A Healthier Function

 

 

            Once upon a time, the idea of a functional beverage was milk. Cows and goats, among others, had been giving up the nutrition for eons before anyone thought of adding something to it. Then came Ovaltine, that chocolaty, Swiss designed powder whose only function was to get kids to drink more milk. While later versions had some vitamins added, the nutritional value was mainly derived from the milk. Today, the consumer is faced with a galaxy of beverages designed to increase energy, provide nutritional supplements and generally be more healthful to drink than the caffeine and sugar-laden sodas available in the U.S. market. Yes, today’s selections of functional beverages can do much more than simply add calcium.

 

Form

 

            Functional Beverages fall into the category of “functional foods”. While there is no formal definition of “functional foods,” the Institute of Food Technologists in a March 24, 2005 report defined the term to encompass “foods and food components that provide a health benefit beyond basic nutrition (for the intended population).”[1]    

 I remember when Gatorade, arguably the nation’s first designed functional beverage, was produced and sold under the Stokely-Van Camp brand. The non- carbonated drink was intended to assist the University of Florida (Gators) in rehydration and to replenish the carbohydrates (in the form of sugars sucrose and glucose) and electrolytes (sodium and potassium salts) depleted during their training and games. Still a popular beverage within many sports, Gatorade has morphed into a snack drink and is available in a rainbow of flavors to satisfy a larger market.

Wellness and functional beverage sales grew from $41 billion in 1999 to $55 billion in 2005, according to Beverage Marketing. This number is expected to keep climbing while demand for sugary sodas continues to decline.[2] That doesn’t mean the soda market will disappear, it’ll just take on a a new identity. When Red Bull was introduced to the U.S. in 1997 no one could predict its massive growth. The venerable Jagerbomb ingredient owns nearly half of the energy beverage market. Nowadays, soft drink companies, not to be outdone, have added functional beverages to their lineup. Monster, Full Throttle and Jeff Gordon just to name three. Additionally, these same companies are adding nutritive elements and nutraceuticals to their standard lineup as evidenced in drinks like Diet Pepsi Max (panax gensing extract), and Diet Coke Plus (various vitamins and minerals).

Ready to Drink (RTD) teas and their benefits (especially the green and white teas) are hugely popular and growing yearly. Smoothies, soy beverages, vitamin waters and enhanced fruit drink are flooding a more health-conscious market.

 

Function

 

Sean Larkin, Director of Sales for Beverage Innovations, Inc. whose product line includes Vengaâ Functional Infusions says “Ingredients are the key to ‘truly functional’ beverage products.  In a category quickly becoming inundated with new entries weekly the consumer may have a hard time recognizing what is truly beneficial. People are indeed becoming more savvy to ingredients that they know have a high degree of benefit such as Pomegranate, Acai, Sea Buckthorn, Green, White, Rooibos and Yerba Matte’ tea blends as well as vitamin fortification. What the consumer may be missing however is which combination of these ingredients work best together when blended in relation to “functionality”. For instance, even though I think it is good for me, what is the absorption rate? What is the vitamin retention rate? How long after it is consumed is it effective? Is there any side effect? All are good questions and should be considered”.

 

           Of course, what if you are looking for a healthier option to add to the drinks you already serve? Consumers are looking for antioxidants, multi-vitamins, fat-burners and energy. If you have a blender (if not see my report on blenders in this issue) you can make smoothies and shakes with all the nutritional desires your customers can come up with.

  Smoothie Essentials is a product line that delivers the extra nutritional value to any blended beverage. David Gross of Juice Bar Solutions told me that sales of functional smoothies and yogurt drinks rose 287% during 2002-2007 and sales of functional smoothies and yogurt drinks are forecast to rise 72% during 2007-2012. That’s a lot of smoothies! He also asks the question to his clients, “Why force your customers out of your store and into a smoothie bar down the street when you can give them all the health-conscious elements they want in your products?” With add-ins such as “Flu Fighter”, “Libido”, “Green” and “Multivitamin” Blends available  the average coffee shop owner/operator can add a formidable group of components to his smoothie/shake menu.

