Le prix du café sur les marchés mondiaux a connu une forte hausse ces derniers temps. A quel point la situation est-elle préoccupante ? Le café est-il destiné à devenir un produit de luxe au lieu de faire partie de notre quotidien ? Dans cet article, nous faisons le point sur ce qui se passe réellement, pourquoi, et les perspectives pour tous ceux et celles qui torréfient, servent et boivent du café tous les jours.
Ce mois, nous mettons en valeur un café exceptionnel qui provient d’Acconcharcas, dans la province péruvienne de Cusco. Une histoire qui remonte à l’époque des Incas !
Ce mois-ci, nous recevrons notre premier café (mais certainement pas le dernier !) transporté tout droit de Colombie par voilier ! Est-ce que c’est aussi bon que ça en a l’air ? Voici quelques informations intéressantes pour vous aider à forger votre propre avis.
Vous avez acheté un très bon café en grains et investi dans un très bonne machine à espresso, mais est-ce que le goût dans la tasse correspond à vos attentes ? Voici quelques informations et astuces pour vous aider passer de la déception au délice !
L’histoire du Stray Bean a commencé par une belle matinée estivale de juillet 2017 lorsque nos premiers clients – une famille de quatre néo-zélandais – ont franchi la porte juste après l’ouverture. Il a fallu un long processus pour en arriver là : trouver le local, convaincre les résidents locaux qu’un « coffee shop » n’était pas destiné à vendre de la drogue et qu’on n’allait même pas ouvrir tard le soir, obtenir les autorisations des travaux auprès de la mairie de Versailles (l’une des plus strictes de toute la France) et enfin faire faire les travaux pour transformer ce qui avait été jusqu’à là une Bonneterie depuis 38 ans. Depuis alors, nous nous efforçons de servir le meilleur café possible à des dizaines de milliers de clients, qu’ils soient des habitants du quartier ou des visiteurs du monde entier. Nous avons traversé des périodes difficiles : 35 jours de grève chez la SNCF ; les gilets jaunes ; le Covid… Pendant tout ce temps, nous avons eu des équipes formidables – plus de 30 personnes au total, presque tous multilingues – qui ont travaillé avec engagement et qui ont tout fait pour que chaque client soit heureux d’être venu. Presque sans interruption : nous pouvons compter sur les doigts d’une main le nombre d’heures où nous n’avons pas été ouverts aux horaires annoncés. La « fermeture exceptionnelle », ce n’est pas notre truc. Quand même, il y a un certain temps, nous avons décidé que nous voulions en faire plus. Nous avions envie de nous plonger davantage dans le monde du café de spécialité. Et cela signifiait une chose : torréfier nos propres cafés ! Torréfier des « cafés de spécialité » La torréfaction ouvre une toute nouvelle dimension au monde du café. C’est le torréfacteur qui choisit les cafés verts, ce qui veut dire qu’il doit comprendre tout ce qui différencie un café d’un autre : le continent, le pays et la région d’origine, la variété de grains, l’altitude de la ferme, les procédés pour extraire le petit grain de l’intérieur de la cerise et le préparer pour la torréfaction, ainsi de suite. C’est un voyage de découverte qui nous emmène dans de nouveaux pays, nous apporte de nouvelles amitiés et donne lieu à de nouvelles sensations gustatives. N’importe qui peut torréfier du café. Réussir un « café de spécialité » (le jargon pour un café de grande qualité, d’exception) est autre chose. Il faut d’abord savoir sélectionner un très bon café et ensuite le torréfier de manière à en faire ressortir tout son potentiel aromatique. C’est une science et un art. Aujourd’hui, nous suivons tous les paramètres de torréfaction en temps réel sur nos ordinateurs. Nous mesurons la taille des grains, leur densité, leur taux d’humidité et leur couleur. Nous enregistrons les réglages de température, d’énergie et de flux d’air qui font le profil de torréfaction. Tout cela est très technique, mais n’a qu’un seul but : optimiser le goût dans la tasse et, une fois obtenu, savoir le reproduire chaque fois. Le goût dans la tasse, c’est ça qui importe. Du corps, de l’intensité et de l’équilibre. Des arômes, qu’ils soient fruités, floraux, chocolatés ou autres. L’absence de défauts, comme un arrière-goût amer. C’est l’aboutissement de tout ce qui a précédé, de la culture des caféiers à la torréfaction jusqu’à la préparation finale par un barista attentif. Magique. C’est pourquoi nos cafés sont uniques. Torréfié dans les environs de Paris et servi dans notre coffee shop à Versailles, chacun a sa propre histoire dont une partie est la nôtre aussi. Et à la fin de cette histoire, la destination de ce voyage, c’est vous ; après tout, la seule chose qui compte vraiment, c’est que vous passiez un bon moment lorsque vous dégustez notre café. Nous espérons que c’est le cas – faites-le nous savoir ! Pour commander nos cafés en ligne, cliquez ici : The Stray Bean E-shop.
