Count the beans

Are you clued up on coffee? Adam Withrington seeks out advice to benefit your pub.

It's a fair bet that most licensees have heard the argument about serving coffee - that it's a great business opportunity and it offers high margins - particularly if you take on the high street coffee chains around breakfast time. Well it seems this message has been listened to - but only up to a point.

While most pubs you visit these days will offer coffee, the chances are that in many cases it won't be much of an offer. What you provide has to be top quality and the feeling among experts is that the coffee is not up to scratch.

Dominic Lowdell, communications manager for Union Coffee Roasters, believes quality is overlooked by licensees. "Pubs are not making an investment in coffee in the right way - they are treating it as an add-on. They need to use it as a means to get people to come back," he says.

Andrea Horsfield, director of the Training School in London, says pubs are letting their customers down. "The licensed trade is guilty of using push-button machines - these scald the beans and make the coffee bitter and sour - to be honest it puts me off buying coffee in pubs," she comments. "What is the point of selling great beer and a brilliant spirits range if you're going to sell rubbish coffee?"

Marco Arrigo, director of Illy Caffè, believes publicans are simply trying to walk before they can crawl. "So many of them have missed out on the basics. They are trying to do all the things Starbucks do - like coffee milkshakes and offering semi-skimmed coffees - and yet they can't even do a decent espresso," he says.

"Some bars and pubs I have been into do a vodka espresso and seem to think they do a good job of it. They are disgusting because the espresso is not right. I just feel that licensees are trying to cope with the idea of coffee rather than trying to take it anywhere."

Reaping rewards​

The extent of the margins you can make on coffee are quite remarkable. Marco says that on his prices, which he claims are higher than most coffee sellers, coffee vendors make a 900 per cent margin - that he will sell a batch of coffee for £100 and it will be sold in the retail outlet for £900.

This is a tidy little money maker for licensees, but consumers will only tolerate being charged high prices for so long, especially if they feel they can get better quality elsewhere - like on the high street.

One pub group that has done well from its coffee offer is Wetherspoon - but the company has not done this through cutting corners and using cheap coffee in sachets. It has invested a huge amount in that side of the business.

According to a spokesman all 630 Wetherspoon venues across the country (not just the pubs in urban centres) have a coffee machine that can make an espresso, latte and cappuccino.

One of these machines will cost, on average, £7,000.

Rudimentary maths will lead you to work out that Tim Martin's company has invested £4m just on coffee machines.

This is not forgetting the fact that Egon Ronay, the gastro guide guru himself, has advised the company on creating a series of coffee blends that are unique to Wetherspoon - not exactly a cheap short cut.

Andrea says Wetherspoon does not charge much more than £1 per cup, but its coffee is quickly served, well-made and tastes a lot better than some of the coffee you get in top-end pubs and gastro-pubs - which all costs a lot more.

Despite spending a fortune on the equipment, Wetherspoon says its venues sell millions of cups of coffee a year. Now that the vast majority of its outlets open at 10am, Wetherspoon is selling coffee for 13 hours a day - it certainly must be making its money back. So the lesson from this surely is if you invest properly, you will be rewarded.

Quality beans​

For Dominic at Union, however, the most important thing about serving coffee in a pub is not the quality of the machine but the quality of the beans themselves. "There are a lot of companies that will lease you a machine, but as part of that agreement you will have to buy beans from them and these beans are often very poor quality," he says. "You cannot cut corners in coffee roasting - you need to educate people on the beans rather than the machines."

Marco from Illy agrees. "Would you lease an oven from your butcher and let him tie you into a deal to supply you with all of your meat at premium prices? These guys are selling what is essentially a huge batch of boiled acorns for about £5 a kilo," he points out.

"Vietnam is now the second biggest coffee grower in the world - after the war a lot of farmers started growing coffee - but it is a very cheap robusta bean coffee. It's nasty stuff."

If you have quality beans and the cash to splash on a spanking new coffee machine, should you go right ahead and prepare to take on your rival Starbucks - three doors down the road - at its own game?

Dominic from Union Coffee Roasters argues not. He believes that this does not need to be your tactic and feels it is important to establish a point of difference - the way to do this is to use cafetières.

Cafetières​

"Pubs are a much more relaxed environment than coffee shops - for example it is easier to sit down - and they can exploit this opportunity. The thing to do is go for the cafetière approach. People still like a good cup of filter coffee. It is an opportunity to offer a good service that does not cost the earth - people are not always going to want an espresso. Cafetières are much more of a sharing experience, while buying lattes and espressos at a coffee shop are much more singular," says Dominic.

However, that doesn't get rid of the suspicion among customers that cafetières are a poor relation to top of the range coffee machines. Not to mention the fact that they give customers the impression that the barstaff have gone into the kitchen, chucked a few industrial strength supermarket brand coffee granules in a pot, added water and pressed the plunger.

In which case, argues Dominic, you have to convince your customers of the quality of the beans you use.

"You can do this by getting them interested in the origins of the beans - use that as a selling point. So have Kenyan beans for breakfast, Brazilian during the day and Guatemalan in the evening. You could print menu cards for your customers describing what the different beans offer and giving tasting notes. In the summer you can offer lighter, fruitier coffees and in the winter more rounded warmer coffees."

Dominic also believes that the cafetière approach is a sound one for the licensee who has yet to offer coffee. "If you don't really have much of a coffee service right now it may not be right to immediately splash out on a top-notch machine. Gradually build up your service through cafetières and once that is established and successful then expand your offer," he advises.

While not necessarily a fan of the cafetière approach - "it can lead to very watered-down coffee if left stewing for ages, which gives the coffee a very woody taste" - Marco agrees that going the whole hog and splashing out on a very expensive machine could be foolhardy. "There is a real skill to making an espresso, but it is treated as unskilled work. Would you let barstaff cook your food? This is what happens with coffee in pubs. The machines that are bought do the work for the staff - like grinding the beans - and as a result the quality drops. A lot of people are unaware that different blends work better in different formats. For example, Blue Mountain is an excellent filter coffee, but it is no good as espresso coffee. I can't think of the number of places I visit which u