Retail Coffee Revival and some ancient history

Especially after my last post I realize I need to do a better job of acknowledging some of the great things that are happening in the coffee world, as well as sharing some perspectives from someone who was involved in specialty coffee back when there was still a pure retail scene, and who then experienced the convulsive changes wrought by the introduction of the beverage business.

Clearly one of the good things about the recent mania for pour-over drip brewing is that there's someone modeling a brewing method that customers can realistically use at home. I've seen many newer roaster-retailers taking advantage of the opportunity to have what they sell on their retail shelves mirror what they do behind the bar to one degree or another, but this new-to-me company from Portland's incredible coffee scene is clearly doing things on a much more in-depth level:

http://www.clivecoffee.com/

The good folks at Clive Coffee have done their homework and are clearly committed to carrying only stuff that works and doing the tremendous amount of education work required to explain why, for example, the only electric drip brewers they carry are $300 Technivorms.

My first exposure to really great coffee was on a visit to Starbucks' Pike Place store in 1977, where as luck would have it some employees had brewed up a plunger pot of Yemen Mocha behind the bar to drink. T'hey offered me a sample cup (no brewed coffee of any sort in the store, of course) and for the first time there was total correlation between smell and taste, with over-the-top complexity of flavor. Starbucks was 6 years old at that point, and was Starbucks Coffee, Tea & Spice (they had saffron and Tellicherry peppercorns, whole leaf tea and catnip for your kitty, at a time when none of those things were available anywhere else in town!).

Back then drip coffee at both Peet's (where the famous 50 cent cups from the 3 gallon urn at Vine St. were already a tradition) and Starbucks came to be seen as more of a sampling tool and way to build whole bean sales than a business, and in retrospect how wonderful it would've been if we'd left it at that. Unfortunately the first espresso machine was installed in a Starbucks store in 1985 (at 4th and Spring in downtown Seattle) and the transformation from roaster-retailer to fast food joint was underway, unbeknownest to many of us.

Along the way, many of us involved with coffee tried a lot of things to keep customer knowledge of and love for the taste of origin coffees alive. I rememeber well how successful we were with a program I called Strategic Drip Brewing in our Vancouver stores in the late 80's, where we had enough volume in the mornings to offer two caffeinated coffees plus a decaf. I chose a "mild" and an "intense" coffee for each day, so one morning there'd be Guatemelan Antigua paired with Sulawesi, while the next might feature an Ethiopian Yergacheffe paired with Kenya. Great-cupping, lesser-known coffees were the rule, and of course blends, Colombian and dark roasts were banned from the rotation. In addition, the stores offered pre-packed half pounds of the coffees being brewed that day at the register so people who liked what they tasted could take it home.

Unsurprisingly, the result of all of this was an employee and customer base that delighted in the variety of coffees on offer and a marked increase in whole bean coffee sales. A bit later on I had the idea of having someone on staff brew up plunger pots of one of the day's drip coffees and take it around to customers queuing in line or sitting at tables as free samples, so they could taste the same coffee brewed two different ways. We sold more than enough plunger pots to pay for the extra labor!

These initiatives ended up being a flash in the pan due to a lack of strategic planning and discipline in the broader organization. Retail is something you really have to work hard at in a beverage store context, because the business that's coming at you - or to you - is a queue of customers wanting drinks. We experienced a huge culture clash during the early days of forced integration of Il Giornale, the fast-paced espresso bars founded by Howard Schultz, with the extant 9 retail-only Starbucks stores, and much of that clash had to do with the entirely different sorts of skills required by the two businesses. The classic Starbucks employee was an over-educated artist and/or liberal arts major, and I well remember how the old employee questionnaire insisted that you describe (in writing) the best meal you'd ever eaten, the best one you'd ever cooked and so on - a way of screening out people who didn't already know and love food and have some palate education. Meanwhile on the beverage side the motto was Q.S.S.C. (Quality, Speed, Service and Cleanliness) and one made sure to screen out people who didn't drive or otherwise were uncomfortable with operating machinery, while looking for folks with high energy, the ability to multitask and plenty of fast-twitch muscle fiber.

The best of the early Starbucks stores were places like University Village, Pike Place and Bellevue that had strong whole bean coffee and retail brewing equipment sales to which small but very busy espresso bars were added. It's probably hard to believe today, but when I started with Starbucks there was a box of index cards kept near the register filled with custom blends of coffee developed for and with long-time customers over the years, and avid discussions on daily basis about whether the new crop of Guatemala was better than the previous year's, or whether the Hao Ya A Keemun was as viable a choice for breakfast as the second flush Assam that had just arrived. Stores like these were by far the most fun to work in, as one could alternate between the intensity of running a four-group La Marzocco solo with 25 people in line at 8 a.m. and the relaxed friendliness of demo'ing entry- to professional-level home espresso machines on the retail side.

Another thing that ought to have been written in stone were the simple espresso bar menus of those days: espresso, cappuccino, caffe macchiato, caffe latte and caffe mocha - small or large (8 or 12 oz!), whole milk or 2% (and the latter grudgingly, with much talk about whether it was too much of a compromise of our standards) and almond syrup as the only other permissible additive (though it was mostly used for "steamers" for children, as an alternative to hot chocolate). The default for the "good" drinks (i.e. straight espresso, caffe macchiato and cappucino) was a real Italian demitasse or cappuccino cup, and in bar training we (and I in particular, I must confess) very much encouraged the mindset of "the quality of the drink you receive will be in direct correlation with the quality of the drink you choose" - meaning that if you order a straight shot it will be prepared with the utmost care in a pre-warmed demitasse, whereas if you order a large Mocha you'll take what you get and most likely not know the difference (though it must be said that even those drinks were in fact prepared with great care, and topped with hand-grated bittersweet chocolate). More on this topic in the next post.