says.

Having a multi-purpose window is a common theme among pint-sized cafés, functioning both as a service window and expanding the shop boundaries outdoors.

Lowman and her partner were deliberate in the design of the bar, taping out the floor a variety of ways to find what optimized their ability to serve customers without sacrificing too much storage space. Lowman says that keeping their shop stocked while still allowing workspace has been quite the tricky little puzzle.

Even with deliberate design, café elements will inevitably be overlooked. For Grade, one of those oversights was ice. “We were designing the space in the dead of winter, so ice was not first on the brain,” Lowman says. Since the

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August 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

layout didn’t leave room for an ice-maker and freezer, Grade buys ice from a local restaurant and keeps enough for cold-draft brews in a cooler behind the bar. The other quirk of their small bar? A three-compartment sink, hidden under the espresso machine. “It works best if you sit on a little step stool while you wash dishes,” Lowman says, joking that it’s just a part of Manhattan living.

TOKYO SMOKE, TORONTO Windows of Opportunity Tokyo Smoke occupies the passage between two buildings in Toronto’s Borough of Stafford, a creative corridor on the west side of town. “The space sat unused and dormant for years,” says Geoffrey Degrasse, head of operations and people. Over the course of a few months, the alley between the buildings was converted into a coffee bar and retail shop. The exposed exterior brick of the two buildings serves as its interior walls, a metal roof hangs overhead, and a rolling-style warehouse door opens to show its street-facing entrance. Inside of this makeshift structure, the café runs out of a refurbished shipping container, a cube measuring ten feet on each side. Shelves were built into the walls, including a condiment shelf made by drilling holes into the back door of the shipping container. It’s as strange a setup we’ve ever seen.

But it works.

Like many other tiny cafés, Tokyo Smoke takes advantage of the large window that spans the street-facing side of the bar. The U-shaped bar allows baristas to easily serve

P HOTOS C O UR TESY OF GRA DE C O FFEE (THIS PAGE), AND TO K YO SM O KE (O PP O SITE PAG E).

GRADE COFFEE, BROOKLYN Make It Work

TOKYO SMOKE

customers who are either outside or inside, with the espresso machine centrally located and cold storage tucked neatly underneath the counter.

Though cutting-edge design was a priority in the build-out, Degrasse says that the original layout wasn’t planned by people with coffee backgrounds.

“That’s become evident as we’ve grown,” he says. The original design only included one countertop opening to accommodate the café’s many tubes and cords.

“That’s a big problem that’s led us to have blocks in the waste pipe before and lack of flow for the water supply into the espresso machine,” Degrasse says.

A second location in downtown Toronto gave them the opportunity to work out some of the quirks that arose from working in a condensed area. Like planning ample space for power cables and waste tubes.

The team at Tokyo Smoke continues to tweak their layout to find what works best, such as moving the condiment bar to the back of the shop to keep customers exploring their retail area (and keeping the cream cool) on warmer days. “There’s something to be said about being flexible in your design,” Degrasse says. “If you can build in some form of potential for changing things in the future, that does add a lot of value.”

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

51

Carissa and Don Niemeyer are co-owners of Story Coffee Company in Colorado Springs. Their journey into the world of miniature cafés was more intentional than most. Having run two different cafés in Portland, the couple set their sights on opening a café in Colorado, near family. They opted for an adventurous route home, putting their shop up for sale and moving their family into a 2000 Volkswagen Rialta RV (with about 100 square feet for the four of them), planning to spend a month or two touring coffee shops before they moved back. A couple months turned into two years by the time their shop finally sold, giving the Niemeyers ample time to learn a thing or two about spartan living.

“That was the key to the whole thing,” Niemeyer says.

“We became accidental minimalists.” The tiny house movement was gaining popularity, and they realized it had the answer to what they were looking for in a café. Niemeyer

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August 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

says the idea of a small space appealed to them because of lower overhead and less need for staff.

Story Coffee Company was constructed in a tiny house that measures 8 ½ feet wide, 13 ½ feet tall, and 20 feet long—standard dimensions for tiny houses, which allows them to be pulled as a trailer. They recruited interior designer Robin Pasley to help create a shop that still felt spacious, even with only 160 square feet inside.

“When you have a limited storage space, you make decisions about what you actually need,” Niemeyer says. Story Coffee maximizes their vertical storage, a trick learned from the tiny-house community. The water heater is stored near the ceiling, while items that require ready access are organized in cubbies and shelves around the espresso bar.

The design prioritizes space and flow for customers.

