Clarification on espresso machine safety inspections expected soon

It is now hoped that the authorities may very soon issue a report on their investigation into the explosion of an espresso machine in a supermarket café last year – the trade magazine Boughton’s Coffee House has learned that official bodies have been involved in consultations with players in the beverage trade, with a view to establishing what actually happens in the supply of espresso machines to the catering industry, and what really happens in the continuing maintenance and inspection of machines.

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

UK Coffee house trade to get ‘Michelin-style’ gradings

Jon Skinner

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/

UK Coffee Week – over-ambitious, or a thoroughly admirable business and charity project?

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

South-west espresso engineer makes unique business move in coffee safety

An experienced espresso-machine engineer in the south-west of England is believed to be the first person to set up a company specifically to deal with the legal requirement for pressure-vessel testing.
Mark Allen of Redruth, for several years an engineer with Origin Coffee (the only coffee roaster in the far south-west) has now formed Espress Test, and says that his services will greatly ease the administrative problem of machine inspection, and will also reduce costs considerably.
It is required that all catering businesses who use an espresso machine should be able to show certification of the machine’s annual pressure-vessel test. However, the recent explosion in a south-coast café has brought to light the long-held suspicion that many cafes simply do not bother fullfilling this legal requirement.
It is suspected that many machines go un-inspected and uncertified either because café owners are unaware of the regulations, or because of the high cost of certification.
That high cost is largely because two professional fees are usually required – one is for the ‘competent person’ who is generally hired by an insurance company to undertake the actual inspection and test, and one is for the café’s usual espresso engineer, who has to be on hand to open up the machine for the inspector.
The regulations say that companies who service espresso machines are not allowed to certify those machines, for fear of a conflict of interest. Several experienced engineers have already asked the appropriate authorities if they might qualify as ‘competent persons’, and been turned down for that reason.
This has led to some unrest among engineers, who point out that the ‘competent persons’ who certify espresso machines may not have specific knowledge of such machines – their work on pressure vessels may be a power station one day, a steamroller the next, and then a coffee machine.
However, it appears that it may be perfectly allowable for the ‘competent person’ to be a qualified engineer, who can thus save the café owner money by being able to open up the machine for himself, do the inspection and test, and put the machine back together.
It is this which has allowed Mark Allen to become probably the first espresso engineer to give up his full-time job to become an espresso machine safety assessor.
“I did it because I believe in it,” he told Coffee House magazine. “I’m not a health-and-safety freak, but I felt I had a duty to do something – and, in addition, it is possibly an incredible niche market!
“I certainly am going out on a limb with this, but I believe that it is the case that, as everybody in the trade suggests, a vast number of caterers just don’t have the legal ‘scheme of examination’. I shall have to be very careful of providing a service that caterers need, without marketing my services by scare tactics. It would be very easy to panic coffee shop owners who don’t know their obligations.”
The new company has been a long time in planning.
“I had begun looking into this 14 months before the Sainsburys incident. I began to realise that café owners were paying maybe £150 for the insurance company’s inspector, and maybe the same again for the espresso engineer to be on hand. I also realised that the ‘competent person’ hired by the insurance company is probably not experienced in espresso machines – he may be doing walk-in fridges next.
“So the regulations became my bedtime reading for months, because there are a vast number of cross-references to work through, and it turns out that the ‘competent person’ can be an engineer and dismantle the machine for himself, so long as he doesn’t actually do any engineering repair on it.
“It seems to be OK to me to replace anything I need to as a result of the inspection, so long as I do not actually perform any ‘engineering’ work. I am allowed to replace a faulty valve, or replace a gasket.”
This, says Mark Allen, means that he could become the best friend of many sectors of the trade – independent café owners will find his test significantly cheaper than the test as it is currently performed by two people, and suppliers and possibly even catering chains may find it much more convenient to hire him alone than to match the diaries of two separate professionals, as is the case at present.
As all espresso engineers are used to swapping work, or doing call-out jobs for a big chain who may happen to need someone in their area urgently, this new service may well be found to be very convenient for many sectors of the trade.
That in turn sets a new value on Mark’s own ‘scheme of inspection’, which, although he has the intellectual property right to it, could set an industry standard.
“A ‘scheme’ is a planned programme of inspection,” says Mark Allen. “The part that everyone knows about is the safety-valve inspection and the internal inspection of the boiler, which is the pressure vessel. With an endoscope, you can see virtually everything inside a boiler, including all the seams, and look for any corrosion. The most expensive equipment uses a camera small enough to go through the safety-valve hole – I can actually take pictures of the inside of a boiler.”
The result is a document which the caterer is required to keep for inspection, and which can be shown to an insurance company. Mark Allen says that his is similar to a vehicle MOT, in that it shows the performance of various parts of the machine, with additional advisory notes regarding items which might be renewed or repaired later, but which do not affect the ‘pass’ status of the machine.
“In theory, the caterer shows this to their insurance company,” says Mark. “In practice, whether any insurer asks to see it, is a good question… but then, car insurers don’t always actually ask to see an MOT or as driving licence. It’s being unable to present them in the event of an incident which is the big problem.”

