OPEN - 7 days a week
Hi everyone and welcome to the very definitely monthly blog, I’m drinking some nice buttery washed Rwanda Fugi on drip from Valor, listening to the artist “Between Friends.” Kinda’ poppy friendly stuff. I saw Anora last night, great movie! Not family appropriate! Gonna’ pretend that’s relevant because Sean Baker directed “The Florida Project” as well, anyways. I’ve had enough of three days off a week, already haha. (see the blog from one month ago where I proclaimed I was done with 80 hour work weeks). I want to stress test our systems and make some extra money this season ahead of my wedding. I also want to put us in a good place to keep these hours for employees after the holidays are over.
This week we opened on Monday! Normally we’re only open Tues-Sun. Let’s talk about it.
When I say we opened I mean I came in and unlocked the door and waited around to see who showed up. I’m talking, coming in at 6:30 when we normally open, didn’t even come in early to get ready. low expectations, low key soft morning. I did in fact scare someone off who was waiting at the door in their car, saw me walking up and drove off haha.
I’m doing a soft launch for the first three weeks mainly to confidently work solo all day, ease in to it and give myself more time to find a baker for sourdough pickup once we make it official. I didn’t even update our google hours. Despite that, we had 21 people come by, maybe 10 of those knew this was happening via word of mouth. The rest just walked on in like it was a normal day. For context we normally see around 60 transactions on a weekday, so three times that.
It reminded me a lot of when we were new, those first few months were mostly me standing around and talking to the same few people for hours at a time. It was cool, I’m way better at making conversation now and holding down a room as one person socially. I could try super hard on every drink, and give everyone a really attentive experience. I know it’s not sustainable though, I’ve gotta get the ball rolling at some point and get a better understanding of how the increased volume affects our systems, then get myself out of here so I’m not working 5 or 6 days a week on bar.
It’s been a long time coming.
This thing happens when we run by on a Monday to drop off milk or water plants or something, people walk in and try to place an order. The lights are off, the chairs are up, I’m wearing flip flops. They’re like “can I get a latte?” It’s incredible. The answer is no, obviously. Where do these people come from? Well it’s not just us, I see people tug on the nail salon doors next door too. Besides the cobbler two doors down, the whole plaza kind of shuts down on Mondays. It goes from dark doors to a more lively atmosphere on Tuesday. So it’s always like seeing a ghost when someone else shows up around here.
Another thing that happens is when we mention Mondays in soft whispers among the team members; People will whip their heads around from all corners of the room to ask if it’s true, the question of “when will you open on Mondays” has become inevitable ever since I started taking time off. I used to say “well I need a day off.” I told a customer we were open on Mondays this week and he said “is this christmas already?” I think word of mouth is going to take some time.
The most frequent occurrence though, is people coming by and saying “I tried to come by on Monday but you were closed” and trying their hardest to psychic brainwave guilt trip us in to opening 7 days a week, sometimes it’s subtle and sometimes it’s not. Now that I’ve heard it 100 times I have some confidence. It really takes a lot of mental fortitude, because It’s more money we could use! I’ve crashed enough by now to know that physical and mental health is more important.
So why now? Honestly.
The condition my fiancé set was “you need two days off a week.” Until now I was sort of waiting for one employee to take Mondays that I could trust, but the two problems with that were me having to cover if they were sick or gone, and that now we generally need two employees on every weekday. So then it became needing two good employees and enough hours to go around. Now I have three employees, and three days off.
Beyond just being gone on paper, I wanted to feel like the shop could exist if I was gone. Right now my two essential tasks are paying bills and grocery shopping, but the other tasks are handled by employees as much as they are me, not including minor upkeep like fixing shelves or changing water filters.
So what changes if we add an extra day? All the systems in some way I think. I’ve began working on that. My first priority is updating our cleaning guides to have auxiliary supplemental material. Like, longer explanations on how I want things done. From there I’m going to review it all.
I hope this all goes smoothly and by January I can take some time off. I’ve got confidence in our team and I feel pretty good about it all in general. I’m excited to update our hours and get some feedback : )
thanks for reading - Eli
80hr work weeks. Now 50.
Happy Thursday everyone, this is a post wisdom teeth removal Eli owner guy coming at ya’ with a blog about not working as much. I’m drinking water and listening to some electronic ambient from Domenique Dumont. Beginning this month I hired about 30 hours of time away from myself, or that’s what I’m shooting for anyways. I want to talk about where I was at and where I’m going as an owner since I know a lot of other owners or potential future owners read these, and people in the service industry who constantly over work themselves.
I think this is important to talk about because when you tell someone as a barista you’re tired, of course you’re going to hear “well you’re in the right place” or something like that. As an owner if you say you’re always working you might hear “well that’s what you’re supposed to do.” Over the short term sure, you can drink coffee and fill in gaps, but it’s not sustainable forever. I can safely say I’m familiar with my limits now, and I’ve spent some time dancing that line. Let’s get in to it.
What my week looked like before this
On average I’d get up at 5:30am and head in to work until 5:30pm 4 days a week, then I’d work until 7pm two days a week for things like the grease trap, shopping, or catching up on other cleaning tasks. On Mondays my “off day” I’d work 3-5 hours on paperwork, admin stuff like paying bills or planning, laundry and even merch design. Sometimes I’d work more or less but usually that’d be about right.
So that’s 80 hours, about an hour a day was eating and using the restroom. I’m thankful for my fiancé who had been helping out with meal prep more recently and encouraging me to eat and sit down more. Believe it or not for the first month or two I also had a night time job but I realized pretty quickly that wasn’t going to work haha.
This ebbed and flowed a bit as we got busier. Early on it was really easy to close up and clean because we were slow, but I also lived 45 minutes away from the shop, so 9-10 hours a week were just spent driving. I didn’t have a good sense of inventory control or any systems so I could also end up shopping 3 times a week. Another 3-5 hours. Thinking in general about inefficiencies I probably hit that 80 hour number with 60 hours on bar, and 20 hours of nonsense like triple shopping haha.
So I got better at systems and got this number down to 70, on bar all day plus some admin work and shopping. I then started hiring with the hours I could afford just to assist during peak hours. I wanted any payroll hours I had to benefit the guest experience; At first that was weekend help then it became every morning. Systems behind the bar were good enough that I could still get out of there on time, but until I was eating regularly I was pretty drained regardless. My peers told me to hire out my time first, but I liked being on bar and really felt like we needed two people on bar to grow and give guests confidence in the morning heading to work that we could get drinks out quickly.
Around our two year mark this spring it got busier and steadier all day, I was tired and back up to 80 hours staying late. I next tried to hire out a little of my time, to prevent me from shopping during rush hour after close and break up my sleep schedule. On Tuesdays our first day open during the week, I left early to shop around noon. On Fridays I came in late, which let me sleep but also gave my body some rest during our busy weekend mornings Fri/Sat/Sun.
Now we’re in Fall (Pumpkin Spice Season)
For the last two years we saw an increase of 30% in sales from summer to fall. Pumpkin Spice lattes, people working at cafes, retail sales, It would coast up through the holidays then slow down in January. That’s also always been my experience in coffee or food, as a food franchisee once told me “the J’s slow us down, June July and January.” This last Winter wasn’t so bad for us, it only dropped maybe 10% in January then hovered around there until picking up a bit in June - August. It was weird and I can try to attribute it to a few things, that it would slow back down, but I decided to have some confidence and plan for an increase in sales of 20% this fall anyways.
Assuming that increase I wanted to allocate as much to payroll I could. If we were going to get that much busier and I was already at my limit, I needed to spend more time on the business from the outside in. I also needed some more rest. So I gave myself Thursday / Friday off, and half days on Tues / Wed. Working all day just on Weekends. TIME OFF! WOW! 2 and a half years later. Let’s break that down.
On Tuesday morning I’m still opening, then going shopping for myself and the shop for the rest of the week around noon. That’s 10 hours. On Wednesday I’m going in at 11am-4pm for 6 more hours. On Thursday and Friday I’ll spend maybe 10 hours total on admin work or miscellaneous projects. Maybe I’ll take one day off and work the other. Then Saturday and Sunday I’m in up at 5am done at 5pm. for 24 hours total. Now I’m at 50 hours total.
So that’s the plan
I’ve used these first few weeks to travel for fun, work and then wedding planning with my fiancé. This October I got back to back surgeries on my legs and teeth that have been put off for the last year. Now I’m ready to hopefully start actually resting and working on the shop haha.
While I feel pretty confident in our basic systems, there are things like adding shelves, cleaning the AC unit, scrubbing the floors. There’s stuff that takes hours after hours I just didn’t have time for before, but things that needed to get done. Sometimes you make a promise like getting shirts made for an event, and then you’re working until 10pm at night or later because that’s the only time to do it! Making amazing stuff is often on top of those 80 hour work weeks. As a creative person they’re just as fun and important, but they’re exhausting!
As I begin to not work myself to death there’s definitely a lot of guilt associated with that, I won’t know every person that comes through the cafe anymore. I won’t be personally responsible for every major or minor decision. I won’t be able to serve every espresso having tasted the dial in. That’s okay though. Trust in your people and shop are what it’s all about. A busy shop is more than one person can handle and it’s more valuable as a team effort made of a fabric of people. Now I can finally sit down at home, and know what my cats do mid-day on a Wednesday, that’s pretty cool too. - Eli
Slowing our roll
Good Morning! It’s Thursday and I’m working on this at the cafe, it’s not too busy so I’m sitting down to eat some pasta. Listening to Covet’s math rock album efflorescence. For my birthday last week we went to a few major cities in the southeast. Savannah GA, Greenville & Charleston SC, Asheville NC. We went to a bunch of cool cafes I’ve really wanted to visit, mainly Methodical’s first location, and Pollen. I’m going back in January so maybe I’ll write more about why they were cool then. But for now!
I was impressed how much they were doing in a very tight space. So I’ve been thinking about how we can do better with what we have, both in terms of literal space and the budget we’re working with.
We’ve been taking in thousands more in gross revenue without really seeing any of that at the end of the month.
The big issue is that I’ll spend carelessly on growing with new tables, gadgets, stickers, whatever! When that extra money is there. But when it’s all in one place it’s easy to think that money is available when it really isn’t. You need to define the purpose of your money to really think critically about why it’s there.
So I picked up “Profit First” by Mike Michalowicz. Which I’ve been recommended and gifted over the years. I actually bought it again after checking out the audio book. Really good book! IMO. It suggests you create a bunch of checking accounts and allocate money in to them after each deposit using your current spending goal. Then slow increase the percent allocations over time until you reach your target. I’m trying to put a real chokehold both on our spending, and our savings towards taxes and loan payments. We’ve always been perfectly on time for payroll taxes, but sort of hacking away randomly at our other tax goals.
This year we should kill a couple of significant loans, and I’m hoping to be so efficient where we are now, that the extra income launches us in to the stratosphere; By that I mean, allow me to take time off and get married in January mainly haha. I would also like to have my first full time employee by the holidays, which I think pumpkin spice season will really help with, assuming we stay on top of those goals.
As we need more storage, we are stuffing things anywhere they’ll fit.
Suddenly my wet ingredients are taking over my cup area, or I’m running out of space for napkins; Just strange issues that come from growth. I needed to know when the excess should be in storage, or in it’s place on the shelf.
So my solution to that is homogenizing our storage in to a few containers. basically tall plastic bins for dry goods, and quart containers for wet. Date and label everything. On top of that, install some more cup storage underneath our counters and move things around so that we dedicate each area of our operation to a type of storage.
So far just putting things in boxes has really opened up our storage, but I’m hoping that soon I’ll be confident in each location and can label those too. Doing this means, I’ve had to get creative. When things have always been in one place, it’s hard to imagine them anywhere else. Just taking an hour after close to move things around and think critically has done wonders for my sense of space. I’d also recommend sketching, talking to employees. Moving stuff, staring at it. Think critically.
That’s all for today
I just wanted to note that this growth has caused us to roll down a hill like a wagon with a loose wheel, shaking but moving in the right direction. Sometimes it’s better to tighten the screws before buying bigger wheels.
: ) - Elias
Systems That Work
Hey y’all, been awhile. We are now 2! Seeing more than twice the traffic of one year ago and with triple the staff, which is logistically nuts. We needed systems! I’m mysteriously caught up today, probably because of those systems. I’m drinking some drip coffee and listening to the album “Doofus Casanova” by Smushie. It’s kind of a silly folk pop album. Let’s write!
I want to talk about how being twice as busy has affected our systems, and how I’ve had to create, destroy, and create again around that. Some of what I use, I see plenty of cafes still not using. I’m sure that’s driving someone there crazy. I hope that new cafes or any managers currently struggling to establish systems find this helpful. Lately I’ve been described as “organized” which I mostly disagree with, but I’m making some progress.
So I’m going to just choose a few systems that we’re now using regularly, and show what they looked like 1 year ago vs today.
Inventory
1 year ago my system was embarrassing. I would pretty much just look around and see what we needed at the end of the day, then go shopping once or twice a week. Maybe I’d take notes on my phone. Our menu was so small, that we could get everything perishable at Aldi. I’d grab milk, almond milk, skim milk, maybe some cinnnamon. I’d buy stuff like napkins at the dollar store if we ran out. It was so low stakes.
When we introduced a much larger menu last August, we had to shop for a lot more and at more places. Pretty quickly I was shopping like three times a week and it took all night. I had no time! I said “I’m going to start shopping one time a week.” Which was honestly hard! My shopping cost more, so I couldn’t just use what I had on hand. I had no system, so I’d always forget something.
My first solution was to print out some excel charts and make a paper shopping list. Then I’d make a stack of those templates, put them on a clip-board, and write on those. This did not solve the issue, because I’d just forget the paper or lose it. It’d be stuffed in my pockets or bags or back at the cafe. I’d just get frustrated and stop using it, and the cycle continued.
My next solution was a digital template, that I’d fill out on the iPad we use as a register at the cafe, and then send to my phone. This was semi-functional, but I’d sometimes forget to send it to myself after filling it out, or just misunderstand what was on the archaic sheet I’d created, and trying to navigate an excel on my phone that was made to be read on an iPad was still making me forget items at the store.
Today I was talking to Mike, a regular who coincidentally, designed an inventory system for another coffee shop once. He had the digital excel and showed me what it looked like. It was a long vertical column, which could easily be filtered based on if items had a value. Meaning, you could make it just show you what needed to be ordered and from where. The long column also meant that you could easily read and scroll through it on a phone.
I kept using our first system because I didn’t have a spare 2 hours, because it sort of worked, but I never forgot what he showed me.
So a couple of months ago I re-organized it all vertically to show the item location, name, how much we have, how much we should have (par), and how much we need to order, followed by the store it should be ordered at. Here’s a snippit of what that looks like filled out.
(ps. organize this list so that you can walk around the store without doubling back (in Anthony Bourdain’s book kitchen confidential, he harped on this point enough for me to do it, and it’s life changing.))
In The Future I’d like to include the price of each of these items and when it was last priced. I’d love to make this shopping list then have an estimated cost for it all. Right now I’m going to our bank statements to gather the cogs for each week in retrospect. I have a price list I just need to move it here too. Otherwise it works pretty well!
Daily Par Sheet
1 year ago I was not keeping a par sheet, this was pretty easy to ignore because I made everything and the only things I made regularly were iced tea, oat milk, and vanilla syrup. Our recipe book has always been on the iPad we use as a register, and it essentially had some spark notes on how to make stuff. This was pretty needlessly stressful, because if I ever needed someone else to make a recipe, I knew they had the guide but not if they had made it before or if the guide was sufficient. At this time I was staffing only during peak hours (I was also there), with a once in a blue moon solo employee shift. If I was sick and someone else needed to make oat milk, it was an unknown.
Today our iPad has a digital document for batch recipes, seasonal recipes, and expiration dates. They’re more fleshed out, and when employees use them they’re able to give feedback or make edits themselves (there’s also a master copy that is un-editable).
We make a lot more now. We cut lemons, make cereal, and sticker cups. We’ve got a laminated fillable excel sheet on a clipboard that we use at the end of peak hours during shift change. This lets us know what needs to be made the rest of the day, and if anything needs to be made urgently or “NOW.” If someone needs to stay 15 minutes late so we’re not out of a crucial ingredient, we can account for that. No more guessing. Here’s a snippet of that sheet.
In The Future I’d expect this to keep growing. As we get busier, tasks that seemed simple become more complicated. Right now we crush a box of vanilla wafers every couple of days, and that takes a few minutes. If we double that, suddenly it takes ten and we can’t do it between orders. This has been such a game changer that keeps people on task, its a crucial part of the operation.
Cleaning list
1 year ago the cafe basically never got dirty, so cleaning it was pretty easy. Everything was new and perfect, we had a very minimal space. So to repeat myself here, I kind of just looked around either during the day or after close, and cleaned up. I remember my friend Mario who managed another cafe told me they’d use scrubbing bubbles to clean their milk fridge once a week. I had no idea why, that sounded ridiculous. Now, I understand.
I think having no standards really hurt us, even if it was usually easy. If we had really messy day or a single really serious cleaning task come up, the pressure was fully on the person who closed in that moment, with no understanding that it would be taken care of by someone else later if they didn’t have time. That the team had their back. I was out of town for a day with an employee closing who had been with us for two months. She left a huge mess, and basically quit without a word. I found it hard to believe it was that messy, but in retrospect she hadn’t ever had to clean anything. If she had an understanding of what was expected of her it may have been different.
Today We make a big mess most days haha. There are some core tasks that need to be done in order to keep the place looking nice, and we write them down. in the book "The Restaurant Prosperity Formula”, David Scott says to walk around the shop inside and out, and take note of everything you wish was cleaner, then write down how to clean it and make your manager get a signature from people for cleaning it well.
