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On my quest of exploring as many specialty roasters and cafes as I try to paint the most encompassing picture of the Austin Coffee Community as I possibly can, I needed to come up with a universal baseline instrument for me to gauge the characteristic differences in how each roaster/cafe presents their coffee, in terms of roast and brew philosophies. Ironically, this industry’s focus is merely one type of seed, but the processes each roaster, cafe, or even team/company, will take in order to get to that final product tells a full story of their backgrounds, characteristics, and their approach to this roasted seed. After all, the objective of the so-dubbed third-wave movement of coffee is to focus on the journey and the story of the bean that ends up in every cup you enjoy, attempting to put more spotlight onto the farmers, lots, and the origin countries and regions that produced the bean aspect of the cup that ends up in front of you. There are, however, other aspects that all contribute to the story of the cup, like the story of the roaster/cafe’s business and their owners, the story of the barista, the story of the different equipment used and experimented with in the roasting process and behind the bar, etc. to name a few. In an attempt to gather as much of these stories as possible from an initial first experience, I decided on a first-order observational drink at every single coffee roaster/shop that I conveniently labeled the Double-Shot Hello (DSH).
This order, I do keep in mind, is very purely analytical, and in no way representative of my taste preferences as a whole or what each cafe is usually best at presenting. That is also to say that my sample size during my first analytical visit to the cafe/roaster is obviously mostly n=1, and is extremely susceptible to change dependent upon many other factors, such as how good that specific shot is brewed that day, how fresh the bean is, how the specific flavor notes of that bean is expressed on that roast on that particular day. But then again, at the end of the day I am precisely aiming to gather as many output data points as possible from as little as I can get away with in terms of input data. You can consider that efficiency maximization, but as a human with very limited resources at my disposal, I also call it frugality. With that small of a sample size on the first visit, I do still tend to take it with the biggest grain of salt (or the coarsest grind of bean if you will). As much of a storyteller I always strive to be, I do understand that a comprehensive story is so much more than one singular cup that accompanies one singular experience, and the more I anchor myself into this next chapter of my journey across Austin, I will have so many more opportunities to visit these roasters and cafes in my pursuit of telling each roaster and each community member’s story to the best of my abilities, and to do these wonderful people justice with each of their stories while I’m at it.
Below I will attempt to list out the data points I am usually attempting or able to gather from a DSH. Granted, the presence, or lack thereof, of certain factors within these lists do not remotely tell the fullest depths of the story of how the roaster is or how their coffee philosophies are, but what I am hoping to gain out of such a small input data point of an order is as much insight as possible about some piece of that story from the get-go. Through this preliminary step, I am also able to pinpoint helpful leads for me to progress into researching more about the roaster and the cafe as a whole team, or network of teams.
From a typical DSH, I am aiming to gauge: