2024 recap (I: Tasks)
The first week of January is always a slow week.
A lot of locals and especially university students are out of town, a significant number of tourists make for a slow week at the café with more lengthy than usual talks about the coffees we roast and serve. Cold hands cling to hot cups of steaming chocolate. Baristas are either calm because of their recent lack of sleep or energetic and hopeful, stemming from their highly successful streak of doing yoga every morning for two mornings in a row.
It is a time of reflection of the Christmas season, a major contributor to annual revenues, a season giving you a lot of insight owing to the unusually high number of first-time customers in a very short time. The copper-brown cover of my fresh calendar mirroring my afternoon brew. After seemingly weeks of holidays, it’s not just your coffee that might appear either annoyingly stale or disturbingly zingy, if you’re like me and crave a mellow brew that just doesn’t trigger your analytical sensory skills. No, you yourself are stale, old, have little to give and at the same time the sharp citric acidity, the phosphoric goodness that pleases the masses, the lactic tang all feel their time has come to make the future theirs.
In your sleepiness
you lose a slipper,
misstep, spill some Rwanda PB on your beige sweatpants. Do some spontaneous laundry. Take a hot shower. Maybe not obsess over skin care this year. Pluck your eyebrows and feel the sting in your nostril. Look into your well-lit face that shines in the mirror and you’ll see:
i can’t be grumpy abt it forever
2024 was a fucking good year
in parts
(pictured: one of those parts)
2024 was a long year that went by in a rush. I have talked about my preparation for 2024 Austrian Brewers Cup in length, I will not lose myself in competition thoughts once again. The tension was palpable as I set out to take a leap. I was doing day-to-day work and started taking over our company’s Instagram (mixed feelings) as my boss was travelling Ethiopia to meet long term partners Taramesa Coop and Schilicho Coop, visiting nurseries at a neighboring Coop that I don’t remember the name of, as well as cupping and discussing the just recently finished crop at SCFCU facilities in Addis Ababa.
As a tight knit coffee business’s social media-admin I had the pleasure to hear a lot of internal unsolicited nagging but also got to present at least four new coffees and three kaffeefabrik special events. It was my job to portray this company’s most successful competition season (hence the lack of footage of my/our competition weekend in November) and a calendar year full of admirable personal development and professional growth.
If our business grew significantly (that will be content of upcoming revision and analysis) that will likely be also due to the entirely new website that – well – does what it’s supposed to. Next to the dumb amount of sophistication that went into comp, the big project of providing this new site with text and pictures together with editorial decisions kept me busy throughout 2024. So, now that we have talked about PR: what was the answer the last time you asked yourself how much the label affected your perception of a coffee’s taste? Do you remember? For me it was: I don’t think I would’ve put those notes down myself but I know where he’s coming from. Well actually now I don’t even know what mine would’ve been. Damn. (in reference to El Limo, Echo, 10.01.25, ca. 12.10h CET).
oh how happy are the times
where you just get to drink without thinking abt it
This became even more complex
as I started writing my own descriptions for broader commercial use for the first time this year. It was a process that certainly went hand in hand with the training of my sensory, analytical and linguistical skills for competition, both ways of putting coffee into text benefiting from each other. How do you make sure the people that could potentially love this coffee will actually end up not only purchasing it but also finding what they were hoping for in their brews? Do you go for internationally known and standardized tastes or rather specific references?
As with so many things in coffee the answer is: if a lot of people have to taste it and like it, ask a lot of people. Just as with introducing batch brew in our shop this year and figuring out recipes for that, coming up with labels for new coffees proved another challenge that made me realize how limited our understanding of our customers’ actual taste experience will always be. Kaffeefabrik 1040 being a small, neighborhood kinda coffee shop it’s not that hard to break the fourth bar and ask regulars for feedback on brews and roasts. If you know somebody’s preferences it is obviously not that hard to anticipate their general opinion on something.
But what I found to be much more difficult is to anticipate what they like in a new coffee, what they dislike in it, how they put it into words and what that might actually be. It is these rather long talks that make you realize somebody might use umami to both refer to the tangy acidity in a washed coffee and to label rather green, herbal florals in another washed. Perfectly balanced, yet intense acidity-sweetness links in a very fermented lot might be a fresh orange for one and cider for someone else. Sure. But actually both among professionals and layslurpers I have found that which aspect of the taste they put into words first, heavily influences how this person will make sense of the perceived rest.
For example,
a more fermenty descriptor to represent the perception of the acidity structure might result in fresher, clearer labels for the taste notes. Somebody else might put the hint of fermentation down as their first taste note and then try and find a lighter, purer descriptor to include the acidity structure into their top three, top four notes. This is a mess. But it is a beautiful mess we have to make over and over again because we will only move further away from consumer experiences if we unlearn how to make sense of coffees in an ad-hoc, unstandardized way.
Spill some. Your professional sweatpants can handle it.
Like the taste of this? Stay tuned for II: taste on Sunday 12.01. 18.00 CET.