Maxwell

Expectation and goals have been a running theme in this blog and it’s a cornerstone of how we think about our coffee business, and about speciality coffee in relation to the wider market. Michael Beverland is a Professor of Marketing who heads up the Bath University Marketing department; he also props up the bar at our shop and drinks a lot of coffee. Recently he shared the experiences he had whilst engaging a group of his current MSC students in a task. The task was to think of a brand, a well known one, but one which personally you have...

Flavour topics – part 3 In essence, these three posts have all been about the way we think of flavour; the way we consider it and turn it into concepts in our head, which are then discussed and exchanged. In the first post I wanted to touch on the fascinating nature of taste, that we can not only interpret flavour differently from a conscious point of view, but that we can have different sensory input altogether even from the same physical tasting object. As we moved in to the second post I wanted to look at the allocation of flavour,...

Flavour Topics - part 2   Speciality coffee, single estate farms, lighter roasts, provenance and flavour notes are a relatively new thing, an emerging approach developing and gaining ground, sprouting out of the entrenched traditional approaches to this drink that make up coffee’s place and history. This isn’t just centuries of tradition but in the case of the North West coast of America and Australia, decades of coffee culture, yes they are sitting on the shoulders of older traditions, but in their own right the approaches are each established enough to set boundaries and define approaches. I have always found...

Flavour Topics - Part 1 When talking of coffee, the discussion of flavour and taste are never too far away. In fact what defines speciality coffee is that it is a culinary product, one that’s all about flavour. The way we all experience flavour is something of a minefield to untangle, I find it to be a common  topic of discussion, it influences service, it drives the craft of brewing, it defines the livelihoods of those that grow coffee, those that roast and, well, everybody involved really. I have touched on taste and flavour in a fair few posts previously...

Choose a fixed recipe, dial in to that recipe and stop there. Bingo. Done. This will display the best of the coffee and, if for some reason it doesn’t taste right then the coffee must be faulty, because of the roaster or something else that happened elsewhere. The barista’s responsibility has nicely been absolved. Yes, under these circumstances (the set recipe ideal) there is a responsibility to brew to a specific recipe and meet the numbers, but there is not a relationship with the numbers that is explicitly taste driven (what I mean by taste driven is using one’s palate...