here's our setup: we keep an airpot filled with one type of coffee in the morning (from a fetco 2031e) until 11am for folks who bring in mugs or just want a caffeine fix. after 11am we only do pourovers on our hario v60 brew bar.
we usually have 4-5 regular coffees plus a decaf available on the pourover bar. all are light to medium roast. currently we have an ethiopia sidama guji gr. 4, a sumatra permata gayo, an el salvador santa rita SHG, a decaf brazil serra negra, a kenya gaturine estate, and a rwanda rushashi duhingekawa from coffeeshrub.
point being, it's a good variety of coffees to suit different tastes. they're all accompanied by three tasting notes in a succinct format - the kenya, for instance, reads "winey, clean, citrus." all the coffees take roughly four minutes to brew and are $2.00 for a twelve ounce. i like the layout and it's pretty simple to see what the options are and choose one.
here's my dilemma - lately we've had an increasing number of people walk into the shop in the afternoon and say "can i just get a regular coffee?" when i explain to them our method of brewing coffee and show them the coffee menu, i often get a look of exasperation - like they don't have the time or inclination to pick one of the coffees. i can understand how they arrived at this mindset, considering how most places brew coffee. i understand it even though it's ludicrous in any other context - you'd have to be an idiot to walk into, say, the crappiest of bars and refuse to pick between bud light and miller lite.
one of my employees has recently started to give people an americano, no questions asked, when this situation occurs. an americano is probably closest to what they want anyways - it tastes like coffee and most of the notes in our coffees will be lost by the time people dump cream and sugar into them anyways. it's simply a waste of our time and coffee to make exasperated people choose a varietal and spend four minutes brewing it when they just want something vaguely coffee flavored into which they can dump additives.
so my question is twofold, i suppose: 1) how do other shops deal with this quandary? 2) should i just start giving them americanos, no questions asked - or should i try to educate them?
Replies