The idea from Union Hand Roasted is to introduce a brand new prize category, of Best Newcomer (Working Barista). The company, which is known for its worldwide sourcing of gourmet coffee, is offering to take the winner on one of its trips to ‘origin’, or coffee-growing countries.

When the new prize was announced, it did come in for some criticism on social networking sites – several familiar names commented unfavourably on it, and one asked why the prize was not being given to the winner of the overall barista contest. Union’s Alan Miller responded, in effect, that experienced baristas have quite enough of a target to aim for, in competing for a prize in the world championships – his idea was to intended to encourage the up-and-coming baristas at grass-roots level.

“We wanted something fresh,” Alan Miller told Coffee House magazine. “From my limited exposure to the competition over the last few years, it has always struck me as odd that only the top end of the trade was involved. And while you need excellent skills and talented people to make any competition exciting and worth its weight, why not encourage the new generation and those perhaps not so skilled to learn more and take part as well?

“A ‘newcomer’ is someone competing for the first time, but already working as a frontline barista. They could come from a niche coffee shop, or a contract caterer, but they will be talking to the coffee-drinking public every day. This is important, because they can spread knowledge, and the point of this is to spread coffee knowledge with consumer engagement.

“By ‘asking for newcomers’, we are certainly excluding some people – but for those who have competed before, they know the situation, they are prepared to enter a very daunting contest, and their big target is going for a place in the world championship. Sure, you have to have the top people in the national contest, but you also widen it and encourage the rest.

“So, how do you encourage newcomers to go in for a contest which is so daunting? You encourage them, with a prize for those who have no realistic chance of going forward to the world event.”

By remarkable coincidence, the contest’s milk sponsor, Arla Cravendale, has also made a move to encourage first-time entrants – it has picked two milk farmers from its own supply chain, and will put them through ‘intensive training and mentoring’ before they appear in the contest.

The two entrants are from roughly the same part of the UK. One of the farmers is Philip Halhead, from Lancaster; the other is farmer’s daughter Rachel Parker, from Garstang, who works at the Old Holly Farm café in Forton. The two are to be ‘immersed in to the world of coffee’ with regular training sessions.

The idea of a sponsor directly supporting individual entrants could raise ethical questions, if the contestants were thought likely to be in with a chance of winning the contest and going to the world finals – however, supporting first-time entrants will probably be seen as a constructive gesture, in encouraging up-and-coming baristas.

Elsewhere, the width of the contest has again been expanded by interest from outside the independent coffee-shop market. Some contract caterers always enter, and this year the training manager for the giant contract caterer Baxter Storey, Tim Sturk, has planned a minimum of four entrants, with the aim of getting one into the top twenty finalists.

Tim Sturk has already put a thousand baristas through his in-house training scheme, and last year he took drastic action – he competed in the northern heat himself, deliberately picking the farthest heat from where his own staff were competing.

“I wanted to understand the pressures that our people would be under and so be able to better coach them through the process. I competed in the Lancashire heat , where it was about 90 degrees in the room – I couldn’t get my grinder calibrated, so had to guess my dosage and my ice glasses for my signature drink melted too quickly. Ouch…. It was humiliating and also humbling, but I am pleased that I have no doubts that I can get one of our baristas into the finals for this year.”

Elsewhere, first-time entrants include two from Marks and Spencer, and the owner of a brand-new coffee house, Sarah Locke of the Studio Lounge in Plymouth, which has been open for only a couple of months.

The UKBC begins at the end of January, and the final will be at the London Coffee Festival.

This story, written by Scoop Malone of Coffee House, can be found among the top coffee trade news at the Caffe Culture Portal – www.caffeculture.com

With impressively good timing, Alex Evans’ guide to independent coffee shops in London has arrived just as the gift shopping season gets under way. This is a truly pocket-sized small book, at 6in x 4in, yet it crams in 150 pages of café guides and good feature stories on such aspects as roasting, brewing methods, and ethical sourcing.

The list of acknowledgements shows that some remarkably influential names in the coffee field were involved, and it has to be said that the photography, by Vic Frankowski of the Tapped and Packed coffee house, is extremely imaginative – atmospheric, and mercifully light on the usual old shots of dripping espresso. A lot of ‘coffee photography’ has got stuck in the same kind of rut that coffee companies’ corporate videos have done… we all know what customers in coffee houses look like, and we know what pouring espresso looks like, and we don’t want to see them ad nauseam. Vic, however, has the photographer’s knack of looking at things from an entirely different viewpoint, and has shot from up in the rafters, or deep in a remote corner of a roastery or coffee-house.

