What Is A Coffee Ambush?»
The Coffee Ambush is where I go into a business, to the surprise of everyone except the one person I organize it with, and I brew coffee for them with the Clever Dripper for the morning. I created the Coffee Ambush as a way to do three things:
1. To get delicious Batdorf & Bronson Coffee in the mouths of lots more people. We roast some dang good coffee, and I want more and more people to see how tasty it is, especially in comparison to the fast food coffee most of them drink.
2. To introduce a lot more folks to what specialty coffee is, and show how much better it can be.
3. To have fun, getting out in the community and meeting a lot of great people who love coffee, and to show them how cool brewing coffee at home can be.
What a great idea. Here’s the latest ambush, of the Cartoon Network offices.
There is little point in denigrating what truly amounts to a small portion of the specialty coffee industry for the purposes of marketing. It exploits and perpetuates a false image in the minds of potential customers and, in that way, damages the industry you claim to love for personal gain. Simply doing what you love and showing how much you love doing it should help you and everyone else in the industry thrive.
This week, a speakeasy theme at the slow-bar, at the Venice, LA outpost of Intelligentsia: “Bootleggers and Baptists”.
A sidenote: as happy as I am to spread the word on these things when I can, don’t you think, Intelligentsia, that the Venice slow-bar deserves, at the very least, its own Twitter account. It’s very easy to miss the word on these things and there is no one place to go to find out information.
Word of Mouth»
They told a stranger at a party how much they love a certain coffee, for chrissakes. They could be doing that for you.
(Source: kyleglanville)
Verve's (@Vervecoffee) New Label Guide»
Excellent general infographic for explaining each facet of Verve’s coffee bag labels.
Update:
Via Twitter, @terroirism asks…
@danielofarabica while I approve, I do have to raise the question: does the addition of cultivar increase consumer awareness/drinking?
For most people I think it’s just info for info’s sake. I can’t imagine anyone but the most. intrepid. customer. taking the time to do the comparative tasting necessary to tell the difference between the various cultivars.
And besides, isn’t there still some debate as to what the definitive influence of cultivar is, especially when compared to terroir, processing, etc?
You could also argue that including cultivar — especially cultivar — leans toward marketing more than anything else. Which I’m not sure I have a problem with. People love a story (just ask Michael Pollan). Cultivar could simply be considered another plot point.
So yeah, I agree that you could argue they’ve put too much info on the label. What I love about it is how well it was done.
Then again, how much info is too much info, and how should that limit be judged? By how potentially useful it is, or by how well it’s presented?
