Generally speaking, when international coffee brands enter China, they often choose to locate their branches in the four major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, especially Shanghai. Five Elephant is a maverick and opened China's first directly-operated store in Chengdu. Five Elephant is one of the well-known specialty coffee brands in Germany, the brand was founded in 2010. Five Elephant Chengdu opened in May 2016 and has a certain weight in the Chengdu coffee circle to this day.
Coffee lovers will be familiar with Five Elephant, and many cafes also use Five Elephant's coffee beans as their first choice for pour-over beans in the store. Five Elephant's green beans are sourced directly from coffee cooperatives, roasted by the runner-up of the International All-Around Barista Competition, and cooked beans are produced by the 2012 World Cup Winner. The coffee beans in the Five Elephant Chengdu store are all flown in from Germany, and the quality of the coffee beans is no different from that of the German store. There is also a cooked bean retail shop that you can take home and savor.
The store supplies five or six kinds of single beans every day, and the bean list is updated according to the coffee beans that arrive in the store, and the drip method is also changed from time to time, sometimes with a press, sometimes with a hand pour, according to the barista in the store, the choice of drip method is decided according to the characteristics of each phase of the beans. Five Elephant's espresso is based on SOE, and there are two or three single beans as SOE for customers to choose from. The La Marzocco coffee machine in Italy and the Mahlkonig EK43 grinder in Germany at the bar are well equipped to ensure the stability of the coffee production. The desserts in the store are not homemade and are outsourced.
The problems of the Five Elephant Chengdu store in the past two years have also been more prominent, showing the development of "anticlimactic". Barista turnover is high, resulting in inconsistent production. There is an increasing number of comments that the coffee at Five Elephant Chengdu is overrated.
Five Elephant Chengdu Store is located neither on the bustling Chunxi Road nor in the high-end business district Taikoo Li, but chooses to go deep into the community, close to the farmers' market and the old Chengdu residential community. The store is set up in a long shape, and the overall store is not large, with black and white as the main color, which makes the guest atmosphere a little cold.
