Coffee isn't Coke

What do we mean?

Well the primary attraction to coffee for me is it is one of the last non-homogenous products in our daily lives

It is a truly natural product and as a result it delivers a vast palette of variances that reflect all the external factors that the coffee has come into contact with on its journey from soil to cup, often from one side of the world to the other.

One of the challenges for a roaster of coffee is to work with this variance in the coffee and consistently deliver coffee to the customer that tastes as close as possible to the previous batch

The same bag of coffee will also taste different on your taste buds at different times of day, and at the same time of day on different days

For espresso use coffee needs to be ground slightly more coarse on days with high humidity, and slightly less on days with less humidity, and so on

So the focus for Londinium Espresso is to demystify the diatribe of the coffee world where boffins and madmen lurk to a simple set of rules and advice that will place you in the right 'zone' with your coffee

From this point you will develop the confidence and experience to fine-tune your method for your unique set-up. It is highly unlikely that any two of our customers have exactly the same set up, and even if the machine and grinder are identical, with identical degrees of wear on the grinding burrs and so on, your technique will differ and you will produce slightly different results from the same coffee beans

It is not possible to set down a rigid set of rules, which if followed by two different people on two identical set-ups would produce identical espresso. Similar, yes, but still with differences.

For us this is a beauty of coffee, not a short coming. Large multinationals have spent, and continue to spend, millions to synthesise the unique taste of coffee in order to deliver a homogenous product to the market at a very low marginal cost of production. The fruits of some of these efforts can be seen in instant coffee, coffee powders, coffee pastes, and probably the most recent development, the Nespresso style pod technology.

We are the first to recognise that such products offer convenience. We would just ask that you don't confuse them with coffee, which is what Londinium Espresso offer you. Coffee by definition can never be a convenience product. Coffee is an affordable luxury.

Even the most straight forward of preparation methods (a grinder and a Swissgold filter) does not come close to a pod system for convenience, but the result is coffee, a fantastic respite from the daily rountine of life.

A taste which carries your imagination to far off plantations in exotic locations with a dense jungle canopy overhead to filter the beating sun with just the first sip. All this while your cursor sits on cell 'C12' of your Excel spreadsheet in some bland city office block. What a bargain!