Espress test: tel. 01209 200 900; www.espresstest.co.uk

Britain’s biggest coffee-culture show turns to… tea!

The Caffe Culture exhibition, the most important trade event in the British hot-beverage industry, has planned a notable new development. The 2011 event will feature an emphasis on tea, in association with the main trade association, the Tea Council.

The Caffe Culture show has always featured some tea, just as it also includes cold drinks, snacks, and various other items which form the stock-in-trade of the average café or coffee house. However, there has been a tendency for some in the beverage trade to think of the show as ‘a coffee event’, whereas it is really ‘a café event’.

The show did have an extreme coffee emphasis in 2010, when it hosted the World Barista Championships, the competition for speciality coffee-making. That dominated the show to such a degree that the organisers, Upper Street Events, have promised ever since to restore a balance of subjects for 2011, and they will now offer tea as ‘a new dimension’ to the show.

This new emphasis on tea may come as a surprise to some coffee enthusiasts, but will be seen by most in the catering and hospitality trades as a recognition that the two beverages both offer great potential.

There is certainly a need for high-quality tea to be promoted in the out-of-home situation. Bill Gorman, chairman of the Tea Council, has pointed out that while tea is the most popular hot drink in the UK, the vast majority of it is still drunk at home, and this is widely believed to be due to the poor reputation of tea served in cafes, hotels and restaurants – in too many cases, the customer is simply served a cheap teabag at an inflated price. By contrast, tea tasters and blenders say that tea is every bit as complex and specialist a subject as coffee, and maybe more so… and quite possibly a more profitable one when the best teas are presented properly.

Several suppliers say they welcome a new recognition of the importance of tea.

Nick Kilby of the Teapigs brand responded to the news by saying: “We’re delighted that an event like Caffe Culture is waking up to the opportunities to really make tea happen out-of-home. We’ve been saying for years that a range of quality teas is an excellent way to satisfy consumers who want more than just coffee, and is a way to attract non-coffee drinkers to venture inside a coffee bar!”

Marco Olmi of Drury Tea and Coffee is both a long-standing supplier of coffee (Drury created the first British espresso used in the Soho coffee bars of the 1950s) and a tea blender.

“This is a very valid move,” he said. “I drink coffee all day, but the potential of tea still excites me, and it should excite the coffee-house trade as well. It will be good to have more talk about how the catering trade can put it across more profitably, because there is so much more that can be done with tea.”

The Caffe Culture show organiser says that his new move reflects the catering trade’s need to handle all beverages professionally and profitably.

“The event is set to deliver several new features in line with the key issues affecting the industry today,” says event director Elliot Gard. “The new additions are designed to meet business owners’ need to survive in the toughest economic conditions in living memory. The UK Tea Council will deliver a programme of presentations and workshops to provide an insight into the potential growth available to businesses looking to attract a greater number of tea drinkers.”

