The Best Coffee?

I was walking towards a café in The Valley when I say one with mass branding showing that they’ve been voted the best coffee in Brisbane; naturally I was intrigued. I walked in and saw banners across the wall of the store showing consecutive years of awards from an institution I’d never even heard of (and that’s saying a lot since I’m a regular at far too many coffee shops and state and nation competitions). So I tried a coffee. While it wasn’t bad, it certainly wasn’t the best coffee I’d tasted in Brisbane.

This situation got me thinking about competitions and awards for coffee. There are so many things that cafés get judged on that it’s just difficult which ones to take seriously. For example, I remember last year an online poll for the best Brisbane coffee. All you had to do was put your vote into the webpage (no grading system) and the results were constantly shown for the best voted coffee shop. At the start, when the only people who knew about the page were coffee shops owners and some of the big coffee bloggers (I had my in with one of the coffee champions and heard about it), the results actually indicated pretty well how I would have ranked the cafés of Brisbane. Then some of the coffee shops started promoting it to their customers to vote, even to the point they were handing out flyers for the website. All this really meant was that the masses would win the award and not the best coffee. The end result was that the big “chain” cafés got more votes leaving the independent and actually better coffee shops in the background.

 

This is the same with the awards that Michele’s patisserie for best coffee shop of the year, and McCafe the best coffee chain for customer satisfaction. These awards come down to the specific criteria of these institutions, however this just gives customers a false sense of what constitutes a good coffee. It just perpetuates the idea that substandard coffee is good, not opening customers up to what good coffee actually is.

Of course I understand that taste is a subjective thing, and we all value different aspects of coffee shops in different ways. For me I value the taste above all – if it’s good I’ll come back, if not there’s no real point. It can be a whole in the wall coffee shop for all I care, as long as the coffee is good! However, we often group coffee and the coffee shops in the same thing, judging the food, service, décor and other criteria into what makes the best “coffee”.  

I find the amount of awards that now roam the market as somewhat ridiculous; they just devalue the proper awards!