turtle wrote:Have you thought of opening a brick and mortar coffee shop?

That is the question of the year. Answer: I've thought about it.

I got into the farmers market scene mainly to sell beans. Initially I was only going to brew free sample cups. Within 2 weeks the demand for brewed coffee altered my business model. Then I added cold-brew. And then, since the Fetco deal came with a Bunn iced-tea brewer, I started offering that and it's been a nice profit center.

But I can't imagine myself managing 3-4 employees and a shop open 15 hours a day, 7 days a week. I'm not saying never, I just can't picture it yet.

The farmers market business model is not a bad one. With a B&M you're limited to one spot and have to be open long hours to make the nut. With a farmers market I'm only open 4 hours at a time where people come regularly to buy specialty items. Sure there is roasting and prep time, but it's still something I can do by myself. It would not cost me much to open a 2nd Saturday location. A few tables and some drop cloths and I have store #2. My son can run them on weekends.

One thing I learned from doing that fair last year was: I like being the coffee guy. My town has a couple of coffee shops, but not a coffee guy. There are places people can go to get a high school kids to make them a so-so cappuccino, but not a place where people can come to talk about coffee. That's what I'd like to be. I can do that in a B&M shop and I can do it as the farmers market coffee guy.

bakafish wrote:No, you still can insert papers at the Forte BG steel burrs backside edge. Just need to take out the upper burr every time before you insert a paper and make markers to match the screw holes. The alignment is to make the burrs parallel so that you can get the consistency. I have done the realignment on my Forte BG and it improved very much. Setting below "touching" on Baratza Vario

How so? Tried this with no luck. You have to use the upper carrier and between the ridge on the burr and the burr carrier it doesn't work.

RyanJE wrote:How so? Tried this with no luck. You have to use the upper carrier and between the ridge on the burr and the burr carrier it doesn't work.

I used 2 materials, 70g/m2 paper and kitchen foil. Cut them to W:5mm, L:10mm, even smaller. Put the burr on the table. Bend the papers to hang on the burr's ridge, and then cover the burr carrier.



I used a whiteboard pen to mark (not in the photo). From this photo, you can see the most wear is at the 8 o'clock position, so at first I put a paper on the 2 o'clock position. I found a layer is not enough (check the whiteboard pen marks), so I added 1 more layer, still not enough. When I added the layers to 3, they were too thick, so I replaced the 3rd layer with the kitchen foil. Repeat all the processes till all the marks were evenly cleaned. Not easy, it took me hours, but worth.