Some of the shots of the interiors of certain well-known London coffee-houses here are the best, and most accurately atmospheric, that we’ve seen (and, to our joy, he shot the same thing that we photographed in the rear of the St Ali café – the giant poster of a young Chairman Mao giving ‘the finger’!

But what of the featured coffee-houses? In what has become the accepted format, the guide divides central London into five parts, and looks at a dozen in the west end, and half a dozen in the other sectors. To a degree, it would be fair to say that it covers the expected ones… well, of course it does. You can’t miss out the really great cafes! But there are some delightfully unexpected entries – typically, the Giddy Up coffee cart.

The book does not attempt to cover every decent coffee venue in the capital, with about three dozen being reviewed, but it is well written, and in meaningful terms… we ourselves once fell out with a very big beverage trade organisation for criticising their annual café guide as being too full of clichés and worn-out phrases to actually mean anything (what on earth is ‘a delicious selection of mouth-watering sandwiches’ supposed to tell the customer, we asked? They never spoke to us again!) In this Guide, we found the term ‘mouth-watering’ used only once, and thankfully, there is very little of the usual sycophantic pandering to Antipodean influences. Here, the brief reviews of each venue actually do give some worthwhile information, and a reasonable pen-picture of the ambience of each business.

There are some interesting observations here and there. One is that London’s baristas are ‘privileged’ to work with a product which has involved so much effort by people in remote places, and that a single lapse of concentration ‘can ruin the coffee that has travelled so far’. It would be a good idea if more baristas realised that… indeed, one of the most illuminating things we ever heard from a barista was from our first world champ, James Hoffman, some years ago when he very honestly recalled to us that in the very early days of his career, he was under the impression that it was his talent which turned the base bean into a drink… and that was before he developed understanding of, and respect for, the bean. Today, his Square Mile roastery has a short, respectful, feature to itself in this Guide.

The additional chapters are worthwhile, too. OK, a history of London coffee houses is predictable and perfectly good, but there is an interesting piece by Steven Macatonia of Union Hand-Roasted on why he finds Fairtrade a ‘limited’ method of buying ethically, there is a good piece on general roasting by Lawrence Sinclair of Dark Fluid, and there is a pretty decent run-down of the various brewing methods.

It all makes up a very nicely rounded volume.

For a tenner, this certainly is a very good buy.

- Ian Boughton, Boughton’s Coffee House magazine
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The Independent Coffee Book, London.
Published Vespertine Press, ISBN 978-0-9566582-2-7. www.independentcafes.co.uk

The British coffee trade is expected to once again play a great part in supporting the homeless of London this Christmas.

Shelter From The Storm is a unique charity – it is London’s only free homeless shelter, open all year round, in spite of receiving no grant, no government support, and being reliant only on volunteers, donations and support… much of which comes from the coffee trade.

A founder of the Shelter is Louie Salvoni of Espresso Services, one of the beverage trade’s most significant servicing companies, and very many members of the coffee trade have supported the work, either with money, or equipment, or with supplies, or with their time, or in helping the ‘guests’ find jobs. One very well-known chain of cafes has played a big part in bringing several of the shelter’s vulnerable people back into employment.

Some of the coffee trade’s best baristas have spent their time at the shelter, fixing drinks for the guests – it is a curious fact that some of the very finest coffee in London has been willingly and generously served entirely free to a clientele of homeless, needy people!

Shelter from the Storm started in the crypt of a church for at first one or two nights a week, and with new premises in Kings Cross, has now realised its dream of opening seven nights a week. In the last year, it has provided thirteen thousand overnight places, and has helped vulnerable people in a wide range of ways, from helping some with job interviews to helping others escape trafficking and torture.

“With your love and support,” say the founders, “we weave a net to catch our guests when they fall through the cracks in society.”

This Christmas, it costs just £9.40 to support a homeless person for one night’s accommodation and food. The coffee trade has done great work already in supporting this project… please remember Shelter From The Storm again this Christmas.

