Reminder: you need good people behind the bar
This is a gentle reminder to local coffee shop owners: unless you like losing business, do not hire teenagers to pull shots without adequate training. I’m not going to name the shop, but let’s say that they appeared with a fairly glowing review sometime within the last 10 or 15 posts on this blog. Over the weekend we got two different coffees from the same under-trained teenager and both were godawfully horrible. So horrible I didn’t take another sip after my first and went to another coffee shop to replace my awful coffee. I will absolutely go back to that shop, but I hope most owners don’t want to take the gamble that most customers will come back after bad coffee drinks.
Owners: train your people!! Pulling shots is an art. Yes, at times we’ve gone on and on about the different roasters in town, but we realize that personnel is probably more important than roast in the quality of the outcome. Don’t have rookies working alone behind your bar if you want to keep your customers coming back. They need to know about timing the shot, pulling thin, how to know in advance if it’s going to be a bad shot, etc. Every quality shop in the downtown core (Goat, Cup, Sidney’s, Amante) has baristas that know before the shot is done whether it’s going to be good or not, and will trash it immediately if it’s going to be bad. Hopefully that kind of attention to detail will spread.
Greg said,
June 24, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Hey guys,
As a quality control kinda guy, I am curious which shop you may be speaking of. It is important that we all know what shop is allowing under-trained staff on bar actually serving drinks in hopes that the info gets back to them and proper corrections are made.
bouldercoffee said,
June 24, 2009 at 7:58 pm
the shop in question has been contacted directly. we emailed them the link to this post