“Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.” — Babe Ruth
mycuppa October 2020 Newsletter
September was an exciting month and not without the inescapable challenges from freight delays and incidents.
Sure, we do make much noise about freight and shipping, and we might sound like attack dogs against freight companies, but it's because we care. We are also trying to better inform our customers of situations with many consumers buying goods online, not just coffee; the same rules apply.
I prefer to say that it's slowly improving. However, in reality, it's not - although we should qualify by saying parcel receivers in Melbourne are still suffering badly, particularly AusPost recipients.
Interstate works well.
For this reason, we reaffirm our earlier guidance to AVOID AusPost if you are in Melbourne and instead choose Sendle - even AusPost Express still needs to be fixed.
The primary cause of delays in Melbourne is from the "last leg" segment. Parcels wait forever for delivery from within temporary dark warehouses AusPost are utilizing.
Ironically, AusPost delivers about 75% of their parcels on weekends here in Melbourne, when drivers are on attractive overtime penalty rates.
For some rather strange reason, they must be unable to work usually during the weekdays – maybe it's a lot easier to sit in vans parked on the street on weekday afternoons.
I'm sure you can read into that statement plenty of reasons why delays are still happening.
The Melbourne metro region has been held to ransom from the crap parcel network performance over the last seven weeks after the peak chaos of early August.
We can see what's going on; AusPost has not appeared busy for many weeks now – vans are empty, drivers are punctual, turning up earlier and earlier every afternoon.
It makes you wonder why there is still so much frozen, stalled, hidden freight on weekdays and then big pushes every weekend.
Moving onto more positive news, we have scribbled down a brief list of what's floating our boat at the moment, hoping it might inspire you to take a punt on a coffee you may never have considered.
Roaster's Rant this month looks at the philosophical influences that help shape our coffee products. It sounds deep and meaningful, best enjoyed with a glass of red wine.
Secret Label. OK, it's getting harder to keep raising the bar and building a rock-star coffee for about half the price of our competitors, but this month is unique; no doubt you might be sick of hearing that every month. But listen, the hero element in this month's Secret Label is cherry cola – I bet that got your attention!
Suppose you have yet to encounter cherry cola in a coffee before. In that case, you are missing out on one of life's great coffee pleasures, especially in milk - its flavour with a capital F. Cherry cola does not come around too often, so take the opportunity when it's available.
The last time we had a coffee with this sort of cherry cola was at the stunning Fairtrade lots the previous year. To balance out this wildly addictive cherry cola, we added some syrupy toffee, almond, milk chocolate, salted caramel and a hint of peach. It sounds weird, almost like a degustation menu, but it works remarkably well.
Last week, AusPost released their Xmas guidelines a month earlier than usual. It is no surprise they are urging retailers to inform customers to have their parcels shipped before the 11th of December to avoid missing Xmas arrival - so that's it. 2 weeks is what they are saying will be a safe standard lead time just before Xmas.
We will remind you again in December, but please take this notice as a "heads up" to get your Xmas shopping done early.
Australia's parcel networks will remain congested now that we are in the peak freight season. This peak runs until the end of January. We don't know what might happen with further restrictions.
The big takeaway from what we see in the parcel networks is that AusPost believes two weeks waiting for a parcel is now an accepted condition - with or without restrictions. We find this a rather disturbing observation.
Secret Label
Our September 2020 Secret Label is now available for a limited time in 1kg packs of whole beans (default), or you can select your preferred grind from freshly roasted coffee beans.
The hero element this month is cherry cola. If you have never encountered cherry cola in a coffee, you are missing out on one of life's great coffee pleasures, especially in milk - its flavour with a capital F.
The cherry gives up a robust, intense sweetness that's just divine.
The last time we had a coffee with this sort of cherry cola was at the stunning Fairtrade lots the previous year.
To balance out this wildly addictive cherry cola, we added some other coffees with delicious syrupy toffee, almond, milk chocolate, caramel and a hint of peach.
It is rounded, bold, and distinctive, with sweet notes of chocolate in a long, complex finish.
In milk, this coffee is like a hot knife through butter, just excellent with smooth and creamy flavours and the stickiest of caramels of chocolates in the long finish.
