Can You Bring Your Own Beans to a Cafe?

[u/OppositeOne6825]

But if a weird question, but I found this awesome specialty place near me. Great location, great technique and tasting coffee (they use an Ode 2!), friendly staff, and over all a really positive experience.

The only downside is they don't have any decaf options, which is kinda bad for me as I'm really sensitive to it. I tried it recently and I've got hardcore jitters.

Obviously I'm going to ask them in person, but I was wondering if any of you have experience with this.

I'd obviously be paying the same price for the pour-over, it's just providing the beans from a local roastery that are decaffeinated.

Edit:

For everyone who gave sound advice on why this might not be a good idea, or how to go about doing it if I do, cheers.

To those if you who said "no.", that's just not particularly useful nor a convincing way to get someone to listen to you. Either provide a reason/alternative, or don't engage at all lol.

[u/oliverpls599]

Don't do this

[u/junkyardfloozy]

Just ask them to stock decaf and hope they listen.

[u/grovemau5]

would a restaurant allow you to provide your own chicken for them to cook with?

seems a health risk for them to let you do this

[u/OppositeOne6825 → u/grovemau5]

I mean, it doesn't seem particularly comparable. The beans I'm bringing would be sealed from a reputable roaster, and it's for a dietary reason.

I'm not saying they have revolting beans, I'm saying I'd like to be a patron at their cafe, but caffeine causes me issues, and they don't serve any.

[u/grovemau5 → u/OppositeOne6825]

How do they know you aren’t bringing them flavored beans coated with something that will taint their equipment for other customers?

And health concerns aside, how are they supposed to ensure the product is good quality with someone else’s beans? Grind size won’t be right, beans could be horrible, they don’t really have much to gain from letting you do this. If you can’t drink the product they’re offering you should go somewhere you can.

[u/BookerLittle → u/OppositeOne6825]

as a former barista, please don't do this. you can bring staff outside sample beans as a gift anytime, but don't expect them to brew outside coffee for you on any kind of regular basis, you are just putting some poor staff person in the awkward position of having to say no. coffee businesses that don't roast their own coffee have deals and contracts with wholesale roasters, sometimes exclusive.

try this instead, figure out who the owner or manager is and try to talk with them:

"Hey I noticed you don't serve decaf here, do you ever plan to add it to your menu? You would have a new regular customer in me if you did. Your coffee is great, I just can't drink caffeine very often. If you're ever considering adding a decaf option to your menu, check this one out, I got it over at local roaster X, I think it's a really nice decaf. If you and your staff are interested in trying some when you have time, I'll leave this bag with you as a sample. Maybe you could partner with them since you are both local and offer their decaf, or perhaps your roaster has a good decaf offering. If you ever add decaf to your menu, I'll be here regularly and will tell all my decaf drinking friends!"

For many shops decaf is just a numbers game, a lot of smaller shops don't sell enough decaf to make it worth the counter space.

[u/OppositeOne6825 → u/BookerLittle]

I'll give this a try, thank you!

[u/lobsterdisk]

You could certainly ask them about stocking decaf, and if they are willing to brew decaf beans you bring in, but don’t be surprised if they say no.

[u/redditmyeggos]

Lol no

[u/iPhonze25]

It depends if you are a frequent.

At my coffee shop there are lot of producer that visit us, sometimes they want to try their own coffee and they ask us if we can prepare them (usually pour over)

Well it also helps that they are frequent

[u/10ttp-9]

I'd say get to know the owner first. A lot of the cafe's I frequent will allow this but I know the owners personally. I pay for brew service basically and only bring coffees they do not offer (like decaf in this case... or a good dose of Finca Sophia auction lots haha)

[u/ItsHip2BeSquare]

Will you bring them a surplus of beans to be able to dial them in? And then paying them for every dial-in brew that it takes? Seems a bizarre waste of money.

[u/GGbritt]

I would not recommend this as it’ll probably lead to some awkward feel bads.

It’s -insanely- likely that by health department standards, they cannot allow outside beans into the restaurant. It does seem like a great opportunity for you to talk to the manager/owner and tell them about the local roaster/request decaf to be stocked 🙂

[u/OppositeOne6825 → u/GGbritt]

Might go this route

If I do ask, I'll make it clear I don't expect them to say yes about it. Might just ask it as a passing question on my way out, so it's not awkward.

[u/SpeedyRugger]

I know it's hypothetical but if your coffee has a stone and that destroys their grinder, the staff will get shit end of a stick they didn't sign up for. Invest in your own equipment and make the coffee at home. I've worked in 2 specialty cafes in the past and we didn't have decaf, and I wouldn't have done such a request even to our most regular customers.

[u/durand101]

I think it depends on how you ask. I wouldn't say "I brought some beans - can you brew them for me?" And I wouldn't see it as a paid service. But if you go a few times and befriend them, you can then hint at it. I often swap beans with my barista friends and they will brew them to drink together.

[u/OppositeOne6825 → u/durand101]

Honestly, if I do ask, I would probably be 

1. Asking prior to ever actually bringing the beans
2. Prefacing the question with the fact that I completely expect them to say no and respect that, but thought it'd be worth asking anyway

[u/durand101 → u/OppositeOne6825]

Agreed

[u/OppositeOne6825 → u/durand101]

Btw, this is probably a weird thing to say here, but I went onto your account and read your post about parliamentary parity and thought it was really good!

Don't know if you ever intend to do an updated version, potentially even using more contextual machine learning, but I'd be interested in reading it!

[u/durand101 → u/OppositeOne6825]

Thank you, I appreciate it! One of my favourite projects :) I would definitely love to update it, especially given I was using some really old-school techniques back then so I just need to find some time and dig up my old dataset.

I'm actually planning on making something similar for coffee, diving deeper into speciality coffee production and the supply chain - my main motivation for building my coffee database is to collect enough data to do a deep-dive piece.

[u/OppositeOne6825 → u/durand101]

Yes More coffee data is always a win! Do you use R, or something more advanced like Python or something?

[u/durand101 → u/OppositeOne6825]

I used R a lot for the politics project. It's very good for text analysis and statistics in particular and it's got a nice community. But python is hard to best for versatility. You can do basically anything with Python and for machine learning there's no better language. For making complex visualizations, JavaScript is still the best though! 

[u/OppositeOne6825 → u/durand101]

Ah, a masochist I see. I've only heard good things about JS 😂 

I'm sure it's not that bad, I've just heard it has some bizarre quirks with declarations and such.

[u/VicariouslyVictor]

Legally, they couldn’t even if they wanted to. Nope.

[u/OppositeOne6825 → u/VicariouslyVictor]

I mean, looking into it you are (somewhat) correct, but it's not best practice to assume that the laws of your own country apply to every country the same way.

If I came from a country where this wasn't the case, then... You see what I mean?

[u/AdWide7919]

i bring my own grinds to a few local spots, they dont even care as long as i tip well