Coffee Lens
The world of the gastronomy fascinates us every day with new ideas, new ways to cook, new products and new ways to show our dishes. On this way, it can surprise us in 2 ways, the vision and the savor.
Lavazza, the italian coffee brand, has just created and launched in the market his new product called Coffee Lens. A surprising lens with the taste of coffee.
Not like the other lens that we know, this Coffee Lens has been created for cooking and not to wear it in our eyes. The idea came from one of the most famous chief Matteo Baronetto (Ristorante Cracco de Milan), since he has to wear lens to do his job, he thought why not use lens to cook which can gve some extra savor to the recipes.
In the Ristorante Cracco, the lens is used like a supplement to combine with La Barbajada (a drink made of coffee and cacao). And of course, it can be used to prepare other dishes.
Most Expensive Coffee
Did you know that the most expensive coffee in the world cost almost $600 per can? No wonder a cup of this coffee cost almost $50. This coffee was coming from a bean and it was being eaten by an animal but the bean itself was not being digested that is why it was being excreted. So this coffee was coming fom a plant though the ugly part was it does pass the digestion process and we all know the last part of it.
Starbucks Shorty
I went to starbucks once and a friend ordered a short cappuccino. I was bewildered…the cup was smaller than any Starbucks coffee I’d ever seen. The “short” size is not even on the menu! Was I dreaming? No. The “short” size is actually very hush-hush, but why?
The drink in question is the elusive “short cappuccino”—at 8 ounces, a third smaller than the smallest size on the official menu, the “tall,” and dwarfed by what Starbucks calls the “customer-preferred” size, the “Venti,” which weighs in at 20 ounces and more than 200 calories before you add the sugar.
The difficulty is that if some of your products are cheap, you may lose money from customers who would willingly have paid more. So, businesses try to discourage their more lavish customers from trading down by making their cheap products look or sound unattractive, or, in the case of Starbucks, making the cheap product invisible.
The short size actually gives you a better quality coffee than the tall, grande, or venti:
The problem with large cappuccinos is that it’s impossible to make the fine-bubbled milk froth (”microfoam,” in the lingo) in large quantities, no matter how skilled the barista. A 20-ounce cappuccino is an oxymoron.
Read the rest of the article from Slate on MSN to get a better idea of the motivation behind keeping this product so secret.
Customers Love Variety
A success tip for a beneficial menu in your coffee shop is to offer a “Wide” variety of “teas”. Not everyone is a coffee drinker, and if you don’t already have the big fad of Chai as a selection, you’re losing business. But in addition to Chai tea, why not offer Thai iced tea? add that to the Starbuck’s award winning concept of being in a frappacino and you’ve got gold … Starbucks sells an incredible amount of chai frappacino’s, especially during the summer. Herbs are cheap, and available in bulk from your local herb shop. In addition, you can buy the herbs cheap in bulk from Frontier Herb or San Francisco Herb Company via mail. Offering selections like “licorice”, “chamomile”, “echinacea”, etc. and letting out the positive aspects of their qualities will increase customer dependence, especially when a customer gets a cold and comes in for a cup of echinacea every day till the cold is gone, or a sore throat alleved by licorice. Dried herb plus hot water – very little cost in that. Sun tea – add a few containers to your roof and offer fresh sun brewed tea … its amazing how rich these teas taste and how much your customers will appreciate it if you advertise it right.
Are Chinese Trading in Tea for Coffee?
For centuries the chinese population has relied on the sweet taste of nice cup of tea. Now millions are learning of the taste and addiction of coffee and latte’s. The problem is in a country where most still drink tea, there seems to only be a few who knows how to brew a cup of coffee. A good cup that is.
Recently China’s labour ministry has declared an official shortage of coffee makers and is calling for 10,000 people to be trained. Restaurants are in good need of coffee makers but the posts are being left unfulfilled for lack of coffee making skills.
I just wonder how long before they realize just how addicting coffee can become. When I used to drink it because I worked at night I didn’t even realize that I was awake for days at a time because we had free coffee as well as free latte’s at work. I was beyond buzzed.
Coffee for Acid Reflux Sufferers
Not being much of a coffee drink since my poison of choice is soda, I never new anything about the high acid in coffee. I wonder if that’s what makes me so nauseous that I gave up coffee?
If you are affected by the acid in coffee the good news is that researchers found that a coffee new to supermarket shelves is lower by more than 50% of acid. Even in coffee that claims to be for the more sensitive stomachs.
This new coffee is called Puroast Low-Acid Coffee and is made by Kerry Sachs.
“This is revolutionary news for the coffee industry, we believe, with the rise in acid reflux sufferers in the aging baby boom population,” observed Kerry Sachs, co-founder of Puroast Low-Acid Coffee. “Puroast delivers the caffeine and great gourmet coffee taste that people crave without the stomach problems caused by high acidity.”
Success for Coffee Shop Owners
How do you define success if you run a coffee house? Is it by the number of customers, good press or like Starbucks the ability to charge people crazy prices and watch them pay even while they grumble?
Coffee makes me sick as in I’ll run the other way if you come towards me with a cup of the stuff. I don’t know if that’s the reason I cannot ever imagine shelling out $ 4 or $5 for a cup of something that I can make in my own house. I mean if you saved up all the money your spending on expensive coffee, couldn’t you then have enough to buy a good or even great espresso or coffee machine for some great homemade caffeine?
Expensive, “Recycled”, and $300 a Cup
Kopi Luwak is a very expensive coffee bean, mostly drunk by the rich and famous because of it’s hefty price. A pound of these beans can run you $300 or more but it is supposed to make one of the best tasting coffees in the world.
The secret to the beans is a marsupial in Indonesia called the Luwak. They scramble around looking for ripe coffee cherries to eat and once these beans move through their digestive track and out their bodies, they are harvested from the Luwak’s feces. They are “cleaned”, roasted and then sold to the suckers willing to pay that much for coffee out of an animals nether region.
I’m not an adventurous eater at all and this item will definitely not be on my list of things to try. Customers have called the taste earthy, musty and exotic. Two of those terms are ironic, considering where the beans came from.
Cultural Side of Starbucks
Bryant Simon, professor at Philadelphia’s Temple University, is “searching for the meaning of modern life amid the round tables and comfy sofas of Starbucks coffee shops.”
He has observed out 300 Starbucks locations in 6 countries, trying to learn “what it means to live and consume in the age of globalization.” In 2008, expect to see Simon’s “caffeine-fueled opus,” Consuming Starbucks, on the shelf at your local bookstore.
In a similar vein, Jonathan Morris, a British historian, says that “there’s a deep sense of unpredictability in the modern world, and what Starbucks provides a lot of people is predictability.” He believes that Starbucks is successful because it sells comfort in “an anonymous, often dislocating world.”
Red Barn Coffee Roasters
When Mark and Lisa Verrochi lost their “three Boston coffee stand leases to large corporate landlords,” they decided to start over — in a small, red, rent-free barn in their back yard.
Out of that barn in Hopkinton, Mass., Red Barn Coffee Roasters was born.
The company soon grew to include 7 locations.
It’s still in the process of expansion, but faces stiff competition:
Red Barn sits in a state flooded with chain coffee stores. Dunkin’ Donuts has 900 stand-alone Massachusetts stores along with 83 combination Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin Robbins outlets, while Starbucks has 151 stores and Honey Dew Donuts has 110 locations.
To help this local business stay afloat, visit one of Red Barn’s Cafes in Westboro, Southboro, Hopkinton, Milford or Boston.
Source: Milford Daily News
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