Our laminated clipboard has a pretty simple description, and I show people rather than make them read a document but it’s a good sentiment. We have regular cleaning and recurring prep tasks on the same list, color coded as start of day (red), end of day (blue), and anytime (white). The purpose is to have employees checking that these tasks are done everyday or sometime during the week so that we keep the place clean. Here’s what that looks like.
In The Future I’d like to make a companion sheet for a better description of each cleaning task, and get all of the above compiled in to a physical binder to reference. A huge part of this system thing is making sure people actually use them. So they need to be in plain sight, usable, and simple. That, or you need to be so dedicated to enforcing them that they get done. I’d save yourself some trouble there if possible.
Honorable Mentions
Personally I keep two small books on hand at all times, in a sling bag with my wallet and keys. A $1 muji sketch pad, and a $25 leuchtturm1917 calendar notebook. I use the sketch pad for just about anything be it design work or rough future menu item costing out. I use the notebook to plan out my week and set some goals. I have a planning day on Monday my “day off” and I follow up on my notes on Friday before the weekend. I try to spend 5 hours a week on this. I also use a notion calendar on my phone/laptop to track all my bills each month and if they’ve been paid. I like notion because you can take notes all over each cell.
I like slack, I hear basecamp is better. Basically a group messaging app that you can share just about any file type in and access from anywhere. People can talk individually or as a group without giving out their personal information to each other.
We have an opening and closing list to reference for new employees. We have a general knowledge checklist we make new employees hold on to until they feel confident in checking everything off. We have a doc explaining the positions on bar and what they should try to own. Etc Etc.
as you encounter problems it’s nice to make systems, and systems change over time to better fit their circumstances. IF THEY EXIST!
START SOMEWHERE! OWN IT! YOU’RE THE BEST! SEE YA! - Elias
Water Burst, Closing for a Day, Fixing it.
Good morning, happy Friday. It’s country music Friday here at the cafe. I’m drinking a giant water bottle, a shaken espresso, and a little bit of drip coffee. I’m listening to jam-rock country man Jesse Redwing’s song “Monkey Man.” ‘Lotta energy, mid day, let’s write. This week it’s a story about our water system breaking. How we handled it, what I did to fix it, what we lost in the process.
Three Thursdays ago our water broke, more specifically the top piece of our water filtration system cracked open and started leaking water from the top; Which was a hell of a thing to figure out, since it’s basically mounted to the ceiling and everything was just wet haha.
This cheap, all in one “whole house” filter system (consisting of a mount, two filter cases, two filters (carbon for taste and sediment for hardness), and the surrounding pipe work) was mounted above the shelf that held our water heater, which is the one spot in the cafe we probably check the least because it’s 8 feet in the air and behind a giant tank.
So as it started to drip a little bit each day, from the top, the whole shelf got wet. It was hard to tell where the leak was coming from exactly, but once it started to drip down below the shelf we noticed the small puddle and got up there. I started by buying some new filter casings and gaskets to make sure we had a good seal, but I couldn’t seem to seal it enough to keep the thing dry. As I cranked it tight I was ripping the whole system off the wall.
I contacted the filter company and they didn’t try to troubleshoot, they just sent over a whole new system (with 20% off it was like $60. I’d now spent maybe $100). At this point it was leaking about a qt a day so I was happy just to be done with it, but when I got up there to start removing the old system I realized it was basically all glued together.
So on a Wednesday, I wait until we’re closed and turn the water off. If I could loosen the glue then I could get this system apart without destroying it. After a lot of twisting and pulling I realize this hunk of parts is absolutely fused to itself haha. So I pull it away from the wall and twist the entire thing loose at once. Then put in the new system the same way, except it didn’t go on tight.
Turns out, the entrance and exit threads needed to be twisted in opposite directions. So by tightening one side, it loosened the other. Using the center screw of the two filters, I managed to get all three connections semi-tight then glue them together. Here’s a photo, spoiler: it did not work and I promise I will learn my lesson by the end of this haha.
I let the glue dry and hope that by the next morning all is well. I come in to open, turn it on, and it’s just shooting water everywhere. I have 45 minutes until we open, so I go to Walmart and buy some more expensive flex glue, and plumbers tape. Go back to the cafe, and put both on. I give it 30 minutes, turn it on again, and it’s still shooting water everywhere. I go home to print a door sign that says we’ll be back Friday, trusting this will all work out.
We have to close
I have tanks full of hot water from the day before, so I brew some drip coffee and set out some cold brew. I decided to give out free coffee for an hour or until we were out of water. My employee Amanda comes in at 8 and helps out for 30min or so. Just to let people know what’s going on and get them some coffee if they need it.
A couple people really appreciated it, and told me they were out of coffee at home or whatever. It was worth the effort. Whenever stuff is rough, you’re slow, etc. My philosophy is to double down on kindness whatever that looks like. Gather some karma live in the moment don’t stress.
So at 8:45 or so we shut back down and flipped the lights, time to get back to work.
I turn the water off, run it out of the lines, take a jigsaw and an extension cord, hold it sideways above my head, and cut the pvc apart around the water system. Top 5 most dangerous things I’d done in here, but anything to not buy another power tool. (I learned later about easy pvc cutters).
So now I got to the hardware store and buy new cpvc, cpvc glue, and copper connections to screw into the old system. This is how it was assembled before, so I buy the same parts. I put this together and it explodes off the wall shooting water everywhere, I learn that you can’t really glue copper to cpvc chemically. I’m looking at forum posts from like 2006 where these plumbers are talking about how you should never do this, or at least that it’s not to code for a reason. Alright, fair enough.
I’m soaking wet, people are occasionally stopping by to read the note on the door and wave hi. I’m responding on instagram to people asking if we’re okay. People are sharing the post and asking others to come visit soon to help cover the closing costs. We had an all staff meeting at 4pm and it went really well, the water issues didn’t really come up and summer ideas were flowing. Back to work on the pipes.
I look on youtube and find that the current standard for cpvc to copper is something called a “sharkbite” or push to connect fitting that clamps down with metal teeth. Easy right? You just push in the copper on one side, and the cpvc on the other. Well I take it all down again, and connect the two materials with a sharkbite, then put it back up there. Since I had to dry some more cpvc glue I painted our baseboards white and resealed them with caulk. Good excuse, they look great. Let’s turn the water back on.
I turn the water on, and it’s leaking about as bad as it was last week. So hey, we can open tomorrow. I put some more glue and tape all over it, then go eat dinner, come back, turn it on again. It’s still leaking slightly worse. What’s this glue and tape even good for? Oh well. It’s like 10pm and I’ve been up since 5am. More glue, bedtime.
We’re open, we’re leaking.
Friday morning is here, and I’m supposed to be off work. I come in at open anyways to babysit the plumbing and make sure nothing explodes. It’s leaking about a gallon an hour, so I’m replacing the 4qt container under the pipes and sitting around. My baristas are incredible rays of sunshine and I am a zombie but happy we’re open!
It’s now too busy, I work the closing shift and after locking up call my friend over who has more experience with plumbing. We take the system down again and he tries to tighten the semi-tight pieces. but cracks the top part open, which funnily enough was the issue we had before with the first system. He sighs and we look online for a third system. It seems like there’s nothing in stock locally so we head to lowes anyways to see what we can find, I mean we’re in FL the water is hard there’s going to be something right?
Lowes has a small selection of home water filter hardware so we pick out casings, filters, and cpvc fittings in roughly the same size we had before. This time we go fully cpvc to avoid the sharkbite. He says there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to just use all cpvc, and this time the female threading of our water filter systems are metal so they shouldn’t crack open, nice.
We head back to the cafe and it’s dark out, he shows me that plumbing tape is actually meant to line the threading of the male piece of pipe, so it’s got a tight fit and acts sort of like a gasket. We glue it all together again, and go get ice cream with my fiance. It’s like 9pm on a Friday and the place is slammed. We sit outside on a bench and try not to talk about the water system. “What is butter brickle? Apparently a type of candy bar, that is also a popular ice cream flavor.”
It’s closing up, so back to the cafe, we turn the water on, and nothing happens. It’s air tight. Amazing. We did it.
We’re good, but at what cost?
Well I mentioned before that the new filters, gaskets, and system cost about $100. We maybe spent another $100 on parts the next day, and had to close for a day. We may have lost $400 in potential gross revenue. That’s $600. If 25% of those sales were saved material costs, and we would have spent $70 on labor, we did save $170. Not including my own personal labor haha. So that’s 430 sunk total. That’s more than I spend on groceries in a month at home, but it’s not the end of the world.
What I really hate is closing up shop! On short notice! When I’m googling a restaurant, I always see one star reviews on places being closed. Maybe the food truck was rained out or the mom and pop shop was closed on christmas, doesn’t matter, one star.
Obviously you as a business owner shouldn’t sweat all bad reviews, but they do affect the algorithm and peoples opinions are valid; I value them generally; I don’t want to be closed when someone travels a long way to try our shop, and I don’t want to be closed for anyone who relies on us daily in any capacity.
I’m happy I got this opportunity to learn about plumbing and to touch up our baseboards, everything breaks and now I know how to fix this specific thing should it happen again. That’s all for now : ) ~ Elias
Hosting Classes.
Good morning, it’s Monday 3/4/24 as I begin writing this. I get the feeling this one will take awhile. I’m doing some R&D on my off day, drinking strawberry lattes and driving around. Strawberries are in season and if I had the time we’d be at strawberry fest in plant city this week, but it’s my Fiance’s b-day and he says we should chill, which is probably a good idea after this last week.
In one month we had 6 events. We had a mini farmers market as usual at the end of the month, and a latte art comp! We also had 4 classes, making 6 weeks of classes total. I was able to focus on one week at a time because one of our barista’s Tori hosted the last two weeks where events overlapped. That said, the last week had 3 events all at once. Madness! A lot of that time was thinking about classes, let’s talk about it.
Classes
So these were simple in some ways and complex in others. For one there was no blueprint, I’d been to some public cuppings and I was looking online at programs like baristas hustle, but I’d never been to something like I had in mind in person. I hit up Watson’s Counter in Seattle Washington who I saw had done classes not long ago for some structure and price advice. The owner said in his experience, price high and have some pre-requisite classes to get people familiar before tackling more complex ideas. This was really helpful in breaking up my class into pieces and charging a fair price. I basically asked people what they’d pay on Instagram and in person, I was surprised to hear about $50 was acceptable, which was the high end of what I had in mind. About $25 an hour, meaning my one hour intro class would be $30 and my longer 2 hour classes would be $50. We broke it up in to “intro to specialty” “home brewing” “cafe brewing” and “latte art x2”
since writing this, I’ve seen similar classes in coffee and baking around the US for more like $100/hr. My focus was on getting the idea out there locally, so I feel like in Jax my $25/hr was still appropriate. On my personal IG I offered free or discounted classes for local baristas but nobody bit.
Advertising should have started like two months before these classes, with posters and posts everywhere. To this day people are coming in 2 months late asking when classes are and how much. We had a little poster on the counter and we’re a minimal space so people read it. But that flyer needed dates times and costs. We were doing a lot of education both on those things and “what a coffee class even is.” That said, we had small classes and it pretty much filled up just because it was such a novelty in this area. I was sort of bummed that it was mostly locals and no baristas, but more on that later.
Research meant writing a speech for each class then fact checking myself and using some trustworthy articles to really expand and nail down my knowledge. Things like regional and specialty processes required a lot more reading than I expected, there was so much out there! Things like anaerobic fermentation also lead in to carbonic maceration and co-ferments. Honey process led into dry-hulled and the nuances of partially washed coffees. Then home machines required a lot of youtube roundups and price comparisons for different retailers, man that market is blowing up! Oh and don’t even get me started on how different regions of just the USA are absolutely certain they have the correct name for a drink style, while dozens of others are sure of the opposite in origin and execution. Fun stuff!
The intro class would just be a short (1hr), affordable($30), speech on specialty coffee to avoid rehashing some basic questions in later classes; It was not required. This resulted in a lower perceived value and a lot of people asking questions in later classes that were covered in this one. It didn’t have a big turnout, people didn’t know about it because we didn’t advertise it all far enough in advance. It was a weak class but good practice and I learned a lot.
Home Brewing was focused on home hardware, like grinders, pour overs, pot coffee machines, moka pots and french presses. So I bought one of each that I didn’t already have, then we covered brew basics and how to apply all this stuff to those machines. We started with how to buy coffee and then got into actually brewing. A speech for the first hour and a hands on class for the second. This is when people really lit up, almost no one raised their hand for part 1, we gave out a lot of drip coffee to give things space to breathe and the atmosphere was nice but not super inquisitive. Once I started grinding and pouring coffee, people had tons of questions relating to their own experience and that was sick, I felt much more comfortable responding then just talking. Of course afterwards people had home machine questions and I had done some research to prepare for that. I don’t make much coffee at home anymore haha.
Brewing at the Cafe, Surprisingly, was mostly the same crowd of home enthusiasts. I was hoping to attract baristas who worked in cafes around Jax. I talked about buying coffee from roasters, and why I might choose a specific roaster, then how to use available coffee to fill needs in the cafe like flavors I’d want in batch brew or espresso. Then we dialed that coffee in, so we cleaned the espresso grinder, and put a new coffee on our espresso machine. Since the previous class was excited about the hands on stuff, I tried to do a lot of that. It wasn’t a huge class, but the 6 or so people there took turns splitting shots of espresso as we worked our way to a good place. For home brewers, they were super down to taste yucky espresso shots. Some people were new to that class, and had questions that we covered in the intro; I was a little annoyed, but I think separating them was still the right call since we just filled up the classes with this free form format.
Latte Art Class was fun! This was the easiest class to sell because people knew what it was instantly, and wanted to try it out regardless of skill level! So we hosted it for two weeks in a row, and being the last class in line there was also more advertising! It filled up! During class, Tori who hosted in place of me talked quickly for the first 15 minutes, then spent the next hour and a half taking turns with everyone pouring and receiving feedback. Having a full group of beginners was great because they all encouraged each other and got to watch each other experience the same basic issues right after them, then see watch for solutions. People were shown how to be safe, and got the hang of steaming milk enough to pour hearts by the end of class. It was cool : )
So we did it!
In Summary I think doing this 1.5 years in was the right call, we had just enough of an audience to make it work. Everyone seemed to walk away smiling and feeling enriched. It wasn’t exactly the audience I expected but it all worked out in the end. We ended up making about 1k which in our slow season is significant but nothing crazy. I split the ticket sales for latte art classes with our host to cover cost of goods, but other than some small equipment it was pretty purely profitable.
Afterwards people got the idea, and started asking about it for the future. I guess that goes to show you need to do anything for awhile to build traction even if it’s a superstar idea. So I’ve been saying “maybe next year, or when we have a slow season.” It made sense to make money after the the holidays when we slow down, but staying late to work now is hard when I already work all the time. So when we do this again if we do, will depend on the culture. It took us a full year to build up a rich culture of people who would be willing to attend, but it feels like most of them did! So now we need more time to build that crowd back up.
I’m grateful for the support, this is another one of those things I wish I had as a young barista that I was happy to put out there. -Elias
Atlanta Day Trip Takeaways
Happy Sunday coffee people. I’m listening to fizzy orange, some jazz group with a handful of singles out and nothing else, in that lull before our usual end of week Sunday rush. Drinking sparkling water we make in house. Just won best barista in Jax on Folio, genuinely love that magazine, super sick. Sweating, our power has gone out three times this week and the AC doesn’t like that very much. Thankfully this is the best possible time for this to happen and the heat still works, maybe a little too well, maybe this is the first time I’ve used it here? Little worried about air circulation causing some other mysterious destruction haha. What a life.
Anyway, Two Mondays ago we went to Atlanta for a day, and naturally hit up a few cafes with a few takeaways. When traveling I round up all the hundreds of cafes I follow on social media and pick a few must visits in major cities. This time those were:
“The Daily West Midtown”
The daily is one I’ve been following for food when we eventually visit Charleston South Carolina, but they now also have a spot in Atlanta and serve Onyx coffee among other local roasters. I’m not sure why I put so much stock in cafes that serve Onyx considering we got in the door on an account last year with little trouble and no real credentials. I just do though, and so far it’s been a good bet.
The daily had farm fresh eggs in the fridge when you walk in, I really liked that and decided to work on that here for our shop. The barista was awesome and considerate, navigating a huge menu with love and advice. I got a cascara (coffee cherry) soda and Dakota my Fiancé got an iced vanilla latte. It was super dark coffee, but it was well balanced, a rare and awesome occurrence. Mine was pretty sweet but hey it’s soda at 9am and that’s on me.
The space was pretty big and airy, we got a window seat looking over some fall trees and a big parking lot and movie studio down below. It was a really nice morning view, I had some root vegetable scramble and Dakota had sourdough, both with perfectly cooked scrambled eggs. It felt good to be tucked away with a view and affordable healthy awesome filling food. We were just kind of talking about how we couldn’t get something just like this in our city, and what to do about it. Do we travel more, do we keep encouraging something like this and supporting locals we love who are on the way? Do we build something or work with someone who can? To be more specific, if I wanted a local vegetarian winter root vegetable hash, a really outstanding coffee, and a cozy space with a view. I would not know where to go. Besides right here. That’s special but that’s a bummer.