It was a quiet moment at the coffee shop. There was a group of four, sitting at the corner table, chatting, having a good time while waiting for their coffees. The first one was served – a café latté. The customer, a young woman, frowns and says something to the barista who served her. After a brief conversation, the coffee is returned. Apparently she ordered a flat white, not a café latté. The barista did the right thing, not arguing but just agreeing to change it. Still, the customer was probably not feeling great about it. No-one likes having to send things back. One minute you’re having a good time with friends, the next there’s just a tiny bit of friction in the air. Years ago there was an ad with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver in it. He’s at a restaurant with a friend. The wine is served. The label is clearly visible to the viewer. He tests it, frowns and tells the waiter it’s no good. The waiter looks surprised but agrees to take it back and replace it. He brings another bottle. Same wine, same result. Jamie tests it, frowns and rejects it again. The waiter is starting to get frustrated but has no choice. He takes it back and brings a third bottle. Jamie tests it and this time is totally satisfied. Really nice, thanks, he says with a big smile. The last shot is behind the scenes with two very happy kitchen staff enjoying the two bottles of wine Jamie has sent back. They catch Jamie’s eye from the counter, give him a wink with a big smile and say “Thanks, mate!”. They’re obviously friends. The ad is for the wine. It didn’t seem to last long, that ad, but I thought it was pretty funny and it came back to me as I watched this scene play out in the coffee shop. It just so happened that the rejected latté was placed right next to where I was standing behind the counter. I picked it up, managed to catch the eye of customer and her friends, said “Merci !” with a big smile and started to drink it myself. It’s unlikely anyone there would have seen the ad but they got the joke and laughed. Just a single word and suddenly the whole atmosphere had changed. How could there be friction in the air when you’re all laughing at the same joke? Often we have a very brief contact with the people that come in, but it can still be memorable. We don’t always come up with the perfect joke every time, but it is amazing how often we have little conversations which seem to mean more than just the few words spoken. It can be a real pleasure. In general, these days there are a lot less of those short conversations with strangers than there used to be [1]. They used to happen when people were doing things like queuing at bank tellers. Now there are ATMs which reduce the queues and smart phones which keep everyone to themselves anyway. Luckily we still have coffee shops! ___________________________ [1] There’s a good podcast about this. See “The Happiness Lab” with Dr Laurie Santos, episode titled “Mistakenly seeking solitude”.
First impressions. They’re so powerful. In seconds we think we know whether we’re going to like or dislike someone we see for the first time. Or somewhere. Sometimes it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what it is that turns that impression one way or another. Other times, it might be something you’re fully aware of, a detail that you look for like a sign, sending you a message of what to expect, rightly or wrongly. That’s me when it comes to places to get something to eat. As soon as I walk in, I find myself staring at stuff, for a bit too long and a bit too intensely. At surfaces. Not to see whether they’re clean or not (as important as that may be), but what they’re made of. Whether they’re real. It’s not that I’m paranoid, wary of invisible forces trying to deceive me everywhere I look. I have my reasons. As to whether they’re good reasons or not, I’ll leave it up to you to decide. Let’s say you walk into a place that straight away looks nice and cosy. A few seconds later you start noticing some of the details. The floor is lino but is designed to look like wooden floor boards. One of the walls is made of brick – no, in fact it’s a tiled veneer. There are nice plants around – plastic ones. And then there’s a fireplace with fake logs and fake flames (though the heat it’s giving out could be real). One can understand. Solid wood parquetry costs a fortune. And why build a brick wall in front of the perfectly good one that’s already there, when you just want the look of it? Plants take maintenance, and you don’t have a green thumb. And a real log fire is of course out of the question for all sorts of reasons, starting with the fact that there’s no chimney. But the ambiance they create, who doesn’t love that? I shouldn’t give any of it a second thought. But I do. There is a question that nags me. If what I see around me is fake, what can I expect of the food and drink I’m about to order? It might look good when it’s served, but we can’t see who made it, how it was made and where those ingredients came from, so my mind goes wondering. Just as my eye wanders off the plate to the shiny imitation wood grain pattern on the laminated table top. We were lucky with The Stray Bean. It’s in an old 18th century building ; most of the decisions about what materials to use came down to stripping back all the surfaces and seeing what was underneath. We found floorboards, stone pillars and a wall that’s made of I don’t know what – layers of wallpaper and paint and plaster – but it’s old and it looked great when we scrubbed it up. We brought in equipment and furniture (some picked up from second-hand markets) made of solid things : wood, blackened steel, stainless steel, glass… Not a veneer in sight. It’s the real stuff. Just like our cappuccinos.