             Sea2o Organic Energy drink is a member of the groundbreaking functional beverage club. Made from rare seaweed found only off the coasts of Korea and Japan, the drink is said to have a very high antioxidant content and boosts energy without caffeine or stimulants. Peter Guyer, Executive Vice President of BioSea,  the maker of Sea2o, told me the product is certified organic and is sweetened with agave and contains agave inulin fiber for the natural energy boost. The drink also contains L-Carnitine that promotes fat burning and Vitamin B6.   

 

The beauty of a free market is contained within the driving forces of innovation and change. The reason the big manufacturers move in a direction is because of the desires of the public and the imagination of companies like these inventing new and dynamic products. Larkin added, “as the Functional Beverage category continues to grow the consumer will indeed become better educated and at some point will easily recognize that there are many products in the market that have great ingredient statements. However in combination with other ingredients found in the blend the end result could be negligible in terms of functionality.  Buyer beware is the lesson here. Make sure you educate yourself, ask questions and do your research. And never forget that the product can and should taste great even if its primary function is to benefit your health”.  

 

 

           

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[1] NAFFS newswire

[2] NAFFS newswire  



BoCo Mobile

It's not often that your average local coffee roaster has the means to be in many different places to showcase the end result of the coffees they source and roast.

More often than not, roasteries remain obscure at best, downright invisible to the larger public at least or folded into that mysterious blank space known as commercial coffee.

Which is why we jumped at the chance to bring to Charlotte a vehicle that would bridge the gap between our happy little roastery and the folks we ultimately want to experience our coffees. You, the public.

We have a philosophy at Boquete Mountain Coffee derived form an ancient Turkish adage that says: When Coffee is Good, Business is Good. That's why we are open to the public at the roastery and, of course, the truck.

Bringing a coffee truck to life is a lot like building and opening a standard coffee shop with a few extra contingencies to plan for. Needless to say things like weather, temperature, gas loadout, tie down straps, mobile cloud services and POS systems all come into play.

But you have to have the proper mindset to bring top-shelf coffee to the public in the proper way, which is why instead of cutting corners with powders, every espresso is hand-crafted by a pro barista, the whipped creams are customized, the chai is true chai, not a concentrate, and the brewed coffees are within 2-3 days of being roasted.

The truck is parked at S. Tryon St. and Stonewall daily from 6:30 am until 2:00 pm and will be at most of the Charlotte public events and other special events.

So, if you see us stop by and have a drink!

Boquete Mountain Coffee's roasting facility is located at :

2113 N. Davidson St.

Charlotte, NC

and can be reached by phone and email at:

704-243-8900

www.bocoffee.com

follow us on Twitter

@BoCoMobile

Heat Shield

It’s an age-old to go problem, how to serve a hot beverage in a disposable cup without your customers turning their fingers into blisters. Millions of dollars and thousands of lives have been lost in the search for the answer. Well, maybe not thousands of lives but you get the idea. The coffee industry and paper manufacturers alike are constantly reviewing and revising the materials that separate our delicate appendages from the cauldron of perfectly brewed elixir within.

The first and most obvious, yet costly approach is to simply double cup the beverage. This presents a couple of problems, however. First, the owner of the café will have an aneurism when he sees the amount of money he’s spending on extra cups going out the door unfilled. Trying to drink from a lidless, double-cupped beverage is an experimentation in dribbleology. I know that’s not a real word but it conveys the message, it’s messy. Even if you have a lid on said cup(s) it’s still, well, downright wasteful. And for all you global warming worrywarts out there, that’s not good.

