I'm sorry, pulling flowers has nothing to do with boutique coffee.

Professional barista communication, please pay attention to coffee workshop (Weixin Official Accounts cafe_style)

It's unclear when it started, but it seems to have become a part of fine coffee. When customers visit boutique coffee shops, they feel that there is a flower design in the milk coffee shop, which is taken for granted. But in fact, apart from beauty, what is the use of pulling flowers? Today we're going to explore six ways to improve a good cup of coffee, or whether it's unnecessary.

Taste Comparison Test

Simply put, latte or cappuccino is a drink made by mixing espresso coffee with steamed milk, and the way these two ingredients are mixed can affect the customer's flavor perception. Matt Perger, who is well known in the fine coffee world, conducted the following experiment in May 2015.

First, he prepared two identical cappuccinos with the same coffee and milk ratio and both with a flower pattern. Then, after stirring one of the cups, he destroyed the flower pattern of course, put on an eye mask for himself, and conducted a blind test.

How did it go? He found that if you want a cup of milk coffee that is very balanced and smooth in flavor, then pull flowers may not be what you want. A standard beautiful pull design must have a dark brown coffee grease ring around the rim of the cup to highlight the white foam pattern. This circle of fat is visually beautiful, but in fact, the taste is very strong and generally bitter, so the first sip of milk coffee often feels a little sharp. On the contrary, a cup of milk coffee after stirring, the taste is rich and not overly stimulating, purely in terms of taste, is relatively superior.

Multisensory experience

When you drink coffee, you are experiencing taste, smell, and texture at the same time. Most people think that flavor is formed by these three aspects, but in fact, flavor may have more factors.

Ida Steen, author of the European Fine Coffee Association Sensory Course, mentioned in an interview with the coffee website Little Black Coffee Cup that many people feel that flavor is a multisensory experience that includes both visual and auditory aspects. Similarly, biochemist Olivia Auell concluded after a workshop on specialty coffee that subjects who drank coffee with slow, sad music were more sensitive to bitter tastes, while lighter music emphasized sweetness. In addition, an Oxford University experiment conducted in 2014 demonstrated that participants 'predictions of how delicious a salad is can change depending on whether the salad is arranged like a famous painting.

In general, the so-called color and flavor is that there are many factors that can affect the flavor of your cup of milk coffee, the most important of course is the taste of the coffee itself, but also includes the smell around you, such as the perfume of others or the aroma of some nearby food, the music being played at that time, and even the design of the flower in the cup.

Increase perceived value

Places that serve good food, such as Michelin restaurants, place great emphasis on the presentation and visual design of the food. An exquisite dish, apart from pleasing to the eye and making the customers feel that the food is present, also brings out an important message: the chef and the staff preparing the ingredients attach great importance to their products and do their best to take care of every detail to ensure that they can provide the best dishes for the guests to enjoy.

A number of studies, including the Oxford University experiment mentioned earlier in 2014, have concluded that beautifully presented dishes increase the perceived value of the dish. A similar situation occurs with specialty coffee. The beautiful flower pattern represents countless hours of practice behind it, as well as incomparable thought and effort, in order to present the best coffee experience to customers, both taste and visual. The attractive appearance also enhances the perceived value of the cup of coffee in the customer's mind.

Microfoam and flower pulling

One of the reasons why pulling flowers can be frustrating is when baristas focus only on visual effects and ignore the texture of the foam. For example, when you order a hot cappuccino, and the barista hands you a cup of extremely beautiful milk coffee with swans and hearts and lucky grass flowers, but just as you are full of anticipation and drink the first sip, you realize that the foam is only 0.1 mm thick, which tastes completely wrong, even worse than a cup of French pressed coffee with warm milk.

Cappuccino should have a dense, creamy foam that blends perfectly with hot milk and espresso, giving you a unique sensory experience when you drink it in one gulp, enjoying both a rich, delicate sweet and marshmallow lingering taste.

It would be a pity to sacrifice the taste that could affect the quality of the whole cup of milk coffee for a pattern that would basically be destroyed after a sip. Therefore, baristas should weigh the weight, visual and taste, and master a good balance point.

Easy to market

Instagram, a type of social media, is already an indispensable tool for businesses and a part of the online life of many coffee lovers.

For stores, every praise and share on social media is the lifeblood of their business and the necessities for their livelihood, because these can effectively attract new customers and achieve publicity. So, if you, as a store owner, completely ignore the importance of pulling flowers in order to make everyone fully enjoy the flavor and taste of your coffee, or even stipulate that the products in the store cannot have pulling flowers, the result may be that only your family and friends will track your social media.

Visual media, images are everything, if you want to attract attention on this platform, so that some users who have not tried your coffee are tracking your account, then you should use the appropriate pull flowers. To draw flowers for art

I believe you have seen the works of the World Flower Competition, how beautiful they are, how superb. For the contestants and the whole competition, the technology and craft they pursue and display is to pull flowers. The role of coffee is just a platform or medium for them to perform. So it makes no sense to talk to them about whether the coffee tastes good, whether it is over-extracted, how it tastes, etc. Even for judges, they only rate visual items such as originality, execution, consistency, contrast, etc.

These flower patterns, sometimes with food-grade pigments, are undoubtedly very ornamental, but they take a long time to make. Think about it as a guest. Would you be willing to wait for half an hour for a beautiful but cold cup of milk coffee? In this case, the idea of pulling flowers for art is contrary to the idea of coffee.

Without sacrificing taste and flavor, pulling flowers can indeed enhance the sensory experience of guests, and it is also a good promotion tool for merchants. But there's one important point I think it's important to keep in mind: bad coffee doesn't taste good because of good design, but bad design makes it irrelevant because of good coffee.