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Starbucks Roastery and Tasting Room
Beans are shipped from the nearby roasting area to baristas using pneumatic copper tubes and stored in vertical urns.
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Starbucks Roastery and Tasting Room
The complete roastery is visible from almost every vantage point inside the facility.
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Starbucks Roastery and Tasting Room
Visitors can watch as raw beans are poured through a grate and fall to a conveyor belt below.
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Starbucks Roastery and Tasting Room
A master roaster stands available to answer customers' questions even while he works.
In December STiR Tea & Coffee International visited the Starbucks’ Reserve Roastery in Seattle, a new chapter for retail and a major step toward enhancing the coffee experience.
This is the first of two planned Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Rooms, a new state-of-the-art experience for coffee as theater. The 15,000-square-foot public showcase will eventually supply 1,500 reserve shops with a second Reserve Roastery opening in Asia in 2016.
Story and Photos by Dan Shryock
It takes only a few steps inside the front door for one to realize this is not your typical Starbucks.
This is the first-ever Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room, a new state-of-the-art experience for coffee as theater. The 15,000-square-foot facility is the centerpiece of a new strategy that includes at-home delivery of boutique coffee and a showcase for single-origin growers.
The roastery, located on Pike Street in Seattle’s upscale Capitol Hill district and nine blocks from the company’s birthplace in Pike Street Market, combines retail and operations in one place and gives a customer a good look behind the coffee curtain.
At-home coffee drinkers can subscribe to 12 shipments of 8.8 oz. bags of super-premium, small-lot coffee shipped from the roastery within 48 hours of roasting at a cost of $24 per month or $288 annually with single bags of the featured coffee for sale.
“We wanted this to be a theater of coffee for customers,” says senior store concept designer Andre Kim. “(Customers) experience, they learn, they connect with every aspect of coffee that you could ever imagine. There are a multitude of details in this space that allow us to celebrate coffee.”
The Seattle store is the only roastery opening for a year, a Starbucks spokesperson said. A second roastery is planned for an undisclosed Asian location sometime in 2016.
In addition, Starbucks will be launching 100 Reserve coffee-only stores during the next five years. The first five will be located in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
Reserve coffees are now available in more than 800 traditional Starbucks outlets. Expansion plans call for that number to increase to 1,500 worldwide.
The roastery experience starts with your first steps inside the front door. At center stage is a Probat P25 coffee roaster, staffed by a master roaster hired for the job based on both skill and ability to interact with customers.
To the left is the teak-constructed bar with some of Starbucks most knowledgeable baristas standing by. Paper menus at the counter detail what’s available each day.
To the right is a retail area where coffee beans may be purchased by the scoop. Beyond the retail space is an upscale pizza restaurant working in partnership with Starbucks.
This is the only place Starbucks Reserve beans will be roasted and packaged, says Marc Wanless, senior manager in manufacturing operations. Previously, reserve beans were roasted at the company’s Kent, Wash., facility.
Starbucks projects it will roast about 1.4 million pounds of select small-lot beans in the first year of operation. The P25 roaster will be used for in-store retail needs while a larger Probat G-120 will roast in 150-pound cycles “primarily for our flavor-lock bags that will be shipped all over the world to our reserve stores,” Wanless says.
“The Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room has redefined what customers expect from a brick-and-mortar retail experience,” said Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. “Combining the magic of this unique retail theater with our digital infrastructure brings two of our best assets together and ensures that customers can experience the world’s rarest coffees in the privacy of their own homes or anywhere else they might want the most premium coffee we offer.”
It’s easy to draw a comparison between the roastery and a micro-brewery or winery. In each setting, the consumer can see the production process, taste the result and ask questions along the way. Only glass walls and handrails separate customers and staff.
“There are times when I thought of this as a brewery or even as a winery,” store concept designer Kim says. “When you go to a winery, you taste and experience the wine. As our customers evolve they want to get closer and closer to what they’re experiencing and consuming. We’re giving our customers the opportunity to see exactly where their coffee is coming from, to see when it’s green beans and how it’s being roasted.
“They want to see what’s going into their cup. Like a brewery, they want to be very close to where their coffee is coming from.”
For many, it may start with an employee hoisting a burlap bag of green beans into position, then slicing the bag and allowing the beans to slowly drop to a loading pit and waiting conveyor. The conveyor then moves the beans through clear tubes up and across the ceiling to await roasting.
Store customers can watch the roasting process from only a few feet away and talk with master roasters. “When you come in the first thing you see is that roaster,” Kim says. “This is where you truly connect with the master roaster. Someone is always going to be staffed there.”
Beans ready for grinding are transferred via pneumatic copper pipes to one of five large glass urns positioned vertically in the center of the bar. From there, baristas take what they need.
“These guys will tell me they need more of a specific coffee and I’ll do my magic and send it over,” Wanless says.
As a Starbucks global coffee and tea education manager, it’s Chris Smith’s job to help customers discover the subtle nuances of both different coffees and different brewing techniques. That path of discovery starts down a short flight of stairs at the “coffee experience bar.”
Coffee classes for customers are planned each week with each class lasting 30 to 45 minutes. “We’re going to have sessions on how to make great coffee, coffee from different origins, espresso demonstrations, pairings, all sorts of stuff,” Smith says.
“It’s all about exploration. Now we’re going to talk more about where it’s grown," he says. "We can talk about terroir just like people talk about terroir with wine. We’ll take the same coffee and brew it different ways and see how the brewing method can affect the flavor. With all the different brewing methods, we can experiment and let people try a coffee brewed four or five different ways. It’s a pretty unique coffee experience.”
This takes place in a casual classroom-style setting with barista-as-teacher working behind a low, open counter. Visualize an informal laboratory environment.
“We have every brew method available – espresso, siphon brewer, French press, pour-over cones, Kyoto style drippers,” Smith says. “This is all about exploring coffee in all its elements.”