You know, I put out on Twitter that I wanted to do a Q and A.

You've got to ask me some questions.

I picked about half a dozen of those, and we're gonna enter those today.

First question came from coffee and content.

Who asked, Is there a future for specialty coffee in capsule or instant form, way forward or dead end?

So it's been pretty hard to miss the growth in these new hyper convenient formats.

When it comes to specialty coffee, you've got companies like Alana and others in the UK moving into Nespresso pods and doing that well, you've got companies like suddenly voila in the U.

S.

Doing instant coffee, and I think it's something is gonna grow and grow and grow and grow.

I think technology will close the gap that will allow us to take something delicious in terms of well roasted coffee beans that were growing well and turn that into either apart or instant.

Now, for a long time.

I think the cost is gonna be super high to do Instant really well is immensely expensive, and I don't think anyone doing instant right now is close to what is actually possible with freeze drying really well brewed coffee that tastes good with pods.

I think people are starting to get into it.

I don't think for a second anyone is gonna take any market share away from Nespresso.

They sell what they sell very well.

They'll continue to grow, spend the money open.

More boutiques do that thing.

They'll be a secondary market of specialty that will grow a CZ well.

But that won't grow anywhere near the rate.

I don't think that espresso did or will continue to do.

David Fox asks.

When we know that the specialty market has reached over supply seems to be a coffee shop or roast on every corner and more coming now.

I think this is actually a great question from David and something I've talked about.

My blog's quite a lot.

I'll stick a link to that in the description below.

I think we'll know when we reached over supply when well initially what'll happen is the rate of closing will begin to increase now, with cafes that'll happen first.

Generally, they have less capital to begin with Ron's or tighter and margins and, you know, high rent a bunch of other things that sort of make a cafe and what fragile business.

So we're more likely to see Cafe start to close, and then, as cafe start to close, we may see one or two roast.

This start to close as well, and eventually you'll reach a kind of equilibrium where the number of openings per year cannon matches the number of closings.

What might happen for little while is well, see, actually a contraction in the market in that more businesses will close the open, but I don't really think that's is likely to happen.

It's a possibility in some markets, and we're already seeing it now in places like Soul and other cities that had crazy booms.

But in London, I think it'll just slow down ultimately on.

I guess the other metric we could look at for when we know that we're into a new thing is that there'll be a new kind of specialty, right?

One specially become special.

Ubiquitous.

The top of that pyramid will fragment off again, the way that specialty fragmented away from commercial coffee on what have a new kind of super specialty thing that won't necessarily be more expensive, necessarily be about luxury products.

But I think it will be different to the way that specialty is currently done and we'll have a higher value to customers.

I don't necessarily know what that is yet, but I think that's what's likely to happen.

Tokyo Brewster says, cupping for espresso.

Okay, so this is a tricky one and wonder at square mile.

We've gone over a dozen different ways over the years.

How do you effectively taste espresso, right?

Do you have to pull shots of it?

Do you have to cup it like you'd cup your drip roast?

Assuming you're not doing a nominee roast thing where you try and rest everything the same if you are roasting specifically for espresso, how is the best way to Q C that I would pretty much say cup of that coffee?

It is gonna taste darker, but you are very quickly going to acclimatize to a table that A LL tastes that way, and your brain pretty quickly learns to switch off from the level of roast.

If it is consistent, you could kind of get a suppression of those flavors, and you will find it with a little practice easier to discern what it's good on.

What tastes bad in a cupping bowl, often espresso roast.

Now we did a bunch of different experiments over the years where we wanted to see if, ah, cupping, bold correlated to actual espresso.

So for while we would do stuff like pull Ikea shots, delude them down to a kind of camping ball strength and cup that against a regular cupping bowl off the same batch and see if you know a bump in vicinity here meant a bump acidity there that a certain kind of fruit quality that we liked in the coffee appeared in both bowls, and it did.

And so while I think it's important to brew espressos, part of the QC process both as components is as a blended batch.

I also think it's much, much easier to QC by cupping a couple of bowls of every batch that your roast So Thomas Bargain asks, Will all roasters eventually own coffee farms?

Is this good?

I'm gonna go ahead and say no, I don't think in the near future Roasters, they're gonna own coffee farms.

We have seen some roast.

Is gettinto farming coffee, most obviously at the high end.

We've seen Tim Little Bow go from working with Finger Termina through to owning figure sweater.

We've seen Toby Toby Smith from Toby's Estate open a farm in Panama called Santa Tereza.

We've seen much bigger companies and tow.

You know, I think Lavazza owns a farm.

Maybe, but here's the thing.

Owning a coffee farm is really deeply unfair.

Farming coffee is deeply unfair.

I don't think many roasters are willing to put themselves into such a financially precarious position as that off a coffee farmer.

Now that's kind of messed up.

I don't argue the fact that it's messed up.

People don't wanna own farms because they'll likely lose money doing so.

Rarely does coffee pay particularly well, even in specialty.

You know, you certainly see some wealthy coffee farmers, but they usually wealthy independent off coffee.

And that's allowed them a kind of buffet to build a brand, build a reputation, fun, great coffee and get the price of that up.

