Roast #26: V3 Survey Results
He said, fill out the survey, fill out the survey...
To start, thank you to those who filled out the survey. I still need to do the raffle. I’ll do it early next week, or whenever I feel less tired 🥲.
I know it's annoying to fill out feedback surveys, so I'm super appreciative to those who took the time to fill it out.
Alright, onto the good stuff.
For the survey, I asked five questions to all V3 buyers. I had the survey open for three weeks. I did a staggered send-out as people received their boxes at different times.
I'll share the results and my thoughts on a per-question basis below.
Note: Any parts of the text that is quoted with a purple bar (like this one!) at the front represents an actual survey response!
Question #1: Favorite bean? And maybe a bit on why you liked it?
I didn't expect the honey pink bourbon (HPB) to win by this much.
Looking back, the HPB was likely easier to dial in, and it didn't require a lot of rest to get good results. Its flavor profile was much more upfront, as the citrus was intense.
The koji was a delicate bean, requiring some tinkering to get it right. If you didn’t give it enough rest, it would’ve been flat. If you didn’t get the right grind size, it would’ve been flat. But when you did get it all right, the koji exhibited a unique, complex, and sweet cup.
For the future, I'll not include beans like this Yirgacheffe. I'm surprised that two people found that bean to be their favorite. My reasoning for adding the Yirgacheffe was that I wanted it to be a baseline to highlight how unique the other two (koji + HPB) beans were.
From the feedback and talking with you all, I realized that there's no need for me to set a baseline. Most of you already have a baseline — whatever your daily driver coffee is (Counter Culture, Joe's Coffee, Partners 🥲, etc.).
My coffee club coffee is treated as a one-off that people turn to for something that's not like their daily driver/baseline.
One thing I will note is that this change in focus may result in increased pricing. If you reference the pricing for V3, the Yirgacheffe Aricha was the cheapest ($6). I'll try to consider value when filling V4 slots, but with coffee, it's a "get what you pay" type of game.
Below are some of the many quotes I enjoyed reading regarding this question.
Koji. I wish I had better words, but it was so unique and delicious. That level of fruity + complex is exactly why I love interesting coffee.
Honey Pink Bourbon w/Tartaric Acid + Orange Peels - SUPER unique (great citrus plus sour flavor - almost like an italian bitter campari) and delicious. I loved the others, but if I had to choose one it would be the HPB. Usually get my beans from various cafes around the neighborhood (Oslo, SEY, Paloma, Devocion), but have never tried something like the HPB before.
Yirgacheffe Kerume. Liked the brightness and was able to get most consistent brews with it. all were good but i think this was my favorite
Question #2: What's your brewing setup? And was there a recipe you found particularly good that you'd be open to sharing with the public?
This one was hard to analyze. The data was all over the place, and I might have skewed the results by publishing a brewing guide.
For the brewing setup part of the question, I was surprised that there were many more conical brewer users than I expected. Almost half of all responders used a conical brewer (Chemex/Hario Switch/V60). Following the conical brewers was a distant tie between the flat bottom and Aeropress.
There were only a few people who brewed the beans as espresso. This is because I might've skewed/pushed people to go the pourover route since the brewing guide I wrote was purely for pour-over.
For the recipe part of the question, I could only pull a little insight since not everyone wrote in their recipe information. The only insight I could gather was people mostly followed known techniques (Hoffman recipe /Kurasu Kyoto Wave recipe /Tetsu's 4:6 /etc.).
The main takeaway for me is that people are using the brewing guide. I'll be excluding non-V60 brewers in my brewing guide as I don't prefer them and am not comfortable enough with them to stand up a recipe for them.
Question #3: What cadence would you buy into future coffee clubs?
monthly if not more often
The "monthly" cadence won by far. There were two answers for "weekly," and then the rest was some variation of "monthly" (ie, Quarterly, Every two months, etc.).
