Tag Archives: analysis

Data Science: Exploring CoffeeReview.com Top Coffees (Cntd.)

Posted on 2015-07-21 by Cafe Hound | Leave a comment

In the last post we began exploring the relationship between the language describing coffee (“cupping notes”) and price/brand/roaster. Our objective is to provide coffee consumers with a general understanding of particular groupings of coffee they can choose based on flavor profiles and mouthfeel characteristics. An example of the type of properties coffee professionals use to describe their craft is illustrated in the below flavor wheel from Counter Culture:

After evaluating the segments that our initial k-means clustering (with a k of 5) produced, I was unsatisfied with the results. My decision to haphazardly throw the price variable (unscaled) into the model was wrong-headed and drove the algorithm to essentially classify segment membership solely based upon that. In some cases such an exercise may be useful, but for our objective of discerning whether specific language could be used to segment particular specialty coffees, this segmentation wasn’t going to do it for us.

Also, this initial segmentation helped me narrow my “business objective”. Now I wanted to segment by flavor profile, something that might actually help inform a potential consumer’s purchasing decisions.

In order to develop the cupping note variables that would inform our segmentation, I explored the text data from Kenneth Davids’ site and selected the most common and/or most distinguishing words to test. The list of words is below.

A quick look at these led me to believe that certain words might not yield significant information gain in the algorithm due to lack of variance. Mouthfeel, sweet and acidity were present in 96%, 80% and 90% of reviews respectively. Their power as differentiating variables would be constrained by their existence in nearly all observations (with the possible exception of acidity).

However, in my initial quick cluster using SPSS, I included the three variables mentioned above and I still liked the results enough to move forward.

Segment 1: 16.9% of reviews

This segment was the most expensive (average $42.31 USD per pound) and highest rated (94.6). The segment was the highest indexed on floral, honey, complex, silk, delicate, intense, and peach cupping notes. It also indexed highly on nib, lemon and acidity. The most common producer countries in this mix were geisha panama and Colombia, Ethiopian, Kenyan and El Salvadoran coffees.

List of Segment One Coffees

Segment 2: 27.8% of reviews

This segment was the least expensive (average $26.72 USD per pound) and moderately rated (94.45) while coming from the most diverse sampling of producer countries. It indexed highest on rich, deep, resonant and pungent cupping notes. Whereas the other segments did not include any coffees from Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico or Papa New Guinea, this segment did.

List of Segment Two Coffees

Segment 3: 13.9% of reviews

This segment was middle of the road in terms of cost and ratings (average $37.09 USD per pound and rated 94.52 on average). It indexed highest as juicy, tart, acidity, nib, bright, sweet, and was also well above average in complexity and floral notes. The range of producing countries varied quite a bit in this segment, with several bourbon varietals from Guatemala, Costa Rica, Hawaii – still other Geishas from Panama, Colombia and Guatemala – several Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffees and a few honey processed coffees from El Salvador (Pacamara) and Hawaii (Maragogype ($75/lb)).

List of Segment Three Coffees

Segment 4: 20.3% of reviews

This segment was the least expensive ($28.46 USD per pound) and lowest rated (94.33) – all things relative to a very highly rated group of coffees. It indexed highest for fruit, sweet, lemon and light while also coming in pretty strong in the tart department as well. This segment is composed of a mixture of coffees from Ethiopia, Kenya, Burundi, Indonesia and Honduras. A few peaberry coffees are included, the red caturra from Rusty’s Hawaiian, a few stray Geisha coffees, and a decently heavy sampling of Sumatra, Yirgacheffe, Sidamo, and various Kenyan single-origins. For the value, this is a very attractive and diverse segment of coffees. See our site visit to Rusty’s in Hawai’i in 2011.

List of Segment Four Coffees

Cupping With Miguel At Lorie’s Home

Segment 5: 21.1% of reviews

Segment five is highly rated (94.58) and quite expensive ($37.73 USD per pound on average). This segment indexes the highest for tart, rich, acidity, syrup, pungent, and mouthfeel, while also scoring highly for honey and bright notes. Panama, Colombia, Hawaii and Ethiopia are the most heavily represented producer countries in this grouping. This segment is probably the most populated by Geishas followed by exotic Ethiopian and Kenyan coffees.

