11 Jan Are Coffee “Bars” the future of the craft drinking experience?
The idea of a coffee bar, a coffee shop that sells alcohol, sounds great on paper, but will it ever become anything more than a niche business?
After 5 p.m., coffee shops tend to see a downturn in their business, which makes sense because most people are not looking for a caffeine boost in the evening. To bring back their loyal coffee customers, coffee shops turn into bars in the evening and offer beer, wine, and liquor, on top of their coffee beverages.
Coffee bars have been around for awhile now, but they’ve yet to become mainstream in popularity. That could be changing with the announcement back in August that Starbucks would be expanding its coffee bar program – Starbucks Evenings – into 2,000 of its store. However, I don’t think Starbucks can even pull coffee bars out of their niche appeal.
Coffee shops offer a fantastic atmosphere that is hard to find anywhere else; quiet, relaxed, and relatively easy to have a conversation without needing to raise one’s voice. Bars are typically the opposite: loud, obnoxious, and you may need to yell to talk to the person next to you. Coffee bars are specifically for those who are looking for the coffee shop atmosphere, while also being able to imbibe.
So who are these mystery customers that coffee bars are perfect for? Wine drinkers.
In a USA Today article, Starbucks mentioned that internal surveying showed 70 percent of Starbucks customers also drank wine. Lots of people enjoy a glass of wine when they get home from work or when they head out to dinner. However, wineries are not as plentiful as breweries, so outside of restaurants you don’t have many options. As long as the wine drinker isn’t looking for an experienced sommelier, then this is the clientele that would cause coffee bars to succeed.
Coffee bars should know who their customers are by now and should know it will be rather difficult to pull away brewery, winery, and even bar patrons. There is definitely a market for coffee bars, but trying to push them into the mainstream, like Starbucks is doing, feels a bit overzealous.
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