I think ultimately it’s going to depend where we are when we hit a stride in both of our personal careers, in tattooing and Tetherball Coffee, where we’ve both only been at it for a couple years. Both require a lot of grinding to build a clientele and create a good brand, before you can start looking forward freely. I think about Clay who owns Trilogy coffee in Deland FL, who followed that up with a solid breakfast spot in his city. Anyways, the Daily was great, and a result of years of work on their end. Maybe something like this is around the corner in the 904 and we just don’t know about it. Or it’s already here! Like I said, it takes work to build a clientele, gotta keep an eye out.
“Coffee Man Blandtown”
What an interesting spot man, it’s huge first of all. Then it’s built largely on cold brew, which notoriously has a not great margin and a not super distinct flavor. How do you build a space and a culture like that off cold brew? How do you keep it open? I’ve got some ideas.
My history with cold brew is a story for another time, but I’ve traveled cross country to compete with it and explained it 100 times, brewed the stuff with whole peaches and whiskey to serve on draft at previous cafes, seen it go from niche to standard. Now it’s all we serve for iced coffee at Tetherball. I’ve done a lot of stuff I bet coffee man has too. They’re commitment to flavor and whole ingredients in cold brew is very unique. It’s so commendable that I don’t know if just “coffee man” is a good enough name. I certainly didn’t expect it going in. Tasting a few I was blown away by the clarity at its strength. It’s caused me to weaken our recipe a little here with confidence that I won’t lose body.
The space size (maybe 3000 sq/ft) has to be possible due to the unique density of Atlanta. You can sneak in a giant space like that 10 min from the city and near housing. Here it just wouldn’t be possible as far as I know. But it’s comfy. Room to stretch, room to work, room to talk to the baristas.
My only hold up is with cafes like ours that use really bright colors, I feel strongly you need a lot of sunlight and texture, or it can come off as sterile until you’ve grown in to the space. At a space that size doubly so. Coffee man has a little sun but feels a little empty. We ran in to the same thing as a new cafe and we’re starting to fill the shoes we originally envisioned. I think Coffee Man will get there too.
“Valor Dunwoody”
Valor is mainly who we use as a roaster at Tetherball, so we’ve been to their first location and roasting space a couple of times. We wanted to sneak up to the new spot for a peak and see what the vibe is like, it was great.
Tons of light, the windows and doors are on two sides of the building and it’s up on a hill. They have a couple of different seating areas separated by plants and slatted dividers. These allow the flow of light and people to move organically and freely. There are plants and pieces of furniture placed intentionally that fill the space warmly and confidently. Love it, our visions really align and I hope we can visit again.
That’s outside the bar, behind the bar at least from my perspective it was super efficient. Similarly clean and organized, yet with a bar that fits 4 people and a pretty big menu. Good use of vertical space too. When I think about how to make our cafe a machine that runs efficiently as we staff more, I know I’m going to have to start thinking about organization behind the bar too, and not just what the customer sees. I was reminded of Project coffee in Sarasota, who also has very clean impossibly tight behind the bar builds.
So Valor Dunwoody, the staff were very nice and caring, the menu was fun and silly. I only wish I could share it with more people beyond physically entering the space. Valor isn’t interested in constantly sharing photos of it, and that’s okay. It’s nice to have a business partner who we can look to and work with to grow ourselves in a similar way. When I think about their first location to now, it’s such a explosive expression of the future. I hope we too, can grow like this !!!
That’s all, back to FL. Thanks for reading - Elias
1 Year Menu Refresh
Hey Happy Thursday, I’m here at the cafe drinking some sample coffees from Makeworth in Washington USA. They had a coffee from Colombian producer Luis Calderon that blew my socks off and gave me some energy to write a blog. Tasted like straight kiwi lemonade. Listening to midwest emo band remo drive with the door open on this beautiful not hot November FL day! (Oh god this blog took so long) I want to talk about our menu refresh, and ditch this like ten page long original blog I had been writing on it. I just want to talk about what we changed and why. Hopefully this isn’t quite as long, but I’m obsessed with thinking about menus! I gotta write this! So it’ll be a little long : )
Feeling the need for change
So December 2022 was our first real stress test, where we had hours of lines and bigger orders with families in town. We got a lot of feedback all at once on how people were receiving the menu, the common questions and what else they wanted. When we had families in, we had a greater variety of people too. In January right after, we had a really slow month! So I had a lot of time to think about those problems and blame them for the dead time.
In late February we went to NYC for my Fiances birthday, and I bought a little sketchpad to take note of popular cafes menus and what did or didn’t work. I was originally inspired back in 2021 by the flags at Methodical Coffee in South Carolina, and cafes like “Variety” in NYC that did volume with a really simple menu, but today 2 years later I knew that wasn’t Tetherball. When we opened I was thinking of other Florida cafes like Trilogy in Deland FL, that served a small community with a simple specialty menu, but their culture was more fitting than ours was for that kind of menu. We had kids, we had families, and we had greater jax traveling just for us to try something amazing. So we could do better.
Here are some photos of our first menu, Methodical in SC, Variety in NYC, and Trilogy in FL. You can see the inspiration.
Killing stuff that didn’t work
Let me just precede this whole section by saying, it has to work instantly. If you’re explaining why a drink is good to someone you’re fighting an uphill battle. It’s like explaining why a joke is funny. Unfortunately you don’t know your audience very well until you open your shop doors and have them open for awhile, you have no culture! That’s my opinion anyway, and that’s why this took awhile and then changed a lot when it did. Let’s get into it.
The only original idea that truly really went away was the “Go Fish.” My thought process on that one was a big sweet tea drink for the good ol’ boys. It actually worked pretty well, we had plenty of dudes in guy harvey shirts ordering this one. The problem was we had people asking every day if “that one is any good” and “what’s a sweet tea latte? Does that have coffee.” the concept of a tea-latte seemed impossible for most people, despite us having a matcha latte, and a chai latte on the menu. They assumed it was bad and would joke about it. It was pretty harmless. Just an iced tea with milk and sugar, something not at all weird for hot tea. After enough jabs we killed it.
The kids drink “snickerdoodle milk tea” should have worked because parents like ordering kids milk. This was that with sugar, like a vanilla bean frappe, which is a popular coffee free drink at starbucks. Weirdly not a lot of parents knew what a snickerdoodle was, and the name was just too long for kids. It made ordering a little tough. If it’s not an easy win, parents won’t take a guess on a kids drink. Weirdly this later became popular with adults as basically a cheap milkshake, and took a long time to make and decorate with whip/cookies. so we were getting seriously bottlenecked on bar during rushes by this $4 kids drink. So we killed it.
The kids drink “cherry lime fruit tea” failed because it was a long name, and it had the word tea. It did okay, but mostly for adults that didn’t want coffee. There’s this weird idea where people think tea either has less caffeine or no caffeine, but also that it’s not for kids. Kids don’t like tea, it’s too mature I guess; Which meant if people did order it for kids they were often sharing it with them half heartedly or splitting it up between kids who couldn’t be expected to finish an iced tea. This is my assessment after a year of selling this drink. So we killed it.
We spent the first year running a lot of seasonal drinks and specials. We had one specials menu with 5 very complicated drinks and lost money on it. We had one or two specials that outpaced our regular menu by miles. We grew an audience just for those launches, and lost people when we took specials away, but we took away at least one important thing from every season. We learned what did and didn’t work for our culture, what was too complicated and what was too simple. How to name drinks and how to sell them. If nothing else, having a seasonal menu gave us some great feedback.
Reworking! Using “Florida-Core” as a guideline
Remember the fruit tea? We did lemonade with key west lemon juice over the summer and discovered that was a big win for kids, we also had people making lots of half tea half lemonade drinks. Our most popular one was a half lemonade half hibiscus tea. It had a similar taste to our cherry lime fruit tea, it looked and tasted even better with no artificial colors or sweeteners. So we added it as “pink lemonade” and included a couple slices of fresh lemon. Now it looked and tasted more fresh, and authentic to FL produce as a state known for citrus and hibiscus!
Now for the snickerdoodle. When visiting south Florida a couple times this year up the east and west coast, I noticed that iced horchata was a really popular thing. It was pretty similar in taste to our snickerdoodle milk tea, and was often made non dairy with rice or almonds. So we decided to do an almond milk, caramel vanilla cinnamon iced drink with no whip. Then call that an “Iced Horchata” and it’s been alright! Even if someone doesn’t know what it is, it’s authentic to FL so it’s something we can be passionate about explaining. The taste has been a real winner too!
Then we added two new syrups, one to pair with our now house-made non dairy milk and one to solve the issue of honey in iced lattes.
The skinny (skim milk) lavender iced latte is a common cafe phenomenon, in my opinion this is because floral flavors go well with low fat drinks. When you add sugar to black coffee it tastes kind of gross because it’s unbalanced, but with cream it works. floral syrups like rose or lavender work a little better with black coffee by filling in that olfactory situation. Since we now made oat milk in house and didn’t add much fat, we were putting out a ton of drinks that could use a perfect syrup pairing, I wanted lavender, but i wasn’t a fan of just a floral flavor because it can easily taste fake, even if you’re soaking buds like we were. A “blueberry lavender” with two FL native crops combined solved that issue; This is a little less thin and sugar sweet than just lavender, the blueberry adds a nice aftertaste.
People love honey iced lattes in Florida, it’s hot and we have awesome local honey, but they don’t work! Even if you add honey to your espresso shot and melt it in, you’re often losing some of that honey and dirtying your shot glass. So we made a syrup for that using organic raw brown sugar and local honey. “Brown Sugar Honey!” This is such a honey forward syrup that when someone asks for honey in their latte, we say yes and give them this, it works fine. Unless they really do need just plain honey, we can do that too. I should also mention here that most of the honey syrups cafes use are just corn syrup, and I really don’t like those, but I understand the need for a quick honey, and that’s what this is.
Finally we added a really strange and maybe overcomplicated drink, that we love.
This summer our most popular item period was a crushed ice, honey brown sugar espresso, with coconut condensed milk. It was a solid drink but way too strong for most people at just 6oz. We kept having people ask for a splash of milk. Despite how popular it was a lot of people felt it needed something, so we invented a super deluxe version, the total coconut bomb “Coco Shake!” This is that summer drink, topped with coconut mousse / milk / foam? Whatever it is, it’s coconut cream we chill over night, take the fat from, and whip it with water and vanilla to make a thick sweet top for the crushed espresso that screams coconut. It’s awesome, it balances the whole thing, and it’s already finding it’s audience.
Embracing stuff that had worked
There were a few things we were putting in a little frame on the counter, instead of on the main menu. Those included specials, syrups, and food. This is because we didn’t want to commit! We wanted new syrups! We wanted new food! As part of the season! But if people didn’t see it on the main menu, they didn’t see it! So we put those up there and ditched the frame. We do still have one of each pastry on display in a glass dome, but they’re also on the board.
There were a few things people were asking for so often that they may as well have been on the menu, like cortados and americanos. The problem was we didn’t have any to-go cups smaller than a 12oz, which made for a ridiculously tiny and hard to pour 4oz cortado. It also made for a very watery americano, since people would get at minimum a 12oz. So we added an 8oz hot cup for americanos, which now had a better body. This also made it easier to pour and measure cortados (just fill the 8oz cup halfway), and added a very small drip coffee option (since our smallest batch brew is 32oz, we previously could do at most two 12oz drips per batch, now we could do up to 4, 8oz!)
We started doing cappuccinos with skim milk, as we really embraced the “dry” now old-school foamy capp. Since skim milk separates, if it’s steamed well you can have a thick couple inches of velvety foam on top, with a thin latte texture below. We began in 2022 doing this style and thinking about capps in a textural way, and we can do a “traditional” 6oz if you ask, but people in FL have responded warmly to our style and we’re gonna stick with it!
People also frequently asked for water cups and kids milk cups. So we added those to our retail fridge along with apple juice and gatorade. They do pretty well, especially water. We were basically giving them away for free before so this is a nice compromise.
Pictures of drinks
In a perfect world we’d have photos of every drink available on a takeaway card and outside menu, on our website too! Percect neat and bright photos! We’ll get there! But thinking outside the box, a little illustration can go a long way.
We have cartoon drawings for each of our seasonal specials. For example, a jack-o-lantern for our PSL. This is something we started to be eye catching on the little specials frame by the register. We decided to blow them up for the main menu too. These draw attention and are fun, but they can also serve to direct demographics to an item or describe that item. For example the lumberjack Fall special is targeting guys who like black cold brew but want a little treat, so it’s got a coold guy with a beard and glasses. This has worked really well. (I once pitched an article on the rise of this specific demographic to barista magazine, when nitro cold brew was big; They sent me a shirt but did not publish it haha.) The Toffee Butter winter special is a little piece of candy, to let people know “hey this just tastes like candy” haha.
Adding a Fridge & Oven!
This was our biggest hurdle in doing a menu with savory options, we wanted to heat food up and store backup food cold. So we needed more fridge space and an oven. We brought in some electrician contractors for 30 minutes to test all our outlets and they told us where we could plug everything in without popping any breakers or running new power. Fridges don’t pull much power but ovens do. We put the fridge where we wanted out in the lobby as a retail fridge no problem, even though it was on the same circuit as all our laptop plugs for tables. We put the oven where we wanted on bar, then had to run an extension cord under the counter to the next outlet over.
I bought a single glass-door retail fridge new for about 1k with a warranty, pretty straightforward.
Ovens man, what a can of worms haha. I did not want to pay 15k for a turbo chef, I did not want to buy one used for 2-3k and have something proprietary, that no one would work on if it broke. I did not want to buy a small toaster oven or air fryer for $150 that wasn’t commercial. I remember when I was a barista I was like “what’s the difference?” The difference is it’s designed for heavy use and heavy cleaning, two things you should or hopefully will be doing!
Our roaster suggested a convection oven, something small we’d leave on all day. I read some reviews online and in coffee business owner groups, and they did not review well. People said they’d burn out in a couple of months. SO I went to the manufacturer website and read some warranties. they suggest an on time of 4-5 hours, so I bought the best reviewed counter top oven at that $3-500 price point and leave it on 7am-1pm at 450. So far it’s been 3 months, it doesn’t give off much heat and it’s held up great.
Adding “FOOD”
So we wanted a savory option. This could be it’s own whole blog but in short we didn’t want to do any prep on bar so it had to be ready to rip, or at least heat up! We didn’t want to do daily deliveries because we didn’t have that level of volume yet. Meaning no avocado toast, no croissants, no croissant sandwhiches!
So we looked around and talked to people, and someone who had a food truck in our lot was doing empanadas for lunch / dinner. We already had a relationship and they weren’t doing breakfast, so it worked great. they’re par baked every other day and we finish them in our over in a couple minutes. We have a meat option and a veggie option, empanadas are big in FL culture, win win!
So we now had sweets, savory stuff, and healthy stuff. We kept doing granola now with yogurt or milk for here or to go, in little deli containers with wooden spoons. It was good for a long time and didn’t require any baking or cooking since we bought the actual granola clusters from an organic wholesale site.
Condensing a full sized menu
So we moved specials and food from our counter, to our main menu board. Then added a few new items. Suddenly our menu was three times the size it once was. Our original flags took a full day to put together by hand and struggled to convey the most minimal info, doing those again was not going to work.
I learned from our specials menu that bite sized information was working really well. So I started thinking about categories. This both broke up our information and forced me to pick a couple of drinks at most in each style. This also naturally made me think about how the information was being navigated visually, and how to have a small homerun list in each section. Four black coffees, three milk based drinks, four teas, three kids drinks, etc. Bam bam bam.
I was doing a lot of underlining, bold lettering, italics, font changes to make this all read well. But It was a mess. I ended up putting the categories in to boxes, inspired by our roaster Valor’s menu with rounded corners, something we were already doing a lot as a part of our brand. They also had a really big menu for a coffee shop, but not in a way that felt ridiculous. In comparison to a shop with 20 specialty lattes, they felt really intentional.
We don’t have exactly the same categories, and generally go more basic and bold but you can see the comparison. I designed it myself in photoshop then went back and forth with a couple different sign makers. Ultimately I had the board printed on thin pvc at a local place, and then had the paper printed at staples, and used super strong magnets / white hooks from amazon. fun project!
Breaking down this menu in detail
First was “COFFEE” & “+MILK” which were inspired by super simple neon menus done at All Day in Miami, and Dayglow in LA.** Two cafe’s I’d had really stellar experiences at, that use a few words to describe their black basics, and +/&MILK for all their milk based drink. These menus don’t help provide much deeper info unless you’re in the know, but they looked sleek and build intrigue. As headers, I think they do an awesome job for us, but we need subheaders.
For “COFFEE” we now have hot drip and cold brew (our basic hot and cold coffee, which are batch brew and yes cold brew, unintentionally the same as allday now that I’m looking at). We also do espresso (17g in, about 2oz out) and americano (8oz) for others who specifically request them.
For “MILK” we now have a 4oz cortado, a 12/16oz dry capp, and a 12/16oz latte. Our espresso drinks are all two sizes, since we do two shot sizes. We use 17g baskets, and have two recipes for 17g & 19g in, with about a traditional “double” and “triple” out.
We have whole, skim, organic unsweet almond, and oat milk made in house. We also have half & half, and heavy cream but we do not steam those ideally haha. We started making oat milk because we can buy organic gluten free oats, reduce waste, and save money. People also often have a favorite brand that they wish you had instead, so this squashes that question with a solid “we make it, it’s great.” When I first got in to coffee soy milk was big, but we never get asked for that or coconut milk, oat/almond work great for our area as alt options.
Below are some photos from All Day in Miami, Dayglow in LA, and Dayglow in Chicago.
