I have a tremendous amount of respect for Christopher Feran and have signed up to this kickstarter.

We've all heard the phrase "jack of all trades and master of none," and there are a lot of horrible things about the world of coffee, but one of the nice things is that niche businesses can develop that don't have to cater to everyone. I'm excited at the idea of Christopher being able to create a virtual roaster business, simply selling a "dealer's choice" rotation of green that appeals to him. There are a lot of ways to select and buy coffee, but, really, the way I do it is basically by buying things that I have had before and by establishing that I have a common frame of reference with people - friends or green buyers - and then by deferring to them.

I'm not the only person that has pestered Christopher with endless questions over the years. He has the rigorous Q-grader type background that gives quite a lot of primacy to clean and sweet cups and he has certainly used his brain to keep learning and experimenting throughout all of his experiences, when many of the rest of the industry sort of just tick the boxes and apply the status quo. I have only had a handful of coffees that he has actually selected and roasted, but they have been right up in my personal sweet spots; clean, sweet and aromatic light roasts, and that's what I expect we'll be seeing. They tick my boxes; they might not tick yours. (Though it does look like he will also have a blend usually available; that appeals to me a lot less.)

baldheadracing wrote:Also, I am pretty sure that whatever coffee he comes up with will be about as far away from "coffee that tastes like coffee" that exists. (I am not saying one is better than another.)

Well worth discussing. My expectation is that, whatever it is, it will be clean, aromatic and sweet and roasted light, with a fair bit of acidity in the roast. So the singles I expect certainly will not be "coffee that tastes like coffee", in the sense that they will most certainly not be roasted to reduce the aroma, reduce the acidity, amp up the body and create some more generic, roast-derived flavours. But on the flip side (and in reference to several of the comments here and not just the one above), whilst Christopher does have some novel techniques and things going on, I expect that these won't taste like gimmick coffees. There are a number of anaerobic natural type coffees on the market that taste like boozy, generic, process-driven liquorice, salt, balsamic vinegar, jackfruit and sharpie bombs, for example. I mean, of course the marketing descriptors never say that; the marketing descriptors usually want to evoke parallels with fine wine rather than the contents of a garbage bin on a hot summer's day. The more novel techniques that Christopher has been associated with are really the koji and the rehydration. Koji has been a little savoury miso in some of it, but the koji that I had from Christopher was quite distinctively clean, sweet and strawberry. I've also tried a bunch of rehydration and, even when rehydrated with things like soft drinks, it tends to stick to an arguably more intense and fresher version of whatever the starting green tasted with, rather than becoming some sort of synthetic flavour bomb. So the more novel processing type stuff that Christopher goes for might end up tasting more classically orthodox than you might think. I sort of assume that the blend that he will have around will probably be more suitable as whatever the closest that he will get to comfort food espresso will be, and I'd expect that that will probably result from lighter roasts of green that is carefully selected to perform well as part of a blend and roasted light, rather than green purchased to a price point and roasted to obscure its inherent flavours, with the rationale that the customers are going to add milk anyway.

Milligan wrote:Bringing FOMO to coffee. It reads like a roastery with the MondoTees business model. It will probably do very well but not for me. Curious to watch their progress. Thanks for the head ups!

FOMO is already here in coffee, and has been for a while. I and many of my friends have many favourite single origin coffees that we buy year after year, from roasters who know them best and have repeat business, usually buying all of that particular crop that farmers produce. Many of these coffees aren't even particularly expensive, but they are in short supply and well-loved by their fans. There are a few coffees that I love dearly that the producers only produce maybe 60-120kg/year of. Equally, there are plenty of roasters advertising stuff that is in short supply, or based on reputation and prestige, that I find utterly revolting, even if it is priced stratospherically high. All of this stuff is certainly not for everyone. The beauty of mail order and the internet is that niche businesses can aggregate enough consumer demand within their niche to be economically sustainable. And nobody that isn't interested in this kickstarter needs to second guess their choices.

AnotherADDiction wrote:That's a little too much for me.

The one thing that I'm kind of taking as an assumption is of course that the kickstarter reward tiers are meant to be ways for us to help Christopher, not retail prices that he intends to charge! Christopher has been so generous with his time and expertise, and writes so beautifully and at such length, that many of us had asked if there was something that we could contribute back eg. like a tip jar for his blog. Having greedily devoured what he has written without paying a cracker for it, I was delighted to be able to drop some money into the kickstarter towards the project.

Anyway, there are only a handful of roasters and green buyers around that tickle my personal sweet spots, and I'm excited at the prospect that this could be another.

We've had an interesting discussion on the thread about green pricing, in which one opinion that came up was the idea that consumers don't care too much about the details anyway and what they just need is to get coffee that they think tastes good at at good price. And, sure, that works for a lot of consumers. But that's really more of a concept that applies to those of us that are going to buy from the best available at a physical location near us, probably because we're physically picking up the coffee, or because we're getting cheap local postage. For those of us that are going to look online and are prepared to pay the relevant postage, the field of competition opens up dramatically, and we can start to find things that cater to our niches. If I'm ordering online and I'm going to pay broadly similar amounts, why would I buy from the local roaster that is just buying spot from the lists of the local importer and gives me not much transparency information? Their coffee might be fine, but those businesses are a dime a dozen. If we're talking about going online to order, the market opens up to a lot of niche players and we can start to hone in on coffee that really meets our preferences. Christopher's experience and established relationships with producers that he actually visits (I'm sure it won't be all of them) are competitive advantages why we might want to try his coffee, and once you do try his coffee, if the roast level and the green selection appeals to you, those are reasons why you might want to keep going back. I guess we'll see what transparency price information comes out.