It is widely known, and widely appreciated, that there has been a great resurgence in the careful serving of top-quality filter coffee – but is it really a practical business strategy? At a time when the concept of the ‘brew bar’ has become widely talked about in the café trade, and the general concept of [Read more]

The Jamaican coffee industry is about to begin a crack-down on counterfeiting and ‘passing-off’ of inferior coffees being sold as genuine Blue Mountain. There has long been a trade in the ‘counterfeiting’ of certain coffees – not just Jamaica Blue Mountain, but Monsooned Malabar and various Ethiopian coffees have been the subject of ‘passing-off’, in [Read more]

The latest in a series of café hauntings has apparently occurred in a completely new business in Lincoln – a spirit with a habit of untying waitresses’ aprons. The site of the new Grayz on the Hill tea-room, acquired by Nora Hughes for her  new café, is a four-hundred-year-old building which has, over the centuries, [Read more]

One of the UK’s biggest tea brands has denied that a press furore over one of its blends was a deliberate marketing ploy to gain attention. Several of the daily press enthusiastically jumped aboard the bandwagon of a silly-season story concerning Twinings’  Earl Grey blend. The producer relaunched the blend with the addition of a [Read more]

The Caffe Nero chain has decided to give free w-fi access in its British high street cafes. In recent years a large number of cafes have decided to restrict or even completely abandon the concept of wi-fi, on the basis that it brings potentially more problems than benefits – at one time it was widely [Read more]

One of the most fascinating social experiments based on coffee house business has more or less collapsed in a whirl of internet ‘flaming’ and abuse. The Jonathan’s Card project was begun by an American, Jonathan Stark, as an experiment in the use of payment methods. Effectively, he took the image of his Starbucks ‘card’ from [Read more]

Independent coffee shops opening over the past few years are beginning to report healthy survival rates.  The latest of the speciality coffee stores to celebrate two years in business is the Urban Coffee Company of Birmingham, which has thrown a party for regular customers. Urban’s Hannah Wolsey has said that over the last year, the [Read more]

There has been another of the regular police warnings about thieves who target customers in coffee shops. The area involved this time is Hertfordshire, where there has been a spate of thefts of mobile phones, wallets and purses, almost all from victims sitting at tables having coffee.  Police suggest that customers in coffee shops tend [Read more]

There will be another tea and coffee festival for consumers in London this year. Yael Rose, whose event at the South Bank Centre in spring was well received by the beverage trade, will run another event at the same venue in November, and probably follow with a third at the South Bank in March next [Read more]

Coffee shops are now more popular than pubs for out-of-home eating and drinking, according to a survey by Deloitte. For their Taste of the Nation report, they questioned 3,000 consumers, and discovered that all consumers expect to eat and drink out of home a little more over the next year. However, the venue of choice [Read more]

Branches of Starbucks in New York City have now turned against one of the sector’s least favourite class of customer – the ‘campers’, the ones who open up their laptops, sometimes order a coffee and sometimes do not, and proceed to dominate a table for several hours. It is one of the major factors in [Read more]

Nine London venues have been shortlisted in the ‘coffee shops’ section of the London lifestyle awards.   Curiously, not all of them are specialist coffee shops as such – some of them are waffle shops and patisseries, but what they all have in common is good coffee. Among the familiar names in the shortlist are Bar [Read more]

There is a coffee element to the new contest being run by the YBF, the Young British Foodies.  The intention is not to find a best product or best venue, as is the case with so many contests, but to identify and recognise the up-and-coming stars in various forms of food and drink. In the [Read more]

The new top man for Starbucks in the UK is a former aide to president Bill Clinton, and holds the unique status of being the only person in the coffee trade to have been the role model for a character in a major TV series. He is Kris Engskov, who joined the American coffee chain [Read more]

In popular modern mythology, the rise of the speciality coffee culture has been largely driven by the ‘young professional’ sector, particularly those in the financial world… which makes it all the more curious that London’s big financial centre, Canary Wharf, is only now to open its first independently-owned coffee house. The reason behind this curiosity [Read more]

The question has come round again of whether the café trade is approaching the time of the ‘roaster-retailer’, the coffee house which roasts its own beans both for its own use and for in-the-bag sale to customers. This has been predicted on several occasions, and in recent times some of the east London coffee houses [Read more]

One of the world’s greatest (and most expensive) coffees is now available in a decaffeinated version.  For the first time, Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee has been processed with the Swiss Water decaffeination technique, and will be distributed by Sea Island Coffees of London, the authorized distributors for Europe. According to a report in the Daily [Read more]