Doors on both sides of the trailer direct traffic toward the register, then out onto a deck with additional seating. Niemeyer also “thought vertically” when it came to indoor seating—three bar stools keep guests seated at a higher level, preventing limbs from getting in the way of customers waiting in line.

STORY C OFFEE CO M PANY P HOTO S BY KATE C REATIV E PHOTOG RAP HY & DESIGN; HALF P INT P HOTOS B Y CORY E L D RI D GE

STORY COFFEE COMPANY

STORY COFFEE COMPANY, COLORADO SPRINGS Making Space for Customers

HALF PINT CAFÉ

HALF PINT CAFÉ, PORTLAND Playing Choreographer Customers need to feel a connection with a business to keep coming back—whether through thoughtful design, phenomenal coffee, or exceptional service. But baristas need a working space that allows them to curate a noteworthy experience.

Marco Johnson opened Half Pint Café in November of 2011. Because of timing with permits, he had only a matter of days to get the space up and running, allowing little time to customize equipment or bar layout. He decided to keep the café running on a less-than-ideal layout for the sake of revenue. “Initially you have to make do with what you have,” he says, “and then when you make money you can change that.”

In Portland’s Buckman neighborhood, Half Pint Café occupies the portion of the bottom two floors of a brick building where the freight elevator used to be. Johnson made minor adjustments as the business grew, then coordinated a major remodel late last year. The idea was to open up the bar and give baristas their own production area, without having to reach over one another.

Johnson drew on his years of bartending experience to build a bar that was efficient for two baristas. The new design has less refrigeration space than the original layout and slightly less storage, but a much better flow for customers and employees. The barista making drinks has ready access to everything. The barista near the register is closest to the pass-through area, easily able to leave the counter to bus dishes, make a run to the back storage area, or assist customers with retail purchases.

Johnson constantly thinks about the customer experience. “Every month or so I’ll come in and just stand here as a customer,” he says. He removed shelving along the shop’s walls during the remodel, giving guests more room as they walk into the shop. High ceilings, a wall of windows, and doors on opposing sides of the shop give the appearance of more space. But multiple points of entry can also cause confusion. “We have two doors for opportunity and confusion,” Johnson says. He emphasizes the importance of greeting guests and offering guidance. Especially in a small area, customers can be quickly alienated if they aren’t greeted. The careful design required to successfully execute a pocket café leaves a strongly personal touch—ensuring that customers feel invited into the space you’ve created is critical for success.

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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August 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

As coffee and China begin their courtship,

Independent Chinese café owners,

international chains attempt to sell a café

meanwhile, are remaking café culture

experience that reflects Chinese culture.

into something inherently Chinese.

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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M

y first thoughts of coffee when I moved to China were ones of longing.

It was my first time in Asia, and I arrived with a job at a city university and a stubborn commitment to experiencing the culture in as pure a form as I could—forsaking a few of my favorite comforts from home that threatened to dilute the Chineseness of my life there. First off: no coffee. At least not in my apartment every morning. No, I would save it for a treat in the newly opened café on campus, or even the Starbucks downtown. I would learn to wake up to green tea.

After four months of private deprivation, a university administrator sent an emissary to my door with a small, friendly Christmas present: a neatly wrapped bottle of instant Nescafé. My will was broken, and I drank.

As soon as I’d washed the bitterness out of my mouth from my first and last cup of instant coffee, I took the hour-long bus ride to the foreign supermarket, in the city’s most upscale shopping mall, and bought a french press. The only bean option was $40-a-pound Lavazza, roasted and ground in Italy. It wasn’t cheap or particularly convenient going back to my morning indulgence, and it certainly wasn’t an exercise in localism, but I found it was possible, and it’s becoming more so every day.

The Chinese are not typically lovers of coffee, especially not of fresh roasted or specialty coffee, and certainly not as a morning habit. Of the coffee purchased in China’s grocery stores, 98 percent is instant, with the most popular kind being the three-in-one: granulated robusta, powdered creamer, sweetener, and perhaps some other flavoring to cover any remaining coffee taste, all blended in one container. But after more than a decade of corporate pushing and slow evolution of markets and tastes, craft coffee and coffee shop culture have begun to catch on.

China has had its own coffee farming industry for more than a century, started when a French missionary to

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COMPANION COFFEE: Enjoy a latte with a furry friend at 36 th Story in Suzhou, China.

the southern province of Yunnan introduced the crop in the late 1800s, and the industry is now rapidly expanding along with national consumption. The International Coffee

The beans grown in Yunnan are all arabica and of middling quality: too good for local consumption, but not good enough for specialty roasters abroad. A large percentage is exported

The more expensive a cup of American-branded coffee is, the more a status symbol it becomes, and the more people want it.

