To learn coffee, first establish your own coffee knowledge system

I have followed more than 20 official accounts about coffee, and every day I am bombarded, liked, retweeted and even saved by the official Wechat account. Then what do we learn about coffee for?

We find that we have a lot to learn about coffee, but what is valuable to us?

Which investments (beans, appliances, books, etc.) are useless?

What are our criteria for choosing coffee knowledge?

We seem to know a lot about stores, products, and baking, but we can't tell when others ask.

Do we really have the core competitiveness of our coffee, cafe, or brand?

How do we build our own coffee knowledge system? Even if your industry or company is the largest, but if the organization is unreliable, do you have the ability not to rely on it?

This article is a review of my study and teaching experience during this period, and also tries to answer the questions that may be encountered by my colleagues in the coffee industry.

Start with why you learn coffee.

Building your own coffee knowledge system is like going from a migrant worker to finding yourself a reliable cafe or a reliable teacher, which is what everyone must do at the beginning! Otherwise, no one will often go to the coffee shop and ask, boss, do you have an apprentice here? But is the restaurant you are looking for really reliable? In terms of career planning, aren't you afraid that the coffee shop you entered will destroy your career orientation and core values?

▲ Coffee learns the "golden circle rule" from why

Why study coffee? WHY

Because of enjoying the leisurely environment of the cafe? Because of the feeling of petty bourgeoisie when holding coffee? Because the coffee flower is cool? Because of the aroma of coffee? Or is it because coffee makes a lot of money? Maybe when it comes to making money, many practitioners laugh, it is very difficult to make money for coffee, so what is the purpose of learning coffee? How can you use coffee to reflect your value? This proves that the most direct benefit of learning coffee is to make money.

Keep in mind that any interest will almost disappear when you can't eat. Most baristas don't make money and look before you leap into the coffee industry.

How to learn coffee? HOW

There are generally two ways to choose:

Working and studying in cafes: in the past, when there were few training schools and lack of network resources, finding a nearby coffee shop to study is the learning path chosen by most friends who want to work in the coffee industry. X Island, X Bank, X Europe and other island coffee chains have trained a large number of outstanding talents for China's coffee industry, but some of them are also due to management problems. And the limited professional level has brought a lot of historical problems to our entire industry, even now that most of the stores are gone, our predecessors are still living tenaciously in our hearts.

Go to training school to learn: now there are more and more kinds of coffee training: academic school, vocational skills training, private training, etc., dazzling, the price is also uneven, often tens of thousands of yuan, less than tens of thousands of yuan. Except for foreign monks such as SCAA or SCAE, most of the domestic training has no relevant qualifications, or even a systematic theoretical basis. Many people are neither poor nor afraid of spending money, but they are afraid that they will not be able to learn even though they spend money. choosing a more reliable one among all kinds of training schools has become a more difficult thing than learning.

There is another mode of learning: self-study, through reading or hearsay, it is not impossible to open a coffee shop without professional study.

What knowledge do you learn? WHAT

Through the pyramid in the picture below, I will find which interval I am learning and sticking to every day:

You can have multiple areas of expertise to play together, right?

For adult knowledge workers, how to improve the height of the pyramid is the most important issue, that is, knowledge learning should focus, choose a direction to go on, and persevere. For the knowledge you are not good at, you need to know who is good at it and try to get help from others. Because the people with the highest level are not the highest in all aspects, just because they know what they are good at and lack, give full play to their strengths and work closely with their peers. Wang Zhigang's "your knowledge needs to be managed"

In a word, learn the coffee knowledge that makes you more professional and make your coffee expertise pyramid higher.

Coffee knowledge acquisition WHERE

After figuring out the purpose, knowing what to learn and how to learn, then I need to figure out where I can get coffee knowledge.

So the process of acquiring coffee knowledge includes the process of screening, so where does the information come from?

Books: fast reading and theme reading enable us to quickly master coffee knowledge, such as: Taguchi Guard's Coffee tasting Collection, Han Huaizong's New Coffee Science, Fine Coffee Studies, Xu Baolin's Bean Hunter, Ishiyaki Zhiguang's you don't understand Coffee, Ke Mingchuan's selected Coffee, Mark Pendgrast's left-handed Coffee and right-handed World are all good professional coffee books. These books are highly recommended and are required for both beginners and foodies.