We used to have a rule. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It was to do with our pricing. We had two prices for coffees, one for in-house and another – about 10% less – for take-away. It wasn’t something I invented myself – everyone knows that food and drinks often cost more when served at a table rather than taken to go. A beer at a pub costs multiple times what you’d pay for the same beer off the shelf in a shop. Nothing controversial about that. And our price difference was only 10%. There are lots of extra costs of serving in-house: the service itself, the cost of renting the space, the renovations needed to turn it into a place where people actually want to spend some time, and then all those tables and chairs to buy and replace from time to time. For the customer, the “rule” part of it wasn’t really a rule at all, more of an assumption. Nowhere was it actually written: “If you buy a take-away coffee, then please take it away”. (Just as it wasn’t spelt out that if your coffee comes served in a porcelain cup, then please don’t take it away.”) Strangely enough, we took it for granted that that’s what people would do. And most of the time, that’s what happened. But not always. From time to time, someone would ask for a take-away coffee, get the discount, then sit down at a table. We were most indignant! How unfair was it, not just for us but for the other customers who were paying a higher price for the same thing? Maybe we needed to tighten our policy, enforce it more strictly? And then came the Trip Advisor one-star review from hell. The title: “Beware of rude and potentially racist coffee shop”. The customer recounted what happened after ordering a coffee: “Got it to go and sat down for a moment to figure out our next step. We were asked to leave as we were told they needed the tables for lunch people. […] With their rude and possibly racist attitudes, I would definitely not visit this place or give them our business.” I was shell-shocked. Apart from plummeting our average rating, it would be the first review that anyone would see until the next was posted, which could be days or even weeks away! I assumed the worst, that it would cause our business to plummet along with our ratings. Fortunately, it didn’t. In fact, it picked up, though that may have been a coincidence. Anyway, I felt the need to reply. I pointed out that the accusation of racism seemed a little unwarranted, firstly because the adjectives “potentially” and ‘”possibly” indicated a slight lack of confidence in the claim and secondly because, at the time, the ethnic origins of our staff included Arabic, Jewish, French, Australian and Scandinavian, and we all got on very nicely together thanks very much. I felt quite good about such points scoring, and I also felt quite confident that none of the staff has actually been rude. Nevertheless, I didn’t doubt that the customer was genuinely annoyed at being told that his takeaway coffee didn’t give him the right to sit down. I started seeing it from his point of view. He might not have even realised he was getting a discount for a take-away coffee. He was probably used to getting coffee from Starbucks or similar chains where they make no distinction. Or maybe he fully intended to take it away when he ordered and then changed his mind. None of which sounded like a criminal offence. I also thought back to a couple of times after coming to France when I was sure I was a victim of discrimination myself, only to realise later how wrong I was. When in a foreign country and things don’t go right for you, even small things, it’s easy to jump to conclusions. I wondered what it must be like for people who really are victims of discrimination, over issues that really do matter. Soon after, we threw our own version of logic out the window and stopped with the price difference. Much simpler to manage. One less rule. It means that customers pay more for a take-away coffee than they otherwise would, but then again it discourages the use of disposable cups which are still an environmental problem and cost money too. And ever since, no-one has found a reason to call us racist.
