Have you noticed that when you stroll into a cafe or coffee shop, you find yourself waiting longer for your drip coffee or latte to land on the bar? You’re not becoming more impatient; wait times for coffee are increasing. However, with longer wait times comes coffee that is brewed slower, giving the brewer more control, which ultimately results in better taste. Read more about how long people are will to wait for their coffee here:
Once about speed—sloshed into a paper cup and gulped on the ride to work—quick coffee now signals cheap coffee and not what customers want. More coffee shops are betting that a wait of four minutes or more is desirable. It takes that long for a cup of coffee dripped through an hourglass-shaped carafe or for a ‘pour-over’ where baristas pour hot water over a filter of coffee into a single mug.
Tad Jusczyk says he waits somewhere between five and 10 minutes for his 10:30 a.m. coffee at D Squared Java in Exeter, N.H. Three different varieties are listed on a chalkboard, and the barista brews his cup at 205 degrees Fahrenheit. On a recent morning, the 35-year old architect requested the Ethiopian Chelelektu grounds brewed on a “bee house” ceramic dripper. He paid $4 and waited while reading the second book of “My Struggle” by Karl Ove Knausgaard. “I like the fact that it takes a little longer,” he says. “It’s a mental break.”
One benefit of slower-brewed coffee is that the coffee vendor has more control over the process and, as a result, taste. Water is heated to an ideal temperature—between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit—and they select the beans they want for each cup and grind them fresh.
Coffee shops are weighing costs and revenues of slower service by evaluating employees behind the counter, longer brew times, and how that effects prices and lines.
“It’s ‘how do I balance the quickness with the slowness,’” says Peter Giuliano, a senior director at the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a Santa Ana, Calif.-based trade association representing roasters, farmers and baristas. The industry term for a coffee counter that contains manual brew methods is “slow bar,” says Mr. Giuliano. “There is a surprising number of people who want to slow down and enjoy for 15 minutes.”
Consumers in their 20s and 30s who grew up around Starbucks and coffee culture’s bolder flavors are helping drive the slower service, says Spencer Turer, vice president of Coffee Analysts, a coffee consulting firm in Burlington, Vt. “They started where we evolved into,” he says. That conversation with the barista is a key part of the experience, he says. Coffee shops sometimes offer lower countertops so that customers can see their drink being made to order.
Businesses are saying “I’m going to slow from 30 seconds to five minutes, how much am I going to charge to cover loss of volume in order to make this a viable business,” says Mr. Turer. The standard coffee shop model used to be about moving 500 people through the store a day for $1.50 a cup, he says.
“To brew each cup by order takes more people, better trained people,” says Michael Phillips, director of training at Blue Bottle Coffee, which has shops in New York, California and Japan and offers several slow brewing methods. “It’s a significantly higher burden for the business.”
Starbucks, which established the taste for specialty coffee, is grappling with line speed. Lines that are too slow turn off customers, and it now offers new technologies to help speed things along.
A mobile order and pay feature on the Starbucks app now allows customers to skip lines by ordering and paying for drinks ahead of time. The feature is “driving meaningful revenue growth,” Kevin Johnson, president and chief operating officer, told investors and analysts in a Jan. 21 call.
But Starbucks also wants to attract the slow customers. About a year ago, Starbucks opened a “Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room” in Seattle, featuring its small-batch coffees. Sourced from around the world, the coffees are roasted on-site and might be served by pouring hot water over a glass carafe ($3.50 to $6.50) or in a 24 ounce French press ($8 to $13). Starbucks is expanding the program to offer the limited-quantity coffees and specialty brew methods by opening 500 new “reserve stores” world-wide in the next five years.
Caribou Coffee, a chain of 425 coffee shops that serve elaborate drinks like Turtle Mochas topped with caramel sauce and Snickers bar pieces, will be testing a slow bar at a store in Minneapolis in June. It plans to offer French press and a nitrogen-infused coffee that looks like a beer but tastes like coffee. Slower, manual methods can take double the time of espresso-machine drinks that take two to three minutes, says Brian Aliffi, Caribou’s coffee sourcing manager. Despite operational challenges that could include more employees and longer prep times, he says, “it’s definitely something we’re looking at” offering more broadly.
In Martinez, Calif., John Cassidy, owns Mountain Grounds, a 300 square-foot coffee shop in a strip mall which typically has four to six different manual brewing devices set up on the counter. An hourglass-shaped Chemex holds a thicker paper filter. Other devices include a cylinder-shaped Aeropress and a siphon, which is a two-compartment glass brewer popular in Japan.
When the shop opened two years ago, lines would often extend onto the sidewalk. Mr. Cassidy put a pot of brewed coffee out, along with a box for cash, to tide over customers waiting for their special orders. But people started leaving after pouring themselves a quick cup.
Now, Mr. Cassidy accepts orders by text message, and has since increased hands on deck to five from two staffers. This includes a greeter at the door who takes orders, a barista at the espresso machine, another barista working the slow bar, an assistant who juggles milk and cups, and a cashier. He charges $2.75 to $6 for a cup.
“Every business consultant has told me this is suicide,” says Mr. Cassidy, who says his business model is working and that his coffee shop, which opened in September 2013, is “in the black.”
The extra minutes also provide time for the smell and sounds of coffee which add to how consumers perceive their coffee, says Charles Spence, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, who also researches consumers’ sensory perceptions for food companies. The smell and taste of coffee comes in two stages: “Orthonasally,” or the sniff of odor compounds through the nostrils. Then “retronasally” which is the aroma traveling through the back of the mouth and perceived as flavor. The complex aroma and flavor of coffee comes from about 40 individual chemical compounds, he says.
“The sounds of grinding, dripping, spluttering, those are all meaningful,” he says, and play a role in how the consumer perceives both the flavor and quality.
At home, coffee made with a drip coffee maker is still the dominant way Americans prepare their cups of joe, according to the National Coffee Association, a trade group, but it has been declining. In 2015, 54% of coffee drinkers reported using this method in the past day, compared with 61% in 2012.
Joe Foley, a computer programmer in Silver Spring, Md., says in a pinch recently while on a boat trip, he spread a paper filter over the rim of a cup and made morning coffee by pouring hot water over the grounds. “This was the best coffee I’d had in a long time,” he recalls. He now uses a $15 device from Bodum, grinds the beans fresh each morning and boils the water over his stove before pouring it over a metal filter. From beginning to end, the process takes about 15 minutes.
The extra time, compared with his old capsule-based coffee machine, is worth it, he says. He enjoys the smell and the taste of his coffee. He even likes the process. “It’s about remembering to take the time to set your day up,” he says.
SRC: See the original article, written by Anne Marie Chaker with the Wall Street Journal at: www.wsj.com/articles/how-long-would-you-happily-wait-for-a-coffee-1456951808