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PHOTO COURTESY OF CURATORS COFFEE I'm reminded of an anecdote Nick Clark told me. When recounting his experience coming back from the World Barista Championships, he noted that his "favorite part in the competition is the espresso, you know it's the actual real coffee itself…You've just got to find something you want to talk about day and night." But then "the first thing everybody asked was, 'What was your signature drink?' and I'm like, 'You don't want to hear about my coffee? My coffee's amazing.'" This is no damning indictment of the signature drink, "if anything it's just I guess kind of like waving a flag of warning saying, 'Remember, the main reason of the signature drink is to promote the coffee.'" With all this focus on profit margin and immediate customer satisfaction, I think there is a line that Alex's ideas risk crossing. We are talking about an industry with an inherent investment in specialism. The intent to popularise a product beyond its means will always be a temptation, but perhaps one that sacrifices long-term industry success for short-term positive feedback. An answer to the transparency issue is found in this principle, too. While the specialty-coffee industry can, as Alex ably demonstrates, push up its profit margins using a model of decreased transparency, the industry's wider aspirations have always been based on increased transparency. A promotion of the coffee—of the work involved in growing, sourcing, and roasting the beans, not to mention the skill and craft involved in preparing high-quality espresso and brewed coffee—fits better into this line of thinking. This is why the coffee costs more to prepare and, Curators Coffee in London specializes in creative espresso- and coffee-based beverages. Owner Catherine Seay says the Summer Espresso Punch, le , and Sparkling Cascara with Lime, are two of therefore, to buy, but more importantly, this line of Curators' most popular drinks. thinking focuses candidly on the value of the product rather than masking it. The signature beverage is not are other proprietary drinks on the market right now? Oh, I don't know, incompatible with a transparent model. Just as the customer is willing a Frappuccino, people buy those like [they're] crack." Alex isn't talking about serving Frappuccinos to supplement specialty-coffee revenue, to pay more money for a skilled bartender, so the signature beverage but pushing the in-shop signature drink model in an accessible direc- can provide an opportunity for a barista to demonstrate his/her mastery of the craft and, in so doing, communicate ideas surrounding tion and finding a means to rival the high-street trend. "I actually did a signature beverage like this at a café I was con- specialty coffee to its customer base. sulting at about three years ago" he says. A single-origin Tanzanian espresso, "simple vanilla, a little bit of orange juice for acidity, you would shake it up in a cocktail shaker" and add a little scoop of gelato and whipped cream on top. "The cost was basically nothing, you know, we'd sampled out that same amount of gelato to people on these little spoons for free, the orange juice was costing, maybe 40¢ a drink…They had no idea what the actual cost was, they had no idea what was actually in it." I follow Alex's logic up to a point, but the specialty-coffee industry oughtn't to covet the frappuccino drinker. They are being supplied with a product that is a far cry from the aims of the specialty industry, and it's naïve to assume that most sweet-coffee drinkers are specialty converts in waiting. It's a different and mostly noncomparable product that is satisfying their cravings. 70 barista magazine Blue Bottle Coffee is one of the fastest-expanding coffee companies in the United States, and its success in entering the New York market demonstrates that a craft-focused café model works. I asked Bennett Cross, Blue Bottle's quality control and green-coffee assistant in Oakland, Calif., why the paradigm works so well, and whether there's space for the signature beverage. He concedes that perhaps Blue Bottle's gibraltar, a short milk and espresso drink, and its New Orleans iced coffee—a cold-brewed iced coffee with a little roasted chicory mixed in, sweetened with a bit of milk and cane sugar—could be considered Blue Bottle signature drinks. But these are neither extravagant nor complex in the manner of a Curators Coffee creation. In fact, the Blue Bottle philosophy leans away from introducing