List of Segment Five Coffees

For more information on the roasters evaluated in this data from the coffeereview.com website, see the links and data below:

And I’ll leave you with a bit of a refresher on the Cup of Excellence Scoring Categories for thinking about and communicating coffee quality/taste.

Cup of Excellence® Scoring Categories

DEFECTS

Phenolic, rio, riado automatic disqualification Ferment
Oniony, sweaty

SWEETNESS (prevalence of…)
+ ripeness | sweet
– green | undeveloped | closed | tart

(possible notations: nutty, chocolate, berry, fruit, caramel, floral, beefy, spicy, honey, smokey…)

Official Release… “Cafe Hound”

Posted on 2009-09-13 by Cafe Hound | Leave a comment

Picture 1_3

Dear Readers,

Over the past six weeks, we have enjoyed unofficially blogging on cafehound.com and have seen the development of the blog and its traffic from visitors “accidentally” coming to our blog. It has been a pleasure to offer diverse information accessible on our blog. Today, we take another important step and officially introduce to you cafehound.com.

What you will find on our blog is random but hopefully informative. As the blog’s name suggests, we are Cafe Hound. We search for the best coffee the world can offer. In Cafe Hounding section, you can read our reviews of cafes from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Coming soon, we will add reviews of coffee houses outside the US. We are also proud to present to you the exclusive interviews of “Who Is Who” in specialty coffee industry. We are honored to have Chuck Patton (founder and owner of Bird Rock Cafe Roasters in La Jolla, California) as our inaugural feature in this interview section. To be added to the list of fame are Eileen Hassi (founder and owner of Ritual Coffee in San Francisco), Michael McGuire (owner and roaster of K-Bay Caffe in Homer, Alaska), Timothy Castle (founder and CEO of Castle & Company, Santa Monica, California), and Karen Cebreros (founder and CEO of Elan Organic, San Diego, California).

Cafe Hound is not only the place you can get reviews and knowledge about your neighborhood cafes. We carefully select and present to you interesting news and upcoming events in coffee industry. Moreover, with our expertise in economics, finance, international relations, and public policy, we devote a section of the blog to analytical and educational issues related to every stage of specialty coffee production– from crop to cup, or from beans to brew. Currently, we proudly review an interesting article by Christopher Bacon of the University of California, Santa Cruz, on how organic, Fair-Trade, eco-friendly coffee could potentially help poor farmers in developing economies get out of poverty. Our main objective is to present to you the cutting-edge academic research on coffee-related issues in a non-academic language. Stay tuned for more of these geeky but exciting posts.

You may want to ask yourself why we, as an academic economist and a policy expert, fell in love with coffee and decided to devote our time to this blog. We have explained it all in the About the Hounds section. For those who have known us before, this section will give you eye-opening stories of the “dark” (but creamy and aromatic) side of our lives. We hope it entertains you and answers your curiosity.

You may also want to know what we expect from this blog. Well, first and foremost, we view this blog as our way to get us exposed to more people in the coffee industry. This is not only those working in the industry itself, but also those who are frequent customers of coffee houses and share our passion in great coffee. Please come join us in our journey to search for the best coffee. Please suggest to us where we should go “cafe hounding.” If you have favorite neighborhood coffee houses, feel free to share with us.

Finally, we realize there are several blogs and discussion boards out there covering coffee and cafes. Many of them are fantastic and comprehensive. By no means do we view our blog as their competitor. Instead, we think that our blog will offer something different, and provide you with both casual and more formal, semi-academic knowledge. The Cafe Hounding section does not rate the cafes (like yelp or other restaurant rating websites) but rather presents you with objective reviews of coffee houses that we carefully select. Most of them are mentioned by local coffee geeks as the “best in town” cafes or employ baristas who have made it to the final round of national or international competitions. The Interviews section gives you behind-the-scene stories about people in your neighborhood cafes and others in the industry that you may not have known before. Finally, the coffee.edu section takes advantage of our strengths and expertise in our main professions as an academic economist and a policy expert. It is very educational in a strict academic sense, i.e. very nerdy, but hopefully is exciting for those readers who are interested in more than just the taste and aroma of coffee.

