OAKLAND, CA—When a customer took to Yelp this morning to decry a local roaster’s coffees as “grassy and underdeveloped,” the roaster decided to head to his company’s Facebook page and educate his customer base about terroir.
“We had a customer post on Yelp that our coffees were grassy and underdeveloped and I just wanted to take the time to offer a little education,” he posted. “Our coffees aren’t underdeveloped. We try to showcase the terroir of each and every coffee we purchase, and sometimes those coffees have beautiful, delicate flavors of grass that we want our customers to appreciate. If we didn’t care, we’d just roast it dark like everyone else and tell you to add a lot of milk and sugar like all the big guys do. But we care about the farmers too much to do that.”
We talked to a few of the business’s Facebook followers in order to see if the education helped them to better appreciate the roaster’s menu.
“That was a hard yikes for me,” said Tina James, who follows the company’s Facebook in order to find out which single-origin espresso they have on the menu each morning. “Like, I understand but, like, no.”
“I thought it was courageous,” said Sam Monroe, an avid specialty coffee consumer. “He wanted customers to know that he really cares about the farmers.”
“Their coffee is super grassy, but I guess it’s on purpose?” said Steve Joon, who grabs a cup of drip coffee from the shop every Friday on his way to work. “So I guess it’s fine.”
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