But actually, for farmers to just charge more on make real money, that's not really happening right now.

Now, in certain situations, you will see roasters or sitting in large companies reach down the supply chain to try and ensure supply.

Obvious situations might be, say, Starbucks, investing in dry mills in China to make sure that they have a supply of coffee there as China booms for them.

I don't think we'll see roasters owning farms, but I think we'll see more roast is investing in dry miles potentially or wet mills.

Potentially, that puts an enormous burden of responsibility on us because as long as we don't want to do it, then that's a pretty good indicator that this is a messed up, unfair, discriminatory system that was traditionally built around colonial wealth extraction.

You know, the way that coffee farming was kind of created a cz, an industry woz to supply the colonies.

You know, there's a long history of abuse and slave labor and all sorts of horrific things in coffees history.

Coffee was never built from the ground up.

To be fair, it was built to be unfair, and so I don't really know what the answer to this is in terms of how do we make it genuinely fair?

But as long as it is so weighted towards developed countries, then you won't see roasters put themselves into financial jeopardy.

Just thio have a small bump in quality or potentially just to save a little bit of money.

Question from Isaac Hecker Are there any movements towards automation in coffee roasting?

And the answer is, yes, there are.

You're seeing more and more automation.

And actually, automation has a pretty long history and coffee roasting.

Certainly much larger plants work on automation.

I've been to a number of very large rose trees where roasting has done from a desk, not particularly near the roaster.

Now, one of the things that I believe is gonna happen is that the increase in quality and espresso machines the fact that we now understand extraction in espresso, the fight that grinders air getting better.

We're gonna start TOC riel transparency on the quality of roasted coffee coming out of a roastery.

Now every roaster in the world struggles with absolute quality, right?

Everyone agrees that roasting is incredibly difficult to be consistent with.

It's incredibly difficult to do Well, everyone has a bad day.

Everyone puts out batches they aren't entirely happy with.

I'm not saying no one writes Good coffee.

I'm saying there is a gap often between what we wanted to achieve with that roast and what we did achieve now, it still may be delicious, but we left some potential on the table.

Now, by and large, many of us are working with vintage machines, wherein we pretty much adapted it to put a small temperature probe into one or two places to track that data with something my crop stir.

But really, that data isn't super good.

You'll see lots of roasters who are able to exactly replicate a roast profile.

But in doing so, the Tates, the coffee will very, very slightly.

This to me tells me we just don't have very good data.

I understand that coffee is an agricultural product, that it's not completely uniform.

But at the same time, I also believe that we could improve the data that we collect from roasters.

And so, as far as I'm concerned, automation isn't gonna be viable or useful to specialty until we're able to collect truly valuable data from the roasting process.

And that's gonna be more than just sticking a thermo couple into a roaster on hoping that its contact with the beans they tumble around in there somehow communicates accuracy about what's happening in terms of the complex chemistry inside a coffee roaster.

So, yes, automation is coming.

But outside of the challenges of automation and potentially machine learning and a bunch of other stuff, really, the challenge to Seoul first is accurate data collection.

We just don't really know what's happening in a roaster still, and that's all roasters that I've ever seen all around the world.

The last question comes from Elizabeth Stone, and she asks, I'm a new coffee shop owner.

My question is to keep it simple or give selections.

I'm a big believer in keeping it simple.

There's a few different reasons for this.

You know, if you read the paradox of choice, that's a pretty great explainer of why I think minimal choices are a good thing.

You're more likely to be happy with your choice from a small selection than you would be.

From a very large selection, you have more buyer's remorse when you pick from a larger selection.

Now, the other challenges.

If you start with a wide selection and you end up with something that maybe doesn't sell as well as you want it to, you're gonna have to delist that product now it might be a size.

You might have started selling a large beverage, and you want to kind of get rid of that size.

Or it might be a drink or it might be something else.

When you take something away, that's a challenge, because you have to explain why you took it away, because there is gonna be an audience for that that already likes that thing.

There may not be enough of them, but there are some people that like it when you take it away.

If you don't get the language right, you can make them feel stupid.

We saw this often in London when people sort of moved away from the larger drink sizes.

Ah, lot of the explanation about why they didn't do 16 ounces like really big drinks was that they didn't like the taste of them.

They weren't proud to serve them.

And if you had bought that drink from that business before then they were saying we sold you something that we think was bad, and we think to some extent you were foolish to buy that thing.

So people get quite upset when you take something away.

It's much harder to take things away than it is to carefully add them.

And again, as a new owner, you want to make sure that you have a minimal number of things to QC and worry about the broader.

You spread your range, the harder will be to have everything be as good as you want it to be and as consistent as you want it to be.

So for me, I'm always about small, minimal ranges.

I think it brings more happiness.

I think it brings better products on.

I think it's a better business.

Strategy seems kind of obvious, but if your range is small, everything has to be excellent.

So they that's today's Q and A.

If you enjoyed it, give it a like, uh, if you want me to do another one, leave some questions in the comments on I'll look at them and maybe do another Q and A suit.

Thanks so much for watching.