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.
Your favorite downtown coffee shop?
Downtown Magazine is running a poll on “your favorite downtown coffee shop.” Tell them your favorite Downtown coffee shop and they will randomly select a winner for a $20 Downtown Boulder Gift Card. Love it. Can’t freaking WAIT to see the results! Seriously.
want to try your hand?
If you’re sick of reading our opinions, we’re happy to throw up a few guest posts. People want to boost Ozo, Logan’s and Vic’s? We’re all eyes. Email us: bouldercoffee ..at.. ymail d o t com
Not afraid to agree: 29th St sucks!
A rouge letter writer named Doug Richards says it all today in the Colorado Daily:
What the Colorado Daily, Boulder City Council, 29th St. developers and their tenants like Laudisio failed to anticipate, is that for thousands of Boulder county citizens, shopping centers are dinosaurs, and with little exception, those citizens avoid them like the proverbial plague. Twenty Ninth St., or whatever it’s called, is no different, except that it is perhaps one of the poorest designed and ugliest complexes to ever disgrace the city of Boulder.
Looking north from Arapahoe Ave, one is assaulted by the sight of the monstrously ugly Home Depot, a huge wall of brick (rather than south facing glass to collect the daily delivery of free solar energy) behind which the new Wild Oats store stands empty, and a corridor called 29th St. that leads one to an unwelcoming, utterly soul-less vista of the usual corporate crap, before redeeming itself with a handy escape route out to Canyon Boulevard.
Please excuse this letter writer’s vehemence, but good lord, what part of innovation and imagination do the people responsible for that thing not understand?
I must have missed an article that precipitated this letter, but I think I can easily guess that it went something like, “Sales at the new 29th St Mall are far lower than expected….” As Richards point out, no shit! Despite the fawning and glowing by the city council, the papers and other corners of the city establishment, there is absolutely nothing remotely compelling about that project. More shopping? Yipeee!!
