Every Tuesday we take you with us, in the world of Batavia Dutch Coffee. Previous week you could read how our adventure started. Today, we will discuss all the obstacles we ran into when trying to bring cold drip coffee – which is what Dutch coffee is usually called outside of Asia – to the Netherlands.
Testing, a lot!
After the idea started to enter our minds in India, we couldn’t wait to start working on it once we returned to the Netherlands. During the testing phase, we realized at least one thing: not being able to read Korean or Chinese was highly distressing. So, we had to trust our taste buds and test a lot of different coffees! After receiving all the instruments needed to start making the coffee, the testing phase began for real. Putting it nicely, not all coffees we developed were amazing, but we quickly realized that we were only drinking Cold Drip Coffee. This made us feel confident to work even harder.
The first cold drip bottles
Once we truly entered the world of specialty coffees we came to the conclusion that there was so much more to offer. The first cold drip coffees we produced were made solely with wooden instruments and had an expiration date of about three weeks. The expression “hit the ground running” nicely describes our strategy at that point. While we had just enough capacity to produce a couple of bottles we tried selling the coffee right away.
Prototype
Right after we found our first customers, we decided to build a prototype for a bigger production. The resulted in a monster production of about 20 liters of coffee per batch. A few weeks later we realized even this would not be enough. Nowadays we drink about this much coffee at the office a week.
To be continued…