Taobao shops, which specialize in roasting coffee, prop up the coffee business with focus.

Jiang Chengzhe and Zhang Jinming are the founders of O-Roasters. These two young Taiwanese who love coffee have a wealth of coffee expertise and skilled skills. Roasting coffee is an interest, but Taobao is more of a business, or a career, fortunately, they do it attentively enough. From the exquisite design of the store to the professional introduction, from the selection of raw materials to careful baking to the selection of packaging, every detail confirms one thing-the European baker makes fine caffeine.

Professional nature

On the front page of Oroaster's store, the first thing you can see is the qualifications and resumes of the two partners: Jiang Chengzhe won the TCRC champion and world runner-up in the 2013 WCE World Cup coffee roasting contest in Taiwan, Zhang Jinming won the runner-up in the 2012 WCE World Cup master contest in Taiwan, and they are both coffee cup testers certified by the Fine Coffee Association of the United States. We not only love coffee, we also delve into coffee. This is the impression the two founders want to convey to consumers.

The roaster's studio is located on the outskirts of Shanghai, with several small round tables, various coffee utensils, soothing music and the strong aroma of coffee in the air, making people think that they have come to a small cafe. A row of graphic display boards placed against the wall are all about the introduction of coffee knowledge, which is an indispensable prop for class.

Jiang Chengzhe, the general manager, is a gentle and courteous young man. When his assistant is making coffee for everyone, he stands aside to introduce to the guests in detail the character of this coffee and the benefits of hand brewing.

Jiang Chengzhe, 30, graduated from Taiwan's National Tsinghua University, majoring in chemistry. When he was a student, he liked to bake and study coffee in his dormitory. At the same time, he also took an e-commerce course. After graduating from university and doing military service, he went to work as a project manager in a Taiwan-funded enterprise in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province. He left his job two and a half years later and was certified as an American project manager by PMP. In his view, these experiences are actually preparations for the present and accumulation for entrepreneurship.

A few years ago, Jiang Chengzhe found a coffee shop on the street of Jiaxing. On an inspiration, he went to the shop owner to discuss cooperation. He provided high-quality coffee beans, rented the venue for activities, and wrote a proposal. "after waiting for a long time, I didn't get a response, so I decided to do it myself. In fact, I didn't think of opening a coffee shop in the first place. I just wanted to bring in some unique boutique coffee. " Jiang Chengzhe said.

"what most people call 'boutique coffee' is general and not so accurate. We go to the American Fine Coffee Association to consult, with a more precise definition, first of all to meet the standards of SCA. " Jiang Chengzhe said while putting a "classification list of defects in raw and cooked beans" on the table. There are many kinds of defects in coffee, such as mold infection, insect bite and so on. According to the counting method, no more than 5 defective beans in 350 grams of raw beans are considered fine coffee.

This is for the requirements of coffee growers, samples of fine coffee must meet this standard. Since it is impossible to buy raw coffee beans from the market without defective beans, in order to meet the standards of fine coffee, the staff of Oroaster have to pick the raw beans before baking and pick them again after roasting. In addition to very few defects, boutique coffee has to go through a cup test, with a score of more than 80 points.

"when you drink a cup of coffee, a lot of things have happened in front of you. Only by controlling every step can you make good coffee, which is not easy." Jiang Chengzhe told the reporter of "World online Merchants". As a good barista, we should not only strictly control the raw materials, but also concentrate on baking technology. For Jiang Chengzhe and his partner, coffee is something they must drink every day, not to mention the pursuit of high taste.

At the beginning of the store, Jiang Chengzhe only posted posts on some coffee forums to introduce European roasters, and never spent money on promotion. "Taobao is pretty good, too. I just put things on it, and some people are interested to buy it. The big reason is that we showed the professional part from the very beginning, so that everyone has a convincing feeling." He said.

Boutique attitude

For coffee enthusiasts, the coffee kingdom is a colorful and inexhaustible world.

"to me, coffee is a very 'chemical' thing. There are a lot of chemical reactions in the process from planting to processing to roasting. Understanding it from a chemical point of view can bring a lot of inspiration." Jiang Chengzhe felt that this was their advantage and adjusted for different utensils and different coffee beans in order to achieve a better and more special flavor.

The demand of the roaster is to make the coffee sweeter, which is not easy. Coffee is bitter if it is roasted for too long, and sour if it is too light. Jiang Chengzhe's understanding of baking is to hope that the coffee flavor is complete and smooth, without a sense of astringency, liveliness, rhythm, and the feeling of beating in the mouth.

Speaking of Zhang Jinming, Jiang Chengzhe would smile and say, "he is also a coffee lunatic." Because of this, the two are willing to devote themselves to the study of coffee.

"many people think that coffee beans have to be roasted evenly and beautifully before they taste good. This is a misunderstanding. For us, coffee should have a sense of layers, such as deeper flavor and bright aroma, and it is good to have a gradual feeling. " They created a baking method called Coreshell, in which beans are quickly treated after a baking, resulting in a difference in internal and external baking degree and a change in flavor. Jiang Chengzhe found it interesting to do so. The coffee changed in tonality, increased sweetness and fullness, and the aroma became more flavored.

