There are a few things I want to cover in this post, answers to questions you might have.

What’s New?

Statistics and data have been updated for each producing country, and I’ve been able to add a few new producing countries: DRC, Uganda, Thailand, Philippines, China and Haiti.

There are also some new and expanded chapters earlier in the book.

This is an updated edition, not a whole new book so most of it is the same as the previous edition.

I own the 1st Edition – do I need to upgrade?

Probably not. If you’ve got the first edition then you’ve got 95% of the material in the second edition. If you want to be a completionist, then I’d be delighted! Hopefully, I will get to do the 3rd edition at some point in the future, and maybe then I’ll recommend everyone update!

Is there a book launch event?

Yes! It will be an all-day event at Prufrock Coffee. There’ll be fun stuff happening all day at the cafe, even if you just want to pop in for an espresso, as well as books for sales, signings, limited edition stuff, and I’ll be running a couple of fun workshops downstairs in the training centre too! Here’s a link to the workshops.

Come along – everyone welcome and I’d love to see you there.

Can I stock the book at my cafe/roastery/coffee business?

Yes! I’d be delighted if you could. The publisher is again happy to work directly with cafes and coffee businesses – if you’re interested then sign up here:

Stockist Interest Form

Note: Even if you’ve signed up in the past, I’m afraid GDPR means I’m going to have to ask you to sign up again.

I want a copy of the book early! And for free!

Not a problem – there’s a little contest running until the end of October 13th 2018. You can enter here: Atlas Giveaway

Can I pre-order the book?

You can find it on Amazon in the UK here, and the USA here. There will be signed copies available for pre-order soon – I will post a link once they’re available.

Is there a video about this I can watch?

I have more questions!

You can contact us through the contact form on the World Atlas of Coffee website.

The post New edition of The World Atlas of Coffee appeared first on jimseven.

The growing demand for coffee means that the Government should act urgently to tackle avoidable coffee cup waste. The charge on plastic bags prompted consumers to change their habits, reducing plastic bag use by over 83% in the first year. Additionally, the plastic bag charge saw an increased level of support for further charges to reduce waste. We therefore recommend that the Government introduces a minimum 25p levy on disposable cups, to be paid by the consumer on top of the price of the coffee.

There’s a BBC summary article here, and a more in-depth look at the report on the United Baristas blog. The report itself is available here.

I’m going to work from the base principle that the waste produced by disposable coffee cups is a problem, that we should be trying to fix. I will also outline where I disagree, and why, with the government. There’s quite a lot to discuss here, so it is best broken down into four parts:

1. What problems are we trying to address?
2. What outcomes are we looking to achieve?
3. What measures will lead to us attaining our goal?
4. What do I propose?

What problems are we trying to address?

The UK uses about 2.5 billion disposable cups per year, and the rate is increasing. However, this only makes up about 0.7% of all UK packaging waste. Cynically, one might argue that politicians have focused on it because of its visibility, more than its potential environmental impact.

In the UK there are only 3 facilities capable of recycling these cups – because standard recycling facilities cannot remove the bonded plastic liner from the paper. It seems appropriate to note that recycling is a profitable business (when done properly), and these businesses may stand to benefit from all of this/have a role to play in potential solutions. It also seems relevant to note that one of them, Veolia, has global revenues in the billions.

The larger problem, according to the committee (and I agree with them here) is that people incorrectly believe that most cups can be recycled. They point the blame at coffee sellers, but I believe this information is spread by manufacturers first and foremost. This misunderstanding is not just an issue for coffee cups, but for other packaging materials too.

There are other issues, such as the current cost of dealing with them – be it as litter or incurred collecting and sorting the cups. However, let’s just focus on the main issues.

In summary:

• We produce lots of waste
• We don’t realise that most recyclable cups are not being recycled.

What outcomes are we looking to achieve?

We want a few things, I believe, from the coffee market and the consumer:

• Choosing to use less disposable cups (i.e. ceramics or reusable cups like KeepCup)
• Disposing of cups in a way that allows recycling (i.e. specialist collection points, separate from traditional recycling collection bins)
• Potentially encouraging the use of potential alternatives like biodegradable cups and lids, and encouraging their proper disposal too – should the cradle to grave energy costs not be higher than disposable cups.
• Understanding the limitations of the current materials and recycling process.

