This Week in Coffee (plus some announcements)
Before I start this week’s newsletter, I’m making a few announcements about the future of Moonhead Coffee. These are happy developments caused by the incredible reaction since launching the newsletter and how inspired I feel to continue the work.
I’ve spent the Christmas break thinking about where we to go next since there’s such demand for high quality coffee and coffee equipment news. I’m hugely grateful for each person who subscribes or even shares the email - this has been my inspiration.
Without further ado, I’m sharing my (very rough) plan for the next six months and humbly ask for your feedback. Email me any time and I respond to everything on willnash@me.com.
The next six months
- A higher quality newsletter, better laid out and with more of my analysis and opinion.
- More ‘newsletter only’ content. I currently post my newsletter on reddit and I’ll soon start on Medium. But I’m going to start holding back much of the analysis and imagery for subscribers. This may require me to move email platforms as photos here are challenging.
- Monthly equipment reviews and tear downs. These will come on the same subscriber channel as you’re used to. Coffee equipment is my passion and speciality and I think this will add another layer of value.
- Some kind of community in the future. This will be either a WhatsApp group or a Discord and will, of course, be an invitation not a requirement.
That’s enough about me, now for the news.
Equipment
This machine does not pour the art for you, but it does claim to 'perfectly texture' your milk first. I personally see these becoming popular at high end aesthetic cafes and with anyone competing in the latte art pouring championships.
Beans
ACE is a brilliant company and one of the brilliant things they do is publish which companies successful bid on the coffee. This means you can see a lot, and later track down who roasted those beans. Ultimately, you can buy the roasted beans and try them for yourself.
Industry
For this story, you’ll need to know a little about how futures work. It’s actually quite simple - the ‘spot price’ of coffee is how much it costs to buy green coffee today to be delivered as soon as possible.
A ‘3m future’ is the right to buy coffee, at a given price, some time in the future (in this case, three months - 3m). It might cost $1.60 to buy a lb of coffee today (for delivery asap (March)) but a futures contract for May might be $1.70. But, a roaster may still buy the contract because they want certainty.
While strike prices for are reasonably stable and even ticking up a little, the futures prices have slipped considerably - driven by good weather all over the world and in particular in Brazil where there have been concerns. All good news for the consumer in Summer 23.
She uses two separate grinders, then sieves out the fines. It’s a lot but it takes a lot to win these increasingly competitive events.
Pret is a well-regarded, large, UK chain of shops selling a mixture of hot drinks and quality sandwiches focused mostly on office workers.
The Pret coffee subscription (£25 a month for all-you-can-drink) has been a huge success and ‘23 will see at least one more coffee chains launch the same product. This success has led to an increase in their overall drink flow and and so the food chain is moving to increasingly automated machines from Cimbali to keep up with the demand.
They'll be using the S60 machines pictures below and is capable of producing 600 cups of espresso a day (according to the company).
For any of you in the US wondering about Pret's relationship with their workers - the company has a great deal of unionisation in the UK and doesn't experience substantial problems because of it. I'm sure they're far from perfect but they certainly don't union bust.
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You’ll be able to see the discussion on Reddit