Not your average Joe
In April of 2012, having completed his month-long coffee tour, Lai returned to Taiwan, his mind filled with things he had learned and new ideas that were inspired by his experiences. With only one small coffee roaster purchased with funds provided by his former employer Qiu Shizong, Lai opened his first shop, Café Wakeup.
However, even as Lai was still sharpening his skills, he immediately had to deal with the pressures that come with managing the business of a coffee shop. Fortunately, after half a year or so, thanks in part to a series of coffee tasting events held by Café Wakeup, Lai had steadily built up a clientele of coffee connoisseurs. The small roaster he had first used was no longer sufficient to meet his needs, so he upgraded to a larger type—costing NT$350,000, and with a roasting capacity of 30 kilograms—to meet the flourishing demand for his java.
Little did he expect that he would immediately hit a wall. Lai relates that the taste of coffee beans is determined by several factors, including the temperature of the air in the roasting barrel and the temperature of the beans themselves. If the controlling factors change, the results will change as well. Lai tried many times to roast beans with his new equipment, but the results didn’t meet his expectations, leaving him vexed, perplexed, and wondering what to do next. “Once I roasted 70 or 80 kilos of beans at one time, but because the flavor was not optimal, I threw the whole batch out.”
The reason that Lai stuck to his high standards is that, for him, the coffee beans he roasts are a manifestation of his own inner self: it is not coffee that he is putting out there, it is Jacky Lai. He says that if sales are poor, you can always blame impersonal factors like lousy materials or a misguided marketing strategy. But the taste of his coffee beans is entirely in his own hands, and depends entirely on his mastery of the art. He says, “If the beans are badly roasted, it proves I just don’t make the grade skill-wise. Who else could I blame for that but myself?”
In 2012 Lai earned his certification as a “coffee cupping” judge from the Specialty Coffee Association of America, and went on to gain specialty certification from the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE). In order to upgrade the skill level of his whole team, Lai has provided funding for staff who have worked for him for at least one year to register for the barista certification exam, and he has also invited experts from the SCAE to come to Taiwan to give classes to his employees.
Lai, who benefited so much from George Howell’s selfless sharing of expertise, has adopted the same spirit. Along with some coffee aficionados of diverse backgrounds in biology, physics, and mechanical engineering, he has organized a group which meets regularly to exchange ideas. “In these meetings we have solved a lot of practical problems, from something as small as the ideal setting of the gas flame for roasting to matters involving machinery and facilities,” says Lai.
Some have criticized young people for lacking entrepreneurial drive, with small independent coffee shops singled out as examples of limited vision. Jacky Lai is proving that generalization to be dead wrong.