Show HN: Kaffee Bitte, specialty coffee delivery for Germany
kaffeebitte.de
kaffeebitte.de
* "Versand innerhalb einer Woche nach Röstung" -- but how long after I order? I'm a spoiled Amazon Prime customer, and I can buy specialty coffee locally at a cafe, and so-so fresh roasted coffee at one of several roasters in my city of ~300k.
* The mandatory subscription is more of a hassle for me. I like to buy fresh groceries (and coffee) when I need them. One more thing to worry about when I go traveling: how many weeks of coffee can my mailbox fit?
On the other hand, subscriptions are great for offices, but which company orders specialty grade coffee? I wouldn't waste it on the typical fully automatic Jura.
* It doesn't say "specialty coffee" on the page, just "frisch geröstet" and "großartig" (everybody can claim that). I was very confused at first, but spent some time to look closer only because you explicitly said so in the submission title. Since there are several roasters in my city, "fresh" is where I start at, it's not interesting by itself.
I don't think you should completely rebrand the beans. Bonanza Coffee is well-known among your target audience, whereas you are some new guys that I don't know if I can trust yet. I'd try to build more on the credibility of the established roasters. A Bonanza bag in the hero image would have been an instant signal.
* The espresso in the hero image has zero crema. Not every coffee gives lots of crema, but for the title image I'd pick one that does, and extract it properly:
http://www.home-barista.com/knockbox/lets-see-your-tiger-str...
* As others have already stated, the registration step is too early in the order flow. I don't want to register before I know that a) I want your stuff, b) the product is on stock and c) I'm okay with all the terms and conditions. Maybe the one coffee that I wanted is sold out, maybe you ship with Hermes or require Paypal. I'd like to know as much of this as possible before handing out my data.
* Phoenix Coffee from Dresden is pretty good
1. Yeah, we should make that clearer. We ship every Thursday, I think that's only mentioned in the FAQ currently.
2. You can actually pause your account on your profile page. We're still adding features there, but will add a section explaining the possibilities on the home page soon. We're also not primarily targeting offices, but optimize for ordering coffee to your home.
3. Good catch about the specialty coffee. I'm not sure "Spezialitätenkaffee" is a thing in German though. We tried to use it in a blog post, but people didn't really seem to understand what it's about when asked. Will try to sprinkle it in anyway, I wasn't aware that it's not mentioned on the homepage.
The branding is tricky, indeed. It's probably easier to catch the attention of enthusiasts with the original bags – I do think though that the amount of people that know the specific roasteries is not super big, especially outside of Berlin. On the other side, we really believe that consistency and ubiquity of our brand is important. We might explore that a bit more when adding more roasters.
4. It's a cup of filter coffee :) Maybe it would help to have a Chemex standing next to it to make it clearer. Or instead, a nice flat white with latte art.
5. Yeah, that was a common feedback. We'll experiment with that.
6. They are! And they're great people.
Thanks again! We got some really good feedback on HN today, much appreciated.
Besides that (and Germans need coffee too!), getting premium coffee delivered is such an amazing thing. I now live in a smaller Canadian city and my fresh roasted, premium coffee options have declined. I've been enjoying Craft Coffee for several months now and not only is the product excellent (I do regular reviews on Twitter, @quinndupont), they are a really great group of people who are always willing to reach out and help or just take suggestions. A start up that actually listens and cares; it's the main reason why I like to support new businesses.
[Edit: one of the best things about Craft Coffee is that they source their fresh-roasted beans from all over North America, so you get the cream of the crop from roasters you'd never be able to enjoy otherwise; you get three different roasters each month.]
And, if you happen to sign up for Craft Coffee (I totally recommend it!), they offer a 15% off coupon code. Look around for a friend's code (they get a free month if you sign up), or (trying not to spam here...) use mine: quinn1922.
B) Since you seem to be a coffee expert: What sort of coffee has a very low acidic profile, whilst having being strong and aromatic?