What measures will lead to us attaining our goal?

So, let’s talk about this tax: on the face of it, there is probably some good evidence it would work. A similar scheme with supermarkets/groceries, with a 5p of 10c fee per bag, has been incredibly successful. In the UK, at least, there have been some key differences:

• Supermarkets can deduct the cost of manufacturing the bag from the fee. Previously supermarkets had to suffer the cost of producing the enormous amounts of bags they gave away for free. Now they have no cost to them, as it is covered by the consumer, which has improved their profitability.
• The cost of the bag, relative to the cost of a typical food shop, is very low i.e. way less than 1% typically.
• Reusable shopping bags are easy to carry and require no maintence or cleaning (hopefully)

Other schemes mentioned in the report suggest charging a deposit, rather than a tax, which I am more comfortable with.

However, I do have grave concerns about a levy as large as 25p. This represents a likely increase in cost >10%. It also presumes that demand for coffee, especially premium/specialty coffee, is fixed. I do not believe this to be the case. I believe that, especially at a time of economic uncertainty, we would see a negative impact on consumption with independent businesses hit hardest of all.

I could be more open to it if the scheme allowed coffee shops to deduct the cost the cups and lids from it – but I don’t think it is realistic as it would be nearly impossible to police. (There are only a few supermarket companies, that have well audited public accounts – there are enormous numbers of coffee shops).

The committee believes that charging a fee is more effective than offering a discount. As much as it pains me, I have to agree here. Pushing reusables as the only answer is problematic for me in a lot of ways:

• There are hygiene issues here. I don’t think baristas should have to wash or handle dirty cups. This would undoubtedly happen often, and be a potentially contentious and difficult interaction for the cafe. Equally, there are other hygiene issues where disposable cups may be the best option when considering infection control or sanitation.
• Standardisation will be a problem. Coffee shops sell by liquid volume, mostly using the vessel as the measure. If people are bringing whatever they have to hand, how would portion control work? Which brands and products are to be considered acceptable? Again – I foresee more difficult conversations for baristas and customers.
• Reusable cups are, for the most part, inconvenient to carry around (in comparison to a shopping bag). I know some brands are better than others, but I just see more friction here.

One final point in this section: takeaway sales are vital to independent coffee businesses. Most lack sufficient capital when they start to be able to afford a large space with sufficient covers to sell enough drinks inside the cafe to be profitable. Reducing takeaway sales, as a whole, would be brutal and destructive to many independent cafes.

What do I propose?

When I look at the two problems, I believe this is a good opportunity to attack the issue of awareness and consumer confusion. I would propose:

1. Every disposable cup must carry disposal information on it. It should state clearly if, where and how a cup can be recycled. I know we all want our cups to be beautiful but I think we’d find ways to display the information in a way that is “on-brand”. Additionally, information and graphics at the point of recycling should be clearer about cups.

2. Continue to incentivise cafes and customers to encourage reuse of cups and suitable reusable cups. To do that I would propose:

• Removing VAT on reusable cups, that meet a threshold of sustainability.
• Taxing the cups at the point of sale from the manufacturer.

Manufacturers should be encouraged to develop better alternatives to what they currently offer. The tax could be waved on alternative products such as those that are biodegradable (if they meet energy impact criteria), which would encourage their use. Cafes would benefit from lower cost of goods if they’re able to encourage more reuse and the tax collected would be easier to project for them in their buying and have fewer issues for cash flow.

1. Build better recycling infrastructure to allow more cups to be recycled. I’m hesitant to suggest spending a lot of public money in a situation where three companies stand to benefit, but I’d be fine with the government lending money at preferential rates or incentivising those companies to build out better collection systems.

2. Use the tax that has been collected, use that money to offer a small refund on a takeaway cup when returned to a dedicated collection point. This would offer an incentive to people to properly dispose of them.

While I haven’t had a lot of time to think about all this, it seemed worthwhile to at least get some thoughts out there. Perhaps let me know on twitter @jimseven if you have any feedback and ideas.

The post Some thoughts on the proposed “latte levy” on takeaway cups appeared first on jimseven.

