How I came up with our Menu

We just received our first one star review. We got blamed for not being able to make her americano with half caf and half decaf, a drink that other coffee shops make. Our naked portafilter simply doesn't allow me to do this easily.

When I was first putting together our menu we tried many variations and combinations to decide what was best to put on the menu.

I didn't want to create a big menu just to make sure I put all the drinks that customers will order. Instead I kept the menu small so we didn't put items in that wasn't up to our standard on there.

I knew we are a specialty coffee shop, so the usual cappuccino, latte has to be on the menu. Also our specialty is the hand drip (pour over), so I didn't include patch brew because I wanted to focus on our hand drip.

I was looking at how coffee competitions have always included a signature drink which the batistas make a coffee cocktail of their creation. And nowadays they have gotten very fancy and I felt that was the trend of the coffee industry. So I decided to start experimenting for drinks that had few simple but natural ingredients and combine them to create our drinks. So far I have found sparkling water works well with our hand drip coffee and cane sugar syrup.

Sometimes customers will want to order things slightly off the menu. For example I purposely didn't put americano on the menu so people that wanted black coffee can try our hand drip. But if a customer wants it of course I would make it for them.

Coffee shops have this reputation that if you can describe your drink, then we can certainly make it for you.

But think about when you go to a restaurant. Do you describe your dinner and ask the chef to make your dinner if you don't see your dishes on the menu. Or do you blame a burger joint for not serving a cheese burger.

We put in a lot of hard work in tweaking the recipe so the drink you see done with just a few simple steps can be seen that way. The devil is in the detail.