Roast #25: Reflection on V3
Prepare for trouble, make it double
Some quick numbers:
Final sold V3 box count: 49 boxes
105 roasts since April 17 (date starting production roasting)
With the 105 roasts, I roasted 77 pounds of coffee.
The extra poundage comes from roasts that failed QA, roasts for the popup, one-off non-coffee club roasts, and other miscellaneous roasts (i.e., test roasts for the V4 Lychee).
Anyways, here we go — coffee club v3 reflection.
Things that went wrong:
Stale roast profiles:
So April turned out to be the month when Winter transitioned to Spring. It went from being ~40F to 70F real quick. The roasting profiles I intended to use were dialed in when my apartment would hover at maybe... 60F? But come April, my apartment was hitting around 75F-80F.
This difference in ambient temperature resulted in a massive impact on roast quality. In the first production run, I ran four roasts of the Honey Pink Bourbon. I used a profile that I had dialed in back in early January. I showcased that roast at Pine Box for our first tasting and was thrilled with it. But then, when I started production roasting in April, due to the increase in ambient temperature, all four roasts I ran for my first production run were scorched and burnt. They were very "roast-y" in flavor, and the burnt/char qualities overpowered any citrus notes.
I noticed something similar to have happened with the Koji, but the effect was dampened, given the Koji was a harder and less sensitive bean.
The increase in ambient temperature meant I had to re-dial in the beans. Dealing with this slowed me down for a week as it wasn't immediately clear why I was getting burnt roasts. The graph and temperature readings looked fine, so I spent some time puzzled, trying to understand what could've changed to produce this issue.
Having stale roasting profiles wouldn't be an issue if I could quicken the coffee box turnaround time or if I was roasting in a fancy environment-controlled warehouse. 🥲
300g batch size was way too small:
RIP 300g batch sizes.
You read the numbers above. If I had made 0 mistakes, I would've needed to run 75 roasts (50 boxes * 3 beans/box / (2 roasts / 1 bean)).
Assuming each roast took ~20 minutes (10 minutes roasting, 5 minutes pre-heating, and 5 minutes packing), I would need ~25 hours of roasting. That's a lot of roasting.
Funny story — after I sent out the pickup form for buyers to answer which popup they would be at, the first five responses were all the Williamsburg @148seconds popup event. It was at this point that I realized that I could be roasting all my pickup boxes for the Williamsburg pickup week. I had a mini panic attack right there and then. 🥲
No more 300g batches — for real this time. 600g batches and above moving forward.
The dream would be just to run one batch and then call it a day. But the downside is that if I messed up that one batch, it would cost me $600+. I can’t afford that kind of loss at the moment.
The benefit of running small batches is I can iterate often and cheaply, but damn does it suck having to run 25 roasts when I know it's possible I could just run one.
Don't buy beans without cupping them:
You may have remembered I originally intended to feature a Double Anaerobic Washed Pink Bourbon from Luis Anibal Calderon.
I bought a Gesha from this producer for V2, so I was confident his Pink Bourbon would also be a hit. So when the opportunity came, I jumped at it and purchased 70 pounds.
I was unable to dial that bean in. I ran eight test roasts to try and get a profile I liked, but I felt all were bad. I reached out to the exporter, and they provided some advice, but they roasted with a different machine, so their advice wasn't super applicable. I tried to apply their advice with my machine, but the resulting roasts tasted bad.
This mistake resulted in me having close to 60 pounds of coffee just sitting in my closet. I'm still not ready to toss it yet, but I need space for new beans, so I'm getting close to being forced to toss them.
Never again will I make a big purchase without first cupping the beans.
Note, I’m not saying Calderon is a bad producer, I’m just saying that I think this specific bag experienced degradation in quality or didn’t taste what I expected. I still intend to buy his coffee in the future, it’s just I’d have to first cup the beans before doing so.
Preparing the boxes took forever:
It turns out that with my printer if I were to run 3+ prints at the same time, the ink would smear on the following prints. I couldn't just "set and forget" the print job. I had to stay by a computer, manually trigger the print jobs, and visually check that no smearing occurred.
