Since Bar Nine started, one of our founding goals was to do whatever we could to make a positive difference in the world around us. On the sustainability side, in addition to being partially solar powered, we have been so proud of offering our Glass Jar takeaway program. It's very simple, we give the guest the jar on their visit, and ask them to return it the next time they come in. It has been a huge success. We see somewhere between 50-60% of our jars returned, which is really amazing, but we feel that is only a first step.
Our dream: to see a 100% return rate on our glass takeaway program. It is an ambitious idea, but we are ambitious people, and we are confident we can create a context to achieve that goal.
Our plan moving forward is simple. Starting January 1st, upon return of your Glass Jar, we will cover 25 cents toward your next drink. It's our way of saying thank you for helping to not contribute to the massive waste problem from coffee bars around the world. In that same vein, we will also be offering 25 cents off your drink if you bring in your own re-usable takeaway cup.
1 disposable coffee cup thrown away is a small thing in isolation, however over 1 billion cups are thrown away each year from coffee bars alone. There are some areas where we can all make big changes to our every day lives and routines to help the peril facing our planet, and there are some smaller areas like this. By acting together, the total sum of our actions can make a huge difference.
Written by Tatiana Ernst
Walk through LA’s Highland Park nowadays and you’ll see a wave of new coffee shops and restaurants. Most sit on York Boulevard or Figueroa Street, main drags where you’ll find a diverse mix of old and new businesses. But sometimes you want to relax somewhere more off the beaten path. This is where you’ll find organic restaurant Amara Kitchen, tucked away on a quieter, mostly residential street, and inside Amara Kitchen, a temporary new outpost for the cafe/roaster Bar Nine.
Bar Nine owner Zayde Naquib met the Amara team as both were starting their businesses early in 2014. Naquib says that Amara Kitchen was one of the first places to serve Bar Nine’s roasts before it even opened as a shop. When Amara completed some renovations this year, creating a more spacious restaurant, Naquib saw an opportunity to join in. He says that along with the expansion, Amara “had been wanting to elevate their coffee service. We realized very organically through conversation we could do a joint pop-up—Amara doing brunch in our cafe and us bringing our coffee service to theirs. It’s a really cool partnership between two like-minded businesses.”
Naquib likens the thorough yet tightly fitted bar setup to jidoka—a Japanese concept that translates as “automation with a human touch.”
“I really want to see if we can rethink the role of the barista in the coffee bar,” he says, “have them focus on monitoring production, and focusing our training in the way you’d develop skills as a sommelier, with a little less on the technical side of making coffee.” One interesting way he does this is by removing the need for grinding beans for the Marco Jet batch brew by using what he says are “nitrogen-flushed packets of ground coffee that we dial in at our headquarters in Culver City. If a coffee tastes best four days off roast, that’s the taste we’re preserving with our packets, which we refresh weekly.” Without a batch-brew grinder on the premises, the pop-up has room for both a La Marzocco Linea PB and a La Marzocco Vulcano Swift grinder.
Another alternative—and admirable—move is in the takeaway cups. “The glass takeaway cups are a big hit,” says Damkoehler. The screw-top containers are reusable, attractive, and practical, the kind of thing we’ll see more of as coffee continues to embrace sustainable goods.
For now, Naquib says the pop-up will run for six months, with the possibility of it turning into a permanent “satellite location.” It’s a bit of an experiment for Naquib, who hopes to expand the jidoka concept through his wholesale partners. “Imagine tasting the exact same extractions all over Los Angeles in cafes, restaurants, and more,” he says. “I think we can achieve a level of consistency that can currently only be found in the Starbucks and Peet’s of the world, but with some of the best coffees produced seasonally and developed to their optimal potential. If our partners can focus on what makes them special, and we can deliver the coffee quality, I think we can help create some really amazing guest experiences. The pop-up is in many ways the proof of concept of this idea.”
Tatiana Ernst (@TatianaErnst) is a Sprudge staff writer based in Los Angeles. Read more Tatiana Ernst on Sprudge.
]]>Written by Zac Cadawalder
I love a good pop-up, and Los Angeles’ Bar Nine is adding an interesting twist to the temporary coffee bar. Inspired by the Japanese manufacturing concept known as Jidoka, which translates to “automation with a human touch,” Bar Nine is ditching many of the manual processes in coffee making in favor of automation, allowing more focus to be on hospitality.
For their six-month pop-up at Highland Park’s Amara Kitchen, Bar Nine is implementing pre-ground, nitro-flushed coffee packets for batch brew, espresso grinders with automated dosing and tamping, and an espresso machine with pre-programmed weight-based yield. The goal of taking what many would consider to be the art of barista-ing is to create a quieter, less messy bar that also allows the barista to focus more singularly on the customer service aspects of the job, to have “hospitality to be the thing that is felt first and foremost” as Bar Nine puts it.
