Coffee?

[Featherstone]

I've been using one of these to brew my coffee in for the past few months. Makes a really good cup! Any of you use one or ever hear of it? Heat the water to around 175f and invert the press and do a short steep for an awesome brew. You get a clean clean cup of the dark nectar!
Aeropress coffee maker.

[GeneChing]

I take my coffee black, but this ad makes me think I should add a little milk next time.

[GeneChing]

What is it about Wing Chun and coffee? If another comes up, this totally deserves it's own indie thread.

Leon baristas learn Bruce Lee kung fu Wing Chun to combat stress and speed up service
FRANCESCA GILLETT 5 hours ago


Staff well-being: Leon restaurants have trained their staff in martial arts to speed up service. Gareth Richman

Baristas across London have been trained in the same martial art as Bruce Lee to help speed up their hands so they can serve coffee faster.

Healthy fast food chain Leon confirmed it has sent its baristas on a six week intensive course in Wing Chun – a type of kung fu mastered by the martial arts superstar.

The company, which has branches all over London, said they have seen speed of service and quality of their coffee improve after baristers took on the training.

They are also less stressed, the firm claims.

Some of the workers had even decided to continue with the martial art technique in their free time because of the benefits they experienced.

Orla Delargy, who works for the company, said: “We noticed that the baristas, some of them were feeling quite stressed. It’s quite a stressful job.

“We tested their heart rate and their confidence levels then we did six weeks’ intensive Wing Tsun training.

"We found the quality had gone up and heart rates had gone down.”

Ancient martial art Wing Tsun helps to increase spatial awareness and a better relationship between body and mind.

The trial was started by co-founder of Leon, John Vincent, in March this year. The aim of pilot scheme was to improve performance, reduce wastage and promote staff wellbeing.

After the initial experiment on six workers, 30 seconds had been knocked off the time it took them to make a coffee.

Not all baristas in London have yet been trained, Leon said.

Leon Restaurants

[GeneChing]

I could easily cobble a Starbucks thread by copying previous posts. There are plenty of them through various threads.

Meh, that would be work.

There's an embedded vid if you're that interested...

China will get a new Starbucks every day for 5 years
by Jethro Mullen and Mallika Kapur @CNNMoneyInvest
October 19, 2016: 7:53 AM ET

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is unfazed by China's slowing economy.
Even with China growing at its slowest pace in 25 years, Starbucks is planning to open more than one new store a day for the next five years in the world's second largest economy.
"I think if you look at the 45 year history of our company ... one of the things that we've done really well is that we've always played the long game," Schultz told CNN in an interview in Shanghai on Wednesday.
Powered by SmartAsset.com
By 2021, Starbucks (SBUX) aims to have nearly 5,000 stores across China.
It's been a long road already for the coffee giant in the world's most populous nation, where it opened its first store 17 years ago.
"We had to educate and teach many Chinese about what coffee was -- the coffee ritual, what a latte was," Schultz said. "So in the early years, we did not make money."
His critics on Wall Street and elsewhere said Starbucks "was never going to succeed in China," he recalled.
But his patience paid off.
"If you look five years ago, most of our business, believe it or not, was expats and tourists in China," he said. "Today, it's mostly Chinese."
Schultz expects China to eventually overtake the U.S. as the company's largest market, although he hasn't said exactly when. (It's already No. 2.)
"One of things I think we've done very well is we've invested significantly ahead of the growth curve -- in people, in systems," he told CNN. "We just finished a fantastic year in China where the results are as strong as they've ever been."
Such talk is enviable for huge U.S. firms that have failed to get into China -- like Facebook (FB, Tech30) and Netflix (NFLX, Tech30) -- or been pushed out -- like Uber and Google (GOOG).
Schultz says it helps that Starbucks is selling coffee, and not active in a more sensitive market.
"We're not in a high tech business, so we're not trying to change behavior in terms of technology," he said.
Other big American brands that had enjoyed years of success selling food and drink in China are now faring less well.
KFC, which is owned by Yum Brands (YUM), is spinning off its China business and bringing in outside investors. McDonalds (MCD) is also looking for a partner to take over the franchise of its China stores.
"They have other challenges ... I can't speak for them," Schultz said, ruling out the possibility of Starbucks following a similar path.
"Whether we're in a small city or a large city, we think that the way in which we can be successful is if the stores are operated by Starbucks people," he said. "We believe that the future of Starbucks in China is still very early."
-- Reed Alexander contributed to this report.

[GeneChing]

I bet Starbucks tea is yuge in China...