The UK’s best teas and coffees, as judged by the Guild of Fine Food, can now be promoted through the beverage trade with the gold star ratings they received in this year’s Great Taste Awards. There has, however, been a slight murmur of enquiry over the judging of the coffees in this year’s awards as [Read more]

The coffee trade has made a considerable impression at one of the world’s biggest think-tank conferences.  At the TED conference in Edinburgh in July, the Coffee Common organisation drew together a collection of the UK’s top baristas, using a selection of top coffees and state-of-the-art equipment to promote the coffee trade. Coffee Common is an [Read more]

The next new ‘origin’ to appear in the world coffee market is likely to be China, with Starbucks having made a decision to invest in coffee growing and processing in the country.  It is probably not a coincidence that Starbucks has already identified China as its biggest potential growth market. There is already a history [Read more]

Galleria illy, the coffee brand’s exhibition of coffee and art, will be in London for a month from 12th September. It is a temporary exhibition space hosted by lighting and furnishings designers FLOS and Moroso, and will include art, literature, science, design and food and wine events presented by famous designers. The artist Francesco Clemente [Read more]

Murmurs have begun to spread through the British beverage trade about the possibility of a new contest for tea, along the lines of the well-known coffee barista championships, following the holding of a ‘world’ event in America in which no British contestants appeared… indeed, in which only one European country was represented. The snappily-titled Tea [Read more]

The Costa café at Great Portand Street, London, has won the ‘café and fast food’ section of the Restaurant and Bar Design Awards.  The café, designed by Stiff & Trevillion, was shortlisted against several sites known for their espresso, including Beas of Bloomsbury, Tinderbox and Peggy Porschen and Moo:baa of Birmingham. Meanwhile, Costa surprised the [Read more]

The two biggest competitors to independent café bars are both planning to develop their interest in the ‘drive-thru’ coffee bar concept. Costa opened its latest bar in mid-June at Lydiard Fields, a busy motorway site at junction 16 of the M4, just by Swindon.  A couple of weeks previously it opened a drive-thru site at [Read more]

It turned out to be an extremely busy time for tennis-themed cafés at this year’s Wimbledon tournament.  The coffee service was dominated by one brand – in a remarkably large sponsorship deal, Lavazza served speciality coffee at sixty different points. Six hundred staff were trained in the use of 200 coffee machines. The brand had [Read more]

Coffee bars who serve coffee certified through the Rainforest Alliance now have an extra promotional opportunity, planned for this autumn.  The Alliance has created its own ‘awareness week’, which will run between September 19-23rd.   Although the Alliance is probably the second-most familiar ethical coffee certification, it has not before now had any promotional mechanism of [Read more]

There has been another surprising development in the trend for well-made filter coffee in the modern café-bar. There has for some time been a groundswell of opinion behind the belief that customers will come more and more to appreciate the qualities of excellent filter coffees, in which subtleties of flavour can be brought out to [Read more]

The coffee bar sector looks to be benefitting from the remarkable amount of interest shown by the general public in tea and coffee events over the first half of this year.  The attendance numbers are high – the Bath Coffee Festival drew 10,115 consumers over a weekend, the Allegra London Coffee Festival has published a [Read more]

The café bar trade and its suppliers are reported be increasingly exasperated with official progress on the espresso-machine safety question.  This follows the explosion of a machine in a café on the south coast (quite possibly the only such incident in living memory), which has brought back to attention the legal requirement for café operators [Read more]

It is expected that the café bar trade will soon come in for more criticism over the rising number of coffee shops in provincial high streets. There are already regular reports within the industry’s trade news magazine of debates in local authority meetings, in which councilors regularly complain that their high streets are becoming crammed [Read more]

Independent coffee shops will be facing competition from Waitrose, as was recently reported in the national press.  The supermarket’s managing director was quoted as proposing to launch a chain of standalone cafés – it turns out that he was mis-quoted, and that he really said he was going to develop his instore coffee shops. He [Read more]

There has been another twist in the story of legal actions over the ‘capsule’ coffee format pioneered by Nespresso. The Nestlé corporation has been wrangling in the European courts against those who make coffee capsules to be compatible with its Nespresso machine. Nestlé’s great selling tactic is, of course, that once a consumer has bought the [Read more]

The most distinctive product in modern beverage retailing, which was the subject of a very sharp rise and then crash in its home country, continues to spread in London. Bubble Tea is a curious drink devised in Taiwan, in which either fruit-flavoured herbal mixes or milky teas are served with chewy tapioca balls at the bottom [Read more]