Mont Blanc, Please

Three days, a coffee shipment that almost didn't make it, a booth built from scratch, and a drink developed with restraint one ingredient at a time.

Less than 48 hours before Coffee Plz, the Cebu and Manila teams were on a call going through the checklist. There was still a long list of problems to solve, including the coffee shipment, which hadn't gone out yet, and a batch of stickers that had come back misprinted, "speciel" instead of "species." Someone on the call said the coffee would ship that day and arrive the next, a timeline tight enough that a delay would have left the event without coffee. But there was no fighting and finger pointing. Instead, departments responded the same way: people asked what needed to happen next, said what they'd do, and did it.

the scramble

Day One

Day one started at midnight for Neon and Jelo. By four in the morning, they were at the venue setting up the booth. They went home for a few hours and went back to continue what was going to be a long, sleepless, and surprising day. Problems kept surfacing throughout the three days, and each one got solved as it came up.

the build

The Booth

The booth was modeled on the interior of Good Cup Manila, particularly the shelf, finished in Latte Brown with integrated lighting. Neon, who leads marketing and ran the event, coordinated with the team, created the booth model, met with suppliers, and set up the booth before sunrise on opening day.

The layout required a series of decisions: which direction the carts should face, whether that would interfere with foot traffic, how storage and workflow would work. Different members of the team had different opinions about how the booth should look and function, and Neon weighed each one before deciding.

The booth included a wayfinder pointing to Good Cup's two locations, Cebu and Manila, and a mirror with one line written on it: "Coffee makes ______ better." Guests filled in the blank throughout the event:

• Coffee makes you better.
• Coffee makes tsismis better.
• Coffee makes milk better.
• Coffee makes love better.
• Coffee makes Red Horse better.

The booth area measured 3.75 by 3.75 square meters. On day two, part of it came apart: the tables tipped over, and several machines, including the Waved machine, went down with them. Neon was in such a rush that morning that she left the house without even putting on a shirt under her jacket, just to get to the venue as fast as possible.

the refresh

The Bags

New bags went out that same week, one for the coffee, one for the tote, part of a brand refresh done with Dan Matutina and Plus63. The coffee bags are now nitrogen flushed, which slows oxidation and extends how long a sealed bag stays fresh. The tote is sized close to the blue IKEA shopping bags and holds three to four kilos of beans, with three different textures across it: the straps, a paper-like exterior, and a cloth-like interior. Adrienne Je t'aime Chrestienne Janes drew the new stickers and the wayfinder illustration on the back of the team's shirts, using the color palette from the new brand guidelines.

the drink

The Mont Blanc

The Mont Blanc came in two coffee bases, Acu Gesha or Candy Craze, and guests picked one when they ordered.

The coffee arrived the day before the event and brought its own emergency. The batch Max used for R&D was the same batch used for testing, and the quality was far from what the tests predicted, because the coffee was two days old and still too fresh to use well. It needed to rest. Max described it as bitter enough that it slowed everything down, and he ran a few test batches just to find the parameters that would produce a cup worth serving. The full batch was 42 liters. Sous vide extraction alone runs 1.5 hours, and every kilo of coffee loses close to twice its own weight to filtering and absorption, so volume made coffee the longest single ingredient to prepare. The team started around five in the evening and didn't finish until six the next morning.

Basic ingredients, done right.

Max, who leads beverages and coached Red for the Philippine National Brewers Cup, built the Mont Blanc around that line. He added, "Keep it coffee forward, not just sweet, heavy, or dessert-like." "People assume we're using cold brew," he explains. "But we're using sous vide process which allows us to extract a lot of good flavor without the risk of adding more bitterness and has the quality of the coffee." For the sugar, he skipped the refined, granulated sugar people expect and used muscovado instead, aiming for a dark, familiar sweetness with its own character, without loading the drink with sweetness overall.

The foam took the most revisions. Max mixed two bases, one dairy and one plant-based, after neither worked well enough on its own. The sweetness in the foam comes from an orange syrup, made by soaking orange slices in a chilled sugar and water syrup for five to six hours, done cold on purpose so it wouldn't turn into the caramelized orange syrup. Too much liquid in the foam makes it unstable and it sinks, so the syrup goes in at just enough volume to add flavor without breaking that structure.

The other deliberate addition is Kalingag, the local version of a cinnamon. "It's really fragrant," he says. "It's sweet, citrus, and really aromatic." It's also strong enough that too much of it overwhelms the whole drink, so the amount he uses is small on purpose. The orange zest gets the same restraint: grate fine enough that even if a guest bites into it, it won't add bitterness to their mouth. The jasmine hydrosol sprayed on top isn't there to be tasted. It's there to prime the guest's perception on the first sip, so the scent carries through the drink even after the spray itself is gone.

Before making a single cup, Max builds the whole experience in his head first: the intensity, the quality of each ingredient, how it should taste layer by layer, before he executes it. It took three to four rounds to land on this version. He considered using an orange oleo saccharum instead of the syrup, since it's closer to pure citrus oil. But making it takes a minimum of a day and up to a week for real depth, and Coffee Plz needed roughly 450 to 500 cups over three days. He didn't have a week. He sliced the orange and steeped it directly in the syrup instead, which ended up adding more flavor to the drink than the original plan would have.

Max's goal for the drink was simple: a refreshing layer up front, a flavor that reads close to dessert without becoming one, and warmth underneath from the two spices working together.

who showed up

The Team

At the brew bar, Gio and Red brewed Acu's Gesha and Boy Javier's Bukidnon Liberica. Acu was present on days two and three. Next to the brew bar, at the Mont Blanc station, Max and Jelo, floor manager of Good Cup Manila, made and served the drink.

The Manila baristas, Ed, Sal, Jarule, Kate, and Des, rotated through the three days, answering customer questions and fielding a recurring one: when Good Cup Manila would open. They handled most of the prep work before doors opened each day and made repeated trips to the accommodation across the venue for supplies: coffee beans, kegs of Acu Gesha and Candy Craze, and ingredients for the Mont Blanc as they ran low.

On day two, a person from a nearby booth, still wearing his work gloves, asked Acu for a photo as soon as he saw him. By day three, the team had settled into a working rhythm. That day, Gio, the company's CEO and co-founder, stepped away from the brew bar to DJ while Acu danced.

Lines for the Mont Blanc were long throughout the event. The Good Cup team took time to explain the ingredients and why the drink came without a lid or stirrer. People who tried the Mont Blanc asked whether the drink would be added to the menu at the Manila location.

the takeaway

The Unseen

Over three days, that included a shipment that nearly missed its window, a booth built from a long series of decisions, a drink developed through several rounds of testing, and a rotating group of staff who kept the event running.

If you have a team who shows up without being asked, a team who values, cares about, and respects the mission of the company, that's an accomplishment in itself. That's one way to describe what made coffee plz work. The preview it offered wasn't only the booth's resemblance to the Manila coffee studio.

It was the people in the company, both the front-facing ones and the ones whose faces and names rarely or never appeared in front of customers.