Cinnamon

A classic Christmas aroma and flavour, simply sprinkle some ground cinnamon to your ground coffee before brewing and voila.

Whipped Cream

This adds a decadent texture to coffee as the aerated cream melts into the coffee to give a truly luxuriant flavour, dust off the top lightly with hot chocolate or ground nutmeg.

Wild Peppermint

Peppermint adds a zing to coffee or hot chocolate. Simply add a 15ml dash of Shott Peppermint syrup to get amazing results as the peppermint and coffee flavours stand out and become more vibrant.

Flamed Orange

Shott is a New Zealand Company that specialise in making the most vibrant syrups without adding artificial flavours, colouring or sugar.   Pump 15ml of Shott Flamed Orange into your coffee and hot chocolate and garnish with finely grated orange zest.

Butterscotch

A flavour that brings memories of childhood.  Like caramel, butterscotch is a cooked sugar and the sweetness of butterscotch paired with coffee makes for a great combination.  Just add 15ml of Shott Butterscotch to your coffee and finish off with whipped cream.

If you’d like to find out more about our range of Shott syrups just drop us a line or give us a call on 01 4666304.

In the meantime, we wish you a safe and happy Christmas from all of us at Watermark.

It seems that just about every cost is rising around us at the moment, fuel, electricity, milk, flour – you name it; it’s going up in price.  It looks like a good dose of inflation is on the cards for everyone but what, if anything, should you do about it?

Dealing with a rising cost base is a little frightening because you’re always left with the niggling feeling that if you raise your own prices then you’ll loose or alienate those loyal customers you try so hard to please.  Unfortunately there is no hard fast rule as to the correct course of action but there are a number of things you can do to help you arrive at a conclusion that suits your business.

• Your business produces sales data every day, capture this and understand how your margin is performing.  Focus on the higher margin lines but understand the relationship and interdependent items on your menu.
• Coffee is an inelastic luxury good, we don’t strictly need coffee to survive and we can definitely make it at home more cheaply, but we still choose to buy coffee at a café.  Visiting a café is about lifestyle and experience meaning that the actual price of the coffee is secondary to the experience. So if you need to put up the price of coffee, then do it.
• Visiting a café is about the customers’ experience not yours as a café owner or your barista.  Beware of faux coolness, trend setting or my pet hate ‘educating the customer’.  The experience should be meaningful to them, understand what this is and you’ll be able to deliver in spades.
• Quality is key, it doesn’t matter what menu item you’re selling if it doesn’t deliver on quality then you’ve missed a trick.  Continually taste the coffee as this practice will help to make sure the grind is set correctly, the machine is clean or if it needs servicing.  It is our experience that deterioration in coffee quality more often arises due to poor calibration of equipment, pour execution in coffee preparation and equipment in need of a little TLC.
• If you are looking to put though a price increase, consider a product bundle so that you can soften the blow for the more price sensitive as well as increase your average spend.

My thoughts on whether to put a price up or not: Squeezed margins give rise to poor cashflow in later periods.  Over doing a price increases is not such a good option either as we all know when someone is having a laugh at our expense.  If you choose to do nothing, run your numbers and make a conscious decision to do nothing. Perception matters, it may be abundantly clear to you why you are changing a price just make sure your customers understand your situation too.  There is a balance in determining the right course of action that can be found with a little enquiry.

At Watermark we have years of extensive experience in advising the cafe sector, please drop us a line or all us on 01 4666000 if you would like to have a chat on how we can help you grow your business and make it more resilient.

There are hundreds of recipe ideas to choose from and each come with simple instruction in terms of the recommended serving suggestion or you can simply come up with a few of your own signature ideas.  The Shott website has lots of inspiration to get you going and we can also send you some recipe booklets by email, just let us know.

The Shott website recipe section can be accessed on the following link:  https://shottbeverages.com/recipes/

• Cashflow is key, and I don’t mean money in the bank. There needs to be more money coming in every day than there is going out. This seems really obvious, but it gets a little more complicated when dealing with vat payments, supplier payments and annual costs like insurance etc.  Plot your expected cashflows (in and out) on a spreadsheet and compare it to your actual cashflow, you will quickly see opportunities to make decisions on how to improve your cashflow management.
• Keep on top of payments to suppliers and the Revenue. Falling behind on Vat and Prsi brings a whole lot of pain which is stressful and expensive to solve.  Make sure your returns are in on time; this is admin time well spent and will allow you sleep a lot better.
• Really try and understand the performing parts of your menu, what generates the most return for the effort. What are the product interrelationships on the menu, is it coffee and cake or just coffee?, what items are you throwing out the most?
• Try to critically evaluate what you would like your business to do better in an ideal world (even a covid world!). Often we can’t get exactly what we want due to external constraints that are outside of our control but it gets us thinking about what mitigating actions that are within our control that we can implement more easily.  For example, are customers waiting too long to get served and not returning next time?  Is the answer to simplify the menu, increase capacity at the till or coffee machine or is it a case of a bit more training to improve the customer experience.
• Deliver value, quality at a fair price. Avoid listening to the hype of media reports into unprecedented increases in disposable income, Wagyu beef sandwiches flying off shop shelves; this hype invariably leads to a temptation to increase prices. At the end of the day most hospitality businesses sell to a cross section of the community not just the wealthy.   Irish consumers have long memories, we remember where we had value and where we did not.
• Sustainability of your offering; consumers know good coffee and they know the importance of sustainability, having an coffee like Woodland Coffee that delivers both attracts new customers and builds your customer loyalty to your business.

