If you want to make the best espresso, you’ll need to pack the perfect puck.
A good tamp creates resistance (with evenly compacted coffee) that makes the brewing water work hard to saturate the grounds and extract all of that great coffee flavor. The water pressure pulls oils from the grounds and creates the bold taste and rich texture your customers expect from a quality espresso.
But if the coffee grounds are loose and uneven, water will find the gaps and move through them instead of extracting flavor, and your brew will be watery and flavorless.
To avoid this, follow these easy steps....
If you want your coffeehouse to reach its full potential, you need a healthy dose of obsession. It requires total awareness of your operation—when a glass is missing on a table, the trash is overflowing, or a staff member seems out of sorts—to keep customers coming back.
Managing details like these can turn your business from good to great. Of course you don’t want to take on everything—you want your staff to be empowered and accountable—but it takes setting the example and regularly communicating your expectations to assure quality and service don’t deteriorate.
Your staff needs to see that...
Coffeehouse marketing is all about letting people get to know you and the benefits you offer.
In a way, your coffeehouse or restaurant is its own form of advertising. If you've got a good location—with plenty of drive-by or walk-by traffic—visibility may be enough to keep business humming along. But other than your brick-and-mortar address, how do you promote your business? And does your marketing message communicate your philosophy while giving customers good reasons to walk through your door?
If you market your coffee shop online or with flyers, cross promotion, or print ads, consider...
A lot of coffeehouses are “good,” but not many are truly great. Great ones don’t tend to fail—and open communication with and among your staff can make you one of the great ones.
When you look at the core of problems at your shop—drama and chaos that can infect your business—you don’t have to look much farther than communication issues. Good managers go out of their way to communicate to their team, whereas loose expectations and assumptions can be their downfall.
Be sure you’re communicating with your staff in ways that will strengthen your business:
Every employee comes to...
Summer is fast approaching, along with an uptick in your iced-coffee drink sales. Iced coffees and teas, nitro coffees, blended-iced drinks (frappes) and smoothies are popular in other seasons too, but by June you can expect your ice machine to start working overtime.
Cold coffee is a great way to win over younger drinkers—with Millenials driving the trend in the U.S. Iced drinks are great for your bottom line, too, because as much as half of a drink’s volume consists of ice—thus increasing your profits by 50%. Providing the lighter flavor that younger coffee drinkers tend to seek out means...
In Part I of this series, we talked about how to conduct an energy audit of your coffee shop or restaurant, to find out where you should be incorporating energy efficiencies.
In Part II, we discussed the many ways you can increase sustainability without spending a lot of money.
Perhaps the most obvious way to go green is to recycle as much waste as you can. But while some plastics can be recycled, the greenest option is to avoid using it to begin with, wherever possible. Plastics can only be recycled a few times before they become useless landfill—unlike glass and metal which can be recycled...
We are a trusted supplier of everything you need to look like - and become - an espresso professional.
