Fancy a coffee?

Invariably, during a property shoot, I’m offered a cup of something hot while I’m beavering away as quickly as I can. Although this is a welcome gesture, I’ve come to realise that the average UK citizen lacks the skill to make an acceptable cup of the beautiful substance known as coffee.

Green coffee beans are harvested in sub-tropical forests worldwide. We have gigantic farms employing millions of people, producing beans of all grades, with some farms even going to the lengths of feeding them to civet cats, and picking them out of the resulting cat-shite to create a bean stripped of it’s natural acidity. (do they get a bonus?)

The beans are sometimes roasted on-site, or exported to foreign shores, where artisan roasteries create magical blends of beans which are full of fresh oils and flavours. The absolute joy of a freshly drawn espresso using a grind from warm beans cannot be described in words – it’s one of the best things in the world.

And then the great British public with it’s post-WW2 hangover attitude gets its hands on the cheap crap and eagerly maintain the low standards that only it can achieve. The cheapest beans are ground, powdered, put through some bizarre chemical freezing procedure, then the mixture is put into jars and it’s shipped out to millions of UK households as “instant coffee”while the rest of the world laughs at us for putting some cancer-causing, brown liquid down our necks. A filthy brown liquid that can only be made partly palatable with the addition of milk and sugar. How do people actually drink it? It might have been fine during rationing, but not now.

So…….. thanks for the offer, but no thanks.