Before The Stray Bean, there was La Bonneterie de Saint Louis. If you don’t know what a “Bonneterie” is, you’re in good company. I think about half the French people I’ve ever mentioned that word to don’t know either. I only knew because this one was in my local area and I used to pass by it regularly, though I’d never actually been through the doors. Not until I started looking for a place to set up a coffee shop and a real estate agent took me in. The occupant, let’s call him Monsieur K, had been there for 38 years. It was time for him to retire and his shop space was up for rent. We wandered around. It was cluttered full of stands and shelves of rather large bras and underpants, stockings (lots of stockings), slippers, nighties, dressing gowns … Intimate apparel for seniors, you might say. An old-fashioned hosiery business – that’s what a “Bonneterie” is. Here, brand names like Dim, Wonderbra, and Playtex seemed to be the big movers. I had to use my imagination to see whether I could transform it into a coffee shop. It wasn’t easy. I tried mentally removing all those undies from view, but then had to get past the lino flooring, fluorescent lights, beige textured wallpaper on those parts of the walls not lined with white laminated shelving, and a distinct impression that nothing had changed since Monsieur K had first moved in. There would be a lot of work to do. Changing from bra cups to coffee cups is easier said than done. Monsieur K was a very pleasant man and, as he wound down to retirement, his business was quite naturally doing the same thing. He had a television screen on his counter – it was for him, not the customers. The latter would occasionally interrupt his daily programmes, as we were doing ourselves that day. He asked what I wanted the shop for, so I told him. I’m not sure he fully understood the concept, but that wasn’t unusual in France at the time. There isn’t even a word in French for coffee shop – “café” is often used to refer to a bar. He gathered, though, that it wasn’t going to be another Bonneterie. It wouldn’t have been easy for him to accept that the business he’d been running for 38 years was just going to disappear. He said it wasn’t the same as it used to be, but it still had potential. There’s always a huge demand for stockings, he said, and there’s no-one else in the area doing them. He gave me a tip: even if I was in the coffee business, I should keep the line of stockings going. I’m afraid that I didn’t take up Monsieur K’s suggestion, so I’ll never know whether a coffee and stocking combo might have worked. I’m also sorry to say (though not really) that virtually nothing of what could be seen inside the old Bonneterie that day survived the transformation: Monsieur K had an “everything must go” liquidation sale, and then we stripped every covering off every wall, floor and ceiling. One thing did survive, though. When you walk in, you see a big horizontal mirror on the far wall. It’s actually a door, the one that used to go through to the changing room. The mirror was already stuck on the back and all we had to do was to take the whole thing off its hinges, give it a clean and a paint, turn it 90 degrees and bolt it to the wall. For us, it does the job perfectly. For Monsieur K, perhaps he can take some heart that there is at least one little part of the Bonneterie of Saint Louis that lives on to this day.
I’ve just completed an in-depth study into The Stray Bean’s marketing strategy. The main finding is this : the amount we’ve spent on advertising since 2017 is precisely 90,13€ per year. Including social media. I was rather shocked. I thought it was less than that. I’d forgotten that we had two years where we completely lashed out, with costs blowing out to around 250€ in each one. To be fair, they were exceptions – the Covid years of 2020 and 2021 when we were in a mad panic trying everything we could to get people to buy take-away coffees (a very tough ask in France, especially when there’s no-one in the street). Let’s face it, for any self-respecting commercial enterprise, investing less than 100€ a year in advertising could be seen as a sign of management incompetence and not very consistent with any globalisation ambitions we may have. So, I feel the need to justify it. And seeing we don’t have a board asking me the tough questions, this is the only place I could find to do it. There are a few possible explanations. It could be because I once listened to Freakonomics Radio podcast episodes 440 and 441, in which they quoted the latest, most robust research ever done on the effectiveness of advertising. It concluded that the benefits of advertising in terms of short-term sales increases are around one twentieth of what everyone thought they were. It’s as if 95% of all advertising dollars spent is a total waste of money while only 5% is doing what it’s supposed to. It could also be that I heard on the radio once (I haven’t checked the sources but I’m sure it was a very reputable radio station which runs very few ads) that 1,000 euros in the price of every new car sold in Europe is to cover the cost of advertising. Put those two pieces of information together and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the main purpose of advertising is to increase the price of everything we buy. I’m quite pleased I’ve been able find such cold, hard facts that clearly support my total lack of marketing strategy, but the problem is that it really doesn’t explain anything. You see, I only came across all that info after having already done nothing for quite some time. The fact is, it just never seemed right. Advertising, promotional campaigns with slickly produced videos, the upselling of customers at every opportunity, Black Friday discounts – it’s all very corporate! But what drives us is not what drives the big chains. We’re a coffee shop first and a business second, not the other way around. The Stray Bean is not where you embrace the corporate world but where you leave it behind. Each to their own. In response, you might calmy ask: “But if you’re passionate about something, why not advertise it?” I really should have a good answer for that, but I’m not sure I do, despite my heart-felt monologues. You might be right. Lucky I’ve never had a board putting me on the spot like that. But if I did, at least now I’ve got Freakonomics Radio on my side.