With so many new coffees arriving in our warehouse over the last two months, our heads are still spinning, trying to get our minds around the standouts.
We have some fantastic new Colombians lined up; one of them (Excelso) has seriously stolen my heart for a short time, and those who take a punt on this month's Secret Label will get a taste for what's in store - it's a cracker. There are five new Colombian lots, and it's like a lolly shop after school with so many tasty choices.
New Guatemala Huehuetenango has arrived, and it will be another few more days, or maybe a whole week, before we can stage that puppy into production. Like last season, we hand-pick the super fruity lot with jaw-dropping dark Chocolate and everything we love about crisp, sweet, punchy Guats.
New season Burundi is now on the floor - sublime brown sugar sweetness, green apple and thick toffee. Again, it will be 2 or 3 days before we can showcase it in production as we tune the new roast profile.
Centre Way blend has undergone a few tweaks to incorporate my love affair with the new Colombian lots. I've flipped and flopped a bit, hunting around for the right balance, and like all tinkerers, I will never be happy.
The espresso blend has some elevated juiciness courtesy of the recent El Salvador arrival, providing syrupy toffee and caramel notes. It's now a remarkably different coffee to what we were offering just a few months ago - we keep pushing into a particular quadrant with this coffee, and it's pleasing to see the feedback.
Just like the Espresso renovation, our Redemption of the Spro has taken a decidedly fruity turn over the last few weeks to satisfy the desires of black coffee drinkers for a refined, balanced, drinkable coffee without the need to add milk or sugar.
Guatemala Todosanterita, a stunning coffee we featured in July that has proved a crowd favourite, is almost out. For fans of this truly excellent coffee, there won't be any more coming in to replace it this season, so when it's gone, it's gone.
We love this coffee for its lush hazelnut and rich Swiss Chocolate taste.
The new lot of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe presents a traditional, classic Yirgy cup reminiscent of everything we have loved about the "King of Coffees". A washed coffee generates significant levels of florals with Toblerone-like honeyed Chocolate. Yum. We like it so much that it may also be offered as a filter roast soon.
We sneaked in a plug for the Costa Rica Jaguar a couple of months back, and it's still ranked as a "stand out" coffee we love. A perfect example of what Costa Rica does best - lovely and tantalizing acids dancing on your palate.
Sweet blend continues to be our top-selling coffee, with over a ton heading out the door every week - balance and poise remain the hallmarks of this beautiful all-rounder and our cherished signature offering that punches out coffees sold for twice its price.
It's no surprise there are often many parallels drawn between wine and coffee - both are incredibly reliant upon either the manufacturer's skill, strategy or policy, and both are at the mercy of mother nature's impact on ingredients.
Around a decade ago, when specialty was emerging as a new segment of the coffee industry, many commentators claimed that coffee had always followed wine, albeit almost 20 years behind.
I'm still determining whether that's indeed the case, as the wine industry has recently borrowed many well-developed coffee concepts over the last few seasons - particularly around single estate traceability.
So we expect some ongoing exchange of ideas as both markets further mature and suppliers seek more distinct points of difference.
Winemakers have consistently demonstrated a clear supremacy over coffee roasters regarding taste notes, and it's still the case today.
As an avid wine enthusiast who consumes far too much of the red stuff, I thoroughly enjoy reading the descriptors available on bottles of wine.
Yet, I often need to improve to incorporate these inspirations.
Maybe we like to keep it simple. Rarely is coffee savoured with that exact slow moment as wine.
Most coffee roasters, myself included, need to spend more time clearly articulating the taste or flavour attributes.
Excuses aside, a typical coffee roaster has to juggle hundreds of tasks each day with demands upon our time challenged by working on product lifecycles measured in just minutes or hours versus the weeks and months for wine.
But there's also a noise that coffee roasters must endure - an ever-present feedback loop. It's sometimes loud and capable of bending the weak-minded if you need the proper structure around your business and your processes. Maybe winemakers also have to deal with this noise; I don't know.
As a veteran of the coffee roasting game, long ago in my early days, there was always a heavy emphasis on obtaining people's feedback or opinions no matter what it was, I wanted to hear it - too dark, too light, not strong enough, too acidic, too fruity, not nutty enough.