What led to their return this year? I don’t really know – I think I just enjoy having a bit of a guess about where things are going.

Here are my five predictions for 2018

1 – High prices drive down quality

A few years ago, when the C-market price for coffee spiked above $3/lb, there was some concern that higher prices were working against quality focused efforts in certain origins. The rationale was pretty simple – why work harder as a producer to raise your quality, when the market will pay very well regardless.

We’re in a similar sort of place if you take the world of speciality. There has been a dramatic rise in the number of companies looking to source better quality coffee. In challenging economic times budgets for green coffee buyers are going to be tested – and this is compounded by high levels of competition for speciality coffee, and I think a lot of companies will accept a lower threshold of quality, that they might describe as “good enough”. It will likely be grown at a decent altitude, of reputable varieties, but I suspect the quality of sorting and picking may decrease as producers may find it more cost effective to cut back in those areas as buyers will still pay pretty good prices owing to competition. (This isn’t a criticism of producers or millers, I think the market will simply pay more for a lower quality product).

2 – Amazon listing the Whole Foods catalogue causes challenges

Lots of great coffee companies have worked hard to get their product listed by Whole Foods. They move real volume in the US, though less so in the UK. Some of those same companies wouldn’t choose to sell on Amazon’s platform (though many do), for a variety of reasons. Now that Amazon owns Whole Foods I expect more of their product catalogue to appear on the site. If you sell to both Amazon and Whole Foods then I’m curious how that will work – I suspect whichever options gives Amazon a greater margin, and encourage a greater average spend, will be the one that tops the search ranking. (Also, I’ve no idea how funnelling things through Whole Foods/Amazon CDCs will work…)

3 – People start taking coffee grown in China seriously

China has been producing coffee for quite a while now, but it hasn’t really been bought and sold by speciality companies. However, there’s been a real uptick in quality from Yunnan and I think more is going to be exported and sold around the world. There’s some surprisingly good and interesting coffee being produced there, and I think this is the year we start to see it appearing more and more.

4 – Some very quality focused, acclaimed businesses in the UK disappear

I use the word disappear on purpose. They might fail, or they might just choose to shut up shop instead. Brexit only looks to make life harder for speciality coffee – currency weakening, coupled with ever higher prices for speciality and more competition than ever… It’s a tough marketplace and a difficult place to make money. This might be the year that some choose to walk away…

5 – Costa Coffee Makes Its Speciality Move

Starbucks has obviously pushed into speciality coffee quite aggressively, and very successfully, with their Reserve brand and roasteries. No other company could have built the insanity that is the new Starbucks Reserve in Shanghai. In the UK Caffe Nero did try and make a move into speciality by buying Harris & Hoole, though I think it is fair to say that this hasn’t been a huge success for them. Costa Coffee is reporting an increasingly challenging market, and may well be losing enough market share to trigger action. It might be a new brand for them (i.e. the Starbucks Reserve model), though I think several speciality coffee companies who have raised money through equity crowdfunding are going to hope that Costa makes an acquisition instead… I’d probably bet on the latter. (This prediction might fall under the “1 year too early” category, but I’m going with it anyway!)

Let’s check back in a year to see how I did!

The post Predictions for 2018 appeared first on jimseven.

It lasted all of two issues, both of which I am proud of. Perhaps, prouder than I really have any right to be considering my contributions were so much smaller than my colleagues who edited and designed it. If I am honest, I found it frustrating that it never really managed to connect meaningfully to its audience. I was always surprised that it didn’t stir more reactions, more conversations, more thought.

It was never a viable business and was never really meant to be. It was a spare time project for three people with very little spare time. I will miss it, I will remain frustrated that it never really met its potential or found its audience, but I learned a lot in the process and more than anything I really enjoyed reading it. There was a part of me that wanted to dive deeper into why it didn’t work, why it failed – because I think those things are interesting and worth talking about – but it didn’t quite feel right. Perhaps saved until another time…

Thank you to everyone who supported it, bought it, read it, shared it and enjoyed it.

The post The end of Longberry appeared first on jimseven.

I’ve enjoyed working on how-to guides for coffee brewers, but one particular brewer gave me a headache: the Aeropress.