C) To use the service you need to own a EUR 1000+ coffee machine, which only rich people have, or am I wrong?
b) I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I'd suggest you look at more of the "newer" West coast style of roasts. Look for "medium" roast beans; the old "full city" (or darker) will give you the strength, but little else. Growing location will not have as much of an impact on those qualities as the roast (different regions tend to have different aromatics, but if you aren't picky about berries versus vegetal versus leather, then ignore the growing source). As for the combination of all of those qualities, it might be tricky: "strong" usually comes at the expense of "aromatic", and "acidity" may be present no matter (although, for my palette, "bitterness" is MUCH more important than acidity--some acidity can be quite nice). The basic tips to get quality coffee are: (medium roast) beans between 3 days and 2 weeks old, use more coffee than you would think is correct (best is to weigh your beans & water), have your water temp at about 95c (not boiling), and make the amount of time between grind and brew as short as possible (ideally <10seconds).
c) Certainly not! My daily brew method is an Aeropress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroPress) available on Amazon or better cafes for <$40 (including all the filters and everything). It only makes a cup at a time, but if you are drinking solo this works (and it takes <2 min start-to-finish to brew). Alternatively, try a "pour over", which is really just a holder for a coffee filter, which you can pick up for $5 practically anywhere (most people think of it as "camping style" but they are totally wrong!). Or, French press (<$40), which won't have the aromatics of the other two methods, but will make a nice strong cup. Also, consider splurging on a good (burr) grinder (~$100), it is WAY more important than your "machine".
Thanks for the detailed answer, sir :)
Learn more here: http://www.josuma.com/monsoon-medley/ http://www.josuma.com/mysore-mystic/
You might find a place that ships it online but if you can't, email me and I can pick it up for you at a local coffee shop. If you're in the Bay Area, the coffee shop is in Oakland.
That's always a small christmas highlight for me, and I enjoy it much more than the chocolate stuff that other calendars tend to offer.
I tend to consume a lot of coffee and I'm always happy to find new deliverers with new coffees, so I'll give this a try. Best of luck!
sure thing, can you write me an email at hannes@kaffeebitte.com?
When I lived in the UK, I ordered coffee from hasbean[0], which is totally great. It's still available from Germany, but delivery cost and time makes it less appealing.
Was looking for something similar when I moved to Berlin, but couldn't find anything like that so far[1].
It does seem a bit pricey at a first glance (although it includes postage, right?), and selection is a bit limited... Couldn't work out the frequency and whether or not it's a subscription or you just order online when you want? my German + Google translate are not enough to figure this out.
Keep at it and hope you enjoy the Burgers at BBI near your office :)
[0] hasbean.co.uk
[1] I'm currently ordering online from solvino.de and they offer quite a wide selection from a nice roasters in Hamburg.
I would encourage to remove registration completely or make it optional and let people pay by credit card / paypal for a quick and easy ordering experience.
It is pricey, but it's also really great coffee, that is imported and roasted in small batches with lots of love :) The compensation is passed through to the producer, so everybody gets a fair amount of money – the prices the farmers get are a multiple of the normal fair trade prices, and decoupled from the world market prices because of the higher quality.
I do enjoy the burgers, whenever I can handle standing in line for a while, haha :)
It makes any subscription-based business harder to build here. Even if you offer complete flexibility to cancel any time, people are worried there must be a 'catch'.
Also, The Golden Coffee Box / Boot Koffie has subscription specialty coffees: http://www.bootkoffie.nl/Koffie/Koffie-abonnementen/.
Anyways. Best wishes, and you will probably find a customer in me!
Beside the obvious geographical difference, of course.
I always imagined that the difference in flavours reflected the different geographies - delicate growth in the Darjeeling hills versus robust growth in the warmer Assam plains. It might also be differences in the way the teas are fermented.
What I dislike is making a subscription to something that I haven't tried yet. So in case I dislike the product, I have to remember to cancel it in order to not get any more of the product that I dislike. That adds a lot of burden in advance to ordering it.
Furthermore, on the page "Jetzt starten" I'd like to select the product(s) first, before entering my personal information.
In the end of last year I created something like what your doing here (www.hotcoffeeclub.com), also with customers in Germany and also posted it to HN just as you did (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818369), not sure if you saw it at the time.
