Once in a while, I like to spice things up a little for no damn good reason because as an independent business owner with no sugar daddy capital backing me up, this is one of the rare form of reward I get out of this Geylang Drip City project.
With our latest marketing campaign for our newly launched single origin coffee bags, we went with (by our own estimations) a fairly tame & uncontroversial premise; No Blends In Geylang.
The idea behind this is to communicate that we strictly serve single origin African coffees and, fingers crossed, spark the curiosity of a casual coffee drinker and invite them to ask the question(s)
"What do you mean by no blends?"
"What's a blend?"
"What's a single origin?"
"Do they taste the same?"
I thought it'd be a great opportunity for some ad-hoc coffeebar customer education, friendly banter and hopefully open up more minds and palates to the wonders of African coffees.
But maybe because I'm someone who's inexperienced, uneducated & not connected to the elite specialty barista/roaster community,
some will inevitably take umbrage at the whole premise of the tagline "No Blends in Geylang" and jump to the conclusion
"he say single origin better than blends..".
But are single origins really better than blends?
As I have learned throughout my specialty coffee journey, whenever there's some form of comparison between coffees, the answer is to fall back on using the refrain
"it depends...."
But i'll spare you the bullshit and expand further by saying
"it depends on the intention of the coffee buyer".
Intentionality is everything.
Knowing why you do certain things the way you do them almost always leads to better communication of it and better outcomes.
I know why I buy and serve only single origin African coffees.
It's because I want my customers to know that coffee is a cash crop native to Africa (despite 4 of the top 5 biggest coffee producing countries being outside of Africa).
It's because I want to show the work that coffee farmers in Africa are doing to create flavor, product & experience differentiation for the consumers of specialty coffee.
I believe I can confidently speak on this and defend this decision because I am intellectually honest and transparent on my intention.
Having said that I understand the obvious benefits of serving blends from a cost, logistics and inventory management perspective.
But I can also see how communicating the intentionality of incremental margin management doesn't exactly exude "artisan coffee messiah" vibes and comes across a bit Vince McMahon-ey.
I may be wrong (although my team will attest that there is zero precedence for this) but somehow uncharacteristically, I'm not super interested in a dialogue on this.
I'll figure it out on my own time as I almost always do.
Peace and hope your next coffee is an excellent one (single origin or blend)!