What coffee consumption lacks most is a professional attitude.

Gao Wei teaches students to bake raw coffee beans, reporter Guo Yao takes photos of students practicing coffee flowers, Guo Yao takes photos of □ reporter Sun Shuang.

It is either the "fashionable petty bourgeoisie" holding the coffee and posing for the best, or the "temporary office workers" who sit for most of the day with a cup of coffee. The reporter's survey found that at present, most of the people who spend in Jinan cafes are for a drink, and few people pay attention to the coffee itself and the skills of the technicians.

The flow of "baristas" is mostly upgraded by waiters.

Gao Wei, a 26-year-old boy, has a small coffee aesthetics studio, but "sparrows are small and well-equipped", with not only all kinds of coffee machines, but also roasters and teaching places.

"I mainly make money by teaching, selling coffee machines and baking my own coffee beans. Now I'm just starting to make some money, but the students are everywhere. " When it comes to the status quo, Gao Wei has a sense of achievement. He said that since teaching began in May last year, there have been more than 50 students, most of them from Xinjiang, Harbin, Shenyang, Guangzhou, Yunnan and other provinces and cities. These include baristas from chain coffee brands, cafe owners and office workers who want to work in the coffee industry, ranging in age from 20 to 60.

"compared with the current situation of Jinan cafes, this is an improvement, because more and more young people who want to work in the coffee industry want to know about coffee and learn about coffee before making a profit." Gao Wei said that in his opinion, most coffee shops in Jinan lack this professional attitude towards coffee.

"it's not easy to make coffee. On the contrary, it's hard to be a good barista." After graduating from college in 2011, Gao Wei, who studied hotel management, went to the local coffee shop to learn to be a barista, but found that he learned nothing after going to several. "although the coffee shops in Qingdao are much better than Jinan in terms of environment, service and quantity, there is still a lack of very professional baristas. Most of them are quick training and on-the-job training, and know very little about coffee culture and skills."

Gao Wei said that in general, if you enter a better store, you will start with waiters and chores, and you can't enter the bar for three months. Three months later, I finally entered the bar, only to find that the barista of the original cafe was also "a bottle of dissatisfaction, half a bottle sloshing around". "I went to a lot of coffee shops and found that each one was about the same."

By chance, Gao Wei met a professional celebrity who not only knew coffee culture like the back of his hand, but also studied coffee skills. There, in more than half a year, Gao Wei systematically learned coffee knowledge and coffee skills, and then chose better-equipped, distinctive or large chain cafes to apply for baristas, but usually stayed in one store for a month or two. learn to jump ship to other stores immediately. Many schools have learned a lot and accumulated a lot of experience and experience in order to open coffee aesthetics studio in Jinan.

The shopkeeper treats guests with tea and baristas are mostly "quick".

During the interview, the reporter found that many coffee suppliers in Jinan are also engaged in training work. Generally speaking, those who buy more than a certain number of products can get the qualification of free training. "We can start to open a shop in a few days at the earliest." Many coffee suppliers said. Although the rapid training of a "barista" has realized the dream of many young people to own a coffee shop and made more and more young people join the team of coffee entrepreneurship, the unprofessional baristas have virtually hindered the promotion of coffee culture in Jinan.

"at present, there are almost no professional coffee training institutions in Jinan. They can become baristas if they know how to do so." Gao Wei said that there are nearly 600 cafes in Jinan, but few are really professional, and few practitioners are willing to promote coffee culture, because it takes time, experience and money, and they think more about interests.

"the difficulty in promoting coffee culture has something to do with the fact that coffee shopkeepers do not understand coffee. I went to the owner of the cafe as a guest, but he gave me a cup of tea, which surprised me. The other party was not surprised, but said that it was a habit for Shandong people to treat guests with tea. " Zhou Pan, manager of the development department of Hengxin Kefu Coffee Shandong Co., Ltd., also believes that the promotion of coffee culture should start with coffee employees, which is also a help to the promotion of their business.

He said that a long-standing cafe must first have someone willing to drink coffee and like to study coffee culture. "most people who go to the store don't go to the store for coffee, but to take a picture and then have a coffee-flavored drink. If you don't take a picture, you will feel at a loss. "

90% of the high-end coffee machines are cheap "cabbage machines"

"the coffee market in Jinan is at least 5-10 years worse than Qingdao. More cafes only focus on profit and don't care much about quality. " Gao Wei pointed to the Italian coffee machine in the studio and told reporters that this machine with more than 90,000 yuan is all over the streets in Qingdao, but it is rare in Jinan. 95% of the machines are less than 30,000 yuan, which is a "cabbage machine" in the coffee industry.

Zhou Pan's company also sells coffee machines. He believes that the level of coffee culture in Jinan can be seen from the buyers of coffee machines. "due to the greater mobility of coffee workers, such as this fully automatic coffee machine, the price is less than 10,000 yuan, so it is very popular with Internet cafe owners. At the beginning, it is more common to choose a coffee maker with a low price. " Zhou Pan said that the price of the Italian coffee machine in this store ranges from nearly 10,000 yuan to hundreds of thousands of yuan, and it is also the most common coffee making machine in the cafe. Not only can make American style, latte, mocha, but also can make all kinds of fancy coffee, which is widely used. Coffee operators generally spend 20,000 to 40,000 yuan to choose machines with high performance and price. "everyone knows that a coffee maker is like a car, and the high price must make sense."

The reporter learned that there are few cafes in Jinan who roast coffee beans by themselves, all of which buy roasted cooked beans. But millions of roasters are common in Qingdao. "roasting coffee beans requires not only great skill, but also experience. A good baker earns three or four hundred thousand yuan a year alone. " Zhou Pan told reporters.

Gao Wei also said that although he spent more than 70,000 yuan on a roaster and sold his own baked beans, he is still burning money. Roasting coffee beans is a technical task, and you need to look for the characteristics and best taste of each kind of beans over and over again. "for example, the taste of beans is divided into acid and bitter, baking a bean sour is better, the bitter pot may be useless. If you quickly train baristas and buy cheap machines and coffee beans, how can the shopkeeper teach others how to taste coffee? " Gao Wei believes, "if coffee shops in Jinan want to be really 'foreign', they still need to treat coffee as a professional thing."

"We have set up a coffee professional trading center, not only to provide coffee sales channels, but also to cultivate the local coffee culture in Jinan. At present, there are all kinds of coffee machines on sale in the market, and almost every dealer has its own training team. In October this year, we held a coffee skills contest in conjunction with the Jinan people's Society department and trained a number of excellent baristas. I believe that driven by the professional market, the coffee market in Jinan can also become more and more 'foreign goods'. " Liu Lei, president of Jinan Coffee Industry Association, said.

Source: Jinan Times