1993
Coffee-cup sleeve
Jay Sorensen, Inventor

Spill a scalding cup of coffee into your lap, and you have two ways to get rich: (a) sue McDonald's, or (b) invent a product that could save millions from the same fate. Reluctant realtor Jay Sorensen chose (b) after suffering a dousing in 1991. Two years later, he unveiled the Java Jacket, an insulating sleeve made from waffle-textured cardboard that wraps around a standard paper cup. Starbucks later launched a similar product, provoking a legal wrangle, but Sorensen's family-run company has prospered by focusing on independent coffeehouses and chains, which have snapped up more than 600 million Java Jackets.

To elaborate, Sorensen says he used to go through a Portland, Oregon drive-thru where the operator would hand him a cup of coffee with a napkin wrapped around it. In my mind I’m envisioning a slow motion sequence. The cup is handed out the window as the orchestral theme from “Platoon” (Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings) plays in the background. He pulls away holding his cup and shifting until, in a horrifying instant, the napkin-clad cup slips away from the from his grasp, plummeting to his lap below. OK, overly dramatic. Still, it led him to invent the pop-top of the coffee world. He says that the standard Java Jacket can drop the exterior temperature of a cup of 185˚F beverage down to 152˚-156˚F.

During my tenure at a silly doughnut chain, I performed some research on the cups we were using because we were getting complaints from customers that the exterior temperature was too hot. Using an infrared thermometer, we measured the exterior temps at around 165˚-168˚F. This represents a full ten degrees above the window of acceptability from Sorensen’s work. The folks complaining were mostly older people whose hands couldn’t take higher exterior temperatures. You see, the center of your palm is one of the more sensitive parts of your body. The maximum amount of temperature it can withstand is approximately 160˚F which is why pro baristas are taught to gauge the temperature of the milk they steam with their palms instead of with a thermometer (another article). The end result is that your fingers being more often used than the center of your palm should be able to take slightly higher temperatures. The silly doughnut chain never solved the problem.

Coffee people not being ones to wait around for manufacturers to tell them what to do began to brand the sleeves for marketing their cafes.

Dave’s money saving tip:

1. Buy plain white hot cups and blank coffee sleeves.
2. Also buy a durable rubber stamp with your logo on it and some stamp ink.
3. Have your staff stamp the sleeves with the logo.

Keeps the kids busy and doesn’t cost that much. On the other hand if you want to have a more professional look for your cup sleeves there are answers.

BrightVision, a San Francisco based company specializes in custom prints for coffee sleeves that help brand and market your business. You can choose from plain brown cardboard or white, pre-printed art or customize your own. Don Scherer, Vice President of Custom Printing says that the sleeves they print go way beyond simple function. Branding of the business, promotion of specials and sales which generate repeat business, Scherer says, are two of the creative ways that custom sleeve printing benefits the independent shop.

Ted Alpert of Double Wrap Cup and Container Company stressed being green in the manufacturing of his coffee sleeves. The 14 year old company makes their sleeves with a high percentage of recycled material. They fit all popular sizes and even fit vending machine cups. The sleeves are translucent enough to allow logos and promotional advertising on the cup to be visible. I’ve tried these and they are very simple and really work well.

It serves your best interest to both effectively promote your business and keep your customers’ hand out of the hospital. The choices of sleeves go way beyond the list here. Check out the industry you’re in and take advantage of the wealth of imagination at work.

The Golden Cup

In coffee there are many different degrees of excellence. They present themselves when you pull your first perfect espresso shot, cup an Ethiopian Moka Harrar that just blasts blueberry or when you simply enjoy a cup of coffee so much you just have to have another. These experiences are what drive coffee lovers to have them over and over again. It’s not really an addiction, just a striving for perfection.

No matter how many times I analyze coffee, I hold to the adage that coffee preparation is a personal thing. Everyone has his or her "method" of brewing a perceived perfect cup. When I was eight, I was taught to brew four scoops of Maxwell House for five minutes in a Corning-Ware stovetop percolator. Of course, the farming community of Trenton, North Carolina isn’t known as a coffee mecca so I attribute that experience as part of my coffee survival training. My early instruction not withstanding, it is usually the case that there is no accounting for taste especially in the coffee world without a provable method to justify organileptic response. Really. This is why coffee professionals, enthusiasts and generally people in the know rely on the time-honored standard known as The Golden Cup.