From there we decided on “TEA” and “KIDS TEMP” directly below. Tea was hard to boil down, but I wanted a short menu people could actually use to order tea and not have to ask for a list. If I had to pick four every day teas over ice, I thought a southern black that could be sweet/unsweet, and a zingy tangy FL hibiscus rooibos red would be great, along with matcha and chai lattes. Just like coffee we have a larger tea list for those who ask, but those would encompass the common every day orders into a few simple words. We make our chai, and we use real matcha from japan. Kids temp was of course going to have hot chocolate, with the above mentioned horchata and lemonade. Three easy wins!
At the bottom we have “SYRUPS”! I don’t want to cook anything in house with a hot plate, so we don’t do chocolate/caramel/white chocolate. We use Hollander, mainly because they are transparent about their chocolate, and they make a caramel without corn syrup, stuff that’s rare in the cafe syrup world.
We do make a vanilla, and sugar free vanilla with monk fruit. As mentioned above we now also do brown sugar honey and blueberry lavender. Basically we buy three flavors and make three flavors, then have 2 or 3 more for the seasonals. We use organic raw cane sugar and brown sugar as a base. They add a nice depth of flavor in addition to the natural ingredients. We use a kitchen aid immersion blender and a strainer for pretty much everything.
We could open and close some day and realize we only did EVERY DAY LATTE’s. As my first coffee mentor once said, “sell someone a vanilla latte, don’t sell them a latte then ask about vanilla.” Meaning we have this list of fully composed in-your-face drinks, & so someone is more likely to ask for one of these with oat milk and no whip, then ask for a latte with all the included ingredients one by one. That’s how we like it. Keeps it easy, get’s someone a great & beautiful drink we’ve practiced, and upsells a little bit or forces them to specify when they want to dial it back.
All three drinks come with whole milk, house whipped cream, and toppings (vanilla wafers, chocolate chips, teddy grahams). This might not sound revolutionary, but there are specialty shops opening all the time without drink specials, and 90% of them don’t do whipped cream. From my perspective if we’re going maximalist from the get go, we should do some really great whip and make it look huge and exciting. Get this iconic look going for all our drinks so you know what’s in there and it looks fun!
Speaking of fun, lastly we have ODDBALLS! These are great drinks that don’t easily fit in to the above categories. They’re showcases of what we can do, and authentic to FL culture with native ingredients.
The “Sunrise Soda” is keylime juice, simple syrup, house seltzer water, and espresso. We combine these in a way that keeps it all cold and doesn’t make it explode, but does leave a nice cascade effect and a clear pallet. I first had this drink at Condensa in Atlanta but it was warm on top, and I’ve had a few weird “espresso tonic”s since, but the key to me is good citrus and a little simple. Before we opened I brought my neighbors a lot of bad acidic drinks until they gave this one the thumbs up, and I learned a lot from their disgusted faces, but in retrospect even if you love this drink you have to be an acidity nut haha.
The “Coco shake” had a ton of iterations. The first one I sold was a summer special with just crushed ice, espresso, brown sugar, honey, and coconut condensed milk. People loved the Idea so we sold a ton, but those same people would often order it, realize it was too strong or too small, and then ask for cream or throw it away. We had a few die hard fans so I wanted to work on a version for the full menu.
So I needed to make the coco bigger and keep it non dairy. I tried a few different alt milks but it lost the texture when you added them, it basically became an iced latte. So I started making a coconut mousse with coco milk powdered sugar and xantham gum. It was good but the texture was now more like a milkshake. I went through a half dozen more iterations because I wanted that original texture and more natural sweetness. Eventually we found a really great coconut cream that we could chill over night, separate the fat, and whip that with a little coconut water and powdered sugar. It just tasted like fresh coconut and had an awesome fluffy texture. This thing now required us to prepare coconut condensed milk, a brown sugar honey syrup, and a coconut mousse separately. All for one drink, which would normally feel like a huge waste of resources. But I love the drink, and for now we’re keeping it.
I won’t go in to FOOD or SEASONAL stuff in this blog : )
Making the actual, physical board
Without exaggerations I’d now drawn almost a full notebook of menu sketches over 5 months. So the next step was to put it in photoshop and apply our brand guide to make it beautiful. Then conceptualize it for a physical board by measuring the space and pitching that to some sign makers. The sign makers mainly need to know the dimensions and how you want to hang it up. So they understand the scale and materials they’ll need. In our case we also had blank spaces to tack on paper, so we needed to make sure we had enough blank space to perfectly fit the poster sizes our local print shop offered.
I would not recommend a maker that focuses on speed like “fast signs” because they’ll quote you before seriously working with you on a project. What they want to do is get you in the door with a high price before you have a chance to shop around. This rule of “get two quotes” should just be something you do everywhere in business. Without getting in to details, I went to a couple of chain shops and then to one shop a regular recommended and got a better experience for a third of the price.
Other thoughts, Ditching prices.
The new menu has really worked, it makes our options feel more full and is really exciting for newcomers. We do a pretty even amount of all our drinks, they’re all unique and fantastic, they feel authentic to our shop, it rocks. On release our business saw a 30% increase immediately and it allowed us to start staffing daily during peak hours. The future is looking bright, and it feels great to have executed on this idea that took about 6 months to put to action.
PS. We ditched prices on the board to allow it to breathe and flow without further detail. It’s hard to say how this has effected people, maybe they secretly think we’re really cheap or expensive now. What I do know is that we’ve only been asked once or twice so it’s seemingly been a non-issue. We’re fortunate to be in an area where people aren’t super price conscious so I’m sure that’s also a contributing factor.
PSS. This is probably the longest blog I’ve written. Now that I’m not committed to doing this weekly I’m just doing it for fun, so I can take my time writing and rewriting paragraphs. I’d like to write a book eventually and so thinking about how to make huge blocks readable is part of the fun : ) - Elias
1! Year of Tetherball
Good Morning! I can’t believe it’s been a year already. This has been the longest and shortest year of my life. Thinking about every day so critically for a year is exhausting haha. AAAAAA. I’m drinking a brown sugar honey oat milk latte, listening to Tom Misch (sort of a modern jazz, guy) and i’m at work on bar. I’m sure I’ve expressed this before but blogging is really hard now that i’m in this! Anytime I touch a computer I feel like I’ve got more important things to be doing, and the more I know the less I feel confident in writing down!
BUT! The point of this blog is to share my business experience honestly, and give some perspective to those doing something similar. Now is a good time to do that, in that way. I’ve heard from several people that this blog has been helpful to them, and I’ve been able to help people in person too. A lot of people want to know what to expect in the first year, so here’s what I saw.
Goals for the 1st year
My goals were mainly to work hard and work cheap, to go as skinny as possible year 1 and build a strong foundation. I was hoping to build a community spot that did volume long term, but in the short term I knew it would be more efficient to work solo. Working solo would let me talk to everyone and think critically about inefficiencies. Save on labor, make every interaction count, keep the place clean and establish systems. I wasn’t opposed to hiring people, but only if I felt like it was creating a poor customer experience.
Despite wanting minimal help I did want to host events, to involve the community and keep employees engaged. I had a few events in mind like latte art throwdowns that were huge in other cities, and bake-offs that i’d seen do well at other cafes in Jacksonville like Vagabond many years ago. I was especially driven to do this because I felt like it was largely missing in Jax, covid or otherwise.
As for what we were trying to achieve as a coffee shop concept. We wanted to do a fun simple shop. Low key, high quality. DIY simple build out, great drinks. So that was a short menu with easy to read descriptions, real ingredients and sometimes complicated execution; Such as homemade whipped cream, shake every iced latte so there are no warm spots and they taste the same top to bottom, buy real caramel and honey instead of the corn syrup based stuff. I wanted a bright and colorful shop that would be a positive place to work and to visit, that had nostalgic and cheery colors, sticking to a brand bible we created around that idea early on.
I was inspired by shops like field day coffee, and others that at the time were just clean carts with a simple menu and a pop of personality. It kind of blew my mind that everything on the menu could be so exciting and I really wanted to have a simple striking menu too.
You might hear this a lot from modern mission statements in 3rd wave coffee, but we wanted to '“make good coffee easy and accessible.” Peoples idea of “good” and “accessible” varies shop to shop. Nonetheless, that’s it : )
Expectations for this year
This is my first business solo, and for all the books I read and continue to read, for all the people I talk to who have similar businesses, you just don’t know man. You need to make some mental leaps on how things will pan out when you open doors. I’m exaggerating a little here in the next paragraph but not by much.
You hear constantly that food/beverage businesses won’t turn a profit in the first year, or they may even go out of business. Naturally I’m thinking, well right after that first year you will be making money. Profit progression is a straight line, and that in month 1 I’ll be making nothing, and that in month 13 I would be hitting my goal gross income. I’d also read that your rent should be 10% of your gross sales, and so with that logic I took out 6 months of revenue to compensate for the slow beginnings.
I was expecting people to like the menu, and order things straight off it as they are displayed. I thought we’d sell some banana bread and I didn’t buy forks. I thought we’d catch a lot of people on the way to work and school. Yea!
Reality of this year
I did work hard and skinny oh man, when we opened I was still working two jobs! Thankfully after about a month I was able to quit my second job and hire someone for peak hours who I met at that job. I learned pretty quickly that working essentially 17 hour days 6 days a week (anywhere from 90-102 hours) was not going to work. I had this boundless enthusiasm because I loved what I was doing and was stoked to be there, but I was a zombie! This needed to be my only job for the foreseeable future.
Events began with our hugely successful grand opening latte art throwdown, which we did again in spring. We had our first craft market in October for Halloween, but that quickly became a monthly staple as our vendor waiting list piled up; It’s now evolved to be kind of a mini farmers market, which filled a local want. We made some shirts for halloween and merch soon became another arm of what we do. Essentially we tried to do one piece of merch per season, and one event a month, but sometimes we bit off more than we could chew and by the end of year 1 we had an event every week of july along with a merch drop, plus my birthday, and the shops birthday. That proved to be too much, we didn’t have space to effectively advertise everything or keep up with the workload! SO now we have 1 market a month with a market manager who organizes it, and one shop event per month based on employee sentiment. I’d say we’re still figuring this all out.
Our general concept really came in to it’s own over the year, we picked up this idea of “florida-core” from our feature on sprudge magazine and tried to embody it alongside our DIY aesthetic. We swapped out our plants for real plants, tried to incorporate FL/local produce on our menu, and embraced our colors doing more light woods pinks and blues. We also found ourselves doing more in house, the crazy rise in prices, and ridiculous waste of all those tiny boxes had us making our own oat milk. We constantly had syrup bottles breaking on delivery or running out of stock, and we had nowhere to store all that heavy glass, so we started making syrups too.
By finding our own footing we also found some relationships didn’t work. The baker we opened with was out of our budget, wasn’t able to provide us with items that made sense or sold, and wasn’t supporting us in person or online. They were also the only traditional bakery on this side of town. We thought we didn’t have a choice, but we found a local baker on Instagram who ended up being a much better fit and who was similarly creative simple and excellent.
As for money, we’ve had a pretty steady year because of how and where we opened. We’re just about where we need to be to pay our bills, month to month we’re 70-90% of the 10x rent mentioned above. We’re doing a specialty shop in the suburbs though, and almost all other shops like this are downtown. So as we slowly find our audience locally during the week, weekdays improve. On weekends new people come to visit and we’re super busy. Over time less new people are visiting and more locals are coming back. Which is good because our slow days are less slow and our busy days are less crazy random.
I should also mention that new shops have a honeymoon period where everyone is checking them out, and they’ll be abnormally busy the first couple months, then slow down. I read about this, I’ve seen it at other places, and it was true for us too. We met a lot of people who’ve been coming back since, and a lot of people who haven’t. A lot of people gave us big giant tips to support us early on, and that was awesome but it doesn’t last. Thankfully I knew about this and did not hire a bunch of employees then find out the hard way.
To summarize, we’ve learned a lot this year and did a good job of planting roots. I’d say it was a success. Because I took out loans to get here, it’ll probably be another year or two before I can pay those off and have money to hire staff in my place. The lease on this building was for three years so my intent was to give this a really hard 3 years and hope for the best, then go ahead and do that if this is for me. So far, I think it is : )
Other thoughts
We’re not a crazy line out the door busy shop, usually. You can attribute some of our slower traffic to us being tucked away and not directly off the highway in sight, we don’t have a drive through and we aren’t a restaurant. I think any of these things would have made us more immediately viable, but that’s okay. it wouldn’t be this concept if it was something else, and I like this concept.
Speaking of food, we’ll probably never be making soup or sandwiches back here. When we were new people would come in and tell us “oh you need to have X” or “you know you’re not busy because you don’t do X.” To this day our only 1 star review is about just that. I like to think that these comments come from a place of wanting to help, but I say to myself, “only do what you can do well.” Tetherball will never be a fancy french restaurant any more than it will sell used tires.
There are a lot of things people don’t understand about what we do now on our tiny menu, “tea latte” and “spro” are ones I get questions about every week. I decided I would give it a year before making changes, so it’s about time. I used our seasonal drinks to test ideas and get a feel for how people read menus. Some things I discovered:
fewer drinks are better, after three seasonals people stop reading and either ask you what’s good or order the first item
have a manly man coffee, a sweet latte, and a kids item.
involve other ingredient creators be they farmers or breweries, to share your menu your audience and your enthusiasm.
even if a drink has many ingredients, keep descriptions brief
if you don’t list prices, people ordering specials don’t really seem to mind. Meaning you can get creative and price fairly.
choose fun concise names or you’ll get tired of them quickly.
We chose to paint this place white, use fabric chairs, and have a “dress bright” dress-code. It’s been fine. As long as you keep up with it, things only get stained every few months and stains can come out. Keep a primer bucket, magic eraser, and bottle of shout on hand. I think it’s worth the struggle. People comment all the time and enjoy the cleanliness of the space.
Goals for next year.
I’d like to update the menu, add more substantial (but still simple!) food items, make some aesthetic tweaks, add more chairs. I’d like to do some delivery or pickup options, so we can advertise and get drinks out to greater jax. I want to keep doing markets, keep doing events, maybe another throwdown.
I want to grow enough that we can hire another employee and I can have another day off. I want to improve at everything I’m doing from inventory to taxes.
I want to have a great year 2! Can’t wait! Thanks for reading! Have a nice day!
20 More Cafe Albums
GOOD MORNING! Happy Tuesday, I’m listening to Asobi Seksu’s 2006 album “Citrus” which is some fairly heavy early dreampop. I’m drinking espresso shots as I get this Onyx guest coffee dialed. They’re house espresso for smaller milk drinks, “geometry” is a bit lighter than I would normally have on espresso but I really love it. I think this will open me up to doing more fun espresso in the future with a better understanding of how it plays with milk. Anyways,
I’d like to recommend some more music to play in your cafe
I wrote a whole blog on this, but essentially I always recommend you match the tone of the room, so keep in mind these aren’t all perfect for every situation. In general though they’re great picks and good music and you can listen to them all day : )
1. Latin Vibes EP collection: lounge edition (house / latin club / instrumental)
A regular of mine brought this in as a physical cd and sure enough it was on streaming services, had to check it out. It’s awesome wallpaper music, blends in but is clearly a specific pick. Super long vibey stuff.
2. Birds, Bees, The Clouds & The Trees; Harrison (Jazz band / electronic instrumental / heavy drums)
Some of that whiny electronic piano I like in african jazz, but clearly made by one guy in a studio with some great drums. A pretty short lp especially with the explicit tracks turned off. Recent fave though.
3. Wede Harer GuzoWe; Hailu Mergia (70’s African Psych Rock / folk / accordion and piano )
Speaking of African Jazz, this album rules. It’s got some fuzzy cozy singing and a really round but upbeat sound. I have no idea how I came across it but I think it’s a great fit for the cafe. His album Lala Belu is also good
4. Win & Lose; Chinese Football( Chinese Math Rock / heavy walls of sound / Guitar Lead )
A lot of modern math rock (that I have listened to) is a little heavy! This one still has a strong sound but the vocals are more lighthearted kind of like “this town needs guns” (another older classic math rock band). Because it’s in chinese, if it’s melodramatic I wouldn’t know, I just like the sound. It can still be loud at the cafe without coming off as too abrasive.
5. the book about my idle plot on a vague anxiety; toe (complex heavy guitar / japanese rock / instrumental )
Speaking of heavy modern math rock, this is kind of like that. I don’t think this Japanese quartet considers themselves that, but I do : ) It’s got a lot to chew on for music fans while still being playable in a cafe and not too wild.
6. Let it Sway; Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
7. Chorus; Literature
8. Early Music; Voxtrot
These are all Indie pop rock albums from 10+ years ago that are bright fun energized, and easy to put on in a louder environment. The strongest front to back is Voxtrot but the others are nice too!
9. Black Sands; Bonobo (Chill electronic beats / soothing vocals / coffeehouse )
10. Mixtape; Bobbing (Experimental beats / Fun songs from a new artist / song based on threat level midnight from the office???)
10. The Mix-Up; Beastie Boys (Jazzy breaks and beats from the beastie boys, super replayable)
11. Beats and Breaks from the Flower Patch; Kitty Craft (thin cute beats / weird 90’s electronic)
12. Lost Tapes; Kitty Craft (more from kitty craft : )) )
Here are some nice low tempo beats and breaks to play in the early morning, Kitty Craft is a little strange and the Beastie Boys are a little loud but overall they’re nice morning music!
13. Today; Babe Rainbow (Chill / Slow / repetitive / surf rock / psych rock )
14. Layla; Unknown Mortal Orchestra (Slightly more awake chill psych rock / ‘that life’ being the most banger )
15. Paper Machete Dream Balloon; King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (dreamy psych rock / but now we’re pretty high energy and weird)
Here are some progressively strange and loud psych rock albums to play throughout the morning.
