Cup North 2015: "The 3rd Wave Has Stagnated" | Mat North

Unless you’re located in the UK or happen to be a fan of beautifully printed tiny books (Coffee - A Modern Field Guide), chances are you’re not super familiar with the very clever man that is Mat North, despite his extensive background in all things coffee.

After over a decade in coffee, Mat has experience within the full gamut of the “brown” side of the industry: he’s worked in both specialty shops and chains as well as consumables and engineering. Two years ago, Mat opened Full Court Press, a small specialist multi-roaster coffee shop in the heart of Bristol, known for its excellent customer service. His team’s ability to articulate their extensive knowledge in an approachable way that has ensured Full Court Press not only serves exceptional coffee, but has sparked an interest in specialty coffee among their customers.

Mat’s Cup North talk is a short and sweet look at the importance of context and feedback, on both sides of the counter, in not only growing consumers interest in specialty coffee, but in our own work. Mat gets meta, referencing recent statements and conversations dominating the coffee twittersphere, and demonstrates a beautifully crafted baseball metaphor as to how best we can “get out of the umpire’s way”.

NOTE: Due to some unfortunate interference with our wireless microphone, Mat's conclusion was horribly muffled. We're in the process of adjusting the audio file as best we can to compensate for the interruption, but in the meantime, we want to share a transcript of Mat's final thought before the Q&A (currently missing), as it's incredibly important:

If we give them the context, they can enjoy it better. It’s a silly one [the metaphor], but I quite like it. 

Let’s come back to this, just quickly. We’ve not stalled--we are evolving, maturing as an industry.

How we deal with this maturation comes from how we communicate: if we communicate properly, with the right feedback, with the right context, we’ll become a mature industry.

Laurent, who is going to talk later, is involved in wine. We shouldn’t be imitating sommeliers, that’s their context!

We shouldn’t be imitating bartenders, that’s their context!

We’ve tried to move too far away from what we knew within the industry from the second wave, we’ve overreacted and we’ve become this new, confused way of looking at coffee.

We need to be brave enough to find our own style of service and through context, we can help everyone communicate better.  Thank you.

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Want to hear more? Mat references talks by James Hoffmann (Asia 2014) and Brian Jones (Asia 2014). Cosimo Libardo, another clever coffee guy that Mat references, gave a talk at our first-ever Tamper Tantrum.