More than an award given once per year for excellence in brewed coffee to foodservice operators, it is the standard that all coffee preparation within the SCAA is based. Indeed, the proper coffee to water ratio, proper grind, brew water temperature and quality and contact time established by the Golden Cup standard are now the rules of thumb throughout the Specialty Coffee Industry rather than the practices of purists and scientists. One can see the reflection of this standard from the types of machinery that brewer manufacturers are producing to espresso extraction and coffee cupping. It is the Award Program, however, that has propelled the standard into the public arena and helped to raise the quality bar on brewed coffee.

What’s it all about?

In short, excellence in brewed coffee. The Golden Cup Award Program recognizes an attention to detail that foodservice operations are paying to their coffee program. It is a fair statement to say that if you are serving coffee and are not seeking the Golden Cup standard, then the coffee you’re serving is not nearly as good as it could be. Golden Cup coffee blooms in the cup, so to speak. The aroma greets the customer before they take their first sip. Coffee that is prepared in this way tastes like it was intended. Bright acidities stand out, sweet caramels and chocolates dance around your tongue and French roasts hang on your palate like the smoke from an evening campfire. (We are talking about Specialty Coffee here). Restaurants that follow this standard strive to have their coffee quality match their food quality, and it pays off. If the last thing a customer tastes in the dining experience is the coffee, then ensuring the coffee is fantastic compliments the whole meal.

What does it take?

A desire to have a great coffee program and a commitment to excellence. The rules for the operator are simple, really. First, select a reputable coffee roaster so the coffee being served is as fresh as possible. This roaster should have an SCAA Certified Brewing Technician on staff that can help the operator become certified. If not, an application can be obtained by contacting the SCAA through its website or by phone. After receiving the completed application, a Certified Brewing Technician will be dispatched to perform an onsite survey of the operator’s coffee program. Third, an operator needs to ensure that the following criteria are met:

1. Clean Coffee Brewing and Handling Equipment

This includes coffee grinders, brew baskets, sprayheads, seatcups in faucets and of course, containers and dispensers. Coffee oils form a residue over time on the surfaces of these components that will influence every batch of coffee it encounters.

2. Proper Grind

Grind particle size is one of the determining factors of extraction. The roaster or coffee provider should be able to discern which grind is correct.

3. Correct Water Temperature

Brew water temperature should be within 195-205F.

No exceptions.

4. Good Water Quality

Basically, if it tastes good and doesn’t form calcium deposits it’s good to go.

Water analysis by a reputable filtration company is strongly recommended.

Reverse Osmosis (unless its re-mineralized) and distilled water are unacceptable.

5. Contact Time

The amount of time water is in contact with the coffee varies with the type of brewer. Newer and more efficient brewing technologies are pushing the envelope but around five minutes of contact time is the norm.

The roaster or coffee provider should be able to help in this regard.

6. Coffee to Water Ratio

3.25 - 4.25 ounces by weight to make 64 fluid ounces of coffee

The reason there is a range is because different coffees extract differently. The coffee will taste wonderful somewhere in this range of 3.25-4.25 ounces.

Logically, the amounts of coffee to use increases as the batch size or amount of water increases. Again, the range of coffee comes into play according to taste.

How is a Golden Cup Award determined?

The certified brewing technician, when performing the onsite survey, will use testing devices and techniques learned in SCAA taught Brewing Fundamentals and Golden Cup certification classes. He or she will test and evaluate the brewed coffee and observe adherence to the above criteria by the applicant. The technician will then take both a coffee and a water sample for submission to the SCAA headquarters in Long Beach, California for further analysis and certification.