16. Expert In A Dying Field; The Beths (Punk Rock / Soft Vocals / Loud SFW)
I basically play the Beths Discog in here all the time, because it’s loud indie punk rock kind of music from New Zealand, but soft enough to play again, all the time. Pretty SFW, Pretty Fun, BIG REC!
17. Dots and Loops; Stereolab (London electronic / repetitive / hypnotic )
18. Cherry-coloured Funk; Cocteau Twins (shoegaze / deep walls of sound / pretty )
19. Delaware; The Drop Nineteens (90’s slacker grungy shoegaze)
Here are a bunch of Dreamy Shoegaze-esque songs to fill in the rainy mornings at the cafe. They’re all sort of different but the same, and easy to put on but still have a good time.
20. Inner World Peace; Frankie Cosmos (singer songwriter / minimal cute guitar)
I used to play frankie’s early albums in the cafe all the time, but haven’t given them a chance in years. I found myself really connecting with this one and I’d recommend this along with “Next Thing” any day for a cute cafe pick.
Okay that’s enough for today
I told myself I’d stop at 20, and I busted these out really fast haha. I hope this helps out someone who’s sick of the same cafe radio they’ve had on loop the last few months. I hope you have a great day! Peace! - Elias
Moving! Hiring! Tiring!
Afternoon! I’m here at work Listening to the 1996 Fishmans album “Kuuchu Camp.” I just ate a pistachio muffin, drinking some water : ) I MOVED! FINALLY! Just gotta unpack. I HIRED SOMEONE! Last night finally. Which is a whole thing. I”M TIRED! But i’m about to be better hopefully haha, we’ll see! It’s easy to get down about it all, so I wanted to write something as soon as I got through it.
I moved across the street from the cafe
Which saves me 6-10 hours of driving a week! It gives me 6-10 hours of free time! It gives me 6-10 hours of extra sleep! It gives me room to breathe.
I’m already working 80 hours a week, so adding that commute is brutal. Every time I needed something from home it was an hour drive. Every time I made my partner bring me something from home it was an hour drive. Every time I needed to go in on my day off it was at least an extra hour! And we did it, and neither of us complained because we liked our house, but when my employee left and the cafe got busier we started talking about breaking lease. We were driving all the time!
So we broke lease, we no longer have a house.
And honestly we couldn’t keep up with it! Mowing the lawn and keeping it clean was half the time we spent at home on a good week!
We rented the house for the space, we were both working from home and we knew we could fill the garage with cafe equipment. We used every inch of that house! Right before the cafe opened, the garage and the living room were full of boxed floor to ceiling! We painted in the driveway, we took photos on the lawn, we even kept an outside cat who stayed in an upside down plastic storage bin I jigsawed together with cafe tools.
But now it was too much, so we moved in to a one bedroom apartment with a porch, and rented a storage unit downstairs for cafe equipment. Which not only gets the stuff out of our house, but makes it accessible for employees down the road, and a much shorter drive in an emergency.
This took about two weeks, and the whole time I was hiring.
With our handful of free hours a week we were packing, cleaning, donating, selling and getting buried in admin work. On top of the usual stuff I was inviting dozens of application emails from our website and from indeed. Pretty soon I was something like 200 emails behind.
For the few folks I did find time to interview, they would often show up early and prevent me from pre-closing. I was happy to talk to them, but I was also being stretched paper thin as I dumped hours in to making connections that could potentially be vital to long term relationships, or potentially be a waste of time.
So I was getting 5-7 hours of sleep a night, and steadier on bar than ever. Weekdays were tough, but weekends were really tough. I was having a hard time asking my partner for help who was basically in the same position, but to their massive credit they were still bringing me lunch and helping out during events. I had a wisdom tooth crack and suddenly I needed to get all 4 removed but couldn’t afford it. One of my regulars is a dentist, and he was able to grind it down a bit which made it non-crucial. For $50. Bless him.
Through it all I was still talking to people like I cared and we were still getting positive reviews. We hit 100 5 star google reviews, and I was invited to be on Win Dixie receipts by their sales rep. I was trusted to serve Onyx coffee on bar later this month, and I continue to hear “this is our first time, but we’ll definitely be back.” I was staying positive.
Our external motto is “Get up and hit it!” Our internal motto is “Give people energy!”
Which when your’e super drained is pretty hard haha. Despite it all, these two weeks we continued to do that internally with events, new merch, and new food/drinks. We did that externally by donating to events such as Umami Curry’s 2 year party down the road, and buying coffee at Setlan Coffee’s opening, and Jacksonville Coffee Co’s opening. We did this all despite being low on funds because it’s as crucial as paying the bills.
It’s crucial to get up and hit it, every day, like we mean it.
So that’s what I did, I drank good coffee listened to good music and had fun. I worried about admin work on Monday, and worried about being a good host the rest of the week. I hired someone yesterday and now I can get to training, we’ll be back on track soon. Thanks for reading! - Elias
NYC Spots & Thoughts Spring ‘23
GOODDD MORNNINGGG FL USA !!! I am drinking ice water, I am listening to New Order, I am thinking about NYC one month later. This last week was pretty busy, and as we get steadier I have less and less time to write. But hey! It’s another notch on the ladder, we’re achieving our Q1 2023 goals and with that expenses go up! We are doing more events, more merch, more great stuff! Keeping it moving keeping this whole cafe rolling. Today let’s focus on the trip.
March 6-10th We Visited NYC
My partner dakota (@voidheart.tattoo) is a fantastic tattoo artist, and had a guest spot at a studio there and was booked every day. So while he tattoo’d and paid for the trip, I ran around and tried coffee. There were way too many spots I didn’t go too (shout out ‘til death, lacabre, coffee project, etc.) BUT! I did go to about 2/3 a day for 5 days; meaning I have a healthy amount to write about.
My “goal” for the trip was to study how cafes wrote their menu. I imagined they’d have sharp and simple menus, which is something I want to do at Tetherball with our second iteration at the one year mark. So let’s take it day by day and think about what we had and what folks there are doing.
Day 1
We got in late. First stop was right next to the hotel, Blue Bottle. I visited the first location in NYC back in about 2015? (first as far as I know) Under the rockefeller center. That spot was doing only pour over black coffee, which was hugely interesting to me at the time, and though today they do more cream and sugar they’ve still got an interesting menu and good black coffee. What stood out to me this year was just very matter of fact menu names. Like the chicory infused cream and sugar cold brew, “new orleans style” iced coffee; Or the Iced latte shaken with molasses and cane sugar, the “Shakerito.” These were black text on skinny pale wooden boards, easy to read and to the point. Classic.
After Blue Bottle we kicked around and went in to The Bean. From the name alone this screamed 2nd wave chain. Sure enough we found a ton on google, but ours had a massic acai bowl menu painted on their bar, and big colorful chalkboard drawings of celebrities for their specials. For example their frappes were “frozen mona lisa”’s. This paired a memorable face to a classic drink. Despite the hugely overstuffed menu, the iconography made it readable. Huh. Well, I got a muddy drip and an almond croissant. Which ruled. That’s one thing I love about big cities, the bread. It was getting pretty late, so if Blue Bottle was uninterested in us, this place wanted us gone haha. But we bugged them for the bathroom and went back out in to the cold. My hot bland drip coffee and my stale croissant were delicious. Time for bed.
Day 2
The next morning we went to Sunflower Gramercy for breakfast, which is worth noting because a lot of restaurants have nice machines and good coffee. This isn’t much of a coffee shop and there’s not much to note on the menu. I had a vanilla latte. it was okay!
We dropped stuff off at the tattoo studio and walked down the road to Coffee Fest NYC . It just so happened to be going on the same week! Host of the podcast Keys to the shop (@keystotheshop) happened to be judging the latte art competition there and got us tickets we couldn’t afford. (awesome pod interviewing folks in the coffee industry and giving advice on running cafes). Coffee fest is a tradeshow, so it’s focus is on introducing brands to cafe owners. I first went to Coffee Fest LA as a shop manager, and realized I didn’t really belong there haha. This time I made a few connections, and hopefully you’ll see those down the road at Tetherball.
If I could shout out just two people from Coffee Fest NYC! @hazelicious_inc is doing really good almond milk alternatives with a super clean hazelnut milk. @espressostateofmind is putting together events to help baristas find career paths in the industry. I’ve been following them for awhile and It was great to meet a few members in person.
After the fest, we still hadn’t had enough coffee so we went to Do Not Feed Alligators. Roasters @touchy.coffee recommended we check it out, and it was a really cool spot. In my opinion there’s some disconnect around the overall design, but I get the feeling in a year from now it’ll be beautiful when it’s had some time to evolve. The menu has a few weird quirks haha, I’d recommend you just go to their website. For one thing they have a canned food menu, stuff like grilled octopus and fish. For another thing they have milkshake machines on bar to froth “frappes” which are essentially frothed milk over iced espresso. I had a $10 drip that was alright. But hey, their strongest element might just be the carefully crafted book store. Inspired and art focused stuff. It’s weird man, I really love it. And I think they’ll get better.
After that we had dinner, freezing our hands off and insisting we walk everywhere, we ended up at a tiny Milkbar on the lower east side. If you watched the documentary series “Chef’s Table” 20 times like me, you might love Milkbar since it was a pillar of that series. I’d been twice already, and I really don’t have kind things to say about the culture. But what I will say, is they still do the best cereal milk I’ve ever had. which means the corn flake ice cream and cereal milk lattes are still bomb. Even with the worst espresso I’ve had in NYC haha.
Day 3
The next morning we bee lined for Blankstreet , which was the current chain hoping to “be the next starbucks in nyc.” Last time we were in town it was Gregorys. Let me describe both of their approaches as I saw them. Blankstreet went for a bunch of tiny builds. Dozens of them just in Manhattan with a bold off green color and razor sharp aesthetics. A couple of transplants in London to legitimize their highbrow goals. That said, many of these were so small you couldn’t really get in and sit, but honestly it was an A for me, tasty and tight menu. It was paired down to the essentials and it all looked good! Who cares if there are seats? Gregorys went for personality, their mascot being a person and their builds having some seating and some yelling out orders. I think Blankstreet had the quality and aesthetics needed to replace the bux, but Gregorys had a more authentic atmosphere. I don’t think either of them were really outstanding, but personally I prefer blankstreet if it means I have a better easier drink. I ordered a small hot pisatchio latte and it was pretty good, but I think it needed something on the back end, which is how I ended up with our spring special the toasted pistachio cardamom at tetherball.
After we got coffee we went for breakfast at MUD NYC, a place I’d been recommended about 6 years ago and never forgot. My head barista at the now under new management Crucial Coffee in St. Augustine, told me “if you go to one place for coffee in new york, go to MUD. In retrospect I can see why he loved this place, a real hole in the wall with delicious and affordable food/coffee. Warm cozy wooden, his kind of place. My bagel with cream cheese and tomatoes came with a free drip and it was all amazing. That said we had to shuffle and duck through an old house to get there, and be made fun of for our blankstreet cups haha. “the enemy” our server said of my cup, which was great. He apologized and I was like no no I get it totally fine.
My partner got to work and we went to the museum at FIT, where we saw some exhibits on fashion and design. A few blocks away was Variety Coffee, which reminded me of a new york bagel counter if it was all espresso based. It was a bit gaudy, the menu was big and brass, the ceiling was high and curved. The line moved like a train and I had a good time watching the barista run bar. The place was packed but we snagged a two seater between some meetings happening for espresso and drip. It was pretty good but I think we were both already wired haha. I liked the simple and effective coffee bar format, It makes sense that their menu would be simple/viewable from far away. It’s nice to see a place killing it that has a format like that. It’s why our menus look the way they do.
Day 4
The next morning we bee lined for pastries at Dominique Ansel Workshop. It was freezing but the space was basically a big kitchen with a service counter so we were in and out. They had espresso based drinks and a hot chocolate with an unfolding flower marshmallow, but we were there to try the super dense croissants and cakes. We had an olive oil croissant, which checked by box for having real fresh olive oil in the city, and a square shaped rice-pudding croissant. It was super filling and the texture was unreal. I was happy to have a good fresh croissant in the city while we were there.
For coffee we visited Felix Roasting Co which has the most beautiful builds in the city objectively speaking. They’re like Victorian paintings come to life with high domed ceilings and ceramic painted walls, flowers and glass, green whites and pinks, all colors I love. We went to another one of their locations last year with a chandelier that has since closed down, they had an anaerobic on drip for $3, maybe the cheapest and best drip of the trip. Dakota got a toasted vanilla latte that was also pretty nice, I think that was his favorite latte of the trip. I get the impression Felix’s more extravagant specials are what keeps drip cheap, and that’s something I also do at Tetherball haha. We sell hundreds of specials a month and that gives me some room to really dial espresso and run drip. Felix has a lot of seating but also seem to do a lot of volume, which I’m not sure the space was built for. I guess if you’re doing good work it’ll get busy regardless of what you want.
We then went to see the empire state building, and there wasn’t much to see. There was a Starbucks Reserve on the bottom floor which seemed a little silly since it operated a lot like a museum. The coffee bar wasn’t very busy, they had lots of unique pastry and drink options but we mostly wandered around, there were lots of merchandise displays and attendants selling them. We went downstairs to a sort of dark cocktail bar. During the day it was strange to be there, like going to a busy fancy dinner restaurant with all the lights turned off at 6am. We asked a bartender for the bourbon barrel cold brew because of course we did. it tasted a lot like whiskey! It also had sugar which ruined the drink! haha. Anyways we got interrupted by a lady who said “Can I just have a vanilla iced latte.” She seemed very mad it was a restaurant/bar style system downstairs, so they told her to go upstairs. The whole thing was weird. She must have ignored a lot of attendants to get to this point.
Dakota headed to work and we took a recommendation from his coworker for a Hawaiian cafe Kona Coffee Co. They Used Kona coffee from Hawaii which is a weird situation in the states. A lot of what is brought here is blended or roasted in a way that does not highlight the coffee well : ). The classic phrase is “Oh Japan buys all of it.” I don’t know if that’s true, I just know (or am pretty sure) this is the first time I had it. The drip didn’t stand out! But! The baristas choice was a coconut latte and it was pretty good! As far as I could tell it was just coconut monin (a common artificially flavored syrup) but either way I was happy to have a coconut latte with coffee from Hawaii, I guess. Haha. They say that the experience is a big part of the flavor, and in this case that was true. It was late, the barista was nice, I had a good time.
Day 5
The next morning our mission was to try Sawada Coffee, a popup by Hiroshi Sawada who is a latte art champ and overall interesting dude in Coffee. At the time it was only open three days a week and pretty tucked away so we hunted it down just in time. There’s lots to love about Sawada from their espressoxmatcha drinks to their skateboard deck pastry case. While at first glance it’s another 2nd wave dark wood shop, it’s style and operation is very intentional. His book Sawada Coffee Style is one I’ve skimmed from a friend but really need to buy haha. It talks about how to be successful and stand out in a busy city. We got a great drip, we had a great “Tokyo style” latte with dark cane simple syrup. Happy we went.
Then we ran back to Do Not Feed Alligators so Dakota could see the space, and I could try that frappe I mentioned earlier. I read the art book titled after the shop or vice versa, and we had a seat. It’d been a fun trip, and I hope this place does well. The least I could do is go back to support them again.
After that we got some bread from the farmers market nearby, we got some taro boba and headed to the airport. I looked at but did not have a Dunkin’ Coffee. It was time to sleep.
Thank you for reading this, I always feel like there’s not enough time in NYC. There’s so much to see and so many people to talk to about it all. It feels worthwhile to go, there’s always people doing interesting things and pushing boundaries to stand up and stand out. I’m just glad i have a way to write it down now. - Elias
How To Organize a Latte Art Throwdown
Hey Y’all good afternoon, I’m deep in to my Monday admin work at Brass Tacks coffee. Vanilla Oat Milk Iced Latte in hand, listening to the album “Raw Honey” by Drug Dealer. Great like, 70’s rock type music, pretty recent release though. Someone told me it sounds like crosby and nash, I’ll have to check them out. I want to write a big long blog on throwdowns, so that’s what i’m going to do. By the time i’m done it will probably not be Monday. Oh well.
We had a latte art throwdown last night
It was awesome. We filled up the shop and the outside area. It was almost as busy as our grand opening, but this time I was ready. It never got out of control. Let me quickly outline that here. So we had a check in table by the door, where competitors could sign up and guests could buy raffle tickets. Both were given free empanada tickets, but baristas were also given stickers and raffle tickets for entering. This let us talk to everyone who came in and set the vibe. People could spread out outside or inside.
Then We had a DJ @djboborose who was able to recognize the room, flex the mood and adjust volume. This was hugely helpful, I could communicate easily without stressing about how people were feeling. When the latte art pours came out, we had a projector facing behind the bar where our menu goes, on a tripod, connected to my phone, meaning I could use my phone freely, and the projector could move, and the screen was always somewhere people could see. On our first throwdown it faced the entryway, which was easy to set up but made it weird for everyone to turn around.
Most of the night baristas hung around the outside of the bar towards the back of the cafe, and guests hung around the entrance or outside, but both could talk and see the pours. The check in table, dj, and judges hugged one wall separated by tables, while everyone else hugged the other closest to the door as they came in. dedicating that half of the cafe for our people, meant we had a sort of implied flow and walkway. Despite it being so full everyone could move around.
To outline staff. We had 6 people total. myself acting as manager, my barista on bar, my partner volunteering on check in, two judges volunteering. and a paid local dj.
