Why do we so often miss the mark when talking about coffee to outsiders? Reflections on a chat between Tuli Keidar and food journo Nick Jordan.
You’ve got two specialty coffee lovers sitting at a coffee bar, and coffee lover no. 1 tells coffee lover no. 2 how much they’re absolutely loving the luscious, stewed cherry note in their cup of V60 brewed, fresh crop washed Honduran. It’s a lovely moment. Everyone’s happy. But when that very same coffee lover, while working behind a coffee bar, attempts to enlighten the perfectly content “I’ll have a latte-with-two” customer by giving them the full spiel about the single origin of the day, a batch brewed Ethiopian Yirgacheffe that “is insanely floral, like jasmine tea with lemon in it”, it doesn’t tend to go quite as smoothly.
(Oh boy, have I been guilty of this…)
So what to do? If you love specialty coffee, and especially if you love it and sell it for a living, you’ve probably wondered why it’s so hard to spread the joy beyond the devoted few regulars who always ask “what’s the single origin of the day?”.
As an industry, we’re clearly doing plenty right when it comes to getting our message across. Over the last decade, specialty coffee shops and roasters have exploded in popularity, but we haven’t done a great job of educating our consumers. Many of the people who visit out coffee shops every single day are still confused about what specialty coffee represents.
I wanted to discuss all this with somebody who understands what specialty coffee is all about but still has an outsider’s perspective, so I was delighted when Nick Jordan, Sydney-based food journo and documenter of Sydney’s incredible and diverse culinary landscape agreed to chat with me.
It was a very fun and thought-provoking chat, which you can watch on Youtube or listen on your favourite podcast platform (search for ‘ECRE Academy Podcast’ and subscribe!).
Here are some quotes from Nick from the conversation, and some thoughts they stirred up:
“People don’t actually care what things taste like. Nobody ever asks me, or DMs me the question ‘what did that thing taste like?’ They ask ‘is it good or is it bad?’”
I loved this point. It’s something that is both blindly obvious when you reflect on conversations you’ve had with others about food, but it does not appear to be taken on board by coffee people. Do we need to emphasise flavour descriptors as much as we do? Are there better ways to get across that our coffee is ‘good’ without references to fruits, nuts and flowers?
“I can say this confidently: there are very few adventurous eaters or drinkers”
This is another thing that is difficult to keep top of mind. Coffee people tend to be the the flavour-adventurous type, and just like with any echo-chamber, you can forget that just by working in specialty coffee that you’re actually somewhat trapped in one.
“People don’t just like something or not like something. It’s very dynamic–they can easily come to like something because of the story told around it or the environment around it.”
There’s always a temptation to turn a conversation like this into more polarised, black-and-white terms: ‘coffee people’ vs ‘non-coffee people’. But of course, none of us are born coffee people, and many people come to change their coffee drinking habits in different ways. Perhaps we need to spend a bit more time exploring what kind of experiences have led people to change their coffee drinking preferences?
“When I write [about foreign foods], I ask myself ‘How do I make this thing sound normal?’”
This is literally the opposite of what we do. What is specialty coffee? NOT normal coffee. Specialty coffee tastes like berries, has a sparkling green apple acidity, a tea-like mouthfeel, a complex winey aroma…
All of these flavours can and do exist in some specialty coffees. They’re all on the flavour wheel. But is that what your average coffee drinker is craving when it’s 6am, the kids haven’t woken up yet and you just want to start the day off with a steaming hot cup of delicious, comforting, life-giving coffee?
“Filter coffee is NOT an acquired taste.”
That’s right. It’s not sophisticated, it’s not high-brow. It’s delicious. Black. Coffee.
Listen to the conversation between Tuli and Nick Jordan on your podcast app (type ‘ECRE Academy’ into your search bar) or watch it on Youtube.