There are just too many different ways to use it, too many potential outcomes and, for a while, this made me a little frustrated. Then a ridiculous idea surfaced, which became another ridiculous idea and so on and so forth until we go to this point: coffee brewing dice.

This is a set of 5 dice, that will produce one of 7,776 different potential recipes for how to brew your Aeropress. I decide to make this because I thought it would be fun! I’ve made a single run, once they’re gone they’re gone.

They cost £12 including UK shipping, and not much more for the rest of the world. You can buy them here: Coffee Brewing Dice. Hopefully, they’ll make a fun little stocking filler or Christmas gift for someone who would enjoy them. They will start shipping at the end of the week.

I made a little video about them too:

The post Coffee Brewing Dice appeared first on jimseven.

In a technology obsessed world, scale has been something of a buzzword but I think it is important to differentiate business that are reliant on scale, where scale is baked into the financial model from the beginning. These are businesses with high fixed costs, but the cost of a new customer or sale is very low or effectively zero. The classic modern day example is Facebook. The people and the servers are there, and adding one more account costs nothing. Aside from a potential spend on marketing, there is no cost of goods. In addition the labour involved doesn’t scale with customers in a linear way. A business like this can lose money, and lots of it, at the start but once it reaches a critical mass it becomes incredibly profitable.

A coffee bar is different. Not only does each drink have a fixed cost of ingredients, the busier a coffee shop gets the more staff it needs. The ideal theoretical model for coffee shops would be to find the maximum number of drinks a fixed staff could serve, and then balance price and quality to be as busy and expensive as possible for that fixed labour cost. However, any additional growth would have to come from additional coffee shops – a whole other challenge of decentralised scale.

This is a roundabout way of discussing why scale is often talked about as good or necessary. Coffee roasting is one area of the coffee value chain where some scaling is possible relatively easily: buying a bigger roaster allows the same team to scale, or a new roaster plus packaging equipment does if there is a desire to not have to scale production labour at all.

So, if we are to consider why quality doesn’t scale then we should consider the aspects of coffee roasting that may be the barrier to retained quality. I’m going to ignore the practices used by business that intentionally compromise quality to grow new markets or opportunities. Those are just strategic decisions and not limits to quality’s growth.

Quality Doesn’t Scale

1. Raw materials

An area that many would point to, when looking at the decrease in quality when a company scales, is in its raw materials. This constraint is almost always self imposed – it isn’t that there isn’t enough coffee of a sufficient quality, it is more likely that the decision has been made to leverage some form of capitalist growth, and to leverage volume for lower prices. This has likely led to decreasing sale pricing to gain growth, which the company feels the need to continue to feed. Thus they spend less on their green coffee, to make their product increasingly inexpensive and able to gain the growth.

However, this is a strategic decision and not a barrier to quality. At some point the decision could have been made not to compromise quality to retain gross margins at lower price points, leadership in the company could have insulated the buyers from the pressures of the sales team. The implication is that perhaps there isn’t a sufficient market at the higher price point and that you can only grow at lower price points. I’m not convinced this is true, and the growth of speciality as a whole indicates that there is significant growth left at higher price points as long as the value of the product matches the price.

2. Manufacturing

There are two ways in which I can see scale impacting roasting negatively, though one remains more theoretical. If a roaster grows and has to run more batches per week then this is going to introduce some level of inconsistency. (My recent complaints about roasting machines seem relevant here.) Time constraints on a team mean less time to QC, and increased workloads take a physical tole –  a more fatigued team is likely to make more mistakes, or let more mistakes through a QC process.

This problem should be alleviated by capital expenditure: buying a bigger roaster. There is likely a sweet spot when it comes to the size of a production team, the number of machines, and the number of batches. Busy enough that profiles are developed and have time to be well refined (for additional learning and understanding of future profiles) but not so busy they are stretched. ^a

The theoretical second challenge is the idea that a larger capacity roaster is not able to achieve the same results as a smaller batch roaster. It isn’t uncommon to see the words “small batch” used across industries to denote the handmade, careful quality of something. However, I think too many small batches is likely a bad thing. As for whether or not larger roasters can achieve the same level of quality – I believe it is possible, but difficult. There’s also the challenge of the expense of a learning curve. Throwing away a bad 10kg roast is annoying, but throwing away 69kg of a failed batch is far more painful – especially when there may be very limited amounts of a coffee. This can all be factored in, but it would likely drive sale prices up (marginally of course, but they’d certainly make reducing prices as a route to grow… challenging). I may be proven wrong, but I believe this is a challenge and not an absolute barrier.

