Ideas spread very quickly

The internet — blogs like this, twitter, newsletters, forums — allow rapid sharing of information. The downside of it is how easy it is that ideas spread very quickly and are often adopted without sufficient testing and rigour.

The above quote is by James Hoffmann from his post The State of Espresso in 2015. It’s a really fascinating post for industry folks and espresso lovers.

The swathe of new coffee shops and coffee related businesses/ideas around Northern Ireland shows no sign of slowing down just yet. Everyone is watching everyone else. You can see and hear the spread of ideas in conversation and in social media activity.

We believe it’s important to differentiate between speciality coffee and coffee and to keep making that distinction.

For us, in the past 18 months we have heard, discussed and rejected lots of coffee ideas.

Not working in the coffee industry has informed much of our decision making. We could change that and perhaps we will someday but, for now we have a commitment to dozens of local businesses and clients through our real jobs.

Shop reviews/guides, apps, events, classes, pop-ups, roasting… even opening a shop. We have talked about all of these. Other people have and will continue to do this stuff — some good & some bad — some speciality but, most will just be coffee.

James Hoffmann also said this at the end of the previously linked article;

I believe that a homogenous environment is bad for speciality coffee, and bad for the consumer.

The wave of coffee activity in Northern Ireland is already looking like a homogenous environment. Eeek!

Ideas spread very quickly. We think we need some new ones…

Originally published at www.coffeeni.com on September 4, 2015.