Starbucks is opening more than a store a day in China and only plans to get faster there


A man walks past an advertisement board of Starbucks in Wuhan, Hubei province, in this October 29, 2013 file photo. A China state television investigative report accusing Starbucks of overcharging local customers for coffee triggered enormous disquiet among journalists at the network and even some soul-searching after it aired.
Lining up early. (Reuters/Darley Shen)

WRITTEN BY Josh Horwitz
OBSESSION China's Transition
March 28, 2017

KFC and McDonald’s have spent the better part of the past year getting out of China. The world’s best-known American coffee chain, however, is only getting bigger there.
Last week during its annual shareholders meeting Starbucks announced that it had reached a minor milestone when it revealed it had opened 2,600 stores in China. That figure is up from a store count of around 2,500 by the end of 2016, and over 2,300 from the start of October, when the company’s most recent financial year ended.
That means that almost 10% percent of the company’s stores—both company-operated ones and licensed outlets—now reside in the China. In 2009 the country was home to just 2.9% of Starbucks stores around the world.

https://www.theatlas.com/charts/ByE1QPD2x

Company data show that during the company’s fiscal 2016, China surpassed Japan (pdf, pg 4) as the company’s number-two market for company-owned stores—the outlets that generate a majority of Starbucks’ revenue. By January 2017, it had 1,212 wholly-owned stores there.

https://www.theatlas.com/charts/S1bDvvv3g

The company’s growth comes as China’s rising middle class, which has a taste for the cosmopolitan, sent sales for fresh-brewed coffee served at retail restaurants surging. Research firm Euromonitor International estimates that the market size for coffee served in cafes hit 20 billion yuan (about $2.9 billion USD) in 2016, up from a mere 1.1 billion yuan 10 years earlier.

https://www.theatlas.com/charts/SJMr0Dv3l

Starbucks captures a majority of this market in China. Three-fourths of coffee shop sales went to the Seattle-based giant in 2014, with the remainder shared by Costa Coffee, McDonald’s, and Hong Kong chain Pacific Coffee, according to Euromonitor.
Last year Starbucks announced plans to increase its store count to China to 5,000 by 2021, which will require opening an average of a dozen stores each week to achieve. The company’s bet on expansion bucks a trend as other foreign restaurant chains struggle to maintain a foothold in China. In January McDonald’s announced it successfully sold 80% of its business in mainland China and Hong Kong to franchisees, as it struggled in the face of competition from local fast food chains. Yum! Brands, meanwhile, spun off its China division last autumn as slowing sales at KFC and Pizza Hut in China burdened the company’s share price in New York.
What has insulated Starbucks from meeting a similar fate? The company’s marker as a status symbol ensures that its brand remains aspirational. As a result, it can charge its famously high prices—which at times dwarfs those in the US. In 2013, various media outlets ran pieces noting how some Starbucks beverages in China were more expensive than they were in the US. State broadcaster CCTV even ran a 20-minute smear piece (link in Chinese) on the price difference, which remains one of the more memorable examples of government-backed media targeting foreign companies (sometimes, but not always, with good reason).

[GeneChing]

Starbucks opens its second Roastery, the biggest Starbucks coffee shop yet, in Shanghai
Richard Simmonds about an hour ago



Shanghai, already home to more than 600 Starbucks, is now only the second place to get an extra-special Starbucks Reserve Roastery.

With a new Starbucks opening up every fifteen hours in China, adding to the more than 3,000 shops already built in the country, one more is hardly newsworthy stuff. But the Reserve Roastery that opened up last month in Shanghai is something special, an architectural mishmash of luxury hotel and whisky distillery floor that covers a ginormous 2,700 square metres (30,000 square feet), and has a two-storey copper cask dominating its centre. As with some of its stores in Japan, Starbucks have embraced aspects of the local culture, incorporating Chinese designs such as the more than 1,000 Chinese character-engraved wooden boards that decorate the copper cask, detailing the history of Starbucks and their coffee.



The Shanghai Roastery, the second to be built after the first opened in Seattle three years ago, features three wooden coffee bars, including one that’s 27-metres (88-feet) long, a Teavana Bar, and an on-site Italian bakery.

▼ A special branch needs a special name. Why have a cup of coffee in a coffee shop on the way somewhere, when you can be “greeted by a multi-sensory coffee experience in an interactive coffee and retail destination”?


▼ If coffee isn’t your thing, because you can’t beat a proper cuppa, then the new Roastery also caters to tea-lovers with their Teavana range.


▼ Not a laptop in sight, so who is writing all the movie scripts that will never be made?


The first team of Chinese Starbucks artisan roasters at the Roastery are trained to make unique, small-lot Reserve coffee, roasted on-site from green beans right through to the finished article at the counter where baristas will prepare your ever-so-fancy beverage of choice.



It isn’t just the coffee-making (apparently they use six different brewing methods) that’s state-of-the-art. The whole site has been designed to immerse customers in an augmented reality environment; by waving their devices around them, customers are able to learn about the coffee roasting process.



Starbucks are also working with Alibaba’s Tmall online marketplace so that customers are able to order Shanghai Roastery and Reserve coffee or merchandise to their doors, or sign up for special coffee tasting sessions.

Now, we’ll need to hop on a plane to Shanghai if we want to experience the Roastery ourselves (and perhaps take our own eggs?), or just hope that Japan will be the next place to receive the honour. Which, given the unseemly amount of money we spend at Starbucks, shouldn’t be too much of a push for the company.

Source, images: Starbucks

When my master Shi Decheng came to town last month, I took him for some sightseeing for a day and we got ahead of schedule. When we got back to the school where he was going to teach, it was still closed, so we went out for coffee. I didn't know the area and did a quick smartphone search and said, "There's a Starbucks nearby". Decheng and his pupil just laughed. They said there are so many Starbucks in China now that it is the last place they wanted to go. Fortunately, we found a little indie coffee shop near by that was delightful.