The service-forward idea for a coffee bar is nothing new, but Bar Nine’s introduction of the Jidoka concept is a new wrinkle. It’s definitely worth checking out for anyone in the greater L.A. area.
Bar Nine’s six-month Amara residence began last Wednesday and is open 8:00am to 4:00pm daily.
]]>Written by Nick Brown
Three-year-old Los Angeles-based roaster/retailer Bar Nine has branched out from its Culver City headquarters to open a popup shop inside Amara Kitchen, one of the coffee company’s wholesale partners based in Highland Park.
Aside from being the latest evolution in a mutually beneficial relationship — Amara has also begun serving brunch daily at Bar Nine’s café — the popup shop represents an interesting exercise in café planning and workflow, inspired by the Japanese concept of jikoda (自働化), which was popularized by Toyota in the manufacturing world and can be loosely defined as “automation with a human touch.”
The popup shop has been designed and equipped to minimize loud noises from grinding and messiness from manual preparation, allowing baristas to focus more on hospitality and customer interactions — all while serving filter coffee and espresso drinks that meet Bar Nine’s quality standards.
To this end, Bar Nine is using pre-ground, nitrogen-flushed packets of coffee for batch brews, automation for tamping and grinding for espresso, and a single espresso machine where exact yields by weight are also programmed.
“Ultimately everything we do in design is about guest experience,” Bar Nine Co-Founder Zayde Naquib told Daily Coffee News just prior to last week’s opening. “We wanted the equipment to be easy to work on for our baristas and be very ergonomically sound, while utilizing automation intelligently for a more consistent coffee.”
The tools Bar Nine is incorporating for the concept are a La Marzocco Linea PB espresso machine with Auto Brew Ratio technology, including scales built into the drip tray, paired with a La Marzocco Vulcano grinder that allows for automated dosing and tamping. For batch brews, the Bar Nine popup team will be using a Marco Jet6, which Naquib described as having “an amazing amount of programming potential.” Drip and cold-brew preparation will involve the pre-ground packets.
“This is not a new idea in and of itself, but I think the presentation of high-end specialty coffee through this medium is unexplored and really interesting,” said Naquib, who founded the roastery with Jereme Pitts in 2013 before opening to the public in April 0f 2014. “Honestly the thing I’m most excited about is not the equipment, but the area we created for drink pickup, which is essentially a floating piece of marble that emanates from the counter. It really puts an emphasis on the reception of the drink from the barista in a warm and open way.”
Naquib described the jidoka application as a natural extension of Bar Nine’s roastery, where they are already putting the concept into practice. Its performance at the Amara popup may also potentially result in some new operational modeling for the Bar Nine café as well as in wholesale.
“The retail bar at Bar Nine is about evolution, so I imagine we will always be trying to refine and incrementally improve the way we approach coffee there,” Naquib said. “Much of the quality control we will be taking place at our headquarters in Culver City. I’m really interested in the concept of treating our main facility as sort of the central nervous system, where we can focus with our small team of doing everything we can to ensure quality, and see how we can repeat that out in the real world, first through our popup, then through partnerships with wholesale partners.”
In eliminating some manual tasks for baristas, Naquib sees additional opportunity to help staff develop a broader range of skills, always with the customer experience in mind. Said Naquib, “With these more automated set ups, we want to focus more in-depth on the things we think matter the most, namely palate development, breadth of knowledge, and a deep sense of service to our guests.”
The Bar Nine popup is now brewing daily from 8-4 inside Amara Kitchen at 519 N Ave 64in Highland Park, Los Angeles.
]]>Starting January 1st 2016, we will be eliminating tips at Bar Nine.
One of the founding principles this company was built on was hospitality, as well as offering work in this field as a potential career that is rewarding and engaging for our team. This is something I’ve thought about doing for a long time, but after Danny Meyer announced he was eliminating tips from his restaurants, it inspired us to just go for it.
The major reasons and benefits of making this move are to:
It fits into our model of trying to “do business better” as we have demonstrated with our commitment to sustainability through solar energy and a glass-only take-away program. We feel strongly that change in the community comes through the efforts of small businesses as much as anything else, so we want the choices we make to reflect that
Ultimately we feel it’s the way the industry will go completely over time. Since this is obvious to us, we don’t think waiting makes sense. There is, after all, no time like the present.
Our bar team will have a substantially higher base rate than industry averages and will have a revenue sharing program added as well. The better the business performs, the more opportunities for growth personally for each of our team members.
