Saturday, March 1, 2008

That's a lot of beans....

Good morning, I just wanted to drop a line to say if you were looking for me at one of the stores yesterday, I was a little AWOL. I am out there nearly everyday, but yesterday we had one of those leadership meetings at the coporate office in the morning and then I had the B-Heard hotline in the afternoon until 6pm. That's right if you would have walked into the corporate office you would have seen me sittin' right at the front desk....

Earlier this week I had to stop by the roasting facility to check a few things out. I swung through the 'green bean' room to take a look at inventory levels and it gave me pause for a moment to think about the volume of coffee these days. I remember when I used to place the order at the original store and I thought it was a big deal when we hit a hundred pounds a week (now that same store does about three hundred pounds a week)....anyway I'm standing there, looking at these stacks of coffee knowing that it won't last long. Last year we moved about 500,000 pounds of coffee....a far cry from that first store.

Our coffee has always been unique because our goal is to make coffee taste as good as it smells.....simple idea, I agree....but for as many coffee shops that are out there....ya' just don't see it happening. How do we do it? ...there's a couple of secrets, of course (I'll share allof them with you someday), but mostly it comes back to a single moment, for me. Do you ever have those moments from your past, where you can still see it as clear as if it was yesterday, even though it happened a long time ago? A little 'back story' for you...I was born in Augsburg Germany http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augsburg ...a beautiful town in Southern Bavaria, (my mother is German, my father is from the States) ....well in Germany afternoon coffee (about 3pm) is coveted and you take a moment out of your day to sit and have a pastry and the perfect cup of coffee....it's a moment to relax. To make the perfect cup of coffee, you would buy your coffee fresh from a shop around the corner that just sold coffee, and ground it to order for you right there. One of the secrets of good coffee is that you buy it in quantities that you would use in a matter of days not weeks. Anyway my moment as a child....was walking into one of these small shops with my mother and watching her talk to the woman behind the counter, then picking out the coffee she wanted, watching them grind it right there with these huge Mahlkonig grinders http://www.mahlkoenig.com/index.html?/startfinal2.html, and then being completely enveloped by the fresh coffee aroma....it smelled sooooo good....so good, it was heavenly. I walk through that memory today, like it was yesterday.....and it's what reminds me that coffee needs to taste as good as it smells....we went home that afternoon and made that coffee (with cream and sugar, of course)....yum!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bob,

Your aroma comments reminded me of my experience as a child when I went to work with my dad. I was always engulfed by the incredible smell of coffee roasting as soon as we entered our plant.

Guy