Caffè Culture 2011 will run over two days (18 & 19 May) at the National Hall, Olympia, London. Information: www.caffeculture.co.uk or 0207 288 6191

Coffee trade says – no more scalded customers

The coffee trade has been told that it must do more to avoid scalding customers with hot drinks. A new discussion document by the Coffee Council, a think-tank of senior managers in the coffee trade, has told the beverage world that ‘one more scalded customer is one too many’, and has suggested that every business which sells hot drinks must now review its safety procedures.. The Child Accident Prevention Trust has invited members of the public to report their experiences of good and bad practice where hot drinks are served.

The actual number of customers injured by hot drinks seems quite small – from the millions of hot drinks served every day, reported scalding cases are probably in single figures each year. Nor does the catering trade appear to be particularly at fault, as the vast majority of scalding incidents appear to have been caused by customers. The problem is that any single case can involve injuries severe enough to be life-changing, and that every such case is seized on by the general news media and damages the catering trade’s reputation.

The Coffee Council’s document reports a typical case, supplied by the Child Accident Prevention Trust. In this case, a four-year-old boy suffered scalding injuries in a café – three years later, the boy still wears dressings on his neck and chest all the time, and requires a half-hour massage every night to retain the mobility of his neck. Skin grafts will be attempted when he is older.

His mother says that she now recognises adults being ‘too casual’ with hot drink, and calls for a greater awareness of the danger of scalds, and for catering staff to be trained to deal with such accidents.

Apart from the ‘duty of care’ aspect, the Coffee Council reminds caterers to protect their reputation and their liability. This is getting more serious – one of the very biggest fast-food names was recently accused in the press of an ‘amateurish’ response to a scalding incident on its premises, and the Council has noted several similar critical comments from the general news media.

There is also a risk of severe damages being awarded in court. Fortunately, even in the new British compensation culture, beverage-related injury awards are still rare; there was a big award of £25,000 against a budget airline four years ago, and a more recent award of £1,400 against a holiday park. However, it is a worry that no insurance companies or legal advisors contacted on the matter would speak to the Coffee Council at all on the matter, which now suggests that caterers will be well advised to specifically check their business insurance cover.

Several recent cases have centred on whether a hot drink was served in a safe manner – typically, a teenager complained to the daily press that he may be scarred for life after a lid came off a takeaway beverage cup as the car he was in passed over a speed-bump. In response, the major disposable-cup manufacturers have stressed through the Council that it is unsafe for caterers to spot-buy generic takeaway lids.

The Coffee Council has told the beverage trade that proving to a court that ‘it wasn’t my fault’ isn’t going to restore a caterer’s reputation. Equally, to say ‘the cup had a warning on it’ is no way to answer the issue of a customer scarred for life.

And so, although scalding injuries represent an immeasurably-small proportion of the millions of hot drinks served every day, the Coffee Council has called upon the catering industry to review its precautions against accidents, against compensation claims, and to avoid distress to frontline staff. The Council sympathises with the hundreds of thousands of front-line catering staff who bear the responsibility of serving hot drinks every day, and so does the Child Accident Prevention Trust, which says: “the important thing is for there to be a procedure in place, and for staff to know what to do. It’s not fair on staff if they’re not prepared for this kind of thing.”

The Coffee Council also calls upon those who provide furnishing and design services to the café and catering trades to consider the safe passage of hot drinks through catering premises. The Council requests that makers of takeaway cups communicate better to the trade the practical aspects of their products, with regard to heat-retention, heat-transfer, safe handling, the carrying of takeaway cups, the use of sip-through lids, and the matching of lids to cups.

Louie Salvoni, founder of the Coffee Council (pictured), says: “we must face up to our responsibilities as an industry, improve our practices, and take better care of our customers.”

The Coffee Council believes that reviewing precautions will be to the great benefit of the catering and hospitality trades, and invites the catering trade to adopt the view that ‘one more scalded customer is one too many’.

The Council can be contacted through Louie Salvoni at Espresso Service, at 0844 692 2222 or 07970 848457.

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The full text of the document ‘One more scalded customer is one too many’ is available in PDF form from the website of Coffee House magazine (www.coffee-house.org.uk)

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The Coffee Council is made up of several senior managers in the beverage industry, who believe that their trade needs a body to speak up for it on matters of importance.

