“Youth is the gift of nature but age is a work of art” — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

mycuppa March 2019 Newsletter

The Secret Label program just keeps going from strength to strength, with so many customers expressing joy from these exceptional coffees.

Thank you graciously for all the kind and wonderful feedback - it inspires us to go further.

It's now a program that's a key part of our operations as we devote even more resources and focus to creating something special, a little bespoke and stylishly curated to delight and satisfy.

Working with so many different coffees over the last 12 years provides us with unique insights, experience and skills that almost no other coffee company can match - large or small.

We have done the hard yards, seemingly many times over and now it's about leveraging our vast knowledge, our array of premium coffees expertly prepared on our best-in-class infrastructure - our freshness and product cycle speed beat the market.

March's Secret Label is another great offering that's shaping up as a treat. There's a lot going on with this delicious blend - sometimes I think it's an amazing orange mocha, yet other times it's a satisfying fruit trail mix, but mostly it's about lingering sweet candy and layer upon layer of chocolate ganache.

Willy Wonka, we salute you.

Our feature article this month looks at the unfortunate "lost opportunity" when you buy pre-ground coffee.

Please don't shoot the messenger, and if you have a grinder already, please feel free to skip the sermon.

We've compiled two opinion pieces this month - the first is a tongue-in-cheek Roaster's Rant about the mysteries of premium dining venues and their crap coffee.

The second article is a more serious discussion about price deflation afflicting almost every Australian retailer and how the problems with a perpetual discounting mentality are running a wrecking ball through too many businesses.

March Secret Label

Our Secret Label blends seem to hit the spot with customers, so when you're on a good thing, stick to it.

March's Secret Label is a blend of 2 premium estate lots. Farms produce various grades from their harvest, and these lots were both the top selected grades from each Estate - we are so lucky to work with wonderful ingredients.

This month's Secret Label has a lot going on. Early in the post-roast development, there are lovely orange mocha notes, and as the coffee reaches its peak, the sweet candy gets sweeter, and the cocoa turns into a lush chocolate ganache. Yep, it's pretty hard to stop at one.

Syrupy orange citric sweetness as black, rich and velvety cocoa with milk - either way, it's adorable.

Sweet candy. Have we used the word sweet too many times yet?

Roasted daily until the campaign allocation runs out - it will definitely not last the entire month.

 

Pre-ground coffee is like fighting with your hands tied behind your back.

If you love your espresso, latte, cappuccino or flat white, did you know that pre-ground coffee is likely half-dead by the time you open the pack?

Doesn't matter if it was roasted that morning, ground and sealed immediately; the fact is ground coffee degrades inside of the sealed packaging incredibly quickly.

Before you send us hate mail, what we are referring to here is no secret but, in fact, the well-known life cycle of ground coffee particles and their peak enjoyment (or expectation) of tasty espresso extractions.

For some brew methods where the contact time between water and the coffee particles is longer and the ground coffee particles larger, there is less impact upon oxidized ground coffee, but there is something very important in the coffee enjoyment equation - your nose and aromatics are one of the first attributes affected by grinding.

Those of you who already own a grinder you can skip the sermon. For the folks who don't own a grinder or might be considering the purchase of a grinder to reach the next level in coffee joy, please read our take on why it's critically important to grind on demand.

Read it here - ground coffee experience.

 

Not so premium?

I bet you have wondered more than once why there seems to be a strange and, at times, perverse correlation between fine dining and crap coffee?

Seems expensive or so-called premium dining venues just can't help themselves in making bad or stupid decisions with their coffee strategy - both in their weird ideas of sourcing or in poor execution.

Kind of defies logic and literally contradicts everything a premium establishment stands for - particularly in the culture of Australia, where the coffee standards are high and the customer expectations even higher.

To read our rant on how and why they continue to get away with it, click on the link here - Not So Premium. 

 

On a more serious note, our second article this month looks at the acceleration of price deflation in the Australian economy.

Input costs are rising much faster than selling prices - it's affecting almost every retailer, and even the Supermarkets have flagged this as a major concern from their recent half-year trading results.

We only need to look inside our business to see evidence of incredible cost spikes - just last week; our software vendor decided to raise the price of their product by 300% with less than 30 days' notice - they do it because they can, having their customer's by the balls and a squeeze like this is just outrageous when no added value is being provided.

Across marketing, compliance, energy and insurance segments, our costs have more than doubled or tripled in the last decade, yet our selling price has risen less than 10% in the same period.

Makes for interesting times ahead - read the full article here, Grinding more than just coffee.