Should your café focus on crafting cups of pour over coffee for your clients—or toss the Chemex beakers and plant some stainless steel behemoths on your shop’s back bar?
New coffee shops starting up without a ton of capital may want to stick with “just” serving pour over coffee for as long as they possibly can.
But upgrading (or at least “switching”) to batch brewing isn’t inevitable—plenty of successful coffee shops stick with serving pour over no matter how busy they get.
Depending on the unique environment and clientele at your coffee shop, continuing to serve pour over in place of batch brew may actually be the best way to go.
After all, not only does pour over coffee offer more of a “craft” coffee experience for your clientele, it’s also more conducive to that all-important review category, “customer engagement.”
It’s a no-brainer that customers tend to feel more special and appreciated at the end of the day when they see baristas focused on making their pour overs at the bar, compared to heading back to pull their order out of a more efficient batch brewer.
While volume, wait times, and serving speed are all obviously important, especially at busier cafés, focusing on making coffee shop customers feel individually important has benefits as well.
It’s different in every situation, but I can tell you from experience that plenty of customers will choose to get their coffee fix at a café with better quality human interaction over a shop where they get their order faster—even if it’s better tasting coffee.
Then again if you’re, say, smack in the middle of a financial district or do most of your volume during morning and noon rushes, it’s quite possible speed is more essential to the bulk of your clientele than “artisan feels.”
But in those coffee shops that do get super busy, batch brewing is certainly an option that should at least be considered. Not only does brewing in bulk provide better consistency across individual orders, but once you find an optimal recipe you can set the batch brewer’s parameters ahead of time.
For coffee shops without a ton of volume, a batch brewer probably isn’t a great fit. You might find yourself wasting a lot of coffee if it doesn’t sell. And you obviously don’t want a bunch of unsold coffee sitting in the brewer for a long time.
Did I mention batch brewers are pretty expensive compared to your basic Chemex? So if you’re thinking about switching to batch brewing, you’d better have enough volume to justify the cost (i.e. how much time will it actually save in your shop? If the answer is a lot, go for it!)
And unfortunately, if you want to offer several varieties of coffee, you’ll want multiple brewers.
If your coffee shop isn’t consistently busy but your brew bar does occasionally get swamped, you might still consider getting one so that you can recommend bulk brewed coffee to customers during busier times and let your baristas do more pour-over when things die down.
At the end of the day, the important thing is that your customers love what you’re serving them—and are happy with the overall experience in your shop.
And depending on your clientele, some people are more than happy to patiently wait, as many minutes as it takes, for a pour-over at noon—other people, not so much. You’re the only one who can gauge that.
So if you’re trying to decide whether to serve pour over or use bulk brewing in your coffee shop, (and you have enough volume, at least part of the time)—why not make use of both options?
