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Both locations are now offering chocolate chip and vegan oatmeal cookies. We’re bringing back coffee’s best companion (besides you, of course). Our menu is now available for delivery to business and residential addresses within a 5-mile radius of our Delmar location! Delivery hours are Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. growlers of our signature cold brew coffee, Blue. Thanks to overwhelmingly positive support and the success of our new processes, we’re rolling out a similar model at our Delmar location every Monday through Thursday, starting April 27!īoth locations will offer specialty coffee drinks, freshly roasted beans, Blueprint merchandise, and pre-filled 32-oz. Over the past few weeks, our Watson location has been open for contactless coffee pick-up service on weekends. We encourage you to stop by for a cup and join in the loop. Our company was born because a handful of baristas knew there was a need for a more transparent way to serve and present coffee. The beauty in these coffees is maintained through precise roasting, brewing, and training methods. Good coffee must be good from the start, so we dedicate a tremendous amount of time selecting a few coffees that are fresh and exciting. Blueprint’s icon is a powerful foray into that way of representing coffee.BLUEPRINT COFFEE IS A COFFEE BAR AND SPECIALTY ROASTER LOCATED IN SAINT LOUIS.īlueprint Coffee seeks a mutually beneficial relationship loop among our producers, vendors, wholesale partners, and customers. Words work for many people, but for plenty of others a scale or colors will hit the same concepts with more force. For every coffee, Blueprint creates a robustly detailed info sheet for wholesale clients and coffee geeks, and there they do include tasting notes.ĭescribing flavor requires abstractions. And Blueprint didn’t forgo flavor descriptors completely.
#Blueprint coffee driver
Even though it’s a huge driver of sales, Marquard says, “Its such a poor indicator of flavor.” The colors of the bag, taking that SCAA lesson further, even mirror the qualities of the coffee. Country, region, altitude, process, varietal, harvest time, and, refreshingly, importer are all listed on the bag. Think about how important bitter has become to describing hoppy beers in a positive way. That said, these are great ways to think about coffee, and with just a nudge a customer may latch onto the concepts. Similarly, few drinkers probably think of coffee’s sweetness. The term bright, which Blueprint wisely chose over acidity, hasn’t penetrated the public’s understanding yet. But just as flavor descriptors do, it shows how difficult communicating flavor can be. It conveys its info quickly, it opens another avenue for thinking about flavor, it creates a standard across Blueprint’s coffees, and it’s gorgeous. It’s a bold approach to flavor that succeeds in many ways. In a branding coup, the icon is a riff on Blueprint’s logo.
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Building on this, the characteristics are color-coded, a decision that Marquad says was influenced by an SCAA article on how color can affect a taste experience. The intensity or prominence of a characteristic in a coffee is plotted on a three-point scale. Their flavor icon is a triangle with a characteristic-sweet, body, and bright-at each of the points. Taking all these factors into account, they decided to represent the flavor visually. The flavor visual for Blueprints Toaraco Jaya AA from Sulawesi. As well, they didn’t want to over-determine or sway a drinker’s experience of the coffee. I’ve had bad experiences with that in the past where people actually think there are macadamia nuts in the coffee,” Marquard says.
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“We didn’t want people to think too literally about taste descriptors. The Midwest coffee culture Blueprint lives in is heavily populated by flavored beans.
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They also wanted to avoid misunderstandings. Working in a market still young in third-wave years, Blueprint wanted to avoid pretension, to not be off-putting as co-owner Mike Marquard says. Wine, especially, provided a bevy of ways to represent flavor.Īmong their first decisions, they chucked flavor descriptors, the most common tool used by roasteries. The six folks who own Blueprint (yeah, six) decided to study beer, cheese, and wine to help guide their approach. When you’re deep in an industry, articulate in its jargon and quick with its shorthand, it’s normal that you’ll talk about your product in ways that zoom over your customers’ heads. Louis thought of how they would represent the flavor of the bagged coffees they sold, their first move was to get away from coffee.
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