Rwanda Rwamatamu You may ask what brings the daughter of a coffee family from Rwanda to Ross on Wye. It turns out that Bernice has been studying Project Management at Middlesborough University, in Teesside. As I understand it, Bernice and Luke, met here, in the UK. The big plan is for Bernice and Luke to […]
“parfum pour toi?” is the New bag of beans Have you noticed the latest distraction that adds value (or and costs) by putting more layers of packaging to make coffee look less and less like coffee and more like perfume? It is kind of cute, but to me, this is going a bit too far. […]
Luxury Colombian Chocolate Our chocolate story starts with meeting this guy (above). Today Barry looks more like Bruce Willis than I think the OG does. Barry travels the world training people in how to process cacao into couverture. From war zones to the desert, Barry is somewhere sharing his skills, with the occasional trip to […]
A combination of media has bought the subject of caffeine to the fore over the last few weeks. Firstly James Hoffmann did a tour of specialty coffee shops in London and found some consistent and stable results. This is amazing in some ways if we look at it from an ingredients perspective. After this JH […]
Non-Dairy Milk, Vegan Milk I am going to tip-toe here on the thinnest of eggshells. The last few decades have seen a huge rise in the volume of milk consumed in coffee. When I say milk here, I am referring to the one also recognised in the dictionary and google, produced by mammals*. What no […]
Coffee in Australia Recipe This is a brief overview of our visit to both Melbourne and Sydney over the past few weeks. When I travel, I love to see how things are different in coffee. Because almost no one reads this I can write almost anything! No, seriously, on occasion my writing does need to […]
Airport Coffee. In the UK, so much of our coffee offerings are by chains, especially in airports. On a very recent trip to see family and friends in Australia, the need to communicate (or maybe even vent!) the highs and lows of buying coffee, whilst traveling became apparent. My frustration wasn’t about what was charged. […]
Is it moral to boycott a (poor) producing country in a war zone? This has been eating away at me, since the summer. There has been a growing group of people in the coffee world that have used the big question of morality, for what I feel is shrowding the less obvious. Ethiopia is still […]
Speedily, squeezing in a visit to Ross on Wye, yesterday between Edinburgh and London (on the same day!) I had the absolute pleasure of (albeit briefly) hosting Jose’ and Jacqueline. It turns out that it has been just over 4 years since Jacob and I visited Maria Branca (that’s mad!) and looked over the farm. […]
Ugandan Specialty Coffee Ugandan specialty coffee is in a particularly exciting chapter of its history. In the (not so) distant past, the majority of Ugandas’ production was commercial robusta and the best arabicas were reputedly grown on Mount Elgon, on the eastern side of the country bordering Kenya. The widest-grown arabica varietals are SL 28 […]
