I lost all respect for the coffee culture when they started charging more for "single pour" - which is how I've made coffee for eight years, simply because Alton Brown recommended it. Seriously? Your holy awesome coffee method is a filter holder from Ralph's? What's the crazy stupid gadget that cost like 15 grand that Starbuck's bought up? The Clover? Had Clover coffee? It tastes a lot like coffee. I wonder if it's like music snobs - you get so into the esoterica that you lose sight of taste. Intelligentsia coffee - and I've had three different brews - tastes like Starbuck's with a pint of vinegar thrown in the percolator. It's acidic, bitey, nasty and extraordinarily fucking expensive. Fuckin' $4.75 for a cup of brewed coffee. Me, I generally focus on fresh and beyond that, I just drink it.
Haha, I know exactly what you mean. A new fancy coffee house opened down the street form me last summer. They offer the single pour, which I wan't familiar with. So when the guy told me about it, I (naively) said, "That's sounds good. I'll try it." Of course then I watched him make it, and was surprised to learn that he was making coffee the way my dad always made it, because he was always too cheap to buy a drip maker! Then I almost had a heart attack when the dude said, "That'll be $4.50." WTF?!?! $4.50 for drip coffee, because the filter holder is stainless steel, and not plastic like the one my dad used to use. Gimme a fuckin' break. I'm not one who's shy about paying for quality items, but the single pour is the most pretentious garbage I've come across in a long time.
Next time you guys head to Jerusalem Garden, get a cup of their Turkish Coffee. It's pretty damned good.
Melitta makes a nice ceramic filter holder you can buy off Amazon for like $9. Gives you a little less plastic flavor than the plastic ones. I haven't seen stainless; Dunno that I'd go that way. But yeah. Exactly. It was kind of like when the Bodums came out - "oh, you're making cowboy coffee but you're too lazy to know when to stop pouring?" My dad, for the longest time, made coffee with a funnel and cheesecloth. This shit ain't rocket science.
The most offensive things about the Bodums is the price of a pour over kettle. It is not that hard to get boiled water on to coffee grounds when you are already brewing by hand. A bridge too far. I swear to god if a hipster shop started doing this it would be the next big thing. Do you even have a doubt? Fuck it. If I ever open a coffee shop up I'm stealing this, lol.My dad, for the longest time, made coffee with a funnel and cheesecloth.
Call it LOFI. Brew in clay urns using cheesecloth and burlap. Serve only pour-over and turkish roasted on-site over a charcoal furnace with modified Electrolux vacuum cleaner air blower. Charge $8 for a cup of coffee. Dirty li'l secret about coffee shops: 4/5 small businesses fail after 5 years but 80% of coffee shops opened are still going strong 5 years later. My problem with it is I'm not cynical enough to pander to people I think are idiots.
IT'S HAPPENING https://bluebottlecoffee.com/store/hario-nel-drip-set Also, they're nice enough to warn you: If offhand remarks wither the complexity of cloth-drip coffee, you basically have no chance right out of the gate dude ;)Coffee from a nel is thick, focused and incredibly sweet – texturally reminiscent of mulled wine. It's quite moody and fragile, too: Water that's too hot, a hurried pour, or even an offhand remark might wither its complexity.
What's the secret?80% of coffee shops opened are still going strong 5 years later.
-Really? That's super surprising to me. I do know that in most restaurants the highest profit margined item is almost always Iced Tea or Coffee. But you don't take margin to the bank, you take profit dollars and unless you are turning and burning there aren't a whole lotta profit dollars in coffee.
...closely followed by desserts. If all you sell is alcohol, desserts and coffee, you will operate a stunningly profitable business. What's the secret? Well, first read this: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_m... Then recognize that coffee shops are to the USA what pubs are to the UK. They fill the same civic hole that Baskin Robbins held for 30 years, something that simply didn't exist before it. Maybe it's because I'm older than a lot of the people here, but I remember when the cafes came. "Coffee culture" didn't slowly evolve, it just sort of... HIT about 1989. I saw a sneak preview of Sleepless in Seattle with my date, who had lived in Tacoma for most of her life before moving out with her dad to New Mexico. She pointed out a Starbuck's in the movie and said "you're going to see a lot of those soon." It seemed odd to me that suddenly everyone would start paying a lot of money for coffee (without first buying a donut) but that's exactly what happened. The coffee shop is the easiest, cheapest, lowest impact third place. And, as the bedroom communities and exurbs metastasize into communities, "coffee shops" help anchor those communities. In essence, a coffee shop charges a nominal fee to a neighborhood in order to exemplify that neighborhood. And not to put too fine a point on it, but they sell addiction - socially-acceptable, minimal-impact addiction. Coffee shops sell caffeine and sugar and they do so for the same price as a pack of cigarettes. They're habit forming. And they often have comfy chairs, free wi-fi and will top up your drip coffee as long as you're in the room. If libraries could charge $2.50 to get people to sit and chill out there'd be one on every corner, too.
I remember this, and that really was about the year it happened. The hangout for my bored teenage friends and I was the local Dennys. We would just pile into a booth and drink cup after cup of coffee, talking for hours. Sometimes we would even order food. Then an indie coffee shop popped up in our small downtown. It had art on the walls, open mics, poetry readings. It was like "wtf?" For a bored teenager this was heaven. It gave us a place to congregate and be social with each other without pissing off the management.