Organization estimates China now grows more beans than Kenya and Tanzania combined.

But the production, culture, and business of coffee in China are far from being a cohesive subject.

to Germany. Most of what the Chinese drink is imported from Vietnam (the world’s biggest robusta producer), just over the border from Yunnan Province.

After the first Starbucks outside the US opened in Tokyo in 1996,

Communist China was just a few rounds of international expansion behind, with a store in Beijing in 1999. The corporate giant, alternately reviled and revered by coffee drinkers around the world, is a sort of gauge for the status of coffee culture in any market, from national to neighborhood. They won’t go to places that don’t have at least a sprouting taste for craft coffee, but they are shy of pushing into markets with well developed, independent coffee scenes (the very first Starbucks in Italy is being painstakingly planned to open next year).

Now, after seventeen years in China, Starbucks controls 60 percent of the café market, and about one and a half new Starbucks open in the country every day.

From the International Coffee Organization’s trade statistics, it’s plain to see how the growing taste for coffee in China over the past decade mirrors the same change in Japan

in the 1960s and 1970s. Japan’s full embrace of coffee took several decades, but the islands are now the fourth largest coffee consumer in the world. China trails in seventeenth place, and is only so high on the list because of its population, with the average Chinese citizen drinking only five or six cups in a year. Imagine the demand when the figure reaches one cup a week, let alone a cup or two every morning.

While the vast majority of Chinese only drink instant coffee and only drink it at home, if at all, a specialty market is slowly taking hold and expanding the market for fresh, highquality arabica beans. The shops come in two distinct versions: the corporate and the local.

Starbucks is well known for specializing its shops to fit local tastes, which in China translates to easternstyle architecture for some of their stores, and local menu offerings like green tea frappuccinos and red bean

scones. It’s a genius move for the bottom line, and undeniably endearing to the local market, where lots of Chinese people visiting coffee shops don’t want coffee at all. They want tea, sugary drinks, and, most of all, a place to socialize.

Still, rather sheepishly one afternoon, soon after moving to a new city in China, I visited my neighborhood’s newest coffee shop during its opening week.

Inside, the freshly texturized, cool gray walls and gray stone flooring matched the soupy, smoggy winter sky. Homey Christmas classics played at a just-right volume, despite it being early November. The young customers were comfortably spread out, peering into laptop and cell phone screens alone or in pairs, looking busy. The flat white I ordered was nothing exceptional, but it was everything I had come to hope for from espresso in Asia. It tasted just like it would in any Starbucks, anywhere in the world.

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MAX IS HERE: The sign outside 36 th Story ironically directs customers to Costa and Starbucks. The menu is in Chinese, a rarity for a product associated with the West. Owner Max Wang pours latte art (bottom right).

And that, sadly, is exactly where I was: any Starbucks, anywhere in the world.

That the brand new store was in the massive, industrial city of Suzhou was a nearly irrelevant detail, despite the tweaked menu.

Starbucks plainly states on its website that it is “creating a coffee culture in a traditional tea-drinking society.”

The honesty of a statement about such contrived cultural change brings into focus the global effort that goes into drinking Starbucks in China: American branding, Italian espresso machines, Central American and African beans, Chinese baristas. It all seems like proof that globalization has won; China is Westernized. But coffee culture in China doesn’t always mean cultural homogenization.

Across the street from the new Starbucks in Suzhou, I soon discovered a spacious coffee shop called 36th Story, owned and run by a thirtythree-year-old Chinese man named Max Wang. He has a small blue rose tattooed on his forearm, a clear sign he’s part of China’s counterculture.

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He plays smooth jazz and R & B, mostly in English, and offers free Wi-Fi, just like you’d find in most coffee shops around the world, but his menu has no English. This is a rarity for a coffee shop here, where English lettering carries hip cachet. The

Max fell in love with coffee after seven years living in Germany. He’s amassed a collection of over 1,000 coffee cups, pots, grinders, and roasters, purchased from all over Europe. And his vision is more about passion than commerce. “I don’t want to have more

Max’s shop is undeniably Chinese—an authentically local coffee shop, in a country that is only beginning to discover for itself what that means. decor mixes European elegance with the classic, kitschy Chinese modern, including giant teddy bears stationed in the chairs throughout the shop.

