Competition is hotting up in the coffee industry | Hacker News Reader

Competition is hotting up in the coffee industry

economist.com

45 pointsNicoJuicy30 comments

"Hotting up" is idiomatic in Britain.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/384556/hotting-u...

As an American who has worked 6 months in the UK, I never once heard this.

An equally rare but still extant US slang phrase is probably something like "aint finna" or "i'm not about that life"

"finna" is a hypercontraction of "fitting to" (via fit'n'ta) which comes from "fixing to" or "about (going) to". So "aint finna" is really "I'm not about to", which makes the connection to "I'm not about that life" more clear.

[edited to add the connection between fitting and fixing]

[edit2, fun asides aside, I don't see what relevance this has to the original comment about hotting up.]

fixing* to

Same thing. See synonyms under https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fixing_to

I've edited the above to account for it.

Really confused why I'm being downvoted and why you are explaining what finna means.

I'll restate the purpose of my comment again, in detail:

1) I said that I worked in the UK for six (6) months.

2) I said that I never once heard the phrase "hotting up", despite us often saying "make some tea" and etc.

3) I then compared the rarity of the expression "hotting up" to the rarity of certain "American" phrases.

4) I ultimately concluded that though all of these phrases exist and are used by English speakers, they are rare and niche.

5) That is to say, they are relatively obscure and not extremely widespread.

If you have not heard the phrase 'hotting up' then you have obviously not watched a TV weather report or really paid attention to your peers when they talk about the weather. It is extremely common here to use the term when describing weather that is going to become warmer over the near term.

It is not rare, but its usage tends to be a bit narrow and is now most commonly applied to weather or to competition (as in 'the contest is hotting up' where an American would use 'heating up'.)

You are being downvoted for being wrong and suggesting that your limited experience and apparent lack of awareness is indicative of the rarity of this expression.

This comment is really representative of human ego and over-confidence. Note that I cannot downvote you, but you can downvote me.

I offered an anecdote, you offered an anecdote. Many of my UK colleagues said "heating up a pot of tea".

But, since you are so very confident of yourself and your country, you swear to me that my experience is so wrong that people should not believe it happened.

You heat up a pot of tea (or would generally just say you are going to put the kettle on), you do not 'hot up the tea'. The usage is specific, which is probably why you did not notice it or pay much attention if you did hear it. OTOH, it is a very common usage when describing weather or competition.

It does not take much effort to do a bit of an online search to see that the comment you were replying to was in fact correct that this term is idiomatic British English. This is not anecdote and is easily demonstrated through thousands of examples that are but a short google search away.

>demonstrated through thousands of examples that are but a short google search away.

There are also thousands of examples of bequeath but a short google search a way but that doesn't mean anything about its place in modern language.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=GB&q=hotting%20...

Brit of 50+ years here. Never once heard "hotting up" in respect of weather even on a TV weather report, though now I stick to radio and app for weather, as TV weather dumbed down too far. Of competition, yes loads of times to the point of it being endemic. Then "heating up" or "warming up" would be used for both weather or competition. :)

For hot weather I'd expect to hear "taps aff", "baking", "warm" (with a reasonable dose of default Brit sarcasm and Northern accent) or, if the red top media are involved, "heatwave" if the temperature rose briefly over 68F. Along with a few expressions that aren't so common any more like "cracking the flags" (warm enough to break paving flags) etc.

Am I wrong too? ;) It may be regionally idiomatic, but I don't recall ever hearing it even during my years working in London.

You're probably being downvoted because:

1) People don't see the connection that you do between your first sentence and your second sentence. 2) "I've never heard it" is what we call an anecdote with N=1. "I didn't hear it in 6 months" is what we call an anecdote with a very short window.

Your second comment is being downvoted for complaining about being downvoted, though I do appreciate your explanation of why you thought your sentences were related to each other.

This would be interesting to read about, but this article seems very light on anything interesting to me. It's mostly just a summary of acquisitions and mergers.

I'm curious if any coffee fans here have any Stratechery-type thoughts on the future of the industry.

Its more interesting if you read it in a 1940's newsreels announcers voice.

Isn't everything?

Well, the consolidation itself is kind of interesting, I think; while retail food service brands have certainly gone through consolidations before, the restaurant and cafe industry hasn't been quite as subject to it. (Not to say that it doesn't happen, but the biggest operators tend to spin off and trade brands as often as they buy them, like Red Lobster being spun off from Darden, or A&W and Long John Silver's being spun off from Yum! Brands -- yes, that local fast food place that's a joint A&W and KFC is actually two separate companies now.)

Something that this piece hints at but doesn't underline well is just how big JAB Holding Company has quietly become in the last ~5 years: they now outright own or have controlling/majority interest in Bruegger's Bagels, Canada Dry, Caribou Coffee Company, Dr Pepper, Einstein's Bagels, Green Mountain Coffee, Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, Jacobs Douwe Egberts, Keurig, Krispy Kreme, Mighty Leaf Tea, Noah's Bagels, Panera Bread, Peet's Coffee & Tea, Snapple, and Stumptown Coffee. That is a big company. Nestlé's coffee brands aren't all that well known over here, despite the push to get people to pay attention to Nespresso.