Cutting the info cards also took longer than I expected. Having to do four individual cuts for each card added up. Each sheet ended up taking around 30 seconds. I'd cut for a few minutes, count how many I finished cutting, and be in disbelief that I had only cut that many.
With scale and volume come their own set of problems.
The brewing guide wasn't well advertised:
link to V2 brewing guide/V3 brewing guide for those who are curious
I'm no good at marketing or advertising. I'm not the best at making something go viral or known.
One piece of content I wanted people to read was the brewing guide. 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.
For the Honey Pink Bourbon — if I don't mention going coarse, I think most people would've gone fine and tasted an extremely bitter cup with no hints of citrus. That bitterness would not be what I intended for people to experience. I put the selected coffees into the coffee club because I had a pleasant experience with this bean at a specific roast and brew method.
And I guess there's an argument to be made that your beans should stand the quality test regardless of the brew method... And I think that's a valid opinion when considering a bunch of assumptions (i.e., the brewer has good equipment, the brewer has a lot of beans to toy around with, etc.).
But those assumptions don't hold here. With 120g, you only get eight tries when dosing at 15g. And since I'm always drinking my roasts in the morning, why not share what I've found successful?
So yeah, I could've done a better job at highlighting the importance of referencing the brewing guide as a starting point. Through the coffee club v3 feedback form, Alison suggested an ingenious idea of having future brewing guides as a printout.
I'll definitely be doing that in future versions, as that easily solves this problem. Thank you, Alison!
Doing the pickup as a popup was hard:
I wanted to do popups for this round because I really wanted to offer you all an in-person pickup experience that was different from a pickup in front of my apartment. I viewed the popups as just an "add-on" to the coffee club pickup and thought they'd be easy to set up and execute.
I was wrong. The "just an add-on" notion was false, and I set myself up to have two events on the same day. The coffee club required its preparations (roasting/packing), but then the popup also needed its own set of preparations (roasting/dosing/packing/popup-specific tasks).
I accidentally doubled my work. 🥲
Things that went right:
Moving everything to Shopify was the right move:
For V3, I opted to move all sales onto Shopify. For those who are new, what I used to do for V1/V2 signups was to have everyone e-mail me if they were interested, and then I'd individually coordinate the details (instructions/payment/confirmation/etc.) through e-mail. The decision to move onto Shopify was to reduce the logistic burden on my side.
With everything going through Shopify, I was able to manage payments and gather information (e-mail/address). It gave me a lot of other minor goodies that made the selling experience super easy.
Along with logistical ease on my side, I believe having everything go through Shopify made it easier for the buyers too. No more did buyers have to go through an e-mail chain to process their order; everything could be processed on Shopify in one go.
Lastly, I think Shopify really helped enable shipping orders. Nineteen of the forty-nine orders were shipping orders. Outreach was mostly the same for V3, yet we got way more shipping orders than V2 (only 3 shipping orders).
Growth
I was able to sell out again this round! I ran out of the yirg with the 49th order, so I couldn't have taken any additional orders even if I wanted to.
Moving forward, I don't think I'll be able to hit this goal. I likely will stick to consistent bean amounts (usually 12kg bags+) moving forward to make it easier for inventory purposes and reduce complexity. It was somewhat of a pain having to keep in mind that I had greatly less of one set of beans than the other two.
Not too much has changed in terms of marketing between this round and the prior rounds. I mainly marketed the coffee club on IG and Reddit; I didn't use any paid advertising, which means that the increase in sales is likely organic. Plus, half of V2 buyers bought in again for V3, and one buyer came back from V1.
I don't know if half is good, but that means 40 buyers were new thoughtfulcoffee customers.
Regardless of what industry metrics say, I'm happy that people are willing to buy back.
To my V1 buyers, I will always appreciate you for taking a chance on me. In my opinion, the coffee club has gone up greatly in quality as I have a teeny bit more of an understanding of what I'm doing now 🥲. I'd love to have you back for V4!
Popup at 148seconds:
How this popup came about was through the power of Reddit. I posted in the r/williamsburg subreddit to see if anybody knew of any venues that might be interested in hosting me for a popup, and Dallas responded!