3. The Human Factor

Coffee roasting remains an extremely human affair. There are certainly those who will always relish that, and those who would be delighted to replace humans with automation – especially if it improved coffee. For now, we need people who care about the results to roast coffee, and it isn’t possible to build external systems that relibaly control quality. (Or, if it is – I haven’t seen it). In a competitve market the human resource becomes extremely scarce. Lots of roasting companies would like to find great people, but currently demand outstrips supply.

I could imagine one argument about why quality doesn’t scale is that people who care about what they make may be less engaged when producing larger volumes. It would feel less “craft”, less “intimate”. However, this implies that they couldn’t achieve great quality at scale and surely if you cared about great coffee then producing larger amounts of it at the highest level should be incredibly desirable – there would be undeniable positive impact on lots of people. Again, if you grow to the size where you have the largest viable machines and are still producing incredible numbers of batches – I could see that being dispiriting and frustrating and, when you have so many customers that they become faceless, a loss of intimacy with the customer would take away a pressure for excellence.

Scale Enables Quality

I also want to discuss the ways in which scale might increase or enable quality. What makes it all so confusing is that I believe scale is necessary to increase quality, and allows significant jumps in cup quality and consistency.

1. Raw Materials

Buying coffee is uttelry entwined with scale. There are endless stories from frustrated exporters, who have given up time to visiting buyers, toured them round farms and mills, only to have the buyer purchase a couple of pallets of coffee. I think there is a significant change in the buying process when you’re able to buy at least one full 40ft container from a single origin.

Scaling up buying can come with better access to what you need. Scaled up buying means buying with greater impact, which can be used positively (in terms of quality ^b).

I think many coffees buy better and better as they scale, until they reach a point when the requirement from sourcing changes. That isn’t a consequence of buy, but of a changing strategy. I think scale clearly enables better quality purchasing.

2. Manufacturing

The primary area I believe that scales enables quality in manufacturing is through improvements to equipment and to quality control. Colour readers are useful. Better probes and roast logging software is useful. Having the resource to train and upskill production team members all enable quality, and all have significant costs that scale can help overcome. Scale enables greater control of packaging – should you want to go down the route of modified atmosphere or different materials. It isn’t a requirement, but it helps.

There’s a bell curve in roasting, as mentioned before. I think getting roast more often makes one a better roaster, increases understanding of a coffee and makes it more likely that you’ll work through a lot before it begins to change or degrade.

Increased scale should also produce sufficient profit to invest in R&D (though so few speciality companies do), and in product development. Increased scale should also allow for the setting of tighter benchmarks of quality, because losing a single missed roast is less consequential (unless you’re going through the jump phase when you’ve scaled up equipment but throughput doesn’t yet match it).

3. The Human Factor

A form fill and seal machine, that takes a roll of foil, valves and coffee beans then spits out finished bags of coffee is a troubling thing. It forced me to contemplate a difficult question: Is it better for a company to create several low paying jobs, or fewer jobs that pay better and are more enjoyable? While we decided on the latter, I do concede that there are arguments for both sides.

As mentioned above, scale creates resources that can be invested into staff: better renumeration, better benefits, more training and education. This should lead to better retention and improved performance – and hopefully increased job satisfaction to go with it.

So why doesn’t quality scale?

I genuinely look forward to people refuting some of the ideas above, and arguing with me – this is the real point of sharing ideas on here. I am aware that I have argued absolutely that quality can scale, certainly to a very large size – larger than we have seen people scale in practice. So, how can I argue this in the face of what I see out in the world?

I’m going to make a counter argument: Quality can scale, but the financial models we’ve chosen prevent it doing so. At some point businesses make a decision about how to increase net profits, by choosing to decrease costs. Under these pressures quality very quickly falls by the wayside. This implies that there is no ceiling to the market, which is obviously not true. Growth certainly becomes more difficult as you scale up and a market feels saturated or fully mined for value, and many companies chase that tipping point of scale where the power of the brand becomes a multiplier of its own. Blue Bottle spring to mind as a business chasing this brand inflection point. There will be many pressures to get to this point as quickly as possible, and we haven’t really discussed the rate of growth. Many businesses may have pressure to grow quickly in order to return the investments that enabled that growth, i.e. an investor who wants a return within a certain timeframe.

