A truly fresh coffee experience.
" I believe that personalising one's roast is going to become more important: home roasting and in-house coffee roasting will be a part of the putative 'fourth wave' of coffee"
—wertperch
A cafe relies on more than just coffee and atmosphere. To truly stand out these days it needs to be a place that's more than a coffee shop. Increasingly, cafe businesses need to stand out from the crowd. Lots of places have great (specialty) coffee, good drinks and wifi, comfy seats. Some cafes are turning to custom coffees in order to shine. They are working with local roasters and having them produce a signature roast for either espresso or pourover. Taking it a step further, more and more cafes are roasting their own beans on site, becoming their own small batch roasters.
There are many companies making roasters aimed at small batch roasting, but only a few are making it really easy for a small cafe business to roast in house. Most of these machines are quite industrial-looking, and require a certain amount of experience to get great results, but some have gone the extra mile to create machines that a cafe can use to quickly and easily develop and produce their own coffees and look good doing it. One such is Bellwether, a California-based company who not only make easy-to-use roasters for the shop, but design them in such a way that they can be put front of house as a feature. This can immediately advertise that this cafe roasts their own beans, and because of the attractive design, attract customers. They are just short of Star Trek technology, allowing for users to quickly download and use a roast profile. These machines are pretty much automated, needing only the roast profile and some beans. They are meant to take as little attention as possible, advertising just two minutes per roast cycle. This means that staff don't have to have huge amounts of expertise, nor spend ages monitoring and tweaking settings. 'Set and forget" is ideal for a small cafe, and little surprise that many cafes are jumping on this bandwagon.
In my town there are already two cafes that are roasting on site; one has been doing it for years, another just opened (and focuses on single-origin roasts with delightful results). My favourite cafe has just ordered a shop machine which will take pride of place close to a window near the front door. Everyone will know they're roasting their own, really fresh coffee. I am very excited for this: watching the beans roasting has to be more interesting than watching people in the queue, at least for me. Drinking a fresh custom coffee is possibly going to blow my coffee-geek mind. This is, i think, going to be a feature of the 'fourth wave' of coffee. I can't wait.
$ xclip -o | wc -w
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