As to what the staff did. I had my barista dedicated to pulling shots and directing bar flow. Resetting the espresso machine setup and explaining to baristas what to do. Calling for baristas when he was ready, and keeping them waiting when he was not. Thankfully we had an hour of practice rounds to familiarize everyone with flow including late entrants. I had my partner at the door on the check in table/pos, who also took the odd bar order (“hey can i have an almond milk latte, and a shirt“) and would push raffle ticket sales between rounds. I had a dj, and two judges who mostly did their own thing. Being from the scene they were invested in doing a good job and enjoying themselves. I mostly stood by the judges at the register to push out free lattes and survey the room. because lattes were all in to go cups it was very easy to keep messes small and clean up quick. I would sometimes back bar for my barista and sometimes walk around to check on staff. If we were using ceramics I probably would have had another staff member dedicated to back bar.
Why should you or your boss care about latte art comps?
Well what even are these things? Bluntly, they’re competitions to see who pours the best latte art. If you have baristas at these events, your shop is on that level. That’s good for your image. If you’re hosting these events, it’s even better. Right?
Well that’s my pitch to owners, maybe they don’t care about that because they’re doing their thing, and their locals will love them regardless. Hey that’s fair, but let me break it down for the culture.
When I jusst got started my city had zero /specialty/, and so traveling to these events was a way to experience that, meet great baristas, get better, and try out fancy new equipment. My boss did not care about these, and told me not to go. That was discouraging but it was my life, and I was a punk who thought I was very good so I went and used my shops name anyways. I went and met people and learned a lot. In most cases these were parties by the people, and I met others who would have lasting careers in coffee or in my city. Sometimes we won and sometimes we lost. It was significant for me as a person, and that’s why I feel like these are worthwhile even if you don’t “win.” Most people even really good baristas don’t win because they’ve got like one chance on equipment they’ve never touched before. You win by getting good on lots of machines, getting lucky, and by practicing.
If your boss would like to invest in the long term career and well being of his or her staff, community events like these are a good way to do so. It doesn’t make sense for every shop, and sometimes you as a barista will have to do all the leg work for free, but that’s how it goes. If you want to do it, below is my advice.
Here’s how you put a throwdown together, start to finish.
1st choosing a date
pick a date, I’d recommend a solid month out. You need a deadline, but you don’t need to announce it right away, just give yourself time to begin reaching out to sponsors.
some things to consider are shipping time for prizes once you’ve reached a sponsor, time it will take baristas to request off or not have other plans, and time it will take to communicate to your cafe-goers who may want to come.
For our initial throwdown it was also a grand opening, which means we had a ton of eyes and word got out quick (1-2 weeks)! 6 months out we had less attention so we had to generate it and it took more time (3-4 weeks people were still finding out)
You may also want to consider the time of year, people have stuff going on around the holidays and usually don’t during the summer for example. But your local area is subject to it’s own events and vibe. So consider that!
2nd staff and sponsors
now that you’ve got a date, talk to your staff, how is this going to look in your space and what do you need as far as workers and sponsors? When do you need to schedule that staff and when do you need those sponsors confirmed by to get them on an announcement poster?
SMALL! If you’re doing a pretty minimal “thursday night throwdown” (back when no one was very good, these weekly events were the norm.) You can go as small as, the entry fee is $5 and that’s the prize money. You don’t need any sponsors beyond your shop owner, who will have to front a few gallons of milk and a few pounds of beans. They may want a cut of entry fees to cover that. Since you’d only have local baristas in the space (about as full as your shop normally is) you only really need to work through word of mouth and your staff can be as one or two baristas volunteering. This is an event for fun, truly. Everyone should be understanding if runs a little wobbly, they’re there to hang out and work on new equipment, and practice.
MEDIUM! This is a shop event, people from outside your immediate barista friend group are showing up and it’s getting crowded. You may want to reach out to sponsors either for guest giveaways (keep people hanging around and having fun) or competitors (get people to show up), I’d recommend brands you are using on bar such as your espresso machine brand or your roaster. Go to their website and find the contact page, shoot them an email. “Hey were hosting a throwdown and we’re looking for sponsors to donate some giveaway prizes.” They’re usually happy to donate some merch or stickers and those will usually get to you in up to two weeks. For larger brands it’s easiest to get them on board at the beginning of any given financial quarter (January, April, July, October). You can also think about local sponsors, maybe you use a local milk or have local candles on the shelf, see if those people would like to donate giveaways or if your shop owner would like to donate some extra tumblers or t shirts. As for staff, you may want two people behind bar pulling shots and cleaning cups, as well as a host to announce what’s going on to the crowd and keep competitors moving. The host may volunteer, but at this level you basically have baristas working for hours and should pay them. If you increase entry fees to cover this, you may also want to have practice rounds so no one feels cheated. Which also means more labor hours. It’s critical at this level that you also have a front desk or somewhere for people to check in and ask questions like “where’s the bathroom” or “where’s the coffee bar?”
LARGE! You’re expecting and pushing for a big crowd, so you need to consider the needs of everyone involved and hand off some tasks. You could have a food truck or two and open up the space to include part of the outside area. This takes food and drinks off your back, moves people around and keeps them busy, and you could even charge the truck for using your space. You could have a DJ, which makes sound level and communication easier, puts another set of eyes on the vibe, and may help you set up a sound system for easy MC’ing. You want a fully staffed bar and front counter, and at this level you could even do a team competition depending on the size of your space. That means more staff but also higher entry fees. For sponsors you’ll want to get creative, reach out to everyone you can think of in the coffee industry from magazines to your milk brand to local coffee influencers. You may want to see if local restaurants or breweries want to provide or discount food / beer. if you end up with an excess of giveaway prizes you can do tote bags for entrants which will build hype around the event. But put in some footwork to contact brands, follow up, and follow up again. The same thing goes for entrants. reach out to the shops pages on instagram and offer discounts, go in to the bigger local shops with posters and tell baristas face to face what’s happening and why they should be excited. If you’re doing all this work to create a big party you need to let people know. Letting people know means photos and videos too! See if a local photographer wants to shoot the event or take videos that you can use to create content afterwards. At this size you’re putting in a lot of work to make the event beautiful, don’t let it go to waste.
3rd Announcing the event
Before announcing the event you need to have your ducks in a row. Make sure there’s a place online where you can sell entries, and that it’s functioning. Make it so that to sign up you need to enter your information.
Some important information to gather from entrants is: name, contact information, shop they’re representing, and maybe shirt size if you’re giving away merch.
Communicate all theevent logistics to your team too! Once it’s announced they’re all going to get questions about the event, and that may be there one chance to get people on board.
You want to make a splash, so think about the best time to post and then put a poster together. Format one for social media and one for literal posters around the shop and outside. Not everyone is online so you need eyes on both sides.
Ideally all of your information is succinctly available via the poster. Some key points in order of importance are: It’s a latte art throwdown, it’s on this date at this time, it’s at this place, everyone can come, it costs this much to enter, what else is happening at the event, it’s sponsored by these people.
putting this together in an easy to read but also visually attractive way can be tough, commission an artist or someone from your cafe if you can. There are great tools like Canva on mobile or pixlr on desktop that you can use as free photoshop alternatives if you aren’t an illustrator.
Once you do announce the event, share it everywhere, you need to start putting in work to promote it. Online and in person you can talk about it with people who come in the door or dm other cafes/baristas. Tell people to spread the word and don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. For every ten people you tell you might get 1 person to come, so you have to tell at least 100 people haha.
4th Leading up to the event
think about everything you need. Did you borrow a projector? you need a projector sheet. Did you get a food sponsor? you need paper plates and trash cans out on the floor. Do you have someone donating beer? You need coolers. If there’s anything you need to order, do it early. If there’s anything you need to pick up day of, schedule that pickup in advance.
schedule staff and communicate the plan. If you need baristas to arrive two hours before the event. You should let them take off early and prepare for it. Make sure everyone knows what’s expected of them day of, and that they can perform that task.
Check in on your sponsors, is that food truck on the way, is that camera man on the way? Is everyone going to be there on time or early?
arrive early early early. Even if you have everything in your head, it will take time for everyone to arrive and get on the same page. Beyond that, people will show up early and come piling in, it will be really hard to organize yourself once you have a full room. If you need to close the cafe early to get ready, do that.
5th During the event
Try to create touch points.
Have someone or somewhere that guests and baristas can go to check in. if the room is going to be packed maybe that’s outside the door in front. Even if there’s nothing for them to pick up or buy, just someone to talk to can be massively helpful for guests
Consider that many of these people are traveling and visiting for the first time. Even if you have blind faith that everyone is able to orient themselves at a glance, you want to make a good impression. They may ask some basic questions about the shop that it’d be great to answer and leave them with positive thoughts about what you do.
Keep an eye on the tone of the room
you don’t want to miss some major mood, and the occasional check in on the music or the people who look lost will go a long way. You can do your best to cover your bases but having those pauses will fill the cracks.
If you have touch points, talk to those touch points and see if they need anything or if they’re concerned about anything. Maybe they need water or maybe a bunch of people had to leave who were supposed to be next in the bracket, and they took the projector with them, and they spilled an ice latte on the register.
Keep it tight.
keep an eye on the time and have a goal for when things should be done. If you want people to stick around you need to keep things moving. Beyond that if you want to get out of here on time you need friends who’ve stuck around to pickup.
You’re a cafe, people need to get up at 5am tomorrow, this can’t run too late. Keep that in mind when spacing out your events throughout the night.
6th After the event
Thank your friends
those are all the baristas who made this possible, all your staff, your judges, your community, your sponsors and beyond! Think about all the folks who made this possible!
Clean it like you mean it
If you get the ball rolling on cleanup immediately people will pitch in and you won’t be out too late. Remember that if you’re opening tomorrow, this needs to be as reset as it is normally or open shift is going to hate you haha.
Ask people for photos!
people will share photos, and you need to remember to ask for those photos so they don’t go to waste. Beyond just sharing the posts your tagged in, say thank you and ask for those posts especially if it’s a medium or small event with no camera man. People will happily share their photos if you JUST ASK.
Wake up two days later and post about it!
posting the next day is a waste of your followers bandwidth. It will be buried. Wait until the initial frenzy of shared photos dies down and then post. So that everyone who was patiently waiting for the photos you took can share them and talk about them.
Congratulations you just threw down.
I hope you had fun, again that’s the point! you may find it was quiet or deadly serious. I like to play loud music, talk to people, and avoid cash prizes. But sometimes that’s just the scene. What you can do to make it more fun is invite everybody and just be radically kind. Do more throwdowns make more friends and have more fun forever.
Thanks for reading - Elias
Miami Crawl & “Good Coffee Shops”
Hey What’s up! Time Flies, I can’t believe it’s been three months since my last blog. The longer it’s been the more I feel like I need to write something big when I come back! Well, this isn’t very big but it is important. A blog about our trip to Miami. I’m listening to Alex G’s Trick. But I’d also like to recommend the Beths new album “expert in a dying field.” Great barebones indie rock : ))). I’m drinking WATER! It’s been a day. People keep asking me about my drive down to Miami. I’ve got a few thoughts on that, which are below.
YOU TOOK A DAY OFF?
Well yea, I mean it was on Monday which is usually my day off, we’re closed, but on those days I actually just do paperwork for a few hours at a local cafe then pass out or clean the house or something. However, this time I needed to recharge mentally and in spirit, so I traveled. I love traveling, driving for hours and seeing new things makes me feel alive. I’ve never spent more than an hour in Miami, and I wanted to visit a shop that seemed to be doing cool things, @superwowcoffee
They do “japanese inspired espresso” and what we had was great. I had an ube latte made with coconut condensed milk. Something I didn’t know existed and literally blew my mind. the coconut condensed milk I mean, we actually have ube muffins on bar here at tetherball right now. I don’t like condensed milk because it goes bad and is a nightmare to work with on bar. There’s not much about condensed milk that you can’t do with cream or something. Coconut milk is typically too thin or full of additives. I could talk about this all day, but I won’t.
DAYS OFF! Are important. They’re a necessary investment in your mental health and you need to be spending time on that just as much as anything else. Personally I love seeing other cafes and trying to grasp what makes them valuable to their community or their baristas. So visiting a new major city is huge! I had so much to chew on and we drove though some beautiful Florida towns like Boca Raton. It made me feel super fulfilled quickly and like a mini vacation for my mindset ya know?
SO HOW WAS MIAMI COFFEE?
Well if you know beach towns, the beach area it about tourism. The coffee shops closer to the beach on the island were pretty touristy and not very specialty. Which is fine. I’m not gonna name names. We were like, "we gotta get some cubano cortaditos on the beach” and we got three of them from three different nice looking coffee shops, and they sucked. way over-extracted, no sugar as far as I could tell, but these small probably single-location shops looked like starbucks. Mad efficient mad nice mad clean. They looked great! Coffee wasn’t great. I had a croissant and a muffin and some juice, all that was kick butt, but the coffee was butt. Ce la vie. We walked the beach and it was super pretty, was cool to be out there making memories, and that was the point. The point of life and driving down to Miami
We got there Sunday night and had some great ramen at “Ichimi” ! The next morning we went to have breakfast off the island at “All Day” (@alldaymia). Best breakfast I’ve had in a long time, and all I had was empanadas. OJ. espresso (from @rubyroasters). Ty got a burger with a fried egg, clearly farm fresh with a dark orange yolk. Dakota got a salad with some fresh butter lettuce, and after trying my juice got some too. Can’t remember what they had to drink, none of us shared. It was all that good. Even if we couldn’t tell, the menu was deep with sourcing notes and descriptions of how good this food was going to be. I try to take the opposite approach and have a minimal menu at Tetherball, so we have low friction during ordering, and we can surprise people with great drinks. At a sit-down place like All Day there’s something to be said for how effective their menu is, I was loving reading it as much as I loved all our food. My only critique was how packed the place is, on the one hand you can’t really blame them because it’s business, but personally I would have preferred a more walkable space where fewer people could have more attention.
After all day we went up and down the city, it’s all a blur of caffeine and highways. I will say that the people at @imperialmoto made us feel cared for and like they were a part of their community, their merch was cool! I had a nice conversation with someone who wants to do coffee forever at @Breezeblockcoffee, and I hope I made him feel like it was possible.
We made it to superwow and met Talita one of the two owners. We had great drinks and it was a cool place, I hope everyone goes and supports them forever. My takeaway there was that you should put stuff on the menu that you want to make and serve. make a space you love, the rest will take care of itself. That brings me to the next part.
WHAT EVEN IS A “GOOD” COFFEE SHOP?
Well my favorite shop was probably Mane just north of miami in Boca Raton. I walked in and loved the place, the baristas were genuinely comfy and nice instantly, we had great coffee. I made them drink a georgia brand canned coffee, they just got bought by coke so one of my side goals was to grab a can at @superwowcoffee while they were still probably in their original state. it was, okay. anyways.
So why was Mane my favorite? well they had a bright open space, the menu was small and cool, and it seemed like they do good work. instantly I wanted to be there every day. Simple effective comfortable design was what I loved, and what I valued. quality too, it’s obvious right away. I didn’t feel like any of the other shops were super comfortable, even if I loved what they were doing inside. The ability to drive up to this sunny neighborhood place, and then for the inside to be killer and open and walkable, that was great. No pressure.
I didn’t like miami as a city, it’s not for me. So the coffee scene was a little cold. I think that’s recontextualized some of my goals for tetherball. I like my soft chairs and low bench. I like my simple outside seats. I like that we’re in a strip by a neighborhood. I like the cloth menu but i’m ready to kill the winter decorations. I understand better why not everything translates to pictures, why wood floors are so important. I love my space, and there’s more I can do.
Those are my thoughts, thanks for reading if you did, have a great day. Happy early valentines. - Elias
My Day to Day as a Solo Owner/Operator
Good Morning, Happy Hump Dayy!!!! This is typically our slowest day at the cafe and a good day to write. I’m drinking water, after upsetting my stomach with a whole milk chai latte. Tasted great and I love our masala chai from Hugo tea. We just started carrying retail tea, and just sold a box! Listening to the New Order album “Power Corruption and Lies.” A cafe classic! That first riff on Age of Consent, incredible. Today I just want to talk about what it’s like being the sole business owner and barista at a small coffee shop of about 16 seats / 800 sqft. The challenges and general day to day. That’s a pretty common question but not one I really want to get in to during a light conversation haha. More on that! Below!
Weekly Schedule
First I’ll start with my idealized schedule, what I write out for myself and how it normally goes. We’re open Tuesday to Sunday 7am-3pm. I work every day, and I have for 5 months.
On Monday I’ve usually got a laundry list of tasks i’ve built up throughout the week but didn’t have time for, cafe related or otherwise. So in the morning i’ll get a little more sleep than usual and then get up to plan all those tasks out. Since this is my only day off I’ll sometimes have plans like going to the zoo or having breakfast with my mom, meaning I need to plan my cafe tasks around those events. On Tuesday I come in a little sooner to make sure we’re ready for the week, I’ve normally got a little more prep like filling squeeze bottles and topping containers which get cleaned on Sundays. It’s a busier weekday since it’s our first day back. I try to shop for the next few weekdays after work, and maybe bust out a major cleaning task like scrubbing the bathroom grout, since i’ve got the most energy after a restful Monday and staying late isn’t as difficult. Wednesday should be the easiest day of the week, since we’re stocked up and it’s our slowest day. I work on things like writing blogs, planning events or responding to emails on my laptop at the bar. I may also do lots of pre-close prep so I can get out asap, and head to places that close soon after us like the bank for change, or restaurant depot for bulk paper goods. Thursday is a slightly busier day; For the most part i’m working bar, and after work I may shop for the weekend (Fri-Sun), forecasting based on how the week has been.
