For those who read the report of my visit to Dublin last summer, you may recall my regret at not picking up a copy of Colin Harmon’s book, What I Know About Running Coffee Shops when I stopped at 3fe. I rectified that this week by downloading the Kindle edition, and I’m very glad I did.
Continue reading
We had some family and friends over for brunch yesterday. Beautiful day, which allowed us to sit outside. The espresso machine got quite the workout, as I ended up making about a dozen drinks in a relatively short period of time. By the end it was putting out pure crema. Here’s one of my earlier efforts, I managed to get some milk art into a smaller glass for a macchiato.
Just into the New Year, Sami of Sami’s Coffee Kiosk made his usual end of the day tweet that he was closing up, this time with a twist.
I’m very much in favor of this. It’s a bit deflating to go into a beautiful coffee shop to find it filled with people on their laptops, making you think you’ve wandered into a library. I’m not one to chat up strangers in cafes (baristas excluded), but I’d rather be around a conversational buzz than quietude interrupted by fingertips dancing across keyboards.
Some spectacular milk art today from my friends at Northside Social
Here’s to a year of sunshine, great coffee, cool music, friendly baristas, and treating your baristas well.
Wishing you the happiest of holidays, my friends. I’m grateful for every and any for take a look here – maybe even you, you bots and spammers.
A lovely gift pack of single serves and a mug from Counter Culture were under the tree for me this morning, can’t wait to try them out.
Peet’s Coffee is merging with European coffee company Jacobs Douwe Egberts. It’s a combination of siblings, as both companies are owned by German holding company JAB, whose other investments include pieces of Krispy Kreme, Pret A Manger, and Keurig Dr. Pepper. JDE’s portfolio of brands are found mainly in Europe with some outlets in Asia, aimed toward mass-market rather than highest quality, so it’s a good marriage in that sense. The move prepares the combined unit for a potential IPO, possibly next year.
I wouldn’t expect to see operational changes in individual Peet’s outlets, but the combination and the potential IPO could give them a war chest for expansion with an eye toward eating into Starbucks’ dominant market share. Both also slug it out on grocery shelves for bags of beans, and this may mean we see more Peet’s branded pre-made drinks in retail coolers.
Blue Bottle Coffee is in the news this week (h/t once again to my friend Karen), as it announced that it is undertaking a series of operational changes with the goal to be zero waste by end of 2020.
The drive starts with pilots in two San Francisco Bay area shops to eliminate single use cups, which they hope to roll out throughout their entire chain.
A company blog post from their CEO announcing the changes contains some frank comments, including an admission that current efforts just aren’t cutting it:
Continue readingWe recently woke up to the fact that our beautiful bioplastic cups and straws were not being composted even though they were 100 percent compostable. Too many ended up in landfills, where they couldn’t break down at all. So we switched to paper straws and sugarcane-paper cups. But that’s still not enough. We still go through on average 15,000 disposable single-use cups per cafe per month in the US alone, which adds up to 12 million cups per year.
-Bryan Meehan, CEO, Blue Bottle Coffee
Ah, that time of year has come yet again. Kindly consider this an update to my holiday gift guide from 2018; all the items there are still recommended. I’ll try to add a few more suggestions, including add-ons to last year, to help you delight the coffee nerd in your life. Just a disclaimer, I’m not getting any kind of click-through payments or other compensation from anyone on these; just my own opinions, for whatever they are or are not worth.
Continue reading