The brewing technician will test to see if the coffee’s soluble concentration or

“Strength” and soluble yield or “Extraction”, when correlated with the weight of dry coffee used and plotted on this chart converge in the “Optimum Balance Box”

When the samples reach Long Beach the SCAA’s Research and Training Associate, Lorenzo Brown, places a portion of the sample into a specialized microwave oven. The Labwave 9000 is a combination microwave, scale and computer that can determine actual dissolved solids to within 0.01% resolution. When the sample passes this final test, certification of the Golden Cup Award is approved.

The applicant will then be notified of the award and will receive in the mail a Golden Cup Certificate, a press release from the SCAA to distribute to local media, an order form to buy a beautiful Golden Cup Award plaque and will be listed in the quarterly SCAA Chronicle’s roster of GC Award recipients. Upon its completion in late February 2005, the Consumer Map on the SCAA website will feature members that have won the Golden Cup Award and their information by city and state in a 2D software map. It’ll be a good way to find actual coffee while traveling.

Then What?

Times have changed somewhat since Dr. Lockhart started the Coffee Brewing Institute in 1952. The over 6000 Golden Cup Awards that hung on the walls of establishments around the country and the world signified something great about the coffee of that time. These days with so much communication and so many coffee chains competing for the same market, anything that calls attention to better quality and sets an operation apart from the herd is crucial marketing.

So, as I always say, “Have a Party!”

As you can see, achieving the Golden Cup Award is no small matter for a foodservice operation or coffee shop. Why not celebrate that fact and have what is becoming known around the Charlotte and Atlanta areas at least as a Golden Cup Party. There are any number of food, wine and cigar awards that are given throughout the year. An organization’s coffee program is no less important. A national award for excellence in coffee says a lot about that company or shop’s desire to be the best. I encourage the operators that have won to set a date for a plaque presentation party and because they are either restauranteurs or shop owners, they usually know local media people, celebrities and others to invite for this particular celebration.

The Golden Cup Award is the perfect marketing tool to promote an operator’s coffee program. The GC parties I’ve been involved with have music, art, a presentation and coffee; what more could you want? An aftereffect of such a public display is that all too critical word of mouth advertising. Coffee sales in the Charlotte area shops that have won the Golden Cup and promoted it in the above fashion have risen on average, 20%. Not bad for a little ole brewing standard, huh?

The goal is to have that perfect coffee experience and then sell thousands of cups of that experience. Excellence in brewed coffee is achievable and is something to trumpet because when coffee is good, business is good.

An Urn by any other name would still be an Scourge.

Recently I wrote an article for Coffee Talk Magazine entitled: Big Coffee (August 2008). As far as articles go it certainly wasn't my greatest literary work but I believe it got the point across about newer technologies for brewing large amounts of coffee and holding it without causing detrimental effects by heating it while waiting to serve it.

During the development of the article, I inserted this photo (above) of a nondescript coffee urn and called it-in my opinion-the scourge of coffee. I found the pic on some random, third party website after Googling the word "urn". Now for those of you who either didn't read the article or don't know what I'm talking about, here is an excerpt:

You’ve probably seen them in diners, restaurants and back-of-the-house hotel operations, or anywhere the operators are treating coffee like a condiment. Many manufacturers make them to satisfy an antiquated idea (they’ve been around since the 1940’s) of how to brew coffee and how to keep it hot. They range in capacity from 3 gallons to 10 gallons. The brewing method is relatively simple and effective; the holding method is insidious. The brew style is a drip system where a loaded paper filter (formerly a cloth, reusable filter) is placed in a basket that is suspended over an internal stainless steel container which is surrounded by a water jacket…more on that later. A swivel spray head assembly is positioned over the waiting coffee and the button is pushed.

Urn style coffee brewers have been around for decades and have proven themselves to be adequate machines inasmuch as they were designed to be using the technology and coffee knowledge of the time. They are so common, like garbage cans, you rarely notice them when you see them.

