Coffee Club

Throughout 2019 I ran our team’s coffee club. I was committed to documenting how the service ran. Including publishing the data openly.

I wrote a blog post about it, which some people got a kick out of. So I’m back writing an update just as I hand the keys to the car to my fantastic colleague Isaac.

Obviously, as I type this… we aren’t drinking much coffee together. I’m sure in the near future the team will be huddled around our little cafetiere, slurping freshly made brews and enjoying each other’s company. This blog post is a homage to those times.

How does Coffee Club Work in 2020

A few minor changes from last year’s coffee club but it mostly worked as follows…

• I’d buy the coffee and bring it in
• team all contributes to making the coffee and cleaning the cafetiere
• it’s nearly always ground coffee (we have had another week of beans we grinded ourselves)
• last year I scored all the coffee’s myself (see a funky graph below I’ve thrown together below). I’ve changed this approach for 2020. Now we stick a post in slack and get the team to give a % score in the comments. Then I average the score. Some are harsher markers than others.
• to my knowledge most people drink the coffee black, no milk of any kind.
• typically very strong if I make it (sorry squad)

Coffee

Total coffee we have either consumed or awaiting to be consumed is 4318 grams.

That’s about the weight of a heavy-ish three-toed sloth.

I now track when we first opened the coffee so know that in January we opened 4 coffee products, in Feb we opened we opened 3 (but one was a MASSIVE tub of coffee - 1.36kg worth) and in March we opened just the 1.

That means we are on pace to drink 17.3 kg worth of coffee by year end. Just imagine… 4x heavy three-toed sloth’s worth of coffee.

Average strength of coffee is 4.5.

Origin

A new one for 2020.

Most of our coffee thus far has come from Colombia. Wonderful land of coffee, the world’s finest emeralds (which I don’t have a spreadsheet about) with 70-90% of emeralds coming from Colombia and Cotton-top tamarin’s.

I’ve made a map where you can see the other lovely places that our other coffee’s have originated from if interested. I had plans to measure the carbon footprint of this but… in sum it’s tricky.

We do think about sustainability (I’ve wrote about that too) and by making pots of coffee for each other we avoid making/buying individual cups of coffee. We also all have a mug so no paper cups or plastic lids here. Certainly more can be done but it is a start.

Scores from last year

As a reminder of what went down last year…

Scores in 2020

Armed with a new scoring mechanism we currently have the top coffee as…

Best - Union Organic Natural Spirit Cafetiere Grind

Score: 79%

The 3rd most costly coffee (per 100g). Good solid brew. Apparently notes of toffee fudge and sugared lemon.

Worst - Cafe Direct D.R.Congo (whole beans) - London Fields Roastery

Score: 68%

What a fall from grace. From the second highest score last year, now the worst or joint worst depending how happy you are to round up scores. Danesi Coffee also deserves a wooden spoon for scoring just as bad.

Average Score

Last year was 69.38%. I also casually reviewed a bog-standard Costa Americano around the 58% region as a score to reference.

This year… 72.75%

Livin’ the high life.

Although keep in mind… the way we score has changed and we didn’t have any of the vile Zanzibar vanilla coffee in 2020 which scored a pathetic 11% last year.

Trend

In an unusual turn of events so far the trend suggests paying more doesn’t necessarily mean better quality. I doubt this will hold out but

Costs

Total spent so far: £55.60 Total contributed from team: £50.22 That means we are projecting about; Predicted year end spend: (up from 2019’s £136.18) Predicted year end contributions: (up from 2019’s £100)

For 2020 Coffee Club I setup a monthly slack reminder which links to a way to pay for Coffee Club. It’s still a honour system but with more nudging to contribute. I feel the iteration has improved the fundraising.

Here is a graph on funding thus far…

Cost per coffee

2019 we had;

• Average cost of the bag of coffee = £2.23
• Median cost of the bag of coffee = £2.40

2020 is;

• Avg cost of coffee bag = £4.63
• Median cost of the bag of coffee = £3.25
• (NEW MEASURE ALERT) Average cost per 100g of coffee = £1.54

Money Saved?

Going off the same calculations as last year of 18g of coffee = a double espresso I can still say we are saving a good amount of £££.

We’ve drunk roughly 239.9 double espressos. At £2 per cup that would be equivalent to paying £479.77 for what we have drunk.

As we only paid £55.60 then we have saved roughly £424.17. Not bad going.

Iterations for 2020

Last year I wrote about some metrics I’d like to move and had some hypotheses about how to make things better. Here is my review on how I’m doing so far…

Invest in more expensive coffee

✓ So far we’ve increased the average and median costs. At year end it will be interesting to see the cost per 100g measure as we’ve got bigger bags/tins of coffee which can skew some of the results.

Creating a slack reminder would encourage more regular funding of coffee club

✓ In operation! Looks promising so far.

Get more people to score the taste to balance out my biases

✓ We have team scoring this year. We have had 1 colleague buy and bring in coffee for the club without any involvement from me. That would be good to encourage. Especially when colleagues go on holiday and spot exciting coffee to try (except a ban on all Zanzibar vanilla coffee).

Record origin of coffee

✓ doing - 6 countries so far!

Record date first drunk

✓ doing.

Not done… yet

I’ve not hit every target. I talked about measuring the carbon footprint of the club. This takes more brain effort than I’ve had capacity to give. Still would be wonderful to do. I also talked about potentially trying alternate methods of coffee making and recording if they influence our scoring. We haven’t done this but it is still possible.

Final thoughts

This will be my last post about Coffee Club as I’m moving on to new pastures. Recently one of my colleagues linked to to a great blog post about the importance of colleagues making hot beverages for one another.

I agree with much of it. It’s been both a fun expression of creating a service, monitoring performance, storytelling with data, helping save us all money and helping to glue colleagues together through mugs of caffeine.