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Contact: www.sfts.org.uk, 020 7697 9569.
Email: mail@sfts.org.uk

Bewley’s is the influential roaster which has dominated the coffee scene in the Republic of Ireland for many years, and which also has operations in the US, in Boston and California.

Darlington’s has been operating since the early 1990s, and has a turnover in the region of £4.5 million. It has a strong business in restaurants of various kinds, significant pub companies such as the St Austell brewery chain, and food chains such as Eat, Caffe Uno and the Bagel Factory – but it has also been seen in the very newest wave of coffee houses, most notably working with Sacred of Soho.

Bewley’s managing director, Jim Corbett, has acknowledged to Coffee House magazine that the acquisition can be seen as providing a firm foothold for his company in the UK.

“We definitely see this as a springboard for further development in the UK. Bewley’s already supplies a number of major UK retailers and foodservice clients, and this is a natural development for us – the Darlington’s business model is very similar to ours in Ireland with a high focus and commitment to customer service and support.

“Darlington’s is now wholly owned by Bewley’s but will continue to trade under its own name and brand, and we intend to develop and grow the Darlington’s brand.”

Darlington’s coffees are currently produced by a number of different roasters. Asked whether Darlington’s clients would now find their coffees roasted by the Irish giant, Bewley’s tactfully replied: “We believe that access to Bewley’s procurement, blending and roasting expertise will enable Darlington’s to expand the range of services they offer, to the benefit of all their customers.”

The acquisition of Coffee#1 by Brains is considered a significant step in the growing interest of pubs in business other than alcohol. The leader in this sector is certainly JD Wetherspoon, with its regular promotions on coffee, which it used to open up a massive early morning breakfast trade. Other pub chains have followed with varying degrees of enthusiasm and commitment.

The SA Brain business has pubs through Wales, and also several just across the English border. The pub trade press reported last week that Brains had secured a new funding package which includes a £70 million revolving credit facility, and almost immediately afterwards came the news of the coffee acquisition. The purchase of Coffee#1 brings Brains fifteen cafes in England and Wales, with a combined turnover of £5 million, but the price of the acquisition has not been disclosed.

Some Brains pubs sell Costa coffee – it is not yet known whether that will continue.

In both Britain and the United States, there has been a wave of activity over the ethical acceptability of the most expensive coffee in the world. It is suggested that by pandering to consumer tastes over a novelty product, the coffee trade is helping to perpetuate animal cruelty in certain parts of the world.

The coffee in question is Kopi Luwak, which can be translated as ‘cat coffee’. This is the product in which coffee ‘cherries’, the complete fruit of the coffee plant, are eaten by the palm civet cats of the far East, typically in Indonesia. The cats digest the cherries but excrete the inner beans, which are then roasted and brewed as any other coffee bean – some people say that the digestive process gives the coffee a distinctive taste.

Others say it tastes awful, but the story of the process is sufficiently unusual that every so often, a newspaper somewhere in the world comes across the product and produces a novelty feature on the subject of ‘cat-poo coffee’. The image of the coffee as ‘the rarest in the world’ has led to its high value – it can be sold for as much as, or more than, Jamaica Blue Mountain.

Although the coffee has for a long time been regarded as a novelty, it was for many years considered to be a relatively harmless one, in the belief that digested beans were gathered more by luck than judgment in the wild, or at least by farmers who knew where to look for the cat droppings.

However, there is now increasing disquiet about what has become effectively the factory-farming, or battery-farming, of civet cats.
The allegation is that farmers who have realised the high price of the coffee have begun capturing the civet cats from the wild and keeping them in tiny cages, allegedly force-feeding them coffee beans to produce the high-priced coffee.

It has been known for some years that some farmers in Indonesia had taken up some kind of ‘farming’ practice, but it was not realised until quite recently that such intensive small-cage processes were involved – one international newspaper has now reported on a typical small farmer keeping 102 civets and collecting 550 pounds of beans a month.

In Britain, the issue has been highlighted by Mike Haggerton, a coffee shop owner in Aberfoyle, who says that he has actually seen caged civets on a trip to coffee-growing regions, and who was upset to see Kopi Luwak coffee featured in recent speciality coffee events.

For the coffee still to be seen as a harmless novelty, he has said, directly contributes to more westerners thinking ‘hmm, let’s try that’, which in turn results in more animals losing their freedom by being caught and put in small cages for the rest of their lives.