On and on it went, often chasing my tail when I could not see the obvious elephants in the room making most of the noise. The loudest voices were, in fact, the minorities often sitting on the edges of the coffee centre.
Ironically, many of those voices were from specialty cafes owned by passionate coffee enthusiasts, which made it even more challenging to adjust to their feedback as you tended to over-trust their senses, which inevitably, I learned the hard way was often a mistaken assumption on my part.
You see, as their coffee roaster, I was the gateway to the broader coffee universe, and they used this channel to indulge in their coffee journey or fantasies - mainly at our expense in terms of excessive time and effort sourcing, roasting and then testing yet another set of new directions in coffee. They would get bored with a coffee after just two weeks - make me up something new, something I have yet to taste before, something nobody else has got.
Back then, another factor also disrupted our common sense - an era I often referred to as the "cafe arms race". Each cafe tried to outdo the other by racing to the top of the coffee temple in some imaginary pursuit they believed would make them successful - Nano-lots, exclusive lots, Cup of Excellence lots, $100/kg Geisha's.
All that mattered to these blinded souls was bragging rights about "who was making the best coffee in town". How could they know? Nobody could taste every cup in town, so it was all just jumping in the shadows.
Those days, nights and weekends were tough - frantically searching for an elusive pot of gold at a never-ending rainbow. Of course, I shouldn't complain; a furious cauldron of hot competition built up extreme levels of skills and expertise we now leverage every day.
Only when I switched down the volume of that incessant noise did our roasting step up to the next level; instead of constantly juggling competing demands, we made some tough decisions to focus on a more universally appealing coffee style.
We also made a break with wholesale and contract supply long ago to focus all our incredible resources on being the best online, and it's been a long journey of continuous improvements as we are, in fact, one of the original online coffee pioneers from 14 years ago when nobody but the bravely bought coffee online.
Playing with coffee for nearly 40 years, we realized it was impossible to offer something different or unique (despite everyone promising they could), and more importantly, it also became obvious you can only please some.
Take fruity coffees, for example - some customers go nuts for fruity notes, yet others recoil in horror and claim the coffee is defective. There is an old saying - give the same coffee to 7 people, and you will receive seven different types of feedback.
Building a coffee everyone loves is significantly more complex than creating something different to everything else. Even today, we have people regularly barking at us to roast in different styles because they can't find what they are looking for anywhere else - maybe that's the point; their needs are so unique that it's not something that's going to be broadly accepted by the more significant majority and hence sitting on the fringe can be a dangerous place to hang out.
Coffee has almost four times the number of transformations from seed to cup compared to wine. Of course, that certainly doesn't mean it is four times more complex; it's just that there is an incredible array of variables involved along the way with coffee.
It also means that many things can go wrong when the roasted coffee is in the hands of the end-user, as different techniques used in the brew or extraction generally become the cause of disappointment, so it's not as easy as opening a bottle and pouring it into a glass.
Finding your place in the coffee spectrum is more challenging than it sounds - the market is dynamic, crowded, saturated, noisy, messy, dysfunctional, ultra-competitive, and unstructured, and consumers' tastes shift rapidly without warning.
There are also many loose truths bandied around by companies claiming their coffee is much better than everyone else. Unfortunately, it will always remain an ego-driven industry with too many false and hollow promises.
Today, more than ever, newbie coffee marketers seem to think that the price a coffee sells for should be a reliable indicator of either freshness or quality - how wrong they are.
In many respects, the coffee industry defies the proven logic of business playbooks. According to developed wisdom, for those trying to succeed in a crowded market, you must be different or unique, yet when you translate that for coffee, you risk missing most of your customers.
Our coffees will evolve, just like the rest of the market. The sensible middle might be the safest and most heavily contested turf. Still, it's also a place of considerable strength for us because it's about playing to the customer's need for a smooth, rich, creamy beverage that's not going to offend but still delights the senses with enough charisma to satisfy.
We understand the target well, and we hit it often with almost all of our coffees within the tolerances allowable for the roasted coffees, yet there will always be some coffees that skirt along the edges because life would be boring if everything were the same and sometimes coffee roasters, just like chefs and many others working with variable ingredients, deserve to have a little bit of self-indulgent fun as well ;-).