I'd love to offer it monthly but quarterly is the most realistic cadence. I have other priorities (full-time job/ other parts of thoughtfulcoffee that isn't the coffee club/ etc.), so there will be weeks where I can only put in an hour into moving the coffee club forward.
The process also takes time. Below is a rough timeline of the steps that happen:
1. Coordinate with producers/exporters to get samples (~3 weeks)
2. Run sample roasts and lock down the coffees to use for that version (~2 weeks)
3. Buy the beans (~1 week)
4. Build the target roast profiles for each bean (~3 weeks)
5. Plan and coordinate marketing/logistics/etc. (~2 weeks)
The above are some naive estimates as each step could vary (ie exporters don't respond, none of the samples I receive fit what I'm looking for, or dialing in a bean simply isn't going well)
One thing I am trying to do is not to limit myself on buying beans. If I only have one slot left for a coffee club, but I have three interesting samples, I will put in orders for all three and save the extra two coffees for the next coffee club.
I’d like to buy them all! It’s a great experience and I love trying new beans
But yeah, I appreciate the eagerness of everyone to buy in! <3
Question # 4: Anything you suggest I can improve for V4?
Less packaging:
Not an improvement, just throwing out an idea. If there are ways for you to reduce labor and materials expenses, I would be totally happy with a package with less polish. At the extreme end of the spectrum, I'd be happy to bring my own containers and just pick up beans in person. I realize you may not want to do that as branding/packaging is part of the product, but the things I value (the coffee, local business, and yours thoughts) can be delivered without the packaging. Of course this only makes sense if there are enough people who would participate in a packaging-light version.
I really appreciate this suggestion, as I think it's made with the intent of helping me reduce costs/labor. Most of you suggested that I omit the outer box, and some suggested on having a "reduced-packaging" option for next round.
My thought on having a reduced-packaging variation is that it adds complexity to my packaging process. At the moment, I lay the outer box across my apartment and fill the boxes with their respective bags. The outer box helps provide some boundary between the orders and provides a structure for me to quickly tack on post-it notes to track who that box is for and what batch their roasts are for. Then for transport, having orders in outer boxes makes it easy to stack on top of each other when moving around.
Without the outer box, I'd be increasing my window of mistakes as I lose the encapsulation the outer box provides.
I hate to say this, but I'm leaning toward keeping the outer box. The cost of labor and materials is worth it if it helps me reduce the chance of messing up one of your orders.
Maybe this process could change in the future when I can hire someone better at organizing things than me to help with packing. 👀
Larger bags a la carte:
It'd be cool if you could buy larger bags a la carte after trying them in the club boxes. But that's probably a logistical hassle.
I love that people want more of my coffee! This is a good problem to have. This will be something I'll explore for the next coffee club.
I know the current sizing can be painful. You spend three to five (20g) brews dialing in, and the next thing you know, you are almost out of beans.
Just free thinking here, maybe I also have an additional option allowing people to buy double the size right from the start? Like there'll be one version that's three 120g bags, and then for those interested in a larger quantity, there'll be another option for something larger (ie. 240g bags?).
I'll solve this problem for V4. I might not have the perfect packaging for it, but I'll be sure to offer larger quantities. With an increased batch size to 700g, that'll allow me to do larger quantity roasts.
Improved packaging:
The bean packaging - while the clips worked okay, I usually store my beans in the bag and I felt that I couldn’t really pour them out of the paper bags without making a mess - if they’re the same next time I’ll probably just transfer to a different container
People mentioned that the clips weren't working well and that pouring beans from the bags wasn't practical. I'd like to see how people are opening my bags here. I didn't understand heat-sealed packaging until Ben, from Villager, told me how I messed up my own packaging 🥲.
So if you were like me, and didn't understand how heat-sealed bags worked, then I'd request you give the package-tie bags a second chance. If not, I'd be curious to hear more about your case. Please send me a DM (@thoughtfulcoffeenyc)!
