What the Paper Cup Takes: Alexander Skrinjaric of Martines

Paper cups look like a small concession to being in a hurry. Coffee chosen carefully, a barista who steered the customer toward a flavour they will actually like, a shot pulled the way it should be - and then all of it walks out onto the street under a plastic lid. Alexander Skrinjaric of Martines places the loss exactly there, in the part a coffee shop exists for.

Martines will be among the participants at Good Coffee Festival in Sofia this September, and Alexander will be there. What follows comes from a Slow Made City conversation ahead of the festival - ten short questions, none of them about turnover or locations.

Everything is connected

His definition of bad coffee runs as a chain, and it leaves nobody out of it.

"Bad coffee is coffee that hasn't been processed the way it should be. It can be processed the way it should be and roasted the way it should be, but if the way that coffee is prepared isn't good, that still means bad coffee, because everything is connected."
ALEXANDER SKRINJARIC, MARTINES

Three separate points of failure sit in that chain, and the customer only ever sees the last one. Fermentation that ran away at the wet mill; a roast that scorched the sugars; brew water at 96°C instead of 92. Bitterness arrives in the cup in all three cases, and the blame lands almost every time on the last person who touched the coffee.

Hence his second requirement of a coffee shop: the barista knows what they are selling and treats the customer well. Knowledge without service is a pose. Service without knowledge is a petrol station with better cups.

What the paper cup keeps

"If the coffee itself was chosen properly, if the barista managed to guide the customer and help with the choice of flavour, but made it in a paper cup - the customer loses that part of the experience, which is part of what having a coffee shop means."
ALEXANDER SKRINJARIC, MARTINES

His argument is not an aesthetic one. A double shot is 50-60 ml of drink, and in a lidded paper cup those 60 ml get sipped through a small opening that effectively removes the nose from the process. Most of what gets called the taste of a coffee is aroma reaching the olfactory receptors from behind, through the throat - and the lid cuts that off right before it does its work.

Everything else - sitting down, the service, the music - counts as part of the product for Alexander, not as decor arranged around it. Coffee shops sell the moment somebody stops; the drink is the pretext.

Noise that says more than music

Asked what he hears when the shop is full, he set the music aside.

"I wouldn't say music. It's more the way you can tell that the people doing things aren't doing them only for the business, but doing them with passion."
ALEXANDER SKRINJARIC, MARTINES

You hear the difference in the tempo behind the bar. Whether the portafilter gets knocked out nervously between orders or every movement has an order to it; whether the barista answers over one shoulder or stops for ten seconds to say which lot this is and why it tastes like that. A full room sounds different depending on who runs it, and that registers from the door.

"We don't have what you're looking for"

Caring about a customer has an inverse side: telling them no.

"We don't sell everything and we can't leave every customer satisfied. We're very direct and we tell them: we don't have what you're looking for. We don't want to disappoint people."
ALEXANDER SKRINJARIC, MARTINES

Short term, refusing costs more than selling. Long term it works the other way round: a customer sold the wrong coffee does not come back and does not say why. A place willing to admit what it does not stock earns trust for what it does.

Double milk, one spoon of sugar

His most demanding customer turned out to be the most useful one.

"We have one customer who likes his coffee as a double shot, but not straight the way the rules say - he likes to add double milk and a spoon of sugar. That's how he likes it, and that's how he tastes coffee."
ALEXANDER SKRINJARIC, MARTINES

Specialty has a long tradition of correcting people: sugar hides acidity, milk kills the delicate notes, third wave does it differently. Alexander landed on the other side of that conversation - that being right about everything is not the job, and sometimes you let someone drink their coffee the way they enjoy it. Education stops where somebody else's pleasure begins.

Two steps ahead

The person he owes the most to never taught him about extraction.

"With patience and drive and vision, over the years he taught me that the most important thing isn't simply having a business - it's good to be two or three steps ahead. He helped me find this passion for coffee."
ALEXANDER SKRINJARIC ON VLADIMIR MALLANOV, FOUNDER OF MARTINES

That lesson is about direction rather than technique. Technique takes months to learn; the appetite for looking two steps ahead rarely transfers to anyone who doesn't already want it.

Twenty-five seconds

Asked what runs through his head while the espresso pours, he went back to where the coffee started.

"How, after the coffee has travelled such a long way to Europe and then to us, we take it in and roast it. And how in those 25 seconds this drink can make a big difference to a customer."
ALEXANDER SKRINJARIC, MARTINES

That journey is long and almost invisible from the bar: picking, fermentation, drying beds, sacks, a ship, a warehouse, a drum, a grinder. Months of work by people whose names never reach the menu run through a portafilter in 25 seconds, in front of somebody checking their phone.

Order it to stay, in ceramic, even when you are pressed for time. If you do take it away, pull the lid off before the first sip - that is the one part of the experience you can get back for free.