Personally, I remain unconvinced that there's a huge untapped market for "better" home coffee and espresso brewers in the US; while this sounds like a setup for a "quality, convenience, and price, pick any two" joke, in practice, it seems like you can pick either quality or convenience, regardless of price. Keurig machines simply don't make very good coffee; a consumer who finds a Mr. Coffee too fiddly is not going to be swayed by a coffee nerd with an Aeropress; and given that Americans don't seem to love espresso drinks unless they're fiddly steamed milk and syrup based concoctions, even a Nespresso machine isn't going to help much with the convenience aspect. JAB's signing a deal with Illy, what led to this Economist article, doesn't seem like it's really going to move the needle much over here, at least; a Keurig capsule full of Illy coffee will still be a Keurig capsule, and Illy's capsule machine that's a competitor to the Nespresso isn't likely to do any better here than any of the other Nespresso also-rans.

(I am, for the record, a coffee nerd with an Aeropress. And a Technivorm, a few different single cup dripper gadgets, a Chemex, and, yes, a Nespresso.)

The best blend of quality and convenience I've found so far is a french press. They're less fiddly and messy than an aeropress (I own one and never use it), cheaper than a drip machine, easy to clean, and produce good coffee. The only drawback is that you do need a decent grinder. A cheap spinning-blade grinder will produce a mix of large grounds and powder that will clog the mesh.

I have a French press, too. I like it, although I am not sure I would agree that it's less messy than an Aeropress, and I think it works best with darker roasts than lighter ones. But, none of the "good coffee gadgets" address the "I want something faster and more convenient than a Mr. Coffee" market that Keurig is going for. I'm not convinced you can get Keurig speed and convenience and get good coffee.

The way I see it, there are 2 factors that make it hard to get keurig speed + convenience and good coffee:

1) Since brew time is a function of temperature and ground size, K-pods can use hotter water and finely ground coffee to speed up extraction of the coffee grounds, even if it results in sub-optimal flavors.

2) K-Pods probably have a complicated supply chain that would make it hard to ship fresh roasted + ground coffee. I'm sure this could be circumvented somehow, but it would most likely require an expensive solution since it's so time sensitive.(ideally you have coffee ground just minutes before brewing, or at least less than a week before brewing.)

Honestly, instant coffee is probably the best solution for extreme convenience + great coffee. Folgers instant is awful, but companies like Sudden are trying to make a decent crystallized coffee: https://www.suddencoffee.com/

While it's been a really long time since I had a Keurig, I seem to remember that they used around 200°F water, and when I had one of the little "use your own grounds" containers for it, if I got the water-to-coffee ratio right it it was...decent. While it brews fast, it brews under just a little pressure, kind of like an Aeropress.

That was before Keurig had been bought by Green Mountain, though, and it seemed like they were trying to manage as good coffee as they could out of K-Cups. They were contracting mostly with specialty coffee roasters, and the K-Cups were filled with nitrogen to try and preserve the flavor. There were a couple I found that I did actually like, although I don't know if I would if I tried them again. :) My impression is that Keurig's quality control has gone down over the years, certainly with the machines, and one suspects the coffee.

I've heard of Sudden before -- positively, from people who really care about coffee -- but haven't tried them. I probably should. I've taken a few trips to places where the nearest good coffee was quite a distance away. :)

For some reason I've found that vacpots are easier to clean up than a press-pot, but they really complement each other: some coffees go to the press-pot, some are better with the vacpot.

Also a coffee nerd.

(PID-controlled Silva / Rocky grinder and an Aeropress at home, La Marzocco GS3 & Nuova Simonelli MDX on-demand at work)

The steamed milk espresso drinks were a gateway drug. I mostly make straight espresso or a machiatto these days.

I would avoid things like Nespresso - creates tons of waste [1], it's much nicer to freshly grind some beans and brew it in a french press or drip brew it if you want filter out more terpenes.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-24/former-nespresso-boss-...

You can recycle nespresso. Also you can buy some reusable capsules as well.

This is an ad for coffee pods, disgised as investment news.

dunno as the economist paywalls this article for me. i guess i clicked too many links into their site...

The title "Competition is hotting up" should really be "Competition is heating up", right? Is there some play on words here that I don't understand? Using the word "heating" is both grammatically correct and works with the word play. Does the economist lack editing staff?

"Hotting up" is a British idiom meaning the same as "heating up". The economist is British. Not everyone speaks American English.

Ah, that makes sense.

they use it again in the article

> On October 8th, in the latest sign that the coffee wars are hotting up, Illy signed a licensing deal for capsules with JAB, blending Illy’s coffee and cachet with JAB’s commercial clout.

A bigger battle may be brewing.

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