Instead of a paper tag accompanying the bags, it might be cool to do a qr code linking to a website with the description. When I did a tasting with a few friends it got a bit chaotic lol
People also suggested how I presented the bean information could be improved. I agree, I'll add QR codes to make sharing the info easier, and I'll also add a printout of the brewing guide in future orders.
Providing recommended brewing instructions as printouts would be awesome if possible!
Initially, I was super excited that the brewing methods substack post was getting a ton of consistent daily visits. But later on, I realized it was likely because people were checking that link daily to reference the doc for dialing-in purposes. That must've been annoying and frustrating... having to recurringly find a link on your mobile phone early in the morning...
Question #5: Anything in particular you'd want me to keep for V4?
Community:
Also the pop-up was pretty fun - idk if it's a lot of work on your end but the lite social aspect of this whole thing is pretty cool. in general while the coffee is great a big part of why i enjoy this is the local / community aspect, so as much as it's possible to create opportunities in that area it's cool (especially compared to the impersonal experience of just ordering coffee from somewhere else on the internet right)
I loved this feedback. A lot of my thinking for this project happens during my subway commutes, and one thought that popped into my mind was if people referred to me as their "coffee dealer" — kinda like how back in the day, you'd have a "weed" dealer?
I wrote a bit about my thoughts on community in my V3 reflection, but that was from my perspective. With this feedback, it seems feeling of community is seen from both sides — both yours and mine. <3
Setting up the pop-ups is hard, but it's worth it as I get to see the glimpses of excitement when customers receive their coffee box. Things like that make me happy.
I plan to keep the in-person pickups.
Fruity, fermented coffee:
Also keep on the more experimental side. I have my daily driver coffee to scratch that itch but I like coffee clubs to introduce me to new things or stuff I may not have bought otherwise.
I will try my best to! I want to clarify that the primary driver for what I pick to be included in each coffee box is based on my taste preferences.
If a coffee has a crazy process but has too much funk or is a flavor profile I'm not big on, I will pass on it. Then on the other spectrum, if there's a coffee with very simple processing but tasted fantastic, I'll buy it.
What I'm trying to say is that I'm not purely buying off of processing, but rather I'm buying off of taste. It just happens my taste preferences skew toward experimental processing. 👀
Brewing guide and coffee information:
i really appreciated the brewing notes. nice to read someone's brewing methodology. thanks for doing this!
I absolutely will keep the brewing notes. I share a bit about why I come up with the brewing guide here, but simply it is:
Buyers would judge me based on how they brewed and tasted the coffee. If I let buyers brew blind, I'm setting my product up for failure. - from Reflection V3 post
I'll try to do a better job with writing the guide (better photos, try more recipes, maybe an iced section?). If you have suggestions (other than using new brewers), let me know!
Really like the amount of information provided about each bean and the variety of flavors.
I have no intention of putting less information about each bean. I love getting into the details about how each bean is processed, and it seems some of you do too.
—
And that's it. Thank you all for filling out the survey. It was a lot of fun reading the responses. I have a pulse on what my audience wants for V4, and I'm able to take away a few concrete action items to implement for V4.
I'll finish with this quote:
I got a bonus vial which was super awesome and appreciated but I didn't know which coffee it was
Well, form-filler-outer, the bonus vial is slotted in for V4. :)
Thank You's:
There’s likely a lot more to thank than what I have listed below, but I’m a bit pooped out at the moment. If I miss any, I’ll be sure to add it in the next post (#baristaseriespart3)
Thank you David for saying "hi" to me at Uniqlo. I felt like a mini-star when I think you said, “Brian from thoughtfulcoffee?”. That little encounter made my week.
Thank you Brendan (sorry!!!!!) for being supportive and namedropping thoughtfulcoffee in the Reddit-sphere. I see you. 👀
Thank you Ryan/Norberto/Jimmy for your work with NYCoffee Discord. From managing group-buys to planning community events, your efforts move our server onward and forward. You could be doing many other things with your free time, but you all choose to dedicate it to growing our community. <33