Every Monday and Thursday is the baking day for European bakers, on which orders for cooked beans before 10:00 in the morning, including the previous days, should be processed.

On the day of our visit, it happened to be baking day, and Jiang Chengzhe described it as "fighting" upstairs. In the baking room on the top floor, one big and one small roaster rumbled, and Zhang Jinming was very busy. Although it is autumn, the temperature in the baking room is still higher than outside, and in the middle of summer, the temperature in this room is often 40 or 50 degrees Celsius, so baking beans is also a physical task.

In the raw bean storage room next door, the shelves are full of turquoise coffee beans packaged large and small. With the high temperature in the afternoon, Jiang Chengzhe conveniently turned on the air conditioner to cool the coffee beans. Generally speaking, the best storage temperature of raw coffee beans should be kept below 25 degrees Celsius. In another room, staff are carefully picking out cooked beans and spoon to remove defective beans to ensure that the coffee delivered to customers is of high quality.

European bakers bake about 500 pounds of coffee beans a month. Because there are only two baking days a week, too many categories will lead to too much time. Therefore, Jiang Chengzhe is planning to reduce the types of coffee beans in stock, after all, in the case of limited manpower, ensuring quality is the premise.

Like Shennong tasting all kinds of herbs, the two young men tried hundreds of coffee beans in two years and were clear about the flavor and performance style of different coffee beans, in order to screen out the most cost-effective beans. Jiang Chengzhe gave an example: "Yunnan coffee has great potential, but the Yunnan coffee you usually drink may not be very good, so you have to look for it and find coffee that is carefully planted and processed. Now we have a Yunnan coffee after trying 60 samples."

In a half-pound freshly roasted coffee shop, 70 to 90 yuan is the most common, cheap coffee is 49 yuan, and expensive coffee is 289 yuan, but the price of people-friendly products is still the protagonist.

"in any case, I hope the coffee is affordable to the public, so the price will not be very high, but the quality will not be worse than that of Blue Mountain." Jiang Chengzhe said.

Teach people how to fish

Oroaster not only produces coffee beans, but also provides expertise. Offline courses have been officially taught since October this year.

As the fame of the roaster grows, more and more people come to visit and learn from the classics. Although most of the customers are individual customers, there are also some regular customers, such as the owners of offline coffee shops.

At present, European roasters have reached a partnership with more than 50 cafes and become upstream coffee bean suppliers.

"some of them were introduced by friends to learn coffee knowledge in the process of purchasing coffee from us." Jiang Chengzhe said. After making coffee for a long time, he found that the coffee training market in the mainland was very blank, and more and more people asked them for professional knowledge online or at their door. "there are few learning opportunities, and they can't find suitable merchants or teachers to learn these things. In fact, baking is very difficult to learn, because there are so many trade secrets that it is impossible for ordinary people to teach.

Han Huaizong, the author of Fine Coffee, is a teacher and friend of Jiang Chengzhe. He is known as the old urchin of Taiwan's coffee industry and has been committed to local coffee teaching. Inspired by him, Jiang Chengzhe and his partner also began to offer teaching courses in the mainland.

It is fun and meaningful to spread coffee knowledge.

Jiang Chengzhe sees that there are more cafes around people in recent years, and the development of the coffee industry is showing an upward momentum, so it is not too much to use "hot" to describe the opening of the course. After they posted the course information through Weibo and Taobao, they soon filled up with students, and some even came to class from Heilongjiang. The courses offered by O'Baker include baking, cup testing, hand flushing, etc., with an emphasis on technicality and practice. They are usually short-term classes, which end in a few days. "We have also taken courses abroad, and we know where progress can be made. A lot of things still depend on time to accumulate, and spiritual practice depends on individuals." Jiang Chengzhe said.

There is another important reason for coffee teaching. Jiang Chengzhe found that there are many misunderstandings of rumors in the coffee industry, which has led to the popularity of some unscientific theories, making many people think that they have to do this or that. For example, when making coffee by hand, some people firmly believe that steaming for 30 seconds is right. In fact, the right thing to do should be decided by the actual situation of beans. Jiang Chengzhe believes in empirical evidence. He buys a lot of professional instruments and uses data to tell us the principle behind it.

In the past two years, he has spent a lot of time and energy to make up his professional knowledge, go abroad to study and learn about the industry, and his own baking method often makes his foreign counterparts feel curious. As for teaching a group of professional coffee practitioners, Jiang Chengzhe is not worried about the competition at all. On the contrary, he hopes that everyone will work together to make the market bigger.

"A lot of people come to talk about cooperation, which requires screening. What we may do now is to open a coffee shop in cooperation with some elders in the design world. We are only responsible for the technical side and do not participate in the operation." Jiang Chengzhe told the "World Network Merchants" reporter. He has been invited to Yunnan many times and met many coffee practitioners. Every year, local farmers send coffee samples for them to help taste. He envisioned setting up a professional website to open up new business.