INDUSTRY PROFILE
On the grid Toby’s Estate Coffee Roasters has developed a new tool to focus on aligning expectations and making coffee tasting more accessible.
Toby’s Estate uses its grid tool to align the expectations of its staff and customers.
T
asting coffee can be intimidating to people new to the industry, especially if what they taste is different to what someone more experienced is describing. This can cause problems if the barista, café owner, and roaster are not aligned on what to expect from a coffee. Realising this, Toby’s Estate Coffee Roasters looked into what it could do to simplify the process. Head of Coffee Nich Rae says while flavour is subjective, most people can agree on its intensity. “If I say I’m tasting florals and strawberries, but you taste chocolate and apples, we can’t say the other is wrong. What we can agree on is whether the intensity of acidity and flavour is high or low, and that goes for finish and mouthfeel as well,” Nich says. “In the coffee industry, one of the hardest things to achieve is delivering on expectations – not only to customers and consumers, but also to your café partners. Even with other roasters, there’s expectations of certain coffees or blends. Taste is very subjective, so we need to align what we expect and
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experience without telling other people they’re wrong.” Focusing on intensity instead of flavour descriptors, Toby’s Estate has developed a tasting grid ranking acidity, flavour, finish, and mouthfeel on a scale of one to eight. Filling out the grid creates a shape that can be compared to others. “You don’t need to be a skilled barista to understand those four characteristics. People feel more comfortable talking about the coffee if they can just pick a number out of eight to rank the intensity. Then we can start having better conversations about how we got there, what we’re tasting, and help each other align,” Nich says. “Rather than getting stuck on things like ‘why aren’t I tasting strawberry?’, people start asking better questions about how to understand what they’re tasting and then change the extraction or the roasting for better results.” Toby’s Estate has used the grid system behind the scenes for more than a year, testing its efficacy before sharing it with the wider community. A grid shape has been made for each of Toby’s Estate’s blends and individual coffees in each blend to ensure each roast is fulfilling its role. This has
helped align Toby’s Estate’s roasteries – in New South Wales, Western Australia, and the Philippines – on what to expect from their coffees week in, week out. “When I was travelling around Indonesia and the Philippines, I noticed they wanted to improve their coffee. We had to figure out how we were going to do that without going back and forth every week,” Nich says. “We had an intensive session with the Philippines team around the grid. Then, they would taste their coffee, fill out the grid, and send their coffee with the grid attached to us. We compared it to our grid and talked through it afterwards. Their coffee drastically improved almost overnight. It was just understanding what to look for out of the coffee and adjusting their roasting to achieve it.” Following the grid’s success in Asia, Toby’s Estate began using the tool in conjunction with its recipe cards at its Chippendale café in Sydney. Nich says it has helped the roasting and green bean buying teams share their experience with the baristas and café staff. “We’re running three single origins and a blend every day. One of the things