Espresso machine explosion was extremely rare incident, says coffee trade

The explosion of an espresso machine in a café on Tuesday was an ‘almost unheard-of’ incident, according to the British coffee industry. However, the coffee-bar and catering trades have been reminded of their responsibility for diligence in the maintenance and care of espresso machines and other containers of extremely hot water.

The Coffee Council has said that although such incidents are so rare as to be virtually unknown, all caterers using espresso machines must remind themselves that they are using extremely sensitive pieces of equipment, for which servicing schedules and boiler-inspection procedures must be followed.

Details of Tuesday’s incident are still not entirely clear, although it is now generally accepted that at 12.23 pm in the café of Sainsbury’s in the Queensmead shopping centre, Farnborough, an explosion occurred, as a result of which several people were taken to hospital and others treated at the scene.

Various media reports give different numbers of the injured; it has been reported by several media that one lady has been detained in hospital with injuries to eye, face and neck. The news media reported the event with different degrees of drama, one referring to ‘panic’, and one referring to a coffee machine being ‘hurled across the café’ by the explosion. An eye-witness said on television that ‘the ground shook’.

Although first reports referred to an ‘industrial coffee machine’, the machine in question later turned out to be a conventional ‘three-group traditional’ espresso machine, typical of the machines used in every high-street speciality coffee-house.

An aspect of the incident which has puzzled the beverage trade is contained in a statement from Sainsbury’s, which said: ‘seven people sustained minor injuries when a pipe in a coffee machine at our Farnborough store ruptured this afternoon’. A reporter on local television later used very much the same phrasing when he said: ‘it was one of the pipes leading into the machine which ruptured, causing the explosion’.

In reply to questions about this from the coffee trade, Sainsbury’s has so far been unable to give any detailed clarification of this diagnosis, or how such damage could have caused an explosion.

However, several coffee-machine suppliers who have seen a picture of the damage, which has now been widely shown on the internet (it can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-11302161?) have said that they are in no doubt that the situation was a boiler explosion, probably caused by a fault at a safety valve.

This, say several suppliers of main-brand espresso machines, is an extremely rare occurrence. Suppliers who spoke to the trade magazine Coffee House almost all said they have never ever come across such an incident; one supplier only said that he recalled stories of a possible similar occurrence in America, perhaps ten years ago.

While being careful to stress that the cause of Tuesday’s incident has still not been established, suppliers of espresso machines have been unanimous in saying that the accident illustrates the importance of caterers treating espresso machines with care, and the importance of appreciating that such a machine is a ‘pressure vessel’, with a legal requirement of regular examination and certification by a qualified inspector.

Although no question has been raised concerning certification of the machine at this particular incident, one supplier of espresso machines has said that he has been campaigning for many years for caterers and café owners to take this matter seriously, and that this incident will serve to remind café owners of the importance of the issue. Several espresso machine suppliers say they now expect a large number of calls from independent cafes, seeking precautionary inspections of their machines.

Louie Salvoni of the Coffee Council said: “Although a very rare occurrence, this is a serious reminder to every catering operator that it is their responsibility to ensure that they adhere to health and safety directives. This is a directive that has for years been reiterated by suppliers.

“We don’t know at this stage what caused the explosion at Sainsbury’s and must not assume anything. However the message is clear to caterers – you are dealing with a pressurised vessel with boiling water. Follow the health and safety guidelines to the letter and do all that is necessary to ensure your customers are safe in your environment.”

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The Coffee Council is an informal collective of senior managers from the coffee trade, formed to comment on matters of importance to the industry.

Contact: Louie Salvoni, Espresso Service, 07970 848457

Great Taste Awards show exotic coffees are a growing trend

Two remarkably different filter coffees have taken the top spots at the Great Taste awards – the only three-star gold prizes in that sector have gone to one traditional single-origin Ethiopian, and to one extremely unusual Indian/El Salvador blend.

This year’s Great Taste Awards, run by the Guild of Fine Food, have highlighted the emergence of a new market for very high-end and exotic coffees, but at the same time, have confirmed that British coffee roasters can come up with some exceptional award-winning espresso coffees at the kind of prices that the catering trade is likely to pay.