Wechat official account: the articles in the high-quality Wechat official account, you will find that there is very little chicken soup and practical information. Since its inception, the "Coffee Aesthetics official account" has been focusing on the push of professional coffee knowledge. Interested friends may find that from the beginning of push is from the basic to in-depth coffee knowledge, if carefully sorted out, it is a professional coffee book, and other official accounts are also very good. You can also pay more attention to it.

Reliable shop or seller: it is not easy to find a reliable coffee shop or coffee seller. A good shop or seller can not only have a good coffee level but also a good service attitude, not only can accurately describe their own product characteristics, but also need to correctly guide customers to make a satisfactory cup of coffee, some sellers are limited, let alone guide consumers, thank God for not misleading.

Knowledge collation and preservation ACCUMULATION

The elimination and updating of coffee knowledge is very important. we are coffee workers, not historians, and a lot of knowledge and information about coffee is out of date even before we collect it. I have read a lot of coffee books and online materials, mostly translated foreign articles or articles from a long time ago, and many of them have translation deviations and outdated information. So in the official account of Coffee Aesthetics, I sometimes send some old articles that I have changed. I hope it will be helpful to you, and I hope you can discuss coffee knowledge with me.

For the materials and materials collected, I will keep them in two places:

The first place is the computer or network cloud disk: save a lot of articles or e-books in the computer and read them at any time when you want to read them. Some good articles are saved in time, so that you won't be able to find them later.

The second place is written notes: whether it's a cup test form or a baked form, it's best to write it down in writing for easy reading or sharing. And will be more intuitive between different categories or the same category of horizontal or vertical comparison, will be of great help to their own brewing or roasting coffee level.

▲ coffee brewing record form

▲ Bake record Table

Knowledge sharing SHARE

Teaching is the best way to learn, 90% of the knowledge is transformed, and sharing is the best way.

Then some of my friends will say, hey, I haven't learned well myself, so I dare not mention sharing. Do you have to wait until you are rich and full of experience before you have the courage to share? The official account of Coffee Aesthetics has accumulated so many followers since it was founded. This is also a kind of sharing, ah, the process of sharing we emphasize is the output, as long as you can find the place of output, there will be someone to respond to you.

Coffee shop or coffee company internal training, internal sharing, online sharing, article sharing, Zhihu Q & A, Baidu know, Douban, there are too many places to share. Yes, these are the real battlefields to test whether you know anything about coffee.

If you work in a reliable coffee shop or company, internal communication and sharing is a very good platform, because in the final analysis, coffee is a drink in your mouth, and it is more meaningful for everyone to share a cup of coffee. Although the network is developed, however, in the catering service industry such as coffee, it is still possible to communicate in terms of technology, taste expression and taste sharing.

▲ did everything he could to let people know that you knew.

The use of knowledge USE

Any knowledge that is of no use to you is a waste of time.

By collecting, collating and sharing, you have turned your written knowledge into what you can use, not only in your brain, but also in your SHOW. A novel approach, a creative drink, is the pace of progress that coffee shops need.

Using what you have learned in your work can not only verify what you have learned, but also improve work efficiency. Why not do it? The ultimate goal of baristas is to produce a good cup of coffee. For poetry and distance, get out! It's for coffee and distance! )

About innovative INOVATION

Innovation about coffee is not as difficult as we think, but it is not as easy as we think. There is no way to innovate when you read a bunch of creative drink books or a pair of baking books, just like you can't operate after watching a surgical instructional video.

When we build our own coffee knowledge system, innovation is the cross-border combination in front of each module of the knowledge body system. Our innovation comes from the world as we know it. The stronger, fuller and more often your coffee knowledge system is updated, innovation will be a small thing.

Go back to the origin GOAL

Let's go back to the first step, the Golden Circle Rule.

Through the first six steps, I think you can position what you are learning or want to learn.