About 8 months in I've definitely learned a bunch and I ultimately decided to stop doing it couple of months ago (the website is not run by me anymore). If you'd like to have a chat my email is on my profile.
I'm dpaola2 [at] gmail if you'd be willing to email me :-)
I'll actually have to check my mailbox now, usually anything important is sent via DHL and they usually come by twice daily ;)
1. Find something people need to buy regularly anyways
2. Buy a 20$ one page design from themeforrest and modify it
3. Let people subscribe to the service to send them the item on a regular basis
4. Hope that enough people are too lazy to just buy things like normal people would do
5. Repeat the whole business model with every item you normally buy when you do your groceries, like: blacksocks (overpriced socks), mymusli (overpriced cerials) etc.
Coffee is different to socks because people that like good coffee won't buy it from anywhere.
If i go to $healthfoodstore around the corner i have a variety of high quality, dark roasted whole bean espresso from different regions. I would be tempted to say that the store's prices are almost always lower than your offering and i can smell the 250g bag of bliss before i spend 12eu on it. How do you compete with that? (given that you consider people with my level of coffee-affection your target audience)
Fresh roasted needs to be more than "roasted sometime before we ship it" for me to make a difference.
Offer a subscription, where you put a coffee roaster in my kitchen. Every week you send me $amount of high-quality, well sourced green coffee beans from different regions. I put some of them them in my KBRoaster(tm), push the "dark roast" button, kitchen starts smelling like heaven and only 7 minutes later i enjoy my fresh cup of fresh roasted, fresh ground espresso, directly from a farm on the volcanoes of the guatemalan central highlands! Thanks for the little bag with fermented cacao beans you put into this weeks package together with a note that espresso and pure cacao go well together. If you roast it at your place and ship it dark to me, my kitchen does not smell like heaven in the morning.
Lastly, the grinding process is (imo) where most of the freshness gets lost.[0] Fresh ground is way more important than fresh roasted. Freshl-roasted is only a selling point if you show me that you are actually fresher than $healthfoodstore. Example: provide very fast delivery for the region around your roaster, offering "it's still warm when it arrives" quality.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_roasting#Packaging
Roasted coffee has an optimal typical shelf life
of 2 weeks, and ground coffee about 15 minutes.Good point. The coffee they sell is much more upmarket than what you can get at $healthfoodstore, but the site doesn't make it clear. The beans they use are more expensive, and they are probably roasted more carefully. Grocery store brands typically use an industrial high-volume and high-temperature roasting process, instead of small batches and lower temperatures. If you need 2 tons, would you rather do 100 batches of 20kgs for 20 minutes each, or one large batch in only 10 minutes?
Phoenix Coffee Roasters are transparent about their costs [0], they pay up to 4 times of the regular exchange price for green beans:
We purchased this coffee for USD 10,60 /kg through Nordic Approach. At the same time the stock exchange price for green coffee was 2,50 EUR/kg, for Faire Trade certificated coffee 3,00 EUR/kg. Our production costs (taxes, transportation, packaging, etc.) mount up to 7,50 EUR/kg roasted coffee. Our overall costs are 15,80 EUR/kg, plus labour costs and VAT. (These beans sell for 35.30 EUR/kg)
Maybe a line like "coffee from Germany's best roasters" would make some people interested.
I put some of them them in my KBRoaster(tm), push the "dark roast" button, kitchen starts smelling like heaven and only 7 minutes later i enjoy my fresh cup of fresh roasted, fresh ground espresso
Have you done this before? Your kitchen will smell like hell and your fire alarm might go off ;-) Also, you should wait a few days for the beans to release all the CO2 from roasting.
Roasted coffee has an optimal typical shelf life of 2 weeks
Citation needed :-) I'd say it's best between the second and eight week.
Gute Idee! Werde es weitersagen :)
Apart from that, our focus really lies on convenience for the customer. That means letterbox-friendly packages, outstanding customer support and additional value through recommendations. For example, we can advise you a coffee based on your brew method.