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Coffee Community

Midway House
Huddersfield Rd,
Meltham
Huddersfield
HD9 4AF

01484 34 00 33
 

David Olejnik (left) and Paul Meikle-Janney

Paul Meikle-Janney of Coffee Community in Huddersfield has an unusual all-round experience, which tends to come in very useful for those who run coffee-bars and cafes – he has cheffed, tended bar, and run catering operations (indeed, he won an award for doing so). He has designed cocktails, and designed coffee-carts. He has written comprehensive training courses and manuals, and trained baristas around the world.

And still, delightfully, he enjoys getting behind the counter, making a drink, and serving it to an appreciative customer… most notably at a recent Glastonbury festival, where he found himself required to make a cappuccino for one of his great rock heroes, Roger Daltrey of the Who.

So this is not a ‘distant’ supplier of services to the beverage trade, but one which gets involved and gets its corporate hands dirty!

Coffee Community’s support can come in well before a coffee-house even opens.  Typically, the company has been involved in the planning of many ‘corporate’ coffee-houses, such as the ones inside big company offices, and it has been their advice early on which has saved many projects from immediate disaster.

“A major issue is always too many opinions going into the setting up of a cafe,” says Paul Meikle-Janney. “The original idea is to serve coffee, which is fine, until someone else suggests serving food, and another says ‘and a bacon roll’, and then someone else suggests tapas, and pizza, and suddenly the whole project gets elevated to the level of Carluccio’s.

“I’ve seen projects fail completely because of this – instead of being happy with a focussed scheme that pays, too many people plan grand schemes which are doomed!”

In sharp contrast, Coffee Community is just as happy to get involved right at the other end of the beverage trade, at coffee-cart level. 

“A coffee-cart can quite literally be a barrow, and can be very profitable,” says Meikle-Janney. “It’s perfectly possible to wash your face on a turnover of £100 a day, and I’ve known a coffee-cart do £4,000 a week.

“By contrast, a badly-planned and unfocussed £50,000 café can go completely wrong. That’s why you have to understand the focus of what you want to do.”

As an enthusiastic practical caterer, he is equally happy to discuss the question of outfitting, which in turn leads to the fraught matter of customer-flow.

There is a lot of sales psychology which is worth knowing. Starbucks have done it very well, from tricks such as the use of the right fabric to create the right feel, the right height of the bar ceiling for atmosphere, and maybe the use of a few steps to create a tucked-away area as a ‘snug’ for meetings.

“But we have also seen the most beautiful coffee bars fail because the customer didn’t know where to stand, or in which way to walk to the till.  You can lose a fortune by getting this wrong, and we see it time after time. If people are waiting for their drink before they pay for it, you will have a bottleneck, and unhappy customers.

“In a well-designed bar, people will know where to stand, and they will flow in the right direction. The ideal system is – order, pay, and wait for your drink. This is a linear system, something which Starbucks got absolutely right.”

Barista training, one of Coffee Community’s major services, is handled in a way which makes it nothing to be frightened of.

“There’s a lot of tosh talked about barista training,” laughs Paul Meikle-Janney. “You don’t really have to study with shaolin monks for three years!

“For someone with the right attitude, a day’s training will get them the basics, and another day will get them delivering confidently. Now, a lot of people will say that it’s easier to economise by not paying to train staff, and by having a fully-automatic machine, set to deliver coffee as fast as possible, but this isn’t right.

“There is a fixed time it takes for water to ‘extract’ flavour from coffee – and you can’t speed it up. There is still the requirement for religious and vigorous cleaning, every day, and there is still the need to understand the principles of grinding coffee.

“The traditional espresso machine may in fact be cheaper, more hard-wearing, and far more flexible in use when operated by someone who has been trained to know what they’re doing.”

And for the experienced barista, Coffee Community can provide practical experience in the particular skill of competition – a barista contest can be great fun, and also a great learning experience.  There is also the related skill of the cocktail contest, or in the case of coffee, the Coffee In Good Spirits contest, in which staff have to divide a drink which mixes coffee and alcohol.

The Coffee Community team are experienced competitors in all the contests, and often support beverage operators who want advice on how to ‘perform’ best in such situations, or advice on how to make up a unique signature beverage.

Some of these creations can be simple, and some can be difficult to imagine - Paul Meikle-Janney himself is responsible for one recipe involving baked beans, lager, maple syrup and chili, as a result of time spent in Santa Fe. However, he adds, the general coffee-bar or restaurant can work very profitably by appreciating how the less complex drinks work – the classic espresso martini, he points out, has only two ingredients!

Coffee community will work  with you to get the hot beverages right...

... and then maybe suggest the cold speciality drinks...

... and then advise on the washing-up technique!