Max estimates the popularity of coffee in China has doubled in the past five years, and import figures show his estimate could even be a bit conservative. “That’s why so many Starbucks come to China,” he tells me.

shops,” he tells me. “I just want to open a coffee museum.” Here in a grimy, provincial Chinese city that doesn’t quite yet share his passion, a museum to coffee would harken back to a purer, less commercial kind of globalization.

Max says the twenty recipes he’s crafted are the reason for his success.

(He’s moved his shop twice now because he ran out of room at the

first two, and his happy customers have followed him, despite the neighborhood competition.) While Starbucks injects typically Chinese flavors into the same drinks it sells everywhere in the world, Max concocts complex, intricately layered ones, with flavors such as blue curaçao, peach, mango, and rose, with shots of espresso, and layers of cream and sugar. His drinks are a Chinese take on coffee, not Starbucks’s take on China.

Still, he hasn’t abandoned the foundations for his market. My espresso tasted fresh and perfectly prepared—not bitter, watery, or simply fake, the way coffee in China often ends up when it finds its way to a cup.

Max is not worried about Starbucks in the least, he tells me with a quiet certainty. He even has a new sign outside, by the front door: “Starbucks is that way, Costa is the other way, Max is here. (My cups are smaller and my prices are higher.)”

But in truth, his prices are on par with the competition. The price for a drink at any of the chains, around thirty to thirty-five yuan, converts to five to six US dollars. Coffee still being viewed as an unusual, foreign beverage gives Starbucks a golden opportunity to market itself as an aspirational brand.

The more expensive a cup of American-branded coffee is, the more a status symbol it becomes, and the more people want it.

Max seems to have an instinctive understanding of this concept, and what it means in his country.

“It’s hard for me to explain in English,” he tells me, choosing his words carefully. “Starbucks is a machine. That machine is only good for Starbucks. But here, people are more important.”

36th Story was the first shop I found that excelled at coffee and felt authentic, both true to its surroundings and dedicated to its craft. Despite selling mostly coffee in the land of tea, Max’s shop is undeniably Chinese—an authentically local coffee shop, in a country that is only beginning to discover for itself what that means.

By creating the culture, as it claims, Starbucks is also making way for independent shops like Max’s to be successful, an economic phenomenon originally noted in the US and dubbed the Starbucks Effect.

Independent coffee shops near a Starbucks make more money, not less.

With both the foreign corporate brands and the locals charging the same price for a product that tastes about the same to customers who are just developing a taste for coffee, it’s anyone’s guess what the future of coffee in China may look like, but the effects of this country’s tastes will surely be felt throughout the industry.

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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, Y T L ME , Y P S CRI Y L B BUB T

THE SALA MAND ER BROI LER is a mainstay of cafés bringing better food to their customers.

BY CORY ELDRIDGE

here’s a secret weapon available to the café owner who wants to expand hot meal offerings beyond just toast or paninis but doesn’t have the space or desire to stuff an oven into their bar. It’s called a salamander, and it’s a wondrous thing.

For all that it can do—and it can do a lot—a salamander is simply a broiler. The heating elements, which can be natural gas, propane, or electric, sit above the food on an open-air rack and heat or cook items very fast. A lowpowered salamander is called a cheese melter, and that’s

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August 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

about all it does. Robust salamanders, though, are used by steakhouses to cook ribeyes.

At Upper Left Roasters in Portland, this salamander is their small kitchen’s workhorse. Co-owner Katherine Harris wanted to offer customers more than cold sandwiches and pastries, but a full kitchen was unfeasible. With only a set of toasters, an induction hotplate, and a salamander (none of which require a hood or fire suppression), the café serves a lovely menu featuring toasts, hot sandwiches, and more. The salamander melts cheese, warms spreads, heats maple syrup, and broils prep ingredients, like poblano

peppers pulsed into a schmear. When Upper Left was being built out, Harris made sure an outlet was wired for an oven. “At this point we’ve realized we may never need the oven,” she says.

“Heating a dish changes the dish,” says Harris, and the sandwiches in the salamander here prove that. One is a house-poached tuna salad on miche bread with tomato and cheddar, and next to it is a croissant with emmantaler cheese and mustard that will be finished with a piece of smoked ham. Those sandwiches could be very nice cold, but who would choose that over warmed?

A salamander requires a 240-volt outlet to accommodate its heating elements. If counter space is limited in your café, most salamanders can be mounted on the wall. While the rack on every salamander can be moved up or down, the most versatile offer on-the-fly adjustment, which allows a cook to go from warming a tapenade one minute to scorching the cheese on a french onion soup the next. (On this salamander, the heating elements move up and down.)

