Roast #16: The tale of four roasters and an artist
...and their journey to pineboxrockshop
Hello again.
Last weekend I was at a little pop-up over in Bushwick hosted by a discord group that I'm a part of, NY Coffee Roasters Discord (invite link).
The pop-up featured four roasters from the discord (Alex from @maveli.coffee / Norberto from @obscurecoffeeroasters / Jimmy from @peculiarcoffeeny / me @thoughtfulcoffeenyc), and an artist (Brent from @purehappinesscoffee).
The following is a write-up of that experience, as I think it's something most of you will enjoy.
Planning
We started thinking about this event close to mid to end of December. Norberto kicked off the planning, and we bounced ideas until we created a formal event thread in the discord and kicked it off.
The conversation was spotty at first. We sent messages here and there throughout the holidays, checking in to figure out what we wanted the event to be, the restrictions for the event, and other miscellaneous high-level thoughts.
From the conversation, we decided to move away from a "formal cupping" to something more market and pop-up-like style.
Then Norberto secured the venue and brought another roaster Maveli Coffee. We were now at four roasters!
Shortly after securing the venue, Jimmy/Norberto took a trip out to scope the bar out, talked to Jeff (@pineboxrockshop), and overall got a sense of what will be provided and what we'll need to run the event.
Then Brent came along and offered to come up with a flyer for the event. This was cool to see, as now our event has started to bring in non-roaster folks and provide opportunities for them to showcase their interests. For those who don't know Brent, he runs @purehappinesscoffee, and he creates amazing zines -- check him out.
Then we started to make things official with a formal flyer and ticketing system!
Then things started to blow up. Alex had the ingenious idea of putting out an Instagram ad for the event. The event would not have been as big as it was without Alex's idea. 99% of the people I asked regarding how they heard about the event were from Instagram. Only one group I asked mentioned that they found the event through Eventbrite.
Below are screenshots of my eventbrite updates to the group. Note how I started off initially excited with sign-ups… and that excitement slowly started to turn into dread. lol.
We finished at 384 tickets.
A week before the event, we decided to turn off the advertising as we started worrying that the increased numbers would make the overall experience worse for everyone.
But back to the story, if you were to follow the discord conversation, you could get hints of me panicking about the number of sign-ups we were getting. I initially had around 100 cups allocated for the event as I assumed we'd have around that many people come by.
But then I bought 100 more... and I bought another 100... and in the end, I gave up trying to buy just enough, so I bought another 500. So in total, I bought and brought around 800 cups to the tasting. 🥲
Preparation:
My preparation for the event went okay. I really seriously started planning and thinking through my roasts about two weeks before the event.
Ideally, I would've had two roasting periods. The first period would be two weeks before the event date to allow for the coffee to have adequate rest and for the flavors to develop.
The second period would be a few days before the event to run the production roasts.
Once again, I didn't scale the roasts in time. The Monday before the event, I tried scaling my favorite roast from 300g to 600g, but I got something with heavy roast notes. I re-cupped again that Wednesday, hoping the roast-y notes would've gone away from degassing, but that never happened.
Given the lack of time, I decided to run with the 300g profiles and go with that.
I assumed that 10% of the attendees would make a purchase, so I aimed for 30 bags. Each 300g profile produced two bags, so I needed to run 15 roasts. I estimated each roast to take around 20 minutes from start to finish, which meant I needed to spend 5 hours roasting.
I got to roast number 13 and then called it quits. 🥲 Had I been able to scale the roast to a larger quantity with the same quality, I would've cut my roasting time in half.
Other than roast preparation, most of the other preparations went well. There were some things I did that helped things speed up.
The first was utilizing printed labels rather than handwritten labels. Moving forward, I'm going to go with this approach. No more handwriting things. 🥲
The second was pre-grinding the coffee. It was the morning of the event that I decided to pre-grind the beans. My thinking wasn't to speed up the coffee serving process, rather, it was to help quicken the degassing of the beans. I was nervous that there'd still be a lot of CO2 within the beans, resulting in inhibited extraction. And a known trick to help with that is to grind the beans to increase the surface area of the beans and quicken degassing.
Lastly, I was happy with the number of bags I brought to sell at the event. The last bag sold during the final minutes of the event, so my supply planning was spot on. In the future, I'll target 8% of attendees rather than 10%.
Day-of Event:
The day has finally come.
Around 12:55pm was when we started getting people coming through the door. I think the first group could tell I was a bit nervous. I remember my hands shaking when putting the filters onto the carafe. But after the first group, it was all smooth sailing from there.
Lastly, here are some fun moments that I particularly remember:
When nobody could pay with the Venmo QR codes because... I never fully finished setting it up. 🥲. Then direct Venmo attempts failed due to Wi-Fi being nonexistent in my little nook area.
When Jimmy and I realized that because we shared a single outlet, whenever he pulled power for his kettle, mine would lag in its heating time.
The reactions and feedback that people had after tasting my coffee. I loved hearing the "Woah, this one does taste like oranges!", "This one is my favorite!" and "This doesn't taste like coffee!".
Having to repeatedly turn down people who expressed interest in buying a bag of the gesha beans since I didn't have any for sale. :(
I wasn't able to get a break until 4 pm. Until then, it was just constant streams of people coming by. I remember once it died down, I sat down, checked my phone, and thanked god there was only an hour left.
When Vince (from my coffee club) came by and shared some lovely compliments!
Meeting people who knew about my account beforehand and came out to support me. There were too many names, but thanks to everyone who came by, introduced yourself, and mentioned you've been following my journey!
The final special moment might've been during cleanup after most folks have left. We discord folks were hanging around, shocked that we had just successfully completed the event.
Thank you all for reading, helping, and supporting this coffee journey. I can't wait for the next pop-up we put on.
Great post. So cool to read!!!! & thanks for the kindnesses :-) and for all your hard work. Really made it special.