“Members of the coffee trade who do not speak out are, by their silence, advocating Kopi Luwak,” he has said.

Elsewhere in the coffee trade, there has been support.

In the US, a Facebook group has been created to highlight the issue, and “to send a message to the coffee industry that Kopi Luwak coffee is unacceptable, tastes bad, does not serve the coffee farmer’s interest, distracts from the message of quality coffee, and that we condemn animal cruelty”.

In Britain, unrest among the coffee trade is certainly growing.
Typically, the craft roaster Steve Leighton of Has Bean in Stafford has said: “We bought 20 kilos of it in 2003, and I’ve regretted it ever since. The farming thing doesn’t sound nice at all, and I do not condone any of that.”

The managing director of the London coffee importer Mercanta, Stephen Hurst, has said: “The stories are quite correct – I have seen these battery farms myself and do not agree with them.

“If there is now a movement against Kopi Luwak, it will be the result of ourselves and others mentioning this unpleasant practice. This coffee is a gimmick, and these poor animals need not be kept as chickens – but whenever someone is going to pay a ridiculous price for something, then abuses will arise.”

The latest aspect of the debate suggests that not all Kopi Luwak coffee is the product of battery farming. The Sea Island coffee company of London, which specialises in rare and exotic coffees, has said that all the ‘cat coffee’ it imports comes from beans collected in the wild, not from factory farms.

This news item from Boughton’s Coffee House, the trade news magazine for those who run coffee-houses and tea-rooms.www.coffee-house.org.uk

Miko's orchid

The coffee is Puro, a Fairtrade blend by the Miko group, and the Teagueia Puroana orchid was discovered in a rainforest which has been bought for conservation purposes by the coffee group.

Puro is the ‘ethically-sourced’ coffee from Miko, the long-established European coffee group which has grown rapidly in the UK, mainly by acquisition of independent local companies – it now has ten UK sites, and stretches from Redruth in Cornwall to Scotland.

For the past five years, Miko has donated two per cent of the revenue from Puro coffee to the World Land Trust, and this partnership has paid for rainforest reserve in Ecuador which covers five thousand acres, with a similar project in Brazil to come.

A world-renowned botanist, Dr Lou Jost, discovered the new orchid species while trekking in the Cerro Candelaria reserve in central Ecuador. The orchid is endemic to the high mountains of the upper Rio Pastaza watershed, and is a member of one of the most remarkable plant radiations in the world.

The same botanist, trekking with a representative of the coffee company three years ago, discovered a new tree species which was later named Blakea attenboroughii after Sir David Attenborough, a patron of WLT.

The Miko project has also turned up eleven more previously-unknown orchids, and a formerly-undiscovered species of frog.

In the UK, Puro coffee is sold through many independent cafes, and also sold through the National Trust – every coffee sold in the 150 National Trust catering outlets directly contributes to the work being carried out by the World Land Trust.

This news from Boughton’s Coffee House magazine: www.coffee-house.org.uk

There has always been a certain amount of debate about the results, notably because tea blenders and coffee roasters are extremely proud of what they do, and they are extremely sensitive to criticism! However, it has been pointed out that the strict nature of the judging this year only underlines the credibility of the awards, and their value at retail… a one-star award, say the organizers, really means something.

The most notable performers in the beverage section overall were Newby Teas, who got twenty awards, and Teapigs, who took 13.

Among the top coffee performers, Baillies, the Irish roaster, got nine stars, although three of them were for tea; three of the coffees received two-star awards. Bolling of Yorkshire got seven, two of them two-stars; so did Java Republic, all one-stars, three of which were for teas. Union Hand-Roasted took four, two of them two-stars. Percol got four, and so far as we can see from the results, the notable thing about this is that they were all for roast-and-ground or wholebean – Percol in the past has also scored well for instant coffees. Tudor got three, including two two-stars, and Cafedirect got a remarkably well-spread five awards, which included teabags, ground coffee, hot chocolate and even an instant coffee.

In tea, the big stars were Newby, with 20 awards (three of them two-stars) and Teapigs, who took 13, including one of the rare three-stars, for its pure lemongrass. Twinings scored 11, with four two-starred, all for its Tea Deli and Tea Rituals products. Whittard scored 10, made up of four teas, three coffees, and three hot chocolates. Clipper got 9, including a hot chocolate. Typhoo got in there for a Harrod’s English Breakfast.

