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Last Updated
10th of December, 2008
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I have always enjoyed coffee, and always been a little weird with it too.
Not in a bad way, more in terms of quality and choice. I remember
asking, as a seven or eight year old, for a filter machine for
Christmas, and drinking filter coffee when no o要e else in the house
did. I recall enquiring if my mom would allow me to choose the coffee
myself, then spending a long time carefully making a selection. I
really don’t know where this desire came from, or why I liked coffee so
much.
There was a shop in Wolverhampton called Snapes
that I liked to visit when I got a little older. Despite it being the
1980s, the shop remained a very olde worlde looking place with oak
panels o要 the walls. o要 these hung big (and I mean big) hoppers full
of what I now know to be stale coffee beans, which when purchased were
wrapped meticulously in 1940s style brown paper.
Snapes
was a reasonable distance from my home and going there was a big thing
to me. As quite an independent young person, I used to look forward to
it and make my own way there. This was at a time when it was safe
enough for relative youngsters to travel ten or fifteen miles alone o要
a bus. I can’t imagine in today’s world letting my son do that, which
is a shame because back then, for me, it was a life forming experience.
The thing I loved most about Snapes was the aroma. I
can still smell it now in my nostrils, the pungent combination of
fragrances; coffee and the roast itself mixed with brown paper and the
old wooden wall panels. It’s a very clear and strong memory. To this
day, I still love the aroma of coffee more than anything else, it’s
such an emotive smell and so distinct.
The love of
coffee carried o要 into my adult life, but back in the early days, the
coffee I drank was nowhere near the quality that I have become used to
and expect today. Just as with many coffee consumers, it was in part
about the caffeine ‘hit’, though that was not all for me, there was
more. I would go for the best quality that was available to me, which
at the time was mostly from supermarkets, because I also wanted
flavour, just as I had years before when trekking all the way to
Snapes. Throughout my life, I have always loved to experience and
challenge myself with taste and the perception of flavours.
When
I left school, I worked in the mental health sector for seven years. As
anyone who has been in nursing knows, the salary is not very good. I
was also living with my now wife Sarah, and had a mortgage at eighteen,
which made money even tighter. So, to supplement my main income, I used
to work three or sometimes four jobs at a time in order to afford the
mortgage payments, put food o要 our table, and buy those nice things
with which I loved to challenge my sense of taste. This meant working
nights or very long hours.
One of the many jobs I had
was at an all night petrol station. It was o要 a very busy road about
ten miles from Birmingham - and not in the nicest part of town. There,
I was locked in from seven at night until seven in the morning all o要
my own, finishing just in time to get to go to my main job. The nights
were long, lonely and very hard work. Staying alert and awake was
important, but making friends with the local police was crucial. I
quickly found out that night workers enjoy coffee, and if you give
night workers nice coffee, they like you a lot!
Thanks
to the coffee, I would have two or three police cars parked outside my
petrol station for hours upon end. The presence of the police is o要e
of the best crime prevention methods around and I highly recommend it.
o要 o要e occasion when I didn’t have a coffee party going o要 and there
was some trouble, I pressed my panic alarm that alerted the police of a
problem and my coffee buddies we soon there, providing a very speedy
response.
I then got a job that paid more money than
nursing but was no where near as much fun. o要ce again, I ended up
doing night duty and, just as before, coffee eventually came to my
rescue, but this time in a very different way. I didn’t enjoy the job
that I was doing and spent many a night thinking about what I would do
differently to change it all and make improvements. I was clearly
unhappy and perhaps a little disillusioned. Around this time my son had
started school and my wife was thinking of new things that she might
like to try for herself. That seemed like a good idea to me, so I too
began to consider what I would really like to do. I loved football but
was never good enough for the school team, so making a living from it
was out of the question. I loved wine, but my liver would never have
held up in the long term. Then it came to me. I loved coffee! At the
time, I had progressed from the supermarket’s finest offerings to
buying green coffee directly from Sweet Maria’s in the US (thanks Tom)
because it simply wasn’t possible to get what I wanted here in the UK.
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