As recapped in the last column, 2015 was a great year for Northwest coffee. The World Barista Championships came through the region (along with the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s annual Event); collaborations between coffee roasters, chocolatiers and other artisans made for awesome collaborative projects; and cold brew just kept getting cooler. Now, it’s time to get excited about everything 2016 has to offer. As the new year dawns, take a look at my predictions for coffee trends on the 2016 horizon.
Roasts will keep getting lighter. For coffee fiends, it used to be that the darker the roast, the better-it was this proposition that first propelled coffee giants like Peet’s and Starbucks into the behemoths they are today. Then, third wave coffee ideology washed through the industry, and people began to realize that roasting too dark cloaks many of coffee’s natural flavors. Over the last few years we’ve seen specialty roasters moving back toward lighter roast profiles. In 2016, expect this trend to continue, and with it, look for consumer tastes to continue to shift as roasters search for the perfect profiles to complement each individual batch of beans.
Pop-ups will keep popping up. The coffee pop-up trend is one of my personal favorites. It mirrors the same trend in the restaurant industry, and as cities grow and space is kept at a premium, keep an eye out for fledgling roasters to test their luck in random spaces like breweries, warehouses and stores of all kinds before making a brick-and-mortar go of it.
Home coffee-making will get better. An increased emphasis on understanding where our coffee comes from and how it was grown, appreciating its unique flavors and terroir, and experimenting with different means of preparing it, will inform our not just our baristas, but our own home coffee-making practices. Similar to the rise of interest in home bartending, learning to prepare gourmet coffee at home will become a focus in 2016 (and don’t be surprised if your coworkers start brewing with French presses and the like rather than using the crotchety old office coffeemaker too). With the addition of equipment such as a coffee machine in homes, the idea of making your own coffee will benefit a lot of coffee drinkers positively. Being able to do this in the comfort of your own home will definitely save you a bit of money, instead of visiting your local cafe daily. Even through there are many on the market, with the help of companies such as Identifyr, you might be able to find the right coffee machine for you faster than you thought. You’ll soon be able to start making coffee without having to leave the house.
Coffee will collide with cannabis. The combination of weed and coffee is already called the “Seattle speedball.” With Washington, Oregon and Alaska having fully legalized the leaf, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau having announced plans to legalize in the entirety of Canada, we’ll see the ongoing intersection of cannabis and caffeine over the course of the year as the rise in weed delivery vancouver services continues. In particular, keep an eye on Alaska, which has announced that it will permit on-site consumption of marijuana edibles in cannabis cafés as soon as this summer, allowing for spaces somewhat comparable to the coffee shops of Amsterdam. This is a great step to getting marijuana legalized. If it does become legalized, then you can buy marijuana edibles online here. Hopefully, this does happen soon, as marijuana can be a great solution for dealing with things like stress for example. It can definitely help make people’s lives a lot better. Luckily for some people, cannabis may already be legalized in their countries, for both recreational and medical purposes. Some of them may even go as far as being able to have their own cannabis business which will allow them to make and distribute their own products, through using equipment similar to the rosin press. With the increasing popularity in this industry, a lot of money can be made for the people who decide to sell these types of products. Hopefully, this will soon be the same for the majority of the countries around the world.
You’ll read more coffee profiles. This year, I’ll be mixing a number of profiles of coffee industry icons and influencers into my standard Caffeination Cascadia coverage, so drop me a line if there’s anyone you’d like to see profiled, and be on the lookout for these types of features in 2016!