There were as always some curiosities – rhubarb cropped up a couple of times, including a rooibos and rhubarb infusion which won a three-star award, and there was a white chocolate and rhubarb drink. Perhaps the oddest of all, and we haven’t had time to check this out yet, was the espresso award to the Ludlow Food Centre, for what is described as ‘a blend of quality robusta beans’.

The alphabetical list of beverage winners can be seen on this magazine’s website, here: www.coffee-house.org.uk . The link to the winners is at the top of the news column.

However, it is clear that there is still disagreement and misunderstanding in the coffee trade concerning the inspection and certification of espresso machines. And so, the Coffee Council has now published its own report setting out how the current situation came about, where the disagreements have arisen, and what are thought to be the major hazards for the trade – most specifically, the main dangers for front-line catering operators.

The main problem is still the general suspicion that a vast number of commercial espresso machines used in the catering industry are not covered by the required certification of inspection.

This need for a commercial espresso machine to be inspected and certified regularly is not in doubt, because it is a requirement under the Pressure Systems Safety Regulations, 2000. It is the detail which is confusing – nobody knows how many operators in the UK’s immense hospitality trade are even aware of this requirement, and there are doubts over how regularly it should be done.

It is not even clear who is qualified to issue such certification – one interpretation is that the inspection of the espresso machine has to be handled by an independent inspector, referred to in some regulations as the ‘competent person’. If this is so, a caterer’s usual espresso engineer is not allowed to do it.

The regulatory authorities and the insurance companies do not speak clearly on the matter, and there is even doubt as to which is the appropriate regulating authority. The viewpoint of the insurance companies is extremely difficult to understand, and they have said nothing to help clarify the fear that in the event of an accident, a caterer’s public liability insurance could be deemed void if their espresso machine had no written scheme of inspection.

The Coffee Council has now set out the various conflicting points of view, and says that the matter must now be made clear.

The Coffee Council has called on the regulatory authorities to work together to give an unequivocal ruling, and to present the requirements for espresso machine testing in clear and unmistakeable language. The Coffee Council has said that the insurance profession must set out immediately, and in crystal-clear language, their requirements for espresso machine testing, and the implications of non-compliance for a caterer’s business. The Coffee Council asks beverage trade associations and suppliers of espresso machines to work to ensure that all caterers are aware of the requirements for testing and certification.

Until the matter is clear, the Coffee Council urges great caution on the part of both catering operators and the engineering trade. Catering operators using an espresso machine might consider it wise to consult their equipment supplier and their insurers for opinions on how they stand – but they are warned that as yet, any views received may be opinions, and worth no more than that.

And until a specific directive received from the authorities, says the Council, espresso engineers themselves might consider it unsafe to act as both engineer and certifying ‘competent person’.

The full document can be read here:

http://www.coffee-house.org.uk/CH8CoffeeCouncilPressureVessels.pdf

The Coffee Council.

The Coffee Council is an informal association of members of the catering trade, specifically from the coffee side of the trade, who believe that it is valuable for issues of importance to be highlighted and discussed throughout the trade.

The Council can be contacted through Louie Salvoni at Espresso Service, at 0844 692 2222