Friday is usually a busy morning and slow afternoon so I come in early to prepare like I would on Tuesday, then I have one employee who helps primarily on weekends come in during peak hours (8-10:30am). One most weekdays I just dial in one espresso machine grouphead to prolong machine life and waste less coffee, on Friday I’ll dial in both to prepare for rushes. I’ll also do things like stock more cups or lids for the day, anything to increase speed during high volume as one person. Saturday is a dedicated bar day! Meaning be ready at 7am sharp to open, backstocked with drip ready to go, that sort of stuff! Constantly reset and be ready. My employee comes in most of the morning, and if we’re busy enough may stay late. I’ll still usually tackle the afternoon solo which may mean a longer clean up, and for that reason I’ll usually be there a little late. I usually try to focus on resting after work and heading straight home. Sunday is the last day of the week and often as busy as Saturday, so we again focus on bar and then do a long clean up. On Sunday i’ll do heavy cleaning like our grease trap, air filter replacement and ceiling dusting, or floor scrubbing. I’ll also clean things on bar like squeeze bottles or pumps. For me it helps to do most of this all in one day so nothing is forgotten, since we have a small cafe it’s not a big workload increase, and we’ll sometimes have time mid-day.
Breaking that down, and my daily advice.
Mondays it’s important to sleep, it’s important to go grocery shopping and plan meals for the week, it’s important to have a life if you can. Clean your house, cut your hair, watch a movie. Ultimately as a business owner there’s a lot of paperwork to be done too, and I try to multitask by visiting another cafe with my partner and doing some laptop work there. then we go shop afterwards, whatever to get out of the house. You’re steering a cultural ship, you won’t be able to have fun or radiate fun in the cafe, if you have zero in your personal life. You can get stuff done and still take breaks.
Tuesdays you might have a lot of energy, which is great but you don’t need to come in on 150%. What you have is enough and overextending yourself leads to burn out. That might seem obvious but still! Pace yourself! Come in solid, hold it down, have fun. Save money for the next couple of days, since this may be your busiest weekday. If you’re really feeling it, put that energy towards tasks like cleaning or talking to people in the sitting area.
Wednesdays are slower, don’t get discouraged, make good use of your time. If you have new beans on bar or anything else you need to try, taste it with guests in the sitting area, share it with people walking in and talk about your feelings on things. Enjoy your slow hours, sit outside with a cup and say hi to people walking by. Read a book, talk to people about the book, they’ll probably ask. You can get out of here on time! If you have to run somewhere after work like the bank, todays the day! Crush those chores!
Thursdays can be surprisingly busy sometimes, prepare yourself and be present. Think about everything you may need for the weekend, and get ready! Stock up and take notes! EZPZ! Don’t be afraid to overstock if you can afford it, you never know what’ll happen on a busy Saturday.
Fridays are when everyone wants to treat themselves for the end of the work week, so it can really pop off around 8am! Be ready for that! Get drip and faster items ready to go to make it as seamless as possible! Part of why I have an employee on staff for this rush is to let weekday warriors know we’re ready for ‘em! and instill that experience! I try to get a good nights sleep tonight too! If i’m not feeling it now, I will by tomorrow! Weekends can drain ya! Thank goodness I can afford an employee on weekend mornings, having someone work with you can make a huge difference in the energy of the space, and is worth the cost for a better experience!
Saturdays just focus on running the bar well. Stay clean and well stocked all day. Stay ready for anything and keep the energy high, do your best to give everyone a fun experience. Think of the weekends as party days, since most people are coming on their day off to check you out. You can keep that party going by keeping music upbeat and talking with guests as though you’re having fun, that this positivity is the expectation of the space! You’ll find that this encourages guests to talk to each other, and then they’re kind of carrying the energy on your behalf. It’s amazing when that happens, how many restaurants or cafes have you visited where everyone is joining in on a group conversation rather than sticking to their clique? It’s not hard to make it happen if you’re open to it as the host of the space.
Sundays are similarly upbeat, but since you’re low on energy remember the tuesday saying, pace yourself. If you can maintain like 80% energy and just stay positive with everyone, you can keep it going. Most of our traffic is like 10am-noon on Sundays, so during those hours I have my employee supplementing things and keeping energy high. I remind him that i’m not in a bad mood today, i’m just kind of zombie mode haha. I hold down bar and he holds down concierge up front. We make it happen! I finish the day and wrap up with a dedicated slow and steady goal of cleanning shoppp! Today is the day i’ll really clean the cracks, since I don’t really have to get up early on Mondays. But you may be dead! and going home is okay too! you can clean next week! just write it down!
Unexpected detours and life advice.
I might make the above sound clinical, but stuff you can’t predict happens every single day. You may need to run somewhere unexpected right after work, or commit to something that takes your night away. To keep things fun you may also need to organize events and social media content that takes hours or days away from you. So fitting those in can be a challenge. Try to schedule them weeks in advance if possible so you can see them coming and push them back too haha.
At the end of the day, this is a lot of work. When I began I had a second job, but quickly had to quit after about a month for my own sanity; Not everyone has that luxury, and if you find yourself working two jobs including running a coffee shop. I have a few more pieces of advice.
Talk to your friends or significant others about what’s going on, putting things into words can organize or ground the chaos in your head. You might not realize how overextended you are if you’re the only person who knows about it.
Eat food, no matter how busy you are. A good meal can give you energy you didn’t know you needed. Even if you’re running on unavoidable low sleep, walmart has cheap smoothies at 5am, a cold meal-prep burrito has tons of cheap carbs, you’ve got plenty of milk in the fridge for cereal or oatmeal. There are affordable and clutch ways to make food happen, and you’ll be flying through calories.
Just go home if you need to go home, most things can wait until tomorrow. You need more time away from the business than you may realize. This is not an excuse to slack off all week and let things fall apart, just articulate what needs to be done, and do it another day.
Thank you for reading, we’re getting a decent bit of viewership here now so hopefully someone finds this helpful. Have a great week!!!!!!! @u@ / - Elias
Undersell, Over Deliver. Crafting an Unfolding Experience
Happy Thursday! I’m writing this on the morning of a tropical storm here at the shop! Drinking one of the last pumpkin spiced lattes I’ll be making this year and listening to Kaytranadas first album, which is kind of a dancy spacey electronic hodgepodge. We’re planning to wrap on fall drinks this weekend so i’m getting it while I got it. A couple of months ago we had a hurricane that required us to close, today hasn’t been so bad; I’m hoping for some more business actually with kids out of school, but we’ll see how it goes. That would be awesome, after the storm last time we had cold weather that was perfect for launching a new menu. Here we are again. I love thinking about guest perception.
This blog will define my current philosophy on guest experience. I believe ideas should be simple and impactful. They should be easy to pick up and play like Tetherball. They should speak for themselves once people choose to interact at a deeper level.
Putting up the Pole
I think it was the book “The VIsual MBA” that described a new business idea as a dance party. You start the party and at first no one is dancing, you need some brave or confident people who are so stoked on your idea that they’re willing to dance alone. Once the party gets going, everyone wants to dance. Our espresso machine repair service man put it more bluntly, “the hardest part is getting people in the door, once they’re in they’ll buy something.” Getting that party started, getting people in the door, that’s important. But we’re not pushing people in the door, not directly. To grow naturally and execute on my vision every time, I want to undersell.
To Undersell here refers to not pushing people with an overcomplicated idea, not giving them all the information at once. Make approaching the shop super simple and easy to understand, make it something anyone can get behind without much effort on their part. We sell “COFFEE” like the sign says, great. They want coffee, that’s their idea come on in and try ours. Then we can blow minds.
Once people begin playing
You can operate inside your space with all you’ve got. Play the defense and build something undeniable. This happens at the micro and macro level. At the micro level we’re having individual new guest experiences. At the macro level we’re building a culture on social media and through word of mouth.
We’re there to hit it back
I won’t pretend that every interaction is the same, it’s not that easy. Weekend mornings for example are a bit different since we have louder more upbeat music and two people to carry conversations a bit faster, we’re pushing people a little more so that we can crush that quick trip drip! And maybe that’s all we need to do! We don’t have 5 minutes for every guest if we’re super busy! But! If we’re having fun we’re still delivering a good time by existing. The core broad strokes are there. We’re ready for anything. We Undersell and Over Deliver where we can. The sign on the store says “coffee,” our menu is small, we speak simply and genuinely. This is to give people the softest simplest expectations, the smallest stairs to climb and the most approachable space going in. Tetherball is a sporty shop, but tetherball is an easy pick up and play sport; You can get up and hit the ball, and you’re playing tetherball.
To Over Deliver here when we do have the time is to give people a drink that goes well beyond expectations, or a conversation that goes well beyond the transaction. Our menu says “espresso, latte, regula’ drip.” When the guest receives an espresso that’s well balanced and served with seltzer and a spoon, homemade vanilla and beautiful latte art with perfect texture on their plain latte, or an interesting and memorable black coffee that’s not too hot or burnt to heck. It’s impactful. We don’t look super unique on the face of it, but we deliver. Talking to someone about their day or their week over multiple trips, asking them what’s next for their family or following up on their coffee from todayh or last week. The best thing you can give someone in my opinion is an unfolding experience, where every step of the process is seamless and amazing.
I think of an older woman who ordered a sugar free decaf vanilla latte, who was amazed we had unsweetened organic kosher almond milk. We walked it to her table with latte art and a napkin, and she again was amazed at the temperature, flavor and speed of our delivery. We followed up a few minutes later to check in, and let her borrow a phone charger when we found out her phone was about to die and she was waiting on a call. This started with a basic latte order.
The most amazing thing about orders like this, is they can start off seeming “rude.” Some of my favorite guests were pretty cold on the first visit. Once they came in and found out we were really nice and made decent coffee, they were pretty personable on the next trip, and maybe even brought friends the time after that. I have to remind myself and my employee to keep putting yourself out there, for over and under-enthusiastic people. Over time it’ll work out. The great thing about underselling is you’re not being fake by doing this, you don’t have to be on 110% for every person, just be yourself and be happy to be there. That’s enough. Your vibe attracts your tribe.
Online and Outside
To reiterate on simple and impactful, I try to keep social media posts interesting. Nothing drives me more nuts than seeing other cafes or businesses, post a picture of a latte with a single sentence. You’re not actually excited to see what they post next! What’s the point in that! We post once or twice a week, with a few good pics and a few good paragraphs on what’s going on. I try to keep my images exciting at a glance too! easy to read at a glance visually and click on, better to actually scroll through and give some time. I love it when i’m following a new cafe or one that’s been doing exciting things worth following, and I can actually check in on them for an update or see a new post I want to read about! There are exciting things happening every day in every cafe, there are people walking through the door with things going on. There are things worth talking about!
I’ve finally heard about tetherball in the wild, and i’ve had other people tell me about it too. It’s always been really nice stuff, hearing strangers say “the music is cool” or “it’s super clean” makes me feel like we’re over-delivering for those people, since those are things that take work! I heard “he must really love his job” this week too which is sick, I do. That’s another one that makes me feel like we’re doing a good job on connecting once we make contact. Ultimately I can’t control every interaction in the wild, but by nailing it here I can ensure that we’re skewing positive.
So what’s different about that?
Well at a glance we’ve got a “minimalist” look, and that’s some of it. In our business plan we wrote we’d make weird drinks more acessible, and one way we do that is by naming our milk tea “go fish” to convince the southern guy with sports shades try a boba shop style drink. Other shops might try and overexplain it rather than letting the drink be there with a strong role, and speak for itself when the time is right. We have dedicated regulars for every drink on our menu, and as someone who wrote the menu that feels awesome.
That minimalist look is not immediate mass appeal, and i’m not posting everything everywhere all the time, hoping i’ll hit my mark. Restraint is endearing, and I’m willing to take my time with what we do well, and put that out there consistently. I’m not selling every type of merch and knick knack on our shelves right away. I’m not putting pictures of our drinks on the windows or on the road, i’m not paying for yelp adverstistements no matter how often they call me. I’m cool with what we have and what we’re doing.
I’m happy to grow with and continue to build on this philosophy. I believe it will build a strong brand through great experiences. We’ll see how it goes : )
First Quarter $ Catch-Up
Good Morning! Happy Wednesday! I’m listening to Sambassadeur’s Self Titled album, soft indie pop. I’m drinking an iced vanilla oat milk latte. This is my favorite drink, and we’re still coasting on some cool post-hurricane weather here. Feels great! I’ve got the door open, and a ton to talk about. Since this is a blog i’d like to look back on practically, and others may look on for reference, I want to try and honestly recap our first few months open as a cafe here, specifically around finances.
$ Expectations
To explain my expectations, I need to start with my estimated needs. So I read online and in a few books that to be sucessful your rent should be about 10% of your gross sales (everything before taxes and expenses). For simplicity I’m gonna say our rent is 1,500 a month. Meaning our gross sales need to be 15,000 a month. I gave us a year to get there and assumed we’d start at 30% of that, working our way incrementally up to 100%.
Meaning I’d hope our day 1 gross sales were like 4,500 a month (30%), and that by the end of Q1 we’d be hitting 47.5% or about $7,125 a month. I thought that $7,125 would be basically enough and if we could hit that we’d be coasting. I assumed $7,125 would be enough for everything I’d need as a one man cafe.
$ Reality
I think at my size, $15,000 a month was a good long term guess, but $7,125 was a little low for one guy. Because I bought so much in cheap bulk early on and now I’m buying things on the fly, it’s evolving, and evolving upwards! There’s so much upkeep too, I’m discovering new costs and things to account for that push that number ever higher. So really my one guy number is about 1k higher at $8,125. And pretty quickly it became two guys whether I wanted to hire or not.
I couldn’t see us succeeding at even a basic level as a one person cafe, because we need those weekend rushes to succeed and we need two people to handle them without people leaving or getting sick of waiting. That’s not even mentioning the cultural value of that investment, since by the end of the week I was dead tired and needed someone to support me and uplift guests. I really wanted to wait to hire until I could pay someone a full 40 hour work week, but the reality is that’s not what the cafe needed, and it’s not what my employee needed.
So month by month
Our Month 1 gross sales were quite good because we were new and people were checking us out or tipping really high to help us succeed. Then and now I’m counting tips as part of our income, and they account for maybe 15-20% of our total day to day. Counting tips we were at that 47.5% number ($7,125) immediately. Which was awesome. Because I had so much bulk storage I didn’t need to buy much, it was right where we needed to be. I was working late getting systems in place, eating out because it was fast and I had some money saved, and going straight to bed because I needed as much sleep as possible. My partner was helping on weekends, they were surprisingly super busy because that’s when new people had time to visit. Our 1 month grand opening party probably did 10% of the whole months sales in one day. Waiting for a month and doing a barista centered event was smart because it was filled out with a combination of early regulars and coffee fans from the area. People were talking about it for weeks which helped us coast out some more of that opening hype.
By Month 2 things were slowing down, we needed regulars and being in a pocket neighborhood on the outskirts of Jax, that was going to take time. Our first time visitors were still showing up here and there on weekends, and our super supportive early regulars were growing during weekdays, but by and large it was me the owner on solo bar sitting around. Number wise it was about the same. At first I wanted to look “ready” so I cleaned prepped and stood up on my laptop refinig admin documents. What I should have been doing was sitting down, and thinking of other ways to generate revenue, which I began seriously taking action on the following month.
Month 3 was a bit busier because we had more regulars filling in the gaps, and weekends were more than one person could handle! At first i had two people because I wanted weekend guests to have a speedy smooth experience, but by now I would have people leaving if I didn’t have 2 baristas on bar, with someone constantly holding front register to get new orders in immediately and greet people. Fall drinks were a big deal, we were selling merch, we had a couple of events that generated a tiny bit of revenue but built big community! We broke 60% of that gross goal, and it was again, just enough. Now we were regularly buying everything and we had one part time employee who would take up to 15 hours a week. The most I could afford at $15/hr.
Surprise good stuff
In the black! Mostly! I had my goals but I’d always heard not to expect a profit for the first year, so I thought things might be a lot worse. I had a second job to cover my personal bills, but I was able to quit that job after only a few weeks, which was great because I was working like 90 hours a week haha. I wouldn’t say we’re making a ton of profit, but we’re making enough for me to eat and exist. So I’d consider that success.
People have taken the design and concept really positively, I thought it might be more of an uphill battle with an older community who were used to super dark traditional cafe visuals. For the most part it’s a range of ages who all appreciate the space. I’m selling a lot of nice black coffees which is cool because we carry great coffee! I couldn’t have asked for a better community so far.
I launched an online store, in part, in case of an emergency. We had a hurricane, we closed, then we basically did a slow day in sales through our site, which rocked. That idea was something I invested some time and money into, and our community came through.
Hiring that weekend employee helped keep energy high, by Sunday I was half awake, and having someone on front counter concierge was helping us achieve our mission of giving people energy. In fact the whole weekend usually feels like a party in here, which is something I’ve never really experienced at other cafes and something I love about us.
Surprise bad stuff
Mo money more expenses, basically as I used more inventory I had to buy more and at a new pace. The increase in sales didn’t always translate directly to revenue, sometimes they meant strictly forecasting or buying in a new way that meant changing my whole workflow. Long term this stuff will pay off, but short term it’s a bunch more big investments.
Investing in things like merch or events was another scary time and money cost that i had to hope would pay off. Thankfully they generally did pay off! I had to make that mental adjustment to spend on such a crazy tight budget. I basically launched our entire merch line off spending all i had on the cost of a couple shirts. Stocking a few in the cafe, and having more available made to order online.
The burnout was real. I eventually did get sick and have to take a day off, thankfully I had an employee trained by then who could handle it. It sucked spending the money so soon since it basically equated to a full work day, but I put myself in that situation by not taking breaks or eating enough, sleeping enough, etc. So I took the break, and I’m feeling much better.
