A Simple $5 Cup Of Coffee Aims To Upend America’s Barista Culture

(Bloomberg) — Ever since Tom Hanks’s Starbucks spiel in 1998’s (“Tall! Decaf! Cappuccino!”), coffee has been ridiculed as performative froth.

But Noah Jashinski believes he has an antidote to those theatrics. Since 2009, when he worked in Los Angeles at the Silver Lake location of third-wave coffee pioneer Intelligentsia Coffee Inc., Jashinski has forged a career that’s made him a coffee whisperer to famed caffeine suppliers such as Blue Bottle Coffee LLC, La Colombe, Five Elephant, and Joe.

Now he’s pushed past those purveyors to open Compilation Coffee in Manhattan’s East Village, the first place he co-owns. It showcases his ambitious vision for the future of coffee shops. There’s only one size (12 ounces). There’s no cold brew. No espresso. Every order is a pour-over and goes for $5, no matter the milk and whether it is or is not iced.

Jashinski predicts his shop is “two to five years ahead” of mainstream brands such as  Dunkin’ and Starbucks in terms of layout, mechanics, and the streamlined method.

Even with the straightforward service, Compilation customers have more leeway to design their own cup than most other places, which Jashinski says resonates with younger Gen Z audiences. A four-question quiz on Compilation’s website helps them reverse-engineer their favorite beans, revealing an inner Willy Wonka with a penchant for delicate, black, fruity florals (the Costa Rica La Minita blend) or a wilder Evel Knievel-inspired heavy, milky, smoked chocolate brew (the Eighty Six blend).

Jashinski maintains several spreadsheets meant to optimize his various roasts and blends: “Numbers within numbers within numbers,” he says, with some calculations involving as many as 222 distinct variables that he won’t share. His system allows his two baristas—one with 12 years experience and one with none—to produce equal-quality coffee. And on the backend, his partner and chief roaster is Oren Bloostein, who helped put specialty coffee on the map in New York in 1986 at the seminal Oren’s Daily Roast. 

“It’s a beans-focused business. We sell cups of coffee, but it’s really about the beans,” Bloostein says. “When Starbucks swept through the city, cafes closed left and right, but I was able to survive by focusing on beans.”

All beans at Oren’s have a score of at least 86, which is the industry’s Cup of Excellence standard. That scoring system, as laid out by the Specialty Coffee Association of America, factors traits like acidity, aftertaste, body, and sweetness to create a score out of 100. “At Compilation,” Bloostein says, “we have some that are 91 or 92,” which qualifies as outstanding. By contrast, a recent independent analysis of Starbucks coffee set its average score at 83.1, a “very good” score. (Eighty is the minimum requirement for specialty coffee). 

Compilation opens at a moment when Starbucks is making its cafe experience less personal with an emphasis on drive-through-only and delivery-only spots over the next three years. 

To achieve that higher rating, Compilation’s beans are roasted with the coffee berry, producing fruitier, fuller flavors that are far more complicated than roasts made only from beans. The $5 flat price is meant to encourage customers’ experimentation with different tastes from different blends. Jashinski likens the experience to “a wine bar for coffee.”

The profit variability at $5 per cup is infinitesimal. “It’s fractions of pennies, and chasing that is not who I want to be,” he says. By contrast, bags of beans range from $7.75 to $16. For every bag sold, 75¢ goes to the Trevor Project, a queer crisis hotline, and 25¢ to Covenant House, a nonprofit teen shelter.

“I had moral difficulty charging for an au lait,” says Jashinski. “Charging people an extra dollar to add an ounce of milk.” And though a $5, 12 oz. drip coffee may not be a bargain in New York, it is on par with pour overs at local branches of Intelligentsia ($6) and Blue Bottle ($4 to $7) and Clover cups from the Starbucks Reserve Roastery ($5). Jashinski is betting on a corporate identity built more on ethics than earnings.

“All these billion-dollar companies claim they want to do better but ‘can’t afford it,’” he says. “That only means they won’t do better until they can find a way to do it and still make the same profits. That’s not the way forward.”

With a tight buildout below $90,000, Compilation is designed to proliferate like one of Jashinski’s favorite low-fuss coffee providers: McDonald’s Corp. “I way prefer McDonalds,” he says. “It’s not burnt. It’s not watery. It tastes like coffee.”