The British coffee house trade is to get its first grading scheme, identifying venues which have been assessed as brewing coffee and tea to the standard that the modern consumer demands.
The idea has come from the Beverage Standards Association, which has made a move away from what are now considered the ‘old-fashioned’ kind of catering trade awards. Instead of seeking to recognise a ‘top café in the UK’, or similar title, it now seeks instead to recognise all cafes and catering establishments who can be seen to do a professional job of preparing the standard hot-beverage menu.
The intention is to invite cafes to compete for a grading or rating, with successful operators receiving display material to advertise their status. The consequence, to the benefit of the beverage industry in general, is that the high-street consumer will begin to see visible evidence of the trade’s high standards.
The idea has been in preparation for some time, but the potential of it has yet to be fully and clearly promoted.
“I don’t think even the BSA realised the potential of their own idea at first,” said Jon Skinner, the barista trainer who is guiding the association’s technical assessment for the award. “It’s something the industry has never had before – it’s a move towards our own kind of Michelin star.”
The BSA did previously have a conventional awards scheme, which sought the country’s ‘best’ café. The organisation has now steered away from that concept, and in doing so is in tune with the current trend away from the kind of awards which are at best subjective, and at worst influenced by commercial pressure or preferentiality.
Instead, the modern requirement of a trade award is something which clearly reflects professional achievement, and in this the BSA has acknowledged the influence of the UK Barista Championship in rewarding people who demonstrably ‘do something well’.
In its own new thinking, the BSA will not look for one ‘best’ venue. Instead, it hopes to recognise a large number of venues which make drinks to a consistently high standard.
Café operators who enter for the awards are invited to specify the beverages on which they wish to be judged. It is compulsory to be judged on a straight espresso shot, but then a café may choose to be judged on its milky espresso drinks (cappuccino, latte, flat white), on its filter coffee, or on its hot chocolate, or its tea.
Venues will receive a rating which is illustrated by a number of cups. Those who achieve a rating of three, four, or the top rating of five, can display a laminated sign promoting their status as a place which has been recognised as preparing beverages properly.
There is a secondary individual prize, for those who are judged to have served the best single drinks during the assessments.
In preparing for the first series of awards, the organisation is still finding its way through certain practical details.
“Judging the espresso drinks are easy,” says Jon Skinner, “because there are already accepted competition standards.”
However, he acknowledges, a curiosity arises in that certain beverages are prepared to the exact point at which they are to be consumed, and some are ‘finished off’ by the consumer. Typically, tea should not be served as a finished drink, because the consumer chooses the time it is left to brew in the pot, and changes the drink by the amount of any milk they add.
“It’s the same with coffee in a cafetiere,” observes Jon Skinner. “But if the server brews the beverage correctly to start with, then puts the teapot or the cafetiere on the table, and remembers to say: ‘please give this three minutes’, then they’ve done the right thing, and ticked an important box.”
The precise choice of product being brewed is almost secondary. A venue which brews a vintage pu-erh cannot be compared directly with one that uses an English Breakfast tea-bag, but what is common to both venues is that they can be seen to go through the correct brewing ‘ceremony’ for the product they choose. As a result, either can be recognised as a venue which brews its chosen beverage properly.
“I cannot judge a café and criticise them for their choice of product,” confirms Jon Skinner. “The best hot chocolate I ever had was the thick dark kind from a paddle machine, but many cafes prefer to use a Cadbury’s powder. I can’t mark them over which one they use – we have to judge their ability to do the best they can with the product they choose to serve.”
This in turn raises the question of whether a venue could choose to be judged on its house speciality, which for a coffee-house might be a flavoured latte. The entry form does not allow for such detail, and while the BSA has indicated that judges will not mark a flavoured latte, Jon Skinner has suggested that if a venue wishes to specifically ask for it, then they should have it judged.
However, he points out, it is early days for a new scheme, and any such curiosities will be ironed out in time.
The BSA has told us that ‘entries are beginning to flood in’, and that even with an entry fee (£35-£45) they hope for 300 participants. (Their old-style café awards usually achieved something in the region of a hundred.) Closing date for the current series is April 29th.

Details: http://www.beveragestandardsassociation.co.uk/

The organiser of the first UK Coffee Week, a shortly-forthcoming but as yet remarkably under-promoted awareness event, says the project could possibly achieve its extremely ambitious aim, to raise one million pounds for fresh-water projects in Africa.

The project is due to take place from 4-10 April, and ties in with the London Coffee Festival, set for the last three days of the same week. The two ventures are organised by Allegra Strategies, the research organisation which publishes annual figures on the size of the coffee-bar trade, and will benefit Project Waterfall, a charity set up by Allegra which will in turn work with the larger Water Aid charity.

The sheer scale of the project has aroused mixed emotions in the beverage trade, partly because of the ambitious total, and partly because of the nature of the fund-raising – the idea is that consumers will be invited to pay an extra 5p for a cup of coffee, and that coffee houses will return the extra revenue to the charity. The charity has also suggested that ‘thousands’ of British coffee houses will be taking part – they will, but the vast majority of them so far are branches of the big high-street chains.

“I simply thought one day – just imagine, lots of people, giving a small amount each, makes a great sum, and that was the basis of the 5p per cup idea,” explains Jeffrey Young, the managing director of Allegra (pictured above). “I now realise just why it’s so hard to get a charity off the ground and working. It’s madness – at times it has been extremely frustrating and exasperating.”