Both Woodland Coffee blends are designated high grade speciality coffees and have a great sustainability story; as more hospitality business will hopefully reopen over the coming weeks (hopefully!) and months, let us know if you would like to have a chat on how we can work with you to start the next exciting chapter of your story.

If we toss the coffee beans into the water, as they are, there’s not much for the water to dissolve, due to the robustness of the coffee bean. All that would be extracted is the outer layer. Hence the need to grind, or open up the coffee bean, increasing its surface area and allowing the water to pass through it and maximise its flavour collection.  A roasted coffee bean is around 30% water-soluble. This means that you can extract about this much of the coffee bean’s mass in water. The rest is cellulose and other plant based stuff which forms the structure and integrity of the bean.

Crushing the coffee beans into a fine grind and dumping it in hot water until it dissolves is not enough to make great tasting coffee. The only thing this will achieve is extreme bitterness as the dissolving/dissolution process will be inconsistent as the crushed coffee will be in different sizes. Unfortunately, not all the flavours coffee possess are nice so we must control the amounts of flavour we extract by measuring, weighing and timing the brewing time, this is achieved by ensuring a uniform and consistent grind profile by adjusting and setting the coffee grinder correctly.

Extraction is a balancing process. Ideally, we want to avoid under or over extracted coffee; the best results sit somewhere in the middle. Under extracted coffee is when the water has not had a chance to penetrate the coffee fully while over extracted coffee occurs when the water has over penetrated the coffee and the balance of flavour is upset.

The key identifiers of an under extracted coffee are in its taste in terms of sourness, a lack of sweetness and somewhat salty aftermath. because we haven’t extracted the coffee flavours for long enough. The overall finish of an under extracted coffee is bland with no lingering aftertaste experience.

Over-extraction occurs when you take too much of the soluble flavours out of the coffee. This level of extraction results in unfavourable flavours coming through which unbalances the coffee and leaves a rough and bitter aftertaste.

The correct extraction is where the coffee is balanced, sweet and the flavours are identifiable with a lingering finish that remains after the coffee is consumed.  If you are unsure whether you are getting the best extraction from your coffee, please let us know and we’ll get it right for you.

Using freshly ground coffee beans delivers freshness, a great aroma and most importantly, a vibrant flavour.   Grinding coffee just before using it helps to reduce the oxidisation process allowing you to get the best flavour from the coffee beans.

How should coffee be ground?

There are lots of different ways to grind coffee, from bashing it up with a pestle and mortar, to throwing it into a food blender or preferably using a burr grinder.  Ideally we are looking for uniformity of grind size to allow the water react in the same way with all of the coffee being brewed.  This makes the burr grinder the preferred choice as each coffee bean must pass through the blades which are set at the same distance from each other which gives that uniform grind profile.  Whether you choose a manual hand burr grinder or a fancy electronic one, that’s a matter of personal preference and hand strength!

Why does grind size matter?

The coffee grind affects the time the water is in contact with the ground coffee and hence the length of time allowed for the chemical reaction between the two.  The grind profile will affect the speed at which the water passes through the coffee picking up flavour.  A fast extraction of coarsely ground beans will result in nothing more than tasteless coloured water and a slow extraction through very finely ground beans creates burning and an over extracted flavour, so it’s a bit like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, we need to get it just right!

What size should the coffee be ground to?

Now, it really depends on how the coffee will be brewed.  For espresso machines, a good rule of thumb is that the  grind profile needs to deliver an extraction time of approximately 25 seconds including pre-infusion; so from the time you press the button to the time you have extracted a 40ml shot of coffee.  As the water is forced through the coffee at pressure for a short amount of time, the coffee grind needs to be fine so that all of the flavour is extracted.  A useful guide is comparing the coffee grind to the texture of fine table salt.

For a French Press or Cafetiere, the coffee is immersed and steeped in the water for up to 6 or 7 minutes so a coarser coffee grind is acceptable to avoid getting an over extracted flavour from the coffee and a build up of coffee ‘silt’ in the cup.  For me a useful guide is a texture similar to that of granulated sugar.

For other types of filtered coffee like V60 drip or aeropress there is good scope for experimentation but I like a fairly fine grind similar to or a little courser than what I would use for espresso; something like fine sea sand.

Coffee that is freshly roasted or has a different roast profile will react differently when ground in a grinder so there are no hard and fast rules which leads to loads of scope for experimentation and fun!