This pressure of speed is another reason people alter their financial models. Quality can scale, but I think there are hard limits on how quickly it can scale once it is a mature business.

Disclosure: a large part of this thinking has come as the result of SQM buying a larger roaster. We’ve grown steadily over the years, and I genuinely believe that we’re roasting better than ever, and more consistently too. While I’m frustrated by the roasting process, I’m proud of what the team accomplish. I’m not really interested in scaling at the expense of quality, so it started me down the line of this thinking.

1. The challenge of where that CapEx may come from, in a business growing rapidly that has its profits tied up in inventory or trade debts is a whole other conversation. I understand one route would be investment, and that may come with an expectation of scaling up to return on that investment. I agree this may add a pressure that makes growth difficult, but as a single example it didn’t seem enough to bring it into the main discussion.  (back)
2. what defines ethically better is now extremely fuzzy and outside of the scope of this piece  (back)

The post Quality Vs Scale appeared first on jimseven.

I am embarrassed. Not by the coffee we roast, but by the machines we use to roast it. They are beautiful, vintage machines that were crafted with skill and care 50 years ago from materials clearly built to last. However, they highlight the utter absence of innovation we’ve seen from roasting manufacturers in the decades since.

Coffee roasting proudly describes itself as an art, as a craft, as a multisensory discipline of small batch manufacturing. This is one of the two ways it has hidden itself from a truth: We are not acceptably consistent in our roasting. For a long time we also managed to hide this behind coffee brewing. Cafes struggled to brew in a consistent way, and brewing was such a complex black box of variables that it was hard to really pin the blame for a disappointing cup of coffee on the roaster and not the barista, or the grinder, or the machine, or the water etc etc.

Roasting coffee is a deeply frustrating business. The inconsistencies in coffee roasting do not often come from a lack of care or effort. Roasting teams around the world work incredibly hard to do the best they can, to cup and QC their product, to improve their roasting curves and knowledge, and to convert the potential of the green coffee they work with into something excellent, transparent and enjoyable. Despite this, I think every roaster would agree that they aren’t able to have every batch turn out exactly as intended. It might only miss by a little, but a roaster with high standards would likely confess that it wasn’t exactly what they wanted that batch to be.

The fault lies with the equipment. A drum coffee roaster built today is really no different to a drum coffee roaster built in the 1960s. (This was true of espresso grinders for a similar period of time…) While some level of automation is now possible with new small batch roasters, mostly there is similar level of data capture and guidance offered by adding a third party product such as Cropster to an older roaster.

A trite definition of madness is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. For a very long time we’ve known that exactly replicating a roast profile with the same coffee does not necessarily produce an identical batch. We dismiss the cognitive dissonance by waving it away with the excuse that coffee is an agricultural product, so… what can you do?

Yet we know the data we get from a roaster is bad data. Sticking a small probe into a drum full of churning coffee beans, and expecting that to tell us the bean temperature is ludicrous. Here’s the most obvious example: We seem to ignore the fact that we’re all ok with a probe clearly telling us lies for the first minute of the roast.

The temperature of the coffee is not dropping at the start, all we know is that the probe is dropping in temperature. It’s not useful data, yet it is something every roaster around the world has to trust and make decisions upon. We have no control because we have no insight.

The world of coffee brewing is changing. Consistency and control in brewing are going to start applying increasing pressure on coffee roasters to up their game. I believe they lack the technology to do so. I believe commercial coffee roaster manufacturers have failed to innovate in a meaningful way. If 7 out of 10 cups of coffee drunk around the world are roasted on a Probat – where’s the incentive? We keep buying the same old technology, at high prices.

I’m not dismissing innovations from Loring, primarily around emissions control and environmental impact, alongside things like ease of cleaning. However, I don’t think roasting companies with Lorings are producing more consistent coffee than someone with a new or old Probat.

