November 2016 Newsletter

As I said last month, I've already organised the specials for November and December, so I thought I'd announce this month's right out of the box.

Ethiopian Wenago Yirgacheffe
$54.00/kg

Traditional Yirgacheffe flavour with sweet jasmine and lemon aroma and front palate acidity, creamy mid palate and punchy chocolate and cherry aftertaste.

I know it's unusual to have 3 Ethiopian coffees on the list, 2 of them from the Yirgacheffe area, but this coffee is so good I couldn't resist. In fact, the last 4 months of this year, December included, have been something I've wished for for years, an unbroken run of 90+ coffees. (And yes, that was a teaser for next month.) If you consider that I put the lowest scoring coffee, the El Salvador Bourbon at 90.5, on first, it will give you an appreciation of how I regard the coffees that have followed it.

I had a fair bit of feedback from last month's newsletter about Kickstarter failures. One person in particular (not a customer or from Oz) seemed rather put out, saying entrepreneurs have to accept a high failure rate before succeeding. True, but that doesn't mean that they get to take a swag of other people's money with them when they fail. Anyway, this person more or less said "If you know so much, why don't you invent something!"

To be honest, I don't think the market is crying out for another variation on a domestic espresso machine. I suspect that's one of the reasons that the Kickstarter startups failed. One thing that did occur to me was the need for a Universal capsule machine. (All right, I was pushing my trolley down the coffee and tea aisle of the supermarket and saw that the shelf space for capsules had been increased yet again, at the expense of both instant and roasted coffee. There were 6 or 7 different types of capsules on display. As well as an extensive bottom shelf of machines, all under $200.00, designed to use said capsules.)

There are already a couple of attempts available, from Sunbeam and Kenwood, but they involve adaptors which must be removed and replaced for each different capsule type. My Brilliant Idea (you saw it here first!) was to include all the adaptor chambers in a sort of rotating carousel, so you clicked it round to the right chamber, dropped in the capsule, and closed and sealed the chamber lid which automatically started the brewing process. Viola! A mediocre espresso of your choice whenever you want it.

Of course, commercial reality is that the capsule system manufacturers make it as difficult as possible to change systems, and the machine manufacturers are happy to make a very slightly different machine for each capsule type. And much to the disappointment of the gadfly who emailed me, you wouldn't need a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development.

There are already more than 100 different capsule machines on the market, coming from more than a dozen Chinese factories. It would be both easy and cheap to modify an existing state-of-the-art machine with the added functionality rather than producing everything from scratch. Which appears to be yet another lesson that the various Kickstarter startups have yet to learn.

Which, for coffee roasters like me, is probably just as well. Otherwise Alan's Universal Capsule Carousel would take over and grow the "capsule convenience" market to the serious detriment of the freshly roasted coffee market, i.e. me. Not a good idea.

Until next month

Alan