This year’s filter coffee section drew nearly a hundred entries, of which only three dozen were considered worthy of a star. Twelve of them went on to be re-judged and uprated to two stars, but only two reached the top grade, to be rated as three-star coffees.

These top two are extremely different coffees.

One is an Organic Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Harfusa from Glenfinlas, of Edinburgh, described as ‘medium roast, a floral, sweet aroma and complex flavour with notes of citrus and chocolate
in the cup; outstanding acidity and full body, clean and lingering aftertaste’. A particular curiosity of this coffee is that it is not roasted in Britain – it is roasted by Alpen Sierra of California.

The other three-starred filter coffee was a far more powerful taste – an extremely unusual blend based on Indian Monsooned Malabar, by Ponair of Limerick. The composition of this blend is still a mystery – according to the notes given to the judges, it was Malabar with ‘intense dark roasted El Salvador beans’. However, the roaster’s own website says that the blend is Malabar and Utz-certified Colombian Supremo. We haven’t been able to raise the roaster to clear it up… but we can confirm it was a pretty powerful blend!

The market for exotic coffees is developing quickly, according to Guy Wilmot of Sea Island Coffees, who won one star for their Jamaica Blue Mountain filter coffee and another for their Hawaiian Kona. (Their Kopi Luwak very nearly ended up with a star, which would probably have been a first!)
Other companies who did well in the filter coffee section of the awards were Grumpy Mule, the Yorkshire brand which has recently work specifically to introduce high-end deli-quality coffees into foodservice, and which took three awards. Java Republic of Dublin took seven awards and has now won 104 in all; the London roasters Union Hand-Roasted took six. Gala scored three starred prizes, and two ‘ethical’ brands did well – FoodBrands, which owns Percol, won awards for four coffees, and Cafedirect won two.

Other starred winners in the filter section were Bewley’s (who did better in espresso, and very well indeed in tea), Ristretto (the Irish one), Exchange Coffee, Robert Roberts, and Taylors of Harrogate.
The espresso section was even more testing, with only twenty star winners, and just one of them achieving three stars.

That top espresso was a ‘lively espresso with a hint of spices and orange chocolate’ from Bewley’s. Two-star espressos were awarded to Java Republic, Exchange (twice), Glenfinlas (twice), and the Italian Connection.

A notable comment came from Tudor Tea and Coffee of Essex, who took one two-star and said the award proves that ‘great’ espresso coffees can be found in the mid-price range the British catering industry demands.

One-star espressos werew awarded to Robert Roberts (for two separate coffees) , Java Republic (also twice), Union Hand-Roasted (twice), NorthSouth (twice), Ecxhange, Bewley’s, Ponaire, and one went to Origin of Cornwall, which has only just this month installed one of the new Loring eco-roasters.

The tea section of the Great Taste awards was the most demanding of all – 237 entries, of which only fifty won stars, and only one three-star winner.

A surprise was the performance of the mainstream brands – Twinings scored seven starred products, including one from its new Tea Deli range, which is one of the newly-fashionable ‘premium tea-bag’ range – these are generally larger-than-usual tea-bags, which allow large leaves to brew properly. Twinings won a star for the gunpowder and mint blend from the new range. Elsewhere, Taylors of Harrogate (maker of Yorkshire Tea) won three stars, Newby of London got six, and Typhoo scored stars for two of its teas.

A full feature on the judging of this year’s Great Taste Awards will appear in the next printed issue of Coffee House magazine (beginning of August).

Boughton’s Coffee House is the UK’s main news source for the hot beverage trade.

Coffee bar owners’ biggest problems are… their own management skills

The ability to find, hire, motivate and retain good staff continues to be the biggest general frustration for operators in the coffee trade. And the second biggest general problem in the trade is… the performance of café owners themselves!

According to a snapshot survey of 200 coffee-bar operators by the Coffee Boys, the extremely experienced café consultants from Northern Ireland, hiring and keeping staff continues to be a major puzzle. Eleven per cent of operators say they have trouble finding the right staff in the first place, and a very worrying fifteen per cent say they can’t get their staff to perform the way they want.

That of course is a management issue, as are café operators’ other major current worries – ten per cent of operators have trouble understanding the financial side of their own business, and exactly the same figure worry that their own management is not good enough to be sure that their business will function properly if they are away from the premises.

