Unless you’re located in the UK
or happen to be a fan of beautifully printed tiny books (Coffee - A Modern Field Guide), chances are you’re not super familiar with the very
clever man that is Mat North, despite his extensive background in all things
After over a decade in coffee, Mat
has experience within the full gamut of the “brown” side of the industry: he’s
worked in both specialty shops and chains as well as consumables and
engineering. Two years ago, Mat opened Full Court Press, a small specialist
multi-roaster coffee shop in the heart of Bristol, known for its excellent
customer service. His team’s ability to articulate their extensive knowledge in
an approachable way that has ensured Full Court Press not only serves
exceptional coffee, but has sparked an interest in specialty coffee among their
Mat’s Cup North talk is a short
and sweet look at the importance of context and feedback, on both sides of the
counter, in not only growing consumers interest in specialty coffee, but in our
own work. Mat gets meta, referencing recent statements and conversations
dominating the coffee twittersphere, and demonstrates a beautifully crafted
baseball metaphor as to how best we can “get out of the umpire’s way”.
NOTE: Due to some unfortunate interference with our wireless microphone, Mat's conclusion was horribly muffled. We're in the process of adjusting the audio file as best we can to compensate for the interruption, but in the meantime, we want to share a transcript of Mat's final thought before the Q&A (currently missing), as it's incredibly important:
If we give them the context, they can enjoy it better. It’s a silly one [the metaphor], but I quite like it.
Let’s come back to this, just quickly. We’ve not stalled--we are evolving, maturing as an industry.
How we deal with this maturation comes from how we communicate: if we communicate properly, with the right feedback, with the right context, we’ll become a mature industry.
Laurent, who is going to talk later, is involved in wine. We shouldn’t be imitating sommeliers, that’s their context!
We shouldn’t be imitating bartenders, that’s their context!
We’ve tried to move too far away from what we knew within the industry from the second wave, we’ve overreacted and we’ve become this new, confused way of looking at coffee.
We need to be brave enough to find our own style of service and through context, we can help everyone communicate better. Thank you.
Want to hear more? Mat references talks by James Hoffmann
(Asia 2014) and Brian
Jones (Asia 2014). Cosimo Libardo, another clever coffee guy that Mat
references, gave
a talk at our first-ever Tamper Tantrum.