I’m proud of the coffee Square Mile roasts. I also believe it is important to have very high standards, and that you should live in a constant state of dissatisfaction with your product. I think lots of other roasters should be proud of their product, and I’m not claiming we’re an industry of charlatans. I do think, however, that roasters the world over are deeply frustrated by their equipment. No one wants to talk about it, perhaps because it involves an admission of imperfection.

There is an opportunity here. It would require R&D spending, it would require experimentation and resources. I believe that there is a very large audience out there looking for something better and willing to spend sensibly to achieve that. This is an industry ripe for disruption.

The post Dear Coffee Roaster Manufacturers appeared first on jimseven.

Coffee now spends a lot of time being compared to wine, much to the chagrin of many. I appreciate the arguments that they’re not the same, that they make for a poor comparison. However, I’m still going to compare the two.

Wine is very expensive because people have been mining out the value in it for decades. There is a large, sufficiently affluent audience for it, all chasing the best value they can get. This has driven up prices and, broadly speaking, the good stuff is much more expensive now because it is good.

As such consumers might reasonably expect that spending more on wine gets you better wine. Spending a lot on wine gets you fantastic wine. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but it is broadly accurate.

Coffee does something different when it gets very expensive. It doesn’t necessarily get better, it gets weirder. The most expensive coffees aren’t the sweetest. The most expensive coffees aren’t the most complex, structured and delightful.

The most expensive coffees are the most esoteric.

Many take delight in the weirdness of Geisha lots, of other rare varieties, or strange cups. I’m always interested to taste coffees like these, to experience something new. However, we’ve come to position these coffees as a substantial upgrade to one’s daily morning brew, rather than a dramatic detour into strange territory.

This isn’t really aimed at Geisha lots specifically, but at all super premium coffee. I believe that we’ve come to disproportionately value weird, strange and unusual coffees, coffees that require context. I think this means that we don’t celebrate the straight up exceptional as much as we used to (I think of the early days of the Cup of Excellence, which promoted these kinds of coffees).

I’m not saying we shouldn’t sell weird coffees. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be expensive. I am saying that I think we need to be careful with how we communicate their value to us and their value to our customers. The challenge will be that the two won’t always line up.

1. Well, more than one thing – but this piece is about just one  (back)

The post The confusion of expensive coffee appeared first on jimseven.

The Jimseven Book

We closed the IndieGoGo backing page today, and won’t be taking any more pre-orders for the book. The good news is that the physical books are printed, packed and currently in a container inside a ship somewhere, and are getting ever closer to the UK. We hope to be dispatching mid-August (depending on customs clearance). After that, they’ll be available in the Square Mile shop and a few other places online that I’ll link to once they’re live.

Update: The book is now available here at Square Mile Coffee, and also here at Decent Espresso.

I received my test press of a finished book and I’m really pleased with it. The printer has done a great job, and it feels and looks great. I am excited!

The E-Book Version

The E-Book version has been sent to backers already – if you haven’t received an email check your spam folders. As such it is now available for purchase and immediate download in the jimseven shop. It is delivered as a link to a zip containing both .mobi and .epub files. It is £3, the price of a good cup of coffee ^a. Thanks to everyone who has supported this.

The best of jimseven 2004-2015 (ebook) – £3

The Shop & T-Shirts

We built a little shop that currently has a few new things. The shop has had a little redesign to be more in keeping with this place.

Alongside the Coffee Variety Family Tree Timeline poster (I need a better name), and the ebook, we now have a few t-shirts available. A few people had asked about them, and I thought it’d be fun.

They’re simple designs, no words (No one has to know it’s a coffee shirt. Unless they know already…) and just the jimseven circle swirls from the book cover. They’re available in a bunch of colours, not just black and white.

T-Shirts! – £16

We’ve some fun, ridiculous, sensible, useful and useless new things lined up. Keep an eye out…

1. This will come in a separate email after the confirmation  (back)

The post Updates: The Book, E-Book, The Shop and More… appeared first on jimseven.

I talk a lot about writing, blogging, the early days of blogs and forums, the frustrating obsession with stats and data it is all too easy to acquire. Listening back there’s a lot I want to correct/improve about what I said – so feel free to pick me apart on twitter!

The post The Coffee Podcast – Part One of my interview appeared first on jimseven.