What is good coffee in your opinion?

"What do you think makes a good cup of coffee? "

This is a question I always ask when I interview coffee shop owners.

The answers were varied.

Having sold coffee for so long, do you have an answer to this question?

Author: Sun Bochuan

In fact, there are two major understandings of delicious coffee in the coffee circle.

One is real specialty coffee .

The pure coffee (espresso or black coffee) is made by professional baristas using the right beans and roasting methods to highlight the flavor of the beans. This kind of delicious coffee is the result of bringing out the flavor of the coffee beans to the fullest under our current conditions. It is also what most baristas and coffee organizations are pursuing.

The pursuit of bean taste and flavor

Why do we emphasize real specialty coffee? Because there is a branch of this school, called the equipment school. The better the equipment, the more likely it is to achieve the above results, but equipment is not everything. Baristas who rely entirely on equipment and do not have their own knowledge will think that using the best beans, the best roasting method, and the most expensive machine will produce the best results. But the results are not necessarily satisfactory. Everything should be appropriate.

The other type is coffee that customers find delicious .

This group of people’s understanding of good coffee is that customers come first.

Although people have different tastes, you will succeed if you can satisfy a group of people who are used to your taste. This school is not bound by form and dares to break some traditions. It uses special utensils and special techniques to make coffee, and even adds other things to the coffee to enhance the final taste.

But people of this school are more limited, because there are so many people in the world that there will always be someone who likes the taste of your coffee, even if it is dark roasted or charcoal roasted. So those who appear in your coffee shop are naturally the ones who like you. They will definitely praise your coffee for being delicious.

It is meaningless to argue about which school is better or worse. As long as you satisfy your current customers and they like you, that's enough.

Make your own coffee

If you must discuss whether your own method is truly delicious and correct, there is actually another way to compare, which is to compare your sales . Customers are objective. If your food is really delicious, more people will naturally go there. The more money you make, the more people agree with you.

At this point you may laugh at me, "So according to you, Starbucks has the best coffee in the world." If I say directly yes or no, you will always have a way to refute me.

Let's put it this way, if all coffee brands are compared to a class, then Starbucks is the rich student who scored 70 points on the test. All the classmates in the class envy him for being so rich, but they can't compare with him.

At this time, a group of students who scored 90 points stood up and pointed at Starbucks and said, "It's great that he's rich, but he's not good at studying." At this time, all the classmates found the point of criticism and said, "Yes, it's great that he's rich, but he's not good at studying." So the poor students who scored 20 and 40 points shouted the loudest.

Which good coffee camp are you in?

From the above description, I can understand that I personally belong to the second group of sales-oriented baristas. The biggest problem in the domestic coffee market is the lack of volume. It's like a country where there are only a few people riding bicycles, but there are a group of people studying supercars. I can't say that supercars are bad, but people need small cars for transportation, which are the necessities of life.

From quantitative change to qualitative change. There is not enough coffee audience yet, so I think it is meaningless to directly pursue the most advanced technology.

We all need good things, but please do so after people's basic needs are met.

So the question is, how do you define a good cup of coffee? Leave a message to discuss!

Coordinator ｜ Zhengyu Editor ｜ Ruoyun Visual ｜ Jiang Fei

The article is authorized by Zhihu author Sun Bochuan.

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