This Week in Coffee; Tuesday 19th of September '23
The Big Three
La Marzocco Launch the Pico - A Home Grinder
Link
As predicted in last week's newsletter, the new Pico grinder is out now. This retail grinder is heavy on style but perhaps a little light on substance - we shall see.
Marzocco continued their unusual naming schedule using unit prefixes (La Marzocco Zebi when?) with this new unit weighing in at a substantial $1000. Marzocco managed to calculate that as and errrr €1000 in Europe. Interesting maths there but Marzocco isn't the only company ignoring fx rates these days.
For that much money, you're up against some serious machines like the Eureka Atom or the Sanremo Allground which both have flat burrs and stepless adjustments. Flat burrs tend to produce a more precise grind* and, stepless adjustment lets you take advantage of that precision by dialing in with detail.
That said, it's a good-looking device and if it's high quality and quiet then I believe it will perform well for a certain type of person.
*Essentially, two flat burrs only need to achieve parallelism but they don't need to be perfectly centrally aligned. Whereas conical burrs need to be both parallel and perfectly centrally aligned to get high precision.
Specialty Coffee Association Launches the SCA Skills Diplomas
We don't have a huge amount to say about this apart from it looks like something which may be of interest to our readers.
The SCA will be retiring their existing SCA Coffee Diploma (sometimes known as the 100-point diploma) in favour of these new specialised qualifications. That diploma will be fully phased out by 2024 but will continue to be recognised after that.
Each of the diplomas will be issued to applicants who have completed the relevant underlying courses and apply online.
UK-Based 92 Degrees raising an additional £3m for growth
I haven't yet personally had the chance to drink any coffee at 92 Degrees and I think that speaks to their interesting (and successful) strategy here in the UK. As a proud "soft southerner" operating in a tiny band of our country 92 degrees have passed me by as they rapidly expanded in the growing northern cities.
I'll spare the readers a lecture on why UK Northern Towns and Cities are underrated and undervalued by UK businesses but 92 Degrees is yet more proof.
With 11 locations, none further south than Liverpool, they've grown using a previous £1.1 million investment. I expect great things here.
Everything else
You guys know how I feel about these kinds of studies. The numbers here are actually quite good (n = 100k) but the main issue is that it's the amount of coffee reported as drunk, not measured. Easy to imagine that most anxious people routinely over or underestimate how much coffee they drink.