In college I used to study at them all the time just so I could fulfill my obligations while simultaneously be doing something at least minimally social."Coffee culture" didn't slowly evolve, it just sort of... HIT about 1989.
It's the morning rush. We have an entire population hard wired and addicted, either habitually or chemically or both. If you've ever been in a coffee shop on your way to a 9 to 5, you'll see them going gangbusters the whole morning. Then a little bump at lunch. As long as you choose your location correctly and make sure that you are along the path of morning commute traffic, I'd bet you're nicely locked in to a predictable recurring source of revenue that also represents the majority of your sales every given weekday. And the turnaround can't get better than somebody late for work :)you take profit dollars and unless you are turning and burning there aren't a whole lotta profit dollars in coffee.
500 people a day, with $2 average profit dollars each is 1000 a day less cost of goods and operating expenses just doesn't seem all that attractive to me. I would almost guess that 500 is a lot for some of the mom and pops. But yeah, a Starbucks on Main street america is busy all day long. If you can tap in to the demand with a good product in the right place, I could see it being a nice, predictable revenue stream. Like having a liquor store or a tobacco shop. -Prey on the addicted :)
Let's do the numbers. A pound of coffee is, call it $6 wholesale. From that pound of coffee you can make 256 cups of coffee - while understanding that a grande is two and a venti is three. So call them shots and figure most shops sell doubles. That's 128 servings at, call it, $3 per serving. Your expenses on the beans are in the noise. How 'bout the pastries? Let's say you sell scones for $2. Your baker is likely selling them to you for $15 for 2 dozen. You're at 50% profit on shit you didn't even make. How 'bout the labor? Say you've got 2 baristas. They're making minimum wage - and tips. Tips aren't your problem. So you're into it for $20 an hour including all the FICA and shit. Rent? Let's say you've got 500 square feet. Let's say you're in a major city but not in a hot spot. You're paying $1000 a month, round numbers. You're open 6am to 10pm, 7 days a week. You're paying basically $2 an hour for your rent. Your overhead is less than $22 an hour, beyotch. And your profit on your main product is essentially 100%. If you sell 8 lattes at $3 every hour you're profitable. Averaged out over the day, that's a latte every 7 minutes. And yeah, there's a lot of slop in the equation and you likely won't sell as many at 4pm as you do at 8am but you're damn skippy you're making your rent if you're halfway clued in.
$1000 a month? For commercial space in a major market even off the beaten path is a stretch. But the point if your numbers isn't lost on me. From where I'm sitting there are better investments. But a chain of shops, then selling franchising rights? Now I'm interested.
It's not. My wife was looking at commercial space a year ago. Some were cheaper, some were more. That's in urban LA, on major shopping streets. Back when I was mixing in clubs our flagship was 9,000 square feet in the heart of Pioneer Square. It cost $15k a month.
For many of these small, independent business owners, if they can cover their fixed costs, materials, and labor, all while making an honest wage, they struck gold. They're pursuing a dream and are their own master. My fiancee owns a boutique, and her competition isn't really the American Apparel across the street, it's the bored, semi-retired housewife with a rich husband who loves clothes and needs something to do. It's kind of weird, but she really is competing against stores that aren't too worked up if they don't make much of a profit. For the ones that are really in for themselves, they really are happy to simply make a wage equal to what they would make in their industry in a good position working for someone else. The competitors that want much more than that are the exception to the rule a lot of times.From where I'm sitting there are better investments.
There is so much voodoo regarding pour overs. The real benefit for a high end coffee shop isn't so much the pour over and filter, but the fact that you just ground the beans up a second before. That's where the big 'value add' is in that whole process as far as I can see. I mean....maaaaaaaaaybe I'm wrong, but I'd bet a significant amount of money that there would not be a statistically taste-able difference in a double blind test between a pour over and any other filter brewed method, as long as the coffee hasn't been sitting around for an hour. As long as you're pouring the right temperature water over the grounds....I just don't taste a difference. This could be. But it shouldn't be. If you're going to be a high end, artisanal roaster, your goal shouldn't be to roast something different. It should be to roast something different that the majority of people trying it will enjoy. You shouldn't need to know anything about industry trends or why Starbucks burns their beans to enjoy what is in your cup. You should be able to just drink it black and say "Damn, this is good," or for those roasters who like to push the envelope, "Damn, this is different...but really good!" For me, Ritual beans have consistently been the most interesting, and most delicious tasting on average. But the cool thing about home roasting is I can just experiment and discover my own thing, get way better coffee for half the price, have raw beans that last over a year, and well, it's more interesting than buying them from somewhere else.Seriously? Your holy awesome coffee method is a filter holder from Ralph's?
I wonder if it's like music snobs - you get so into the esoterica that you lose sight of taste.
...AND WHY THE FUCK ISN'T IT ALWAYS LIKE THIS!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!???? If I go to the Ralph's up the street to buy whole beans from Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, they've likely been sitting on the shelf for three months. If I go next door to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, they've likely been sitting on the shelf for six. "Fresh roasted" coffee in LA is anything less than a month old. But oh fuck how people love their kuerigs around here...The real benefit for a high end coffee shop isn't so much the pour over and filter, but the fact that you just ground the beans up a second before.