If melted cheese and hot spreads have been on your menu wish list, a salamander’s the tool to make all your bubbly, crispy food dreams come true.

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

61

Counter INTELLIGENCE STRAIGHT CHILLIN’ It may be hot outside, but Califia’s new line of Nitro Cold Brew is cool and refreshing. Packaged in sleek, recyclable, on-the-go aluminum bottles, the line marries creamy almond and macadamia milks with cold-brew made from a specially curated, signature blend of direct-sourced beans. An infused nitrogen jolt brings out the natural sweetness. Choose from three on-trend flavors: Latte, Mocha, and New Orleans. califiafarms.com

MAKE IT WORX

I’M A SLAYER FOR U Slayer

F+B Therapy built

released

its

Barista Worx

newest machine at the

coffee lab and train-

World of Coffee event

ing center to produce baristas with exceptional skills

in Dublin last month.

in coffee making, interpersonal communication, and

The machine boasts

customer service. The fully equipped lab includes

innovative steam technology that seeks to develop

Cimbali and FAEMA espresso machines, a sample

milk flavor. The Slayer Steam features the patent-

roaster, batch brewer, and a selection of grinders.

pending Vaporizer to create dry steam at custom

Baristas certified through F+B can connect with em-

temperatures, allowing coffee professionals to coax

ployers through the Worx portal barista exchange.

out unseen levels of gloss, sweetness, and creami-

fnbtherapy.com

ness. Available in two- and three-group models.

the

slayerespresso.com

LESS IS MORE The new Max on-demand grinder from

Want to make a profit in the

Dalla Corte is compact, simple, intui-

coffee business? Ed Arvidson

tive, and efficient. At just sixteen centi-

is here to show you the way. A

meters wide, the mighty, little grinder

twenty-three-year veteran con-

is ideal for single-origin coffees, alter-

sultant to the specialty coffee

native blends, and small spaces. Max

industry, Arvidson’s book, How

automatically recognizes the dose to

to Get Profitable in the Coffee

be ground and keeps the portafilter in

Business, reveals tried and true methods for maxi-

place during grinding, leaving the user

mizing your business profitability. The e-book in-

free to move on to other tasks in the

cludes templates for forms, policies, and planning.

prep process. dallacorte.com

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MONEY IN THE BANK

August 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

coffeebizhelp.com

» People & Products «

LET’S TALK MÉXICO Registration is now open for the thirteenth edition of Let’s Talk Coffee Global. This year’s event takes place October 13–16 at the CasaMagna Mariott in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. With the theme of “Prospering in the New Reality,” Let’s Talk Coffee Mexico will explore how the industry can collaborate to tackle challenging social, economic, and environmental issues faced in 2016. letstalkcoffee.org

COFFEE INSPIRATION

WHAT’S FOR LUNCH? Ignited through the

Coffee Fest is proud

personal passion of

to unveil the new Food

company founder

Integration Lab, set to

Joe Behm, Behmor recently launched Behmor In-

debut at Coffee Fest

spired, a humanitarian program connecting brewers

Anaheim. Each of the three-hour workshops will

and roasters directly to coffee farmers in Central

explore the basics of what it takes to successfully

America. The program allows many farmers to taste

add a culinary program to their coffee shop. Ses-

their coffee for the first time, and seeks to improve

sions address the business side of creating a menu,

soil and growing conditions to help farmers earn a

including pricing, labor, initial investment, and cost

better living for their harvest. behmor.com/behmor-

of goods. coffeefest.com

inspired

COLD AND GRUMPY

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

Café

Leonor Gaviña-Valls and the

Brooklyn-based

Gaviña family were honored

Grumpy announced the

with the SCAA’s 2016 Life-

launch of their bottled

time

cold brew. The ready-to-

The

Achievement nation’s

Award.

largest

mi-

nority-owned family coffee

drink cold-brew comes in

ten-ounce

bottles

roaster, the Gaviñas have been leading producers

with no milk or added sweetener. This is the first

of high-quality and great-tasting coffee for gen-

bottled beverage release by Café Grumpy, boasting

erations. Leonor is a licensed Q grader and actively

the café’s signature orange hue. The cold-brew is

works to improve the quality of coffee and set indus-

available on-site at Café Grumpy and at select retail-

try standards and practices through several organi-

ers in the New York area. cafegrumpy.com

zations. gavina.com

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

63

Trade Show & Events CALENDAR AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

