Expert Reviews & Buying Guides for Coffee Enthusiasts
Let’s be blunt: the average British coffee drinker now spends somewhere between £500 and £800 a year on their daily habit. That’s the commuter’s flat white, the mid-morning pod, the après-lunch cafetière — it all adds up with a quiet ruthlessness that your bank statement is quietly furious about. Here’s the thing, though. A decent … Read more
Let’s get one thing straight: the days of decaf being a punishment drink are well and truly over. That beige, slightly sorrowful cup you remember from the nineties — watery, flat, vaguely reminiscent of dishwater — bears absolutely no resemblance to what modern decaffeination technology produces. And yet, the stigma lingers. People still apologise when … Read more
A weekly coffee subscription is, in essence, a standing order that sends ground or whole-bean coffee to your door on a set schedule — usually every seven days — so the bag in your cupboard never quite runs out. For anyone in the UK who’s stood at the kettle on a wet Tuesday morning, scraping … Read more
Let’s be honest. Most of us spent years making peace with whatever granules came in a brown jar from the supermarket — dark, bitter, vaguely coffee-shaped. Then someone handed us a cup of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, and suddenly we tasted blueberry and jasmine where there should have been mud, and our entire relationship with the morning … Read more
There’s a quiet revolution happening on British doorsteps. Not the political kind — the caffeinated kind. The fortnightly coffee subscription has, quite brilliantly, solved one of the most mundane yet genuinely irritating problems in modern life: running out of good coffee on a grey Tuesday morning and being forced to rummage through the back of … Read more
There are roughly 95 million cups of coffee consumed in the UK every single day. Let that sink in. Ninety-five million. And yet, the vast majority of those cups are brewed from bags that have been sitting on a supermarket shelf for the better part of six months, slowly going the way of stale dreams … Read more
There’s something quietly brilliant about what’s happened to British coffee culture over the past decade. Walk down most high streets from Bristol to Edinburgh and you’ll find independent roasteries where the baristas talk about processing methods the way sommeliers discuss terroir. The jar of instant that used to live on every kitchen worktop? Increasingly confined … Read more
There’s a particular kind of smugness that comes from pulling a shot of coffee you roasted yourself. Not the insufferable kind — the quiet, deeply satisfied kind, when you inhale the first bloom of a freshly ground Ethiopian Yirgacheffe you took from green bean to dark magic in your own kitchen. That’s the feeling that’s … Read more
There’s a particular kind of smugness that comes with roasting your own coffee. Not the insufferable sort — just the quiet, private satisfaction of standing in your kitchen at 7am, listening to the first crack of green beans, knowing the cup in your hand will be fresher than anything in any café on your high … Read more
There’s a particular kind of magic that happens in late October. The radiator clicks on. The last of the daylight disappears around half four. And suddenly — inexplicably — your regular morning flat white just doesn’t cut it anymore. You want something that smells like the season. Something with cinnamon. Something that makes your kitchen … Read more