What drives your purchasing habits?
This is a perennial business, marketing and operations question!
I love wine, and over the decades it's become clear to me that objective quality doesn't necessarily overlap with my taste preferences. The reality is that my current taste preferences have limited overlap with my taste preferences from twenty years ago!
The objective markers of quality in wine making (I'm going to name a few and probably miss a lot): care and diligence in the vineyard, meticulous harvesting techniques, oak barrel selection, diligence in the wine making process, care in the bottling process. Many of you will know of Robert Parker, the wine industry's most famous critic and a force so powerful that he influenced an entire generation of winemakers. Unfortunately for me, he influenced these winemakers into a style of wine making that differs to what I like. He championed extremely ripe, heavily oaked, "sex-bomb" (his type of terminology) wines. I can understand why he did this. These sorts of wines stand out on a tasting table because they are extreme in their characteristics. I prefer elegant and balanced wines (fruit, aged character, oak and acidity) which complement the food with which the wines are served.
My belief is that there are strong parallels in the world of coffee. The objective markers of quality in coffee roasting: meticulous green bean selection, a methodical and obsessive process for determining blending ratios, care and diligence in the roasting process, regular tasting of coffee by the roasters, other quality control factors such as destoning, measurement of yield loss post roasting, roast colour analysis, secondary quality control factors around the equipment used to taste the roasted coffee such as objective temperature measurement of espresso machine brew water, coffee refractometry to ensure that extraction yields are appropriate and that grinders used and their burrs are in good condition, and a meticulous extraction process. Garage Roasters is a boutique roasting business, nevertheless we have invested in all of these drivers of quality in roasted coffee.
The final part of the puzzle is consumer preferences. Each person has a unique palate with a large driver of that being genetic. I've had many people tell me that Garage Roasters' coffee is the best they have ever tasted. I've also had customers who didn't care for our coffee. Our perspective is that this is purely driven by preference. Objectively we roast extremely high quality coffee.
To summarise this newsletter, I have two suggestions. When selecting anything (including roasted coffee as well as pinot noir) I think it is important to make sure that your producer demonstrates all of the characteristics of high quality. At that point it comes down to your own set of preferences and that's where the fun starts!
To read more about coffee bean processing click here
To learn about tools of the trade click here