Drink your Friend’s to Improve your Own

Posted on July 27, 2010 by

If there’s one thing helps you improve your coffee service more than anything else, it’s tasting everyone else’s coffee. Regularly, as often as possible. Tasting nothing but your own product develops predilection for what you’re serving, and it becomes impossible to be objective. Of course you think your coffee tastes great! That’s all you drink! And when you’re knee-deep in daily operations, that sadly becomes the norm. Guess what? Someone else is serving something better, and you should taste it!

  • http://www.tropicalsaloon.com Tim Styles

    One thing we've found at Penny University, dialling in and drinking just 3 coffees, 6-7 days per week, for the last couple of months, is that excessive introspection makes objective tasting very difficult.

    We've tried to mix things up by tasting a bunch of other coffees as well, nipping out for espressos at Present, to try and keep perspective, but I think you're right. Only tasting your own stuff, or only 3 coffees from your range, can make you pretty blinkered.

  • http://shotzombies.com Mike White

    I think this is true for cupping as well. The easiest way to learn about one coffee (for me) is to contrast it with another.

  • oscar

    a totally different perspective from the other side of the world:
    http://metropolis.co.jp/dining/taste-maker/kats…

  • ccapell

    Yeah, if you're only drinking your coffee, you're drinking the Kool Aid. As you say, people fall in love with what they drink regularly, which I think goes a long way to explain the love for updosed/underextracted brews we used to see so much of (and still do, in many places… cough, triple ristretto… cough, V60…).

  • Anonymous

    Yeah, if you’re only drinking your coffee, you’re drinking the Kool Aid. As you say, people fall in love with what they drink regularly, which I think goes a long way to explain the love for updosed/underextracted brews we used to see so much of (and still do, in many places… cough, triple ristretto… cough, V60…).