AUGUST 17–20 IRAN COFFEE & TEA EXPO Tehran coffeeteaexpo.ir

SEPTEMBER 14–17 GOLDEN BEAN NORTH AMERICA Portland goldenbeannorthamerica.com

AUGUST 18–21 ROASTERS GUILD RETREAT Delavan, Wisconsin roastersguild.org

SEPTEMBER 16–18 NEW YORK COFFEE FESTIVAL New York City newyorkcoffeefestival.com

AUGUST 28–30 WESTERN FOODSERVICE & HOSPITALITY EXPO Los Angeles westernfoodexpo.com

SEPTEMBER 22–24 BIG TEA IN TEXAS/ NORTH AMERICAN TEA CONFERENCE San Antonio, Texas teausa.org

SEPTEMBER

SEPTEMBER 7–9 COTECA HAMBURG Hamburg, Germany coteca-hamburg.com/en

SEPTEMBER 10–11 COFFEE AND CHOCOLATE EXPO San Juan, Puerto Rico coffeeandchocolateexpo.com

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August 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

SEPTEMBER 25–26 CANADIAN COFFEE AND TEA SHOW Vancouver coffeeteashow.ca

SEPTEMBER 27–29 FLORIDA RESTAURANT AND LODGING SHOW Orlando flrestaurantandlodgingshow.com

» 2016 Coffee & Tea Trade Shows, Classes & Competitions «

SEPTEMBER

SEPTEMBER 30–OCTOBER 2 COFFEE FEST ANAHEIM Anaheim coffeefest.com

OCTOBER

OCTOBER 13–16 LET’S TALK COFFEE Puerto Vallarta, Mexico letstalkcoffee.org

OCTOBER 17–20 MOSCOW COFFEE & TEA EXPO Moscow expocoffeetea.ru/en

OCTOBER 20–22 TRIESTESPRESSO EXPO Trieste, Italy triestespresso.it

Fresh Cup Magazine « freshcup.com

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ADVERTISER Index Go to freshcup.com/resources and click on “Fresh Cup Advertisers” to view the Advertiser Index and the Websites listed below.

66

ADVERTISER

CONTACT

ONLINE

ASHE

844.722.4968

ashellc.com

14

Barista Pro Shop

866.PRO.LATTE (776.5288)

baristaproshop.com/ad/fresh

21

Bunn

800.637.8606

bunn.com/refresh

Café Femenino Foundation

800.791.1181

coffeecan.org

Cappuccine

800.511.3127

cappuccine.net

Chocolate Fish Coffee Roasters

916.451.5181

chocolatefishcoffee.com

Coffee Fest

800.232.0083

coffeefest.com

Coffee Shop Manager

800.750.3947

coffeeshopmanager.com

36

DaVinci Gourmet

800.640.6779

davincigourmet.com

4

Florida Restaurant & Lodging Show

203.242.8124

flrestaurantandlodgingshow.com

65

Fresh Cup Magazine

503.236.2587

freshcup.com

Gaviña Gourmet Coffee

800.428.4627

gavina.com

13

Ghirardelli Chocolate

800.877.9338

ghirardelli.com/maximo

67

Golden Bean

310.266.2827

goldenbean.com

Gosh That’s Good! Brand

888.848.GOSH (4674)

goshthatsgood.com

68

Holy Kakow

503.484.8316

holykakow.com

25

Huhtamaki/Impresso

800.244.6382

impressocup.com

13

Java Jacket

800.208.4128

javajacket.com

57

Josuma Coffee Company

650.366.5453

josuma.com

37

Let’s Talk Coffee/Sustainable Harvest

503.235.1119

letstalkcoffee.org

17

Monin Gourmet Flavorings

855.FLAVOR1 (352.8671)

monin.com

Mountain Cider Co.

800.483.2416

mountaincider.com

Pacific Foods

503.692.9666

pacificfoods.com/foodservice

RetailMugs.com

970.222.9559

retailmugs.com

59

Routin 1883

800.467.7142

1883.com

49

Sea Island Coffee

44.207.735.4473

seaislandcoffee.com

51

SelbySoft

800.454.4434

selbysoft.com

17

SerendipiTea

888.TEA.LIFE (832.5433)

serendipitea.com

59

Toddy

970.493.0788

toddycafe.com/schooling

21

Vessel Drinkware

855.883.7735

vesseldrinkware.com

48

Your Brand Café

866.566.0390

yourbrandcafe.com

51

Zojirushi America

800.264.6270

zojirushi.com

August 2016 » Fresh Cup Magazine

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