To accommodate the change, we will be introducing very modest price increases to our items in January, most items will be .25 to .50 cents higher than current pricing. Given our average tipped amount is higher than that, often our guests will be spending less money than they do now. This is a very exciting prospect for us.
]]>Today through Saturday we will be at the US Coffee Championships, hanging out at the Modbar booth talking pressure profiling. Because of this, I wanted to post some thoughts we had on the subject. At Bar Nine, there is no such thing as good enough and every day marks a new challenge to yesterday’s thoughts and ideas. Pushing forward is what drives us. Because of this, we love having the tools at our fingertips to explore pressure profiling.
There is a lot of stigma associated with pressure profiling and understandably so. It is not a common practice for coffee bars to manipulate pressure during extraction, and therefore there is little real world experience that comes with it. We have been profiling for the past year and a half, which feels like enough time to address our thoughts on the subject. (for reference, we use Modbar as our espresso machine and the EK43 as our grinder for all espresso at our location)
When we first started playing with profiling, we tried just about everything we could think of. From lever style extractions to V curves to Max Pressure shots to bizarre things in between. We weren’t necessarily improving the coffee we were serving, we were just making it different. After about 2 months, we started learning one absolute truth, which is that there aren’t any. Every coffee, and therefore every profile curve, is different. From bean density in green coffee to solubility and degree of roast; not to mention any of the countless differentiators in the growing conditions, varieties, origin characteristics, etc; coffee is nothing if not inconsistent. What profiling offers us is an ability to work with these ever-changing variables, and craft an extraction right for that coffee.
Given the tools at my disposal, I get to take a unique approach for dial-ins. Instead of just thinking about how to best extract a tasty shot (balance between sweetness, acidity, and body), I get to take it a step further, adjusting pressure to extract the flavors unique to this coffee. My goal is to accurately reflect how this coffee tastes in the cupping bowl. Say for a high density coffee, I might push extraction and pressure a little harder early on, then taper off slowly, trying to maximize acidity then really develop sugars. Or, for a little lower density coffee, I might ramp slowly up to max pressure and hang there, piquing at max pressure a little later but increasing perceived sweetness. If I want to push flavor over body, I might go with lower pressures and temperatures, taking a Yirgacheffe that might taste over-extracted at a 9 bar shot, dramatically decreasing pressure to yield more fruit and floral characteristics. If I want to round the taste out, I might increase my pre-infusion time. If I want to slow an extraction down and don’t want to adjust the grind, increasing pressure or temperature, or decreasing my pre-infusion time, will help me with that.
This is a small window into dialing in with profiling, and at Bar Nine, we are by no means experts, however we are excited at the thought of improving every day. The real summary here is that, if you have more tools and variables to present something wonderful, you should explore them, as any good scientist would do when working to prove a theory. It is true that you don’t need pressure profiling to serve delicious espresso, but given the option and with a little understanding, you can take your extraction to a new level.
]]>-Henry David Thoreau
One of the fundamental driving forces for us here at Bar Nine is making great coffee simpler for our end user; whether that is the guest coming into our cafe, the person making coffee at home, or the pro account making it for their guests. We have worked hard to be focused in our coffee selections, keeping our menu to a fixed number of 3 of the most exceptional coffees of the season. We want to take it one step further.
All our coffees now cost the same.
Selecting a coffee for purchase, whether you are making it at your house or buying for your cafe, should never be a decision based on price, it should be a decision based on preference. What flavors inspire you? What would your guests love to enjoy? What would make a killer espresso, or what would you prefer to serve as a pour over? These are the kind of questions we want to be able to ask our guests and accounts, and variable pricing gets in the way of that. Because of this, we are offering a fixed price for all of our coffee, retail or wholesale*. We are thrilled to work harder on our end so we can achieve this, because we want it easy for you. Whether in-store or online, all of our retail coffee in 12 oz bags now sells for $20. Happy Simplification.
*for more wholesale info, visit BarNineWholesale.com
]]>Written by Betty Hallock
Industrial-sleek coffee shop and roaster Bar Nine Collective officially opened its doors to the public Tuesday in a cavernous warehouse in the Hayden Tract of Culver City.
Founded by Zayde Naquib, who ran the coffee installation at MOCA's Mike D-curated Transmission LA exhibit, and Jereme Pitts, Bar Nine is located in a 3,400-square-foot space that used to be a food truck commissary kitchen. It now features an expansive bar with a shiny new Modbar espresso making system (the first in Los Angeles) and an on-premises matte black Probatone 12 Series roaster.
