The Pros and Cons

Here’s what other coffee professionals thought:

The Pros

• By manually brewing coffee the barista can create an experience for customers. Apart from the actual taste of the coffee, the human element can be a decisive factor when it’s about whether a customer would come back to a coffee shop or not.
• The manual brew allows the barista to control and adjust every valuable of the brewing process in the moment.
• When time allows, the barista can customize the brewing depending on the preference of the customer.
• Some cafés offer a variety of single origin beans, sometimes as many as 10 or 12. By doing pour-overs the barista can make quick adjustments to each brew depending on the coffee beans.
• Pour-over gear is much more affordable than decent batch brewers. However, the time spend preparing pour-overs might be more costly than using batch brewers.

The Cons

• When a café is crowded and there is a number of people ordering pour-overs manual brews can become very time consuming and increase waiting times for customers.
• Consistency is a challenge, especially during rush hours when the barista doesn’t have enough time to give your brew the attention it needs.
• While baristas put more effort and time into manually brewing coffee for their customers, many customers might not actually taste the difference between a manual brew and an automated brew.
• If too much emphasis is put on the pour over method it might end up distracting the customer from the actual coffee and its qualities.

The Batch Brew Enthusiasts

As opposed to Scandinavian countries or Taiwan and Japan, Switzerland has still a very espresso-centered coffee market. The people behind Just Coffee in Zurich are seeking to change the perception of filter coffee by making it more accessible to the average coffee drinker. To achieve this, they are sticking to batch brew only. “It is quick and easy to make batch brew. We brew using the FETCO model 2131, which is a novelty in Switzerland, with an output of 2 liters of specialty coffee in 6 minutes”. On Saturdays, Just Coffee organizes “democratic cuppings“ using batch brewed coffee. “We let people in the street taste the difference between coffees from Brazil, Ethiopia, or Kenya without the slurping sounds and the hype.” Just Coffee is a takeaway coffee place. “People want their coffee fast and sometimes without the barista’s intervention. This is why we love our “self-service” batch brew pots where people can just walk up and serve themselves.”