The national consumer interest in coffee has as yet only been measured by UK’s first regional event, a weekend in Bath last year which attracted the quite astonishing figure of 7,350 visitors and returned a profit of several thousand pounds which was distributed to local charities. However, the beverage trade is divided on the exact amount of national enthusiasm for coffee, and indeed the national consumption – last year, the high-street coffee chain Starbucks made the remarkable claim that 20 million British consumers visit coffee houses in a week, a claim which even many in the coffee trade thought exaggerated.

“The market certainly is in millions,” says Jeffrey Young. “McDonalds say they have two million customers a day, and Marks and Spencer have twenty million visitors a week, of which a large number go into their coffee shops. I would estimate that 75 per cent of the over-25s who visit the Bluewater shopping centre have a cup of coffee. Look at all the branches of Costa doing so many hundreds of coffees a day – we are talking big numbers, staggering amounts of consumption, and of figures which are in line with the audience numbers for a major TV series.

“I do believe that nobody has really realised how important coffee shops are as a social medium, and I believe UK Coffee Week could reasonably reach five million British consumers.”

The vision of a 5p levy on cups of coffee throughout the country has provoked some questioning – smaller coffee shops may have problems doing the accounting, and there will be delays in queues while baristas explain why they are asking for extra cash. The bigger chain coffee-houses have planned their own publicity and automated their tills to cope.

Possibly the single biggest question mark over Project Waterfall has been the target – a million pounds in a week. It has been suggested that this might just have been too ambitious a figure, given that remarkable things can be done in certain countries for sums which, to the average wage-earning Briton, are relatively low. There is already a widely admired scheme by which a coffee-trade wholesaler, Peros of High Wycombe, sponsors ’playpumps’, operational water wells built as children’s roundabouts, and has already put in several dozen at around £4,000 each. (The coffee shop chain Esquires runs a similar project).

“In hindsight, maybe I could have been more conservative,” responded Jeffrey Young candidly. “I do have an ex-colleague who works in Ethiopia, and yes, he says: ‘you have no idea what a thousand pounds can do out here’.

“But I do see that Macmillans raise £8 million in one annual coffee morning, and that’s inspiring.

“And it can be done. For chain cafes of several hundred branches, if you take a low estimate of 600 coffees per day per store, that can add up to quarter of a million coffees a day for even one brand, and multiplied by six and a half days a week, that can be one and a half million beverages from one chain of shops.”

That, he suggests, could amount to £80-£100,000 raised by each of the biggest high-street players.

The most recent information is the first funds raised will support a project in Tanzania, managed by the Water Aid charity. This is hoped to bring clean drinking water to up to 7,000 people in the Chini Ward of the Mbulu District, and involves 12 ‘water points’ at a cost of about £60,000.

Allegra will also run the London Coffee Festival, which runs on the last three days of the UK Coffee Week, and which will be centred in the newly ‘cool’ area of Brick Lane. The festival event has some big names in there – Starbucks, Costa, Lavazza, and several of the makers of high-quality espresso machines.

The intention is to inspire London ‘foodies’ to realise just how much there is to know and enjoy about coffee, and to give visitors the chance to work espresso machines and the like for themselves.

Jeffrey Young is hoping that the project, for which all admission fees go to the water charity, will open consumers’ eyes to the prospects of great coffee.

“A realistic objective would be to inspire them to say: ‘I thought I liked coffee, but I never knew about all this!’ “

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UK Coffee Week is between 4th-10th April.
The London Coffee Festival will be held at The Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, from April 8-10, 2011. Opening hours:
Friday 8th April: Trade Day 10:00am-4:00pm followed by Public Launch 5:00pm-10:00pm
Saturday 9th April and Sunday 10th April: the weekend days will be separated into 3 sessions
Brunch 10:00am-1:00pm, Lunch 1:00pm-4:00pm and Teatime 4:00pm-7:00pm.
Tickets are available from www.londoncoffeefestival.com for £8.50, discounted to £6 for orders of 5 or more tickets.*

Readers in the coffee trade might wish to see the detailed candid interview with Jeffrey Young published online by Coffee House magazine.

http://www.coffee-house.org.uk/CH2FullstoryCoffeeWeek.html