These aside, the biggest single worry for café owners is the problem of attracting new customers. Just over ten per cent of café operators are worried about not being able to get their prices higher, or increase their existing customers’ average spend.

By contrast, few respondents are worried about their suppliers, and a remarkably small figure, a fraction of one per cent, are worried about suppliers’ inability to provide them with ‘great coffee’ – that figure is going to stir some debate among those who believe that the cafe sector’s biggest current challenge is to raise the public’s level of expectation in coffee quality!

The survey is being run in preparation for the Coffee Boys’ presentations to this week’s Caffe Culture show, where the consultants John Richardson and Hugh Gilmartin will be speaking on each of the three days. The Coffee Boys have promised that rather than give a conventional speech, they will focus specifically on café owners’ known current problems, as highlighted by responses to the survey.

It is still possible for cafe operators to take part in the survey, at www.thecoffeeshopquestion.com . Responses continue to be invited, and the value of taking part, says John Richardson, is that those who run coffee shops and cafes will get their voices heard.

(The Caffe Culture show is at Olympia, London, 23-25 June)

High street coffee bars claim massive contribution to retail economy

The role of the coffee shop in the high street economy may be far more important than has previously been thought, which will explain why so many local councils are now keen to turn parts of their shopping and tourist locations into ‘café culture’ areas.

Research sponsored by Starbucks suggests that the coffee-house trade is now vastly important to the high-street retail economy, and even goes so far as to claim that twenty million people visit coffee shops in a typical week.

That figure will almost certainly be discussed at this week’s Allegra Coffee Summit, a major coffee trade conference, and will not be received without question. It has been suggested that the figures are so surprisingly high that the coffee trade and the business community in general will want to see more evidence of the workings.

The most remarkable figure claimed by Starbucks is that 35 per cent of the British adult population, ‘at least twenty million customers’, visit coffee shops in a typical week. This has already aroused questions, and the trade magazine Coffee House has enquired of Starbucks whether they, as sponsors, were not sufficiently surprised to query the finding – however, the coffee chain has not responded.

A senior manager at another well-known high street chain has commented that if all the socio-economic segments and factors of the economically-active adult population were taken into consideration, the industry’s customer figures could not reach twenty million a week. It is thought that twenty million ‘transactions’, taking account of the many people who make multiple visits in a week, or even in a day, might be a more likely figure, but although Coffee House magazine has suggested this to the research company involved, the researcher’s reply does indeed suggest that its figures refer to individuals.

Another figure which Starbucks has used for its promotional use is that ‘up to 25 per cent of footfall’ on the high street is ‘made up by people out for a coffee’. The idea that a quarter of all visits to retail streets is inspired by people looking for a cup of coffee has also been questioned.

Allegra Strategies has responded that two separate studies have given the same answer: one in which consumers in six locations were asked what their purpose on the High Street was, and another which reported that of the total footfall on five locations, 25 per cent of that footfall entered the coffee shops on that street.

However, the coffee trade has reacted positively to an additional finding which suggests that ‘the presence of coffee shops typically boosts the local economy of the British high street by 3-5 per cent’. This, says the trade, is a very likely figure, and gives the café trade something to put forward to those local authorities who, while saying that they want a ‘café culture’ area in their towns, then protest about the about the number of cafes which are opening, and continue to place obstacles in the way of the hospitality trade – most typically, in the matter of permission for street furniture.

“If the 3-5 per cent figure is correct, it provides the trade with an important answer to the increasing number of councils who are complaining about the number of coffee shops on their high streets,” commented Louie Salvoni of the Coffee Council, an organisation recently formed to speak up for the coffee trade. “How can they complain if we can show that we are bringing them positive growth?”

Several coffee-house operators have told Coffee House magazine that they believe this figure to be perfectly reasonable, and one major chain has said that it is now often invited into retail-regeneration areas specifically for the growth that its cafes can provide.

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The Allegra Cofee Summit is on Thursday April 22, at Vinopolis, London

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All the best beverage trade news comes from Boughton’s Coffee House magazine – www.coffee-house.org.uk