The coffee bar faces the large glass doors that open onto its patio, equipped with the stainless steel taps and steam arms of the Modbar system, an upstart machine that features a touch-screen panel to control temperature, dosage (a set quantity of water) and pressure profiling (water pressure at the grouphead that is varied during the brew process to alter the extraction).
"It’s not without its trials, but it’s an amazing system," said roaster Mitchell Tellstrom, formerly of Barrett's Micro Roast Coffee in Austin. "The product that it yields -- it’s hard to drink espresso from elsewhere.... The best part of the pressure profiling is it's the first company to really have a way of automating it so it has repeatable results."
The space houses a cupping bar and communal table and features a large outdoor patio. Cuppings have been held each Sunday at noon since the beginning of the year.
Tellstrom recently was serving coffee from Cotecaga station in western Rwanda, another from Karongi Gitesi, also in Rwanda, and a microlot coffee from the Segec station in Burundi's Kayanza region.
Bar Nine serves espresso and espresso/milk drinks with whole milk or its own house-made hazelnut milk.
The new coffee shop emphasizes sustainability (it's partially solar-powered) by using compostable packaging and serving coffee to go in reusable glass jars. Bring your own coffee cup cozy.
3515 Helms Ave., Los Angeles, (310) 837-7815, www.barninecollective.com.
]]>There has been much discussion within the coffee community about the use of the Mahlkonig EK43 as an espresso grinder since Matt Perger, with the coaching of Ben Kaminsky, flipped espresso preparation on its head at WBC last year. Being something wholly new, it sparked opinions greatly positive and extremely skeptical. As we prep Bar Nine for our official launch, I thought it would be a good time to share our thoughts with our experiences.
Our set-up: Modbar espresso units + Mahlkonig EK43. First, in speaking of the EK, it is now abundantly clear we are pulling a different kind of shot. It has to be as our extraction percentages have changed dramatically, 21-23% being the range. In addition, the dramatic reduction of fines, enables us (or forces us, perhaps) that we grind much finer than what is traditionally used for espresso (we’re talking “Turkish-level” here). What does this mean in the cup? Well this is where the answers get simultaneously vague, at-times frustrating, and other times increasingly exciting.
Looking at more traditional 9-bar extractions, these are rounder, sweeter, and clearer than before. You can extract more, which means “luongo” can be pretty tasty with the right coffee. And if you serve a very lightly roasted coffee as we do, this is a good thing, because curbing shot volume is very difficult. You’re basically always operating at the finest possible setting. There are ways to compensate: the now infamous nutating tamp, or otherwise throwing traditional parameters out the window and going for a new kind of definition for espresso. This is acceptable, but as a barista who agonizes over control, the answer lies elsewhere.
What it seems to boil down to for me is an altered balance of both constants and variables, The definite constants before were dose/beverage weight as well as brew temperature and pressure. Your variable to achieve your goals became adjustments to grind setting. (The aforementioned is assuming these are our accepted starting goals in quality-oriented cafes). The way to bring control back into the process is to add grind setting to your constant list and having brew pressure become the major variable (we have our EK pegged at its finest grind setting).
We’re using Modbar, which has a very similar internal set-up to the La Marzocco Strada EP. Essentially, we have 5 stages of profile control at our fingertips, as well as max and minimum pressures, rinse cycle, and volumetrics. We’re using all of them, which takes a lot of work. Suddenly, your simple brew recipe with a single variable of grind size to achieve desired yield becomes a multitude of variables where our goals have shifted entirely. Sure, extraction yield still plays a role in how we craft our profiles, but the biggest thing is we are exploiting everything beautiful our coffees have to offer. Pressure profiling can open doors for new and improved flavor anyway, provided you know how to manipulate it, but with extractions at say 18%, these are glimpses of flavor possibilities. Extracting at the high percentages we are is where flavor really starts to pop. Take a high-acidity Kenyan that can be abrasive as espresso, turn it into canned peaches with sparkling acidity and syrupy sweet finish with a 45 g beverage weight. Exploit the sweet glory of a voluptuous bourbon from El Salvador, pulling a lever-style normale. These differences in extraction are simply more pronounced with clarity rivaling that of a great filter brew. The possibilities are endless.
To wrap it up, in order to put out what you want as a barista, having variables to alter is paramount to the control in flavor presentation we want. By shifting those variables to profiling coupled with an EK43, I firmly believe we can make a more distinct personal stamp on the coffees we serve. Is it for everyone? Definitely not. Probably not for most in fact. Designing a work flow around a grinder used for spice milling presents other challenges. The simultaneous amount of control and the surrender of other controls (ie, grind setting) can be daunting, but once you start tackling it, look out. Your palate will thank you.
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