Serving Coffee in our Wellness Center - French Press?

[NoCoffeeNoPrana]

Has anyone attempted to use French Press rather than typical drip systems for a small coffee shop? Advice? Is this a terrible or wonderful idea? Road blocks or major issues we might run into? (Other than glass presses potentially breaking or not being able to serve everyone that comes in if we get more customers than expected.)

Probably TL;DR worthy details in the comment below

 

[NoCoffeeNoPrana]

I am a manager at a yoga studio with a pretty vibrant community. We've got a client base of about 2k, with ~500 being regulars that come weekly or more often, the rest coming bi-weekly or a few times a month. Most of the regulars and some of the semi-regulars are loyal customers and feel like they are part of a community, so we are expanding to create a Wellness and Community Center (massage/reiki/healing services that includes a retail/workshop/community event/etc space out front). We'd like to serve coffee in this space before/after classes and workshops and on select hours weekly.

I'm debating the use of French Press for this. My thoughts on where this is ok or a benefit:
-It's a client base that will be stopping in and staying, hanging out so the 5 minutes isn't an issue.
-We'd have hot water ready to go so the total prep time is decreased. (Still reading the opinions on exactly how hot that should be.)
-The select hours wouldn't be those morning rush hours when people are in a hurry, but instead would probably be around 10a-1p when local office workers (we are downtown) are wanting coffee meetings or mid-morning perk.
-I'm thinking we'd purchase different size presses so we could brew up a batch for one lone customer or a small group at once. If we needed to scale up, we could get more presses and have multiple brewing at once.
-There's only one other coffee shop within the area that is considered downtown and to be honest- their coffee sucks.
-It would be novel and different to a lot of people, which is a plus here. And since we likely won't have a non-stop stream of visitors, it will eliminate the coffee sitting forever on a burner plate or in a thermos thing.
-People around here will usually pay a little higher price for better quality (real or perceived- for example, driving across town for organic coffee and passing about 3 different starbucks/scooters along the way).

Negative:
-If I'm massively underestimating how many people show up during those hours and we can't make enough coffee fast enough...
-I don't know any others, that's why I'm here asking.

 

[Mr.Peaberry]

Hello NCNP,
I think you should consider the pour-over rather than the french press. Clean up would be one heck of a lot simpler. You can scale up the pour-over easier than the french press because of the time savings on clean up alone. AND, the pour over delivers a cleaner cup. The one downside of french press is the muddy taste due to coffee ground powder escapes the press. I like the muddy taste...yes, I'll admit...but a lot of people don't. In my opinion, pour over is your friend.

Peaberry