We are primarily a wholesale roaster. The bar brews a lot of coffee, certainly, and sells more pounds/week retail than any cafe of its size I’ve yet seen. But compare the weight used there to the numbers found on the order sheet at the roastery, and one will begin to contemplate the fate of all this coffee leaving our hands.

When thinking of all these individual clients: cafes, grocers, restaurants, wineries, etc questions arise: How long will it sit around in bags? In open containers? Hoppers? With which method will it be brewed? With blends, in consideration being paid to the application in mind during our development? Is the equipment routinely serviced? Already desperately in need of repair?

Further, when you consider the number of hands (usually in pairs) employed at these individual outlets the questions become a bit more frantic to me: Do they even drink coffee themselves? The coffee they’re serving? Have they come from a background in coffee? Food, at least? How long have they been serving coffee in one specific way, and how ingrained in them is it? Any possibility of relearning technique or information? The list is exceptionally long on this front…

With these considerations in mind, I have been trying to (slowly, so far) visit all of our clients. This is a quick enough process for a certain portion of our business. If a grocery store is shelving our coffees, I consider business-sided things like signage and placement. For those with bars, serving a full menu of crafted drinks and catering to large clientele, this means scheduling a time to meet with the owners/managers and member of their core staff. This latter part is the most fun to me. It is also, without a doubt, the most taxing.

I’ve learned so far that the easiest way to initiate such a session is when we first gain the account. New businesses are for the most part slightly overwhelmed in the ordeal of opening the doors for the first time.  They are very much eager for their new vendor to serve in a partnership role while they get their bearings. If management is new to coffee in particular, so much the better for us in expecting to serve a more active role in selling our coffee, both to the business and to the consumer. So over the last few months the majority of training visits scheduled have been arranged during the last few days of build-out, a soft opening, or coinciding with a uninterrupted change in ownership. The rest are then those who are actively striving to improve the quality of what they are doing. They want to  learn how best to treat the coffee and how to impart to the customer the level of artisanship and attention to detail required to obtain that perfection of cup. And they really want to learn how to pour latte art…