And with this introduction, we officially proudly present to you… cafehound.com.

–The Hounds

Buzz: Why the Starbucks “15th Ave” Store Is Doomed to Fail

Posted on 2009-09-07 by Cafe Hound | Leave a comment

Source: Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path, Harvard Business School
Date: 2009.07.28

Editor’s note: Peter continues the conversation he started here in his next post, Further Thoughts on Starbucks’ 15 Avenue Experiment)

Late last week, Starbucks opened a new coffeehouse. Considering they have around 15,000 outlets, this might not seem like news. But there’s a wrinkle: the new coffeehouse is called 15th Ave. Coffee & Tea, and is an attempt by SBUX to create a distinct, bespoke, of-the-neighborhood coffeehouse.

Two and a half years ago, Howard Schultz famously distressed over the “commoditization of the Starbucks experience,” and after returning as CEO, committed to transforming it.

But 15th Ave Coffee & Tea is an experiment doomed to failure, because there’s no way a corporate coffee chain can create an authentic neighborhood coffeehouse experience. Your favorite local coffeehouse is the product of someone’s passion, dedication, and probable borderline craziness. 15th Ave is the product of corporate product design and development. Read the introductory copy on the 15th Ave website:

Fresh roasted coffee. Tea picked from the far reaches of the world with care. Artisan baked breads and treats that are sure to delight. A little flair of Italia with some heavenly gelato or affogato. 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea brings these flavors of the world direct to your local neighborhood everyday.

This is so transparently corporate marketing speak. Compare it to the website of my favorite San Francisco coffeehouse,Farley’s, which is amateurish (and I mean that by its Latin root: done for the love) and personal:

Roger Farley Hillyard broke his coffee pot back in 1988 and could not find a store to purchase a replacement part. After scouring the city, Farley’s was conceptualized as a coffee and tea store. Through various incarnations, the present day concept of creating a place of community for the community was developed….The character of Farley’s mirrors the uniqueness of the people and allows for a genuine and distinctive experience for everyone.

Faking it is not a good strategy in bed or in retail.

Perhaps my biggest beef with 15th Ave is that it’s fundamentally dishonest. Everyone knows it’s run by Starbucks, but the website and the store do all they can to suggest it’s a true independent (though the high level of interior design suggests a bankroll out of the reach of most entrepreneurs).

So why not just call it “Starbucks”? About a year and a half ago, I posted on Adaptive Path’s blog about how Starbucks could improve its experience, and many of those ideas are being attempted with 15th Ave. Do the folks in corporate feel that the Starbucks brand is so brittle that it couldn’t encompass this experience?

It’s pretty clear that there’s a high degree of consternation about the associations people have with the Starbucks Experience. I find it foolish that they’re trying to re-engage the more sophisticated end of the coffeehouse market through this new, out-of-whole-cloth creation. What Starbucks needs is a series of “experience interventions” within their existing store framework.

Instead of expending efforts creating whole new experiences, prototype and iterate improvements on the existing experience. Keep fiddling until you’ve found something that hits your sweet spot, that lucrative space above Dunkin Donuts and McDonald’s, and below the quirky and sophisticated local roaster.

When I first heard about 15th Ave, I wanted to like it. I find plenty to admire about Starbucks — when I lived in Manhattan in the mid-90s, they did more to improve the quality of that city’s erstwhile swill than any other single factor. And I think it’s great when companies pilot new concepts, particularly those that are driven by improving experiences. But the clumsy cloak-and-dagger of how this “independent” store’s status was handled leaves such a foul taste that I can only assume it will go the way of Circadia, Starbucks’ failed, late-90s attempt at a similarly funky neighborhood coffeehouse that sold booze.

Howard, stop fiddling with these distractions. Focus on improving the core.

(For those further interested in retail experience design, Adaptive Path recently published a detailed case study of work we did with Mission Bicycles, a boutique fixed-gear bicycle retailer in San Francisco.)