Broad Goals for the future
Of course the big goal is to keep growing towards that theoretical 100% 15k gross revenue! How do we achieve that? Beyond just giving it time, I’m continuing to listen and spend where it makes sense. The tough part about this time is having such a thin budget, like I can’t exactly invest in a big food program or a pickup service, anything that wasn’t in our original business plan; Both of those things I know could greatly increase revenue. Those just take more time and money to implement well than I have right this second.
So I’m operating in my space right now and just trying to master what we have and what we planned to do, bust out more iced oat milk vanilla lattes. I want to keep doing exciting things for our current audience while maintaining our basic concept for all the new people coming in daily. Bringing in new coffees / teas on bar, making seasonal stuff, holding events, etc.
I’m also trying to do what’s best for our internal culture, which means getting more hours to staff and making sure we’re confident in our current workflow so we’re not struggling on weekend bar. Rather than taking on new menu items or concepts I have some goals around adding things like new shelves or backup barware, minor construction that will make the space better for us as baristas.
Other Notes
I neglected to mention taxes, remaining construction bills, loans financing etc. There’s a ton of stuff that we’re working on paying off, that once we do will make the daily operating expenses way cheaper, and open us up for new investments. These things take time too, so when people say “it just takes time,” they’re right in a few ways. If you can get over some initial humps, it’ll be easier down the line.
I’d also like to reiterate that we’re doing well for a new cafe, a lot of places notably start with a slow year or two years, owners working two jobs or multiple owners working multiple jobs. Maybe I have low expectations but right now it feels pretty great, and I’m happy to be here as one guy.
I say one guy, but this wouldn’t be possible without my super supportive partner helping pay bills at home and buying food, doing stuff to make life at home easy so I can focus on the cafe. If you have friends or a partner while taking on a new small business, don’t be afraid to hang out and take a break. It can feel like you need to be on 100% of the time, but there are diminishing returns there, and you’re not going to put in a year of work more quickly by working a couple extra shifts.
Launching Merch / Online Shop
Good Morning! Happy Tuesday! I’m writing this blog from the cafe, playing Voxtrot’s “Early Music” album, which is a remastered collection from this year of some of their early popular stuff. Really great cafe music, would recommend it for sure, upbeat 2000’s indie pop rock. A lot of this style of music would play on pandora cafe radios in the early 2010’s and Voxtrot was a staple. Anyways, this week we’re past the hurricane and deep in to fall. We’ve had merch and fall-merch for about a month now, so let’s talk about that.
Why so little merch, why this choice in merch?
I see plenty of coffee shops and other cafe-adjacent shops open with tons of merch. Shirts, hats, mugs, etc. I’m not a fan of this, I have two opinions on why; Firstly more merch is more clutter in your space, and I wanted to start with a very minimal build so we could grow. Merch is not part of the architecture, and when you open that’s what’s important. Secondly I feel like merch is an extension of your culture, and you can’t totally understand your culture from the get go. That said, my choice in merch isn’t totally radical haha, it’s just the door logo on shirts, and the sign logo on stickers. My design principal is “know what you need to know,” which is our name and that we do coffee. But! If our culture hit in a really strong or unexpected way, I’d want to capitalize on that once I had a grasp on it and maybe I would have pivoted. I’ve pivoted on some small sticker runs like the character from “over the garden wall” in our color scheme, for our movie night.
So we started small with what we could make in house, being printed stickers and hand screen printed shirts. Our first shirts were given away as part of our latte art throwdown, and our first few stickers were given away free to the first customers we had. Doing these free were a great way to test the waters and get honest feedback; Our stuff has improved since in quality, and our income has never been super dependent on how well these did. That’s another important point, merch isn’t a massive dependable short term money maker as a coffee shop so you shouldn’t treat it that way. Doing a small run of something you like will be more impactful to the culture then pumping out 100 of something completely forgettable.
How and why we built the launch around our website?
Our first time selling anything on our site was with our latte art throwdown, where we sold entry tickets and raffle tickets for the event. This had a few hiccups, one was understanding how and when the money got to us, but mainly it was making sure credit card transactions went through and tracking order numbers / inventory worked appropriately. After a week we pretty much got it down.
So then we did a small shirt and tote run in August, in-store, and through that sold a handful of shirts. That taught us a bit about customer reception, like what sizes sold, what other styles people wanted, and what type of people liked those white shirts. We wanted to have a “merch store” on our site, and so we redid the look of our online shop slightly, and filled it out with merch items that responded to the gaps we saw in our original run. We really wanted more logo shirts out there, so our second design was an autumnal soft green and orange variation to contrast our stark white logo shirts. We did some prints/postcards of our cafe paintings that get a lot of compliments, and of course more circle logo stickers.
This dual launch drove traction to the online store as people checked out the new designs, and allowed us to sell that merch without over-stocking in store, by making them available online for in store pickup. We do production once a week on Monday our day off, and on that day we also restock the store with what we’re low on or out of. There’s less pressure to overstock in store every day, since we’ve outlined a restock day and have that online store.
How the reception has been, how production has been.
The reception has been slow but steady, we sell maybe 5-10 merch items per week. People are increasingly excited to pick up merch while they’re in, be it a sticker or new shirt for themself or someone else. I’ve had no negative comments on shirt quality and i’ve been washing my own without any real degradation in quality. Our first run of stickers and shirts definitely took a beating over time, but our newer shirts and stickers are much more sturdy, which again I attribute to starting with some small test runs. I’ve had maybe one or two real requests for new styles of items, which i’m considering for future drops.
Production has been alright, Since it’s on my “day off” i’m trying to minimize the time we spend on it. I try to do things like pick up blank shirts after work so i’m not also driving around. Some amount of R&D is necessary to improve, but again just minimizing that or allocating that to days “on” is ideal. Very thankful to my life partner Dakota for essentially spearheading the process as he also works on his own online store (not yet launched). The two serious pieces of equipment that everything revolves around are our high quality printer, and our cricut cutter. We’ve spent a lot of time in Michaels and Joanns haha.
Our first website sale.
With the hurricane this last week we had to close for a day and a half, to compensate we had a 20% off website sale. The previous week we had zero website sales, because it had been a couple weeks since our launch. This week we had something like ten new sales, and we also temporarily sold gift cards. This resulted in the equivalent to a slow day at the cafe, and seriously helped us out when we closed for a day right before rent was due.
Working in the industry during covid I saw a lot of cafes struggling to make sales while being closed. A lot of them launched websites for the first time, mainly for pickup or delivery but partially for things like merch. I felt that having diverse sources of income would be crucial in case of emergency, having a working website ready for whatever was key. I didn’t see the hurricane coming at all, and we’re nowhere near being fine if the cafe got wrecked, but having that site ready for a sale sure helped a lot.
All that said, we’ve done something like $1k in sales since launch, about half of that was around our throwdown, the other half was merch sales since. overall that’s like 5% of our income since opening. That may not seem like much, but it’s definitely taken less than 5% of my total time to do, my margins are solid, and I’m not holding on to a bunch of backstock. It’s been a worthwhile endeavor. I’ve got more plans for future merch and I’m excited to do more!
Thanks for reading everyone! - Elias
Launching a Fall Menu
Good Morning! Happy Thursday! It’s actually like 2pm but i wanted to hop on here quick and talk about fall stuff while it’s fresh on my mind and before I fall behind! (haha) I’m drinking water to combat all the coffee from earlier today, and listening to the album “The Flower Lane” by Ducktails here at the cafe. It’s pretty chill acoustic indie pop. Since my last music post i’ve got a handful of new albums I want to talk about, but one per blog will have to do.
So We Launched Our Fall Menu
To quickly list those drinks we have a pumpkin spice latte, a brown sugar maple pecan cold brew, a vanilla apple “cider seltzer” (with or without espresso), and a vanilla apple black iced tea. I’ve got a bunch of theory behind why those drinks and how I break down the menu process, so let’s get in to it.
I started with “what flavors represent fall” to me. Personally I think of fall colors first, reds and oranges. So that’s apples, pumpkins, maple leaves, etc. Especially living up north as a little kid, I think of raw apple cider really fondly and visiting pumpkin patches. I learned about how good and versatile real maple syrup is from my dad and from a couple at a farmers market I met who live in Vermont and bring stuff to FL every year; We bought a ton from them and froze it, used it forever.
So let’s use pumpkins apples and maple; They’re colorful, memorable, fall themed, and mean a lot to me. Next I need to think about how I can turn them in to a syrup sauce or other base to use with drinks. If we make a really fantastic base, it’s versatile and can be prepared in advance for drinks that are easy to execute at volume. I’m also thinking about how to avoid things like our house whipped cream, or I don’t know a latte with an extra shot, a pour over, stuff that takes time to prep!
Pumpkin was pretty straightforward, I tasted a few organic purees then started messing with it as an iteration of a pumpkin spice latte. I thought about doing a pumpkin caramel, or a pumpkin hopscotch (hopscotch being our most popular regular special with vanilla and caramel.) When I actually began tasting I learned that pumpkin is super strong! So like a banana in a smoothie, it can carry or overpower a drink from texture to flavor.
I then thought about how i’d source spices, and was considering a spice grinder or food processor. A food processor would have the added benefit of crushing apples for our apple drink. A spice grinder would also be great for our chai, since we source a tea and spice blend from our tea maker Hugo now (kind of a long story but we use what they use for their boxed chai concentrate, but raw, which gives us some prep room). What I quickly realized was this would mean a space and money investment that I wasn’t totally prepared for. we’d be carrying tons of spices, cutting apples, adding new shelves or stuffing ours, etc. I was broke and short on time, as you often are as a new business. I’ve also become a lot more hesitant for major changes on a whim, guarding what i’ve built and understanding the risks and rewards of spending on a limited budget.
So I found a raw spice blend I liked that had everything I might want in a pumpkin pie, and measured it in to taste. Instead of fighting the pumpkin I just added enough simple syrup (1:1 sugar to water) to thin the puree out and let it carry the drink! Our pumpkin spice is a lot less sweet, but it tastes way more like actual pumpkin pie in a latte than any other drink I’ve ever had. I love that. I love our PSL : ] “The Great Pumpkin” is a cute simple Charlie Brown reference and an awesome name for this drink.
Maple Syrup has an inherent “manliness” factor that cold brew shares. I wrote a rejected article for barista magazine a few years ago about this phenomenon, when nitro cold brew was really connecting with older men off the “it looks like draft beer and it’s super strong” thing. (they sent me a shirt and said thanks, can’t complain). Since then, cold brew has become as acceptable as black coffee in the manly man culture, at least in Florida. I decided to lean in to this with “the lumberjack.”
It’s basically just an iced coffee cream and sugar, but it rides the line of being a “regula’ cold brew” too. “Brown sugar maple pecan cold brew” makes no mention of cream, the focus is maple syrup and cold brew. Not too weird. Guys who normally just get the black cold brew have been willing to try it, and really like it. Even though it’s shoulder to shoulder with the foofoo pumpkin spiced latte. It has singlehandedly doubled my cold brew prep.
Apple cider is my personal favorite fall drink. I get stoked for it every year at the grocery store, I drink it in taller glasses than even my big guilty pleasure diner glass of cheap orange juice on a day off haha. I knew I wanted to do a sparkling apple cider, but my first instinct was to combine pre-made apple cider with our seltzer; This ratio didn’t really work, and when I started testing I couldn’t even find apple cider. A combination of expense and scarcity made this feel like a silly choice. So like with the pumpkin I thought about a food processor or knife and cutting board on bar, but I imagined the prep and storage on that to be excessive.
So I started testing apple purees and apple sauces, which shined right through our seltzer even with 1 or 2 scoops. At the end of the day these tasted like apple water, so the completed base also had some of our spice blend used for the pumpkin, and our house vanilla. I was testing this base on bar when someone ordered a lemon black iced tea, I didn’t have lemon so I offered to make her an apple vanilla tea; She liked the drink, and I liked it about as much as our sparkling apple cider, so we added both to the menu.
As an aside, the “Bone Apple Tea” was a placeholder name, but everyone I showed laughed so it stuck.
Reception So Far
SO far it’s been great, weekends have been packed with people coming down to try the fall menu. Everyone super likes the not so sweet pumpkin. I didn’t really know that people traveled for cafe specials, but I’ve seen more than a couple pumpkin spice maps haha. I did a photo shoot on Instagram for each of the drinks and it got a ton of traction. I did some comparisons and we got more hits than a lot of other more established cafes; I’m not sure if it was our timing or if we just did a stand out job with the photos, but it could be related to how infrequently we post compared to some others, it being our first seasonal menu, etc.
I expected the order of popularity to be Cider Soda > Great Pumpkin > LumberJack > Bone Apple Tea > Cider Soda with Spro
It’s more like Lumberjack > Great Pumpkin > Bone Apple Tea > Cider Soda with Spro > Cider Soda
iT’S ALL GOOD!
Something I didn’t say straight out but want to emphasize at the end here, is specialty drinks are an opportunity source and compose ingredients as great drinks. I don’t really like buying syrups or mixing them, because they’re just sugar with added oils for smell or flavor. A great example is our staple sunrise soda. It’s FL key-lime juice, house seltzer shaken until super carbonated, and espresso; it’s a key-lime juice and espresso highlight. People love it, I love it.
So if it’s fall and you’ve decided to do a smores latte for example, think about how you can go beyond the marshmallow and chocolate syrups. You can dip graham crackers in melted chocolate, you can toast a marshmallow with a hand torch. I know these things take more time and training, but you’re doing a handful over the course of an entire year, put in some effort for your people on both sides of the bar. You don’t have to make up ten drinks, you can do one or two really well. If it gets people talking it’s worth it.
I believe in you, if you’re reading this you’ve had food that I haven’t, you’ve had drinks I haven’t. Think about your experiences and what you like, think about how you can put those in front of someone who’s going to appreciate them. Create! Add fun things to your menu! People will try them and try to appreciate them like they appreciate you or your cafe! - Elias
Cafe Music
Good Afternoon! Happy Tuesday! It’s just after noon here at the shop and i’m in my usual slow hour or so, caught up on prep and drinking seltzer water, listening to Clever Girl on the cafe speakers. I’m kinda beat up, I was sick on Thursday and had my first employee Ty take solo bar, then we crushed the weekend together setting record sales. I slept yesterday! Today! I’ve got a bunch of social media posts to make, but they’re tied to other up and coming ideas. So for now, I decided to write about music. This is something I thought a lot about on bar, since you’re sort of a dj for the space. I’ve met a few more people this week who say they read or have read the blog, so a practical subject felt like a good choice.
Finding cafe music is easier than ever, but still sort of hard.
When I started this journey 8 or 10 years ago, If you searched “cafe music / coffee shop music”, you’d get a lot of generic acoustic jazz or piano. This music is serviceable depending on what kind of cafe you are, but if you listen to this stuff too long it will drive you insane. When music radios like Pandora were new, they’d end up playing the same ten songs on repeat and that was basically unlistenable too haha. SO, I needed to find better music.
I used to spend a lot of time in facebook groups or other forums, asking people for recommendations on cafe music. I never really had much luck. I’d give a few examples and have people nodding their heads without much to contribute. So instead of hoping answers would come to me, i spent time reading what others liked and cherry picking songs or in some cases albums that were a good fit. Listening to a lot of classic albums and sparking conversation in the cafe was a fun way to discover new music. I definitely played a lot of inappropriate stuff, but it never really caused any problems. If I had someone to guide me on what was a good fit, I may have made more quick progress.
Thankfully now even without a cool music loving manager, there are places like Spotify that will guide you! Or expose you to a lot of great music, even searching for “cafe music” there are other people who are making normal playlists full of great music that are a good fit for a cafe.
& HEY! I believe baristas should listen to what they like, within reason.
There are things you want to watch out for making a playlist, like extended periods of silence, super loud harsh passages, or excessive and clear profanity.
Outside of that, just talk to the staff. If you’re an owner, manager, or caring employee you can try to curate a shop playlist with everyone. At my previous job I created a 36 hour playlist with my baristas, by having everyone contribute artists and songs they liked. Then I spent some time skimming songs for stuff that fit. That was overkill.
What I learned was that no matter how long your playlist is, people are still going to complain about hearing one song too many times. Trying to micromanage the music at all times is impossible; So keep that playlist evolving, let people play fun stuff and let Spotify do it’s thing. etc.
What I do now is keep a morning (chill) playlist, and a peak hour / afternoon (more upbeat) playlist that we can refer back to. So most of the time we play whatever, but if something weird comes up and we just need to get good music on fast, we have those playlists to flip on in a hurry.
Here are some album recommendations
Here are ten albums i’ve been listening to recently at the cafe, that are pretty safe to play aloud front to back. If you need something new to listen to : )
If these are too chill and you want something louder weirder etc, check out Parannoul (loud new shoegaze), or Pink Pantheress (soft fast drumn’bass)
The Universe Smiles Upon You - Khrouangbin (quiet jazz)
One Hundred Mornings - Windows 96 (vaporwave)
Falling into Place - Home (slightly more upbeat fun vaporwave)
Priorities - Project Pablo (house)
WHO CARES? - Rex Orange County (angsty soft boy pop)
No Dogs Allowed - Sidney Gish (angsty soft girl pop)
Summer’s Over - Jordana / tv girl (weird duet pop)
Lotta Sea Lice - Courtney Barnett / kurt Vile (weird duet folk)
Things Take Time, Take Time - Courtney Barnett (chill new folk)
effloresce - Covet (math rock)
Thanks for reading! Have a great week!
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