@148seconds was kind enough to fit me into their Earth Day popup. The whole team was super welcoming and easy to work with. I loved how chill, relaxed, and open their space was. It was big enough that multiple parties could gather, which fostered many ad-hoc coffee conversations.
It was at this event that I saw conversations happening between my buyers! I know that it's just people talking, which can happen at any event or gathering, but it's knowing my project brought this together that makes it touching. <3
Popup at Villager:
Since Ben (from @villager_ny) and I started our working partnership, he has brought up the idea of us doing a popup together. And honestly, I've been somewhat scared to do one out of fear of having nobody show up and letting their team down. But with V3 and some hints that I'd at least get a few south Brooklyn and neighboring area orders, I thought timing a popup with the V3 release would be a good idea.
The popup went great! My friend Maria was an amazing barista that day, and the Villager team was super helpful and welcoming.
I realized from running this event that having a cafe as a popup location was amazing — having cafe equipment on hand was a game changer. I could wash my glassware, grind with an EK43 (grinder I used to dial in at home), and expand my offerings to include iced drinks.
I didn't have to lug jugs of water, cups, or napkins to and from the event — everything was just there.
The "club" part might make sense now:
This might be what I'm most excited to write about.
When I was brainstorming for the V3 Kill post, one of the reasons I came up with killing the coffee club was because how my offering wasn't really a "club," and the offering didn't make a whole lot of sense. A club usually hints at some sort of collective or some community, and I didn't feel that for V1/V2.
But for V3, I feel I'm seeing some aspects of "community" come through!
Here are some quick examples that I've witnessed/heard:
Alex running a cupping of the coffees with his friends
Sylvan bringing his friends out to try the coffee at the popup
Then instances of people (Morgan/Vincent [V2]/+ maybe more?) who bought more than one box to share with their network!
And instances of people (Flavio/Shahrukh/ + maybe more?) telling their friends/family with the hope of including them in future boxes
It's the willingness of people to share something I made with their network that's really exciting; that feels like confirmation that what I'm making is something people value.
People want to be a part of this:
It’s cool to see people willingly give me suggestions and feedback on what I can do better in future versions. It shows that they care about the project and want it to improve.
It’s also awesome to hear people wanting to collaborate with me and help with the club and be involved in it.
One particular example I’d like to share is with @purehappinesscoffee. Brent reached out and suggested that we do a documentary-like snippet for each of the bean for V3. I love the work that he’s doing, so I excitedly agreed!
And the result was super cool! I’ve never been filmed for my work before, so this opportunity was super exciting for me — it briefly felt like I “made” it.
Here are links to the three videos for those interested:
But in short, I’m awed that people want this project to get better and that people want to collaborate with me. This was a hope when I first started the coffee club as I intended to try and rotate artists/designers for my labels. I’ve kinda… given up on the rotating artists/designers as it’s probably financially unfeasible, but the collaboration aspect seems to be blooming. <3
And that's it. Thank you all for an amazing Coffee Club V3 experience. I hope you all enjoyed the coffees I shared, and I hope to see you all again for V4.
Thank you’s:
Thank you Dallas and @148seconds for taking a chance on an internet stranger and welcoming me into your Earth Day event. It says a lot about what @148seconds is and represents. <3
Thank you Ben for the continued support and helping make this happen.
Thank you Courtney for helping run the orders, and consistently checking up on us!
Thank you Lee/Shachar for providing us with whatever we needed on bar that day. Hopefully we didn’t get too in your way during service!
Thank you Antonio for making us look good!
Thank you Maria for helping with the popup! I would’ve been super bogged down if it was just me brewing. <3
Thank you Gian (@apassageforms) for coming through with the t-shirt design. I know it wasn’t easy to get it done before the popups, and I super appreciate your work and efforts. <3
Thank you to @purehappinesscoffee for the V3 promotional videos! They were a ton of fun to make, and you made me sound so professional in them!
Love this behind the scenes about how you are building this Bryan! Super interesting to hear your process and how things are growing. Thank you for the great (and thoughtful 🙂) coffee.
Super interesting read, thanks for sharing! I’m glad my comment about printing the brewing notes helped haha. Side note if you ever need help in the analytics/data science sphere let me know. Super excited for V4!