So the point of the article was to show the better technologies available to the folks who wanted to do a better job brewing and serving their coffee in large quantities. Well, forgive me for having and expressing an opinion.

First of all, I don't care about urns. Having worked on them on too many occasions to count I find them cumbersome, hard to fix, heavy as hell and generally a poor brewing option, no matter who makes them. The heated, 1.5 gallon Bunn-o-matic/ Curtis/Fetco and dare I say Grindmaster/AMW systems are fast approaching dinosaur status but the urn systems are by comparison, pre-prehistoric.

Shortly after the issue was published, I received an email from Miles Small, the editor/owner of Coffee Talk, who forwarded an email he had received from the National Sales Manager of Grindmaster Corp. , Mr. Keith Enscoe.

Mr. Enscoe relayed both his and Grindmaster's disappointment with my article because it excluded their take on urns and yet showed a photo of an urn (explained above) which happened to be one they manufactured, who knew?

He went on to explain to Miles how Grindmaster had introduced an urn with new "features and benefits" and this new digital urn was called the 'Barista Series'. Re: "Gourmet" anything.

They were also apparently shocked that I was unaware of this new brewer that was voted best new product at the SCAA show in Minneapolis.

I wasn't unaware, I just didn't care.

In October, 2008 a rebuttal article, such as it was, appeared in Coffee Talk written by somebody at Grindmaster with the tag under the headline being; Commercial coffee urns are the scourge of coffee? To the coffee professional; not!

Pushing past the Wayne's World vernacular, the writer doesn't refute any point I made in my article but jumps headlong into a salesman's feature and benefits pitch that could have been in any ad and paid for. However, this wasn't the case.

Now I don't begrudge Miles trying to placate an apparently angry manufacturer that thinks he been intentionally maligned by an article that appeared in his magazine, heck, they might even buy ad space which is what they should be doing anyway. I do have a problem with letting a manufacturer bully its way into gaining a free portion of trade magazine ad space to essentially advertise its product when the premise was responding to a supposed offense.

Once again, my article was focused on brewing large amounts of coffee with newer technologies.

The "features and benefits"Grindmaster has put on their revamped urn are digital controls, pulse-brew, a coffee ready alarm, a timer, interchangeable brew orifices, air agitation, variable brew temperature, Low temp/no brew and digital coffee level sensors.

The problem is, these are not new technologies. Maybe new to the brain trust of Grindmaster and probably new on an urn, but certainly not new to the brewing industry.

To wit, digital controls on coffee brewers started in the mid nineties with Bunn's introduction of the Thermo-fresh system. Around the same time, interchangeable brew orifices were available on the Fetco 70 series brewers. Coffee ready alarms and timers evolved with the new wave of digital gadgets appearing on brewers again in the mid to late nineties as well as air agitation and variable brew temperature control. Fetco's Extractor series introduced pulse brewing, low temp/no brew and digital coffee level sensors in 2000.

In 2008 Grindmaster finally got around to putting these advances on an urn. Man, that's forward thinking.

The tag line really explains it all to me. Commercial coffee urns... . That's exactly the point. Grindmaster has a viable market out there. It's just happens to be the commercial coffee market. Those operators that don't really care what their coffee tastes like just as long as it's hot and black and in a gas station. I say explore and develop that market to its fullest extent and embrace who you are. Simply installing 8+ year old technology on a 40 year old chassis and riveting a label that misappropriates the term Barista on it doesn't make your product cutting edge, new or better, just predictable.

Here We Go!

Ok,
I've decided to write this blog because I'm tired of holding back my opinion on all things coffee. I'm going to be blunt and honest and yet factually accurate in my assessments of the industry.

While some of you may find my opinions disagreeable, hey, we live in America. That being said I will temper my notions with fact and as much historical evidence as possible to support my positions.

I hope you find this blog enlightening, challenging to the established thought on coffee in this country and fun.

Enjoy!

Dave