It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Ten Years of Mis Adventures in Coffee

Annabel Townsend

• Publisher: Pottersfield Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781988286518
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

This is not a success story. It's a tale of ten years in the coffee industry, of what happens when you take the leap, seize the day, and follow your dreams—then discover you don't have any money, your landlord is an idiot, and the job you moved to another country for may not exist.

Annabel's coffee adventures took her from a wet, dreary market in northern England to the Canadian Prairies via a PhD in Central America. Along the way, she learned her barista skills from a World Champion Barista, entertained teenagers with her coffee and culinary experiments, and discovered the joys of entrepreneurship almost by accident. She sorted bad beans from good ones on tiny farms in the highlands of Nicaragua and took home a tropical disease as a souvenir. Her business ventures have combined coffee with books, babies, bicycles, and burlesque, because what else do you do with a PhD. in coffee? She gradually mastered the art of juggling a start-up business, her thesis, and a five-month-old baby at the same time, and negotiated emigration bureaucracy, a few disastrous business relationships, and the brutality of Canadian winters.

1

Why Coffee?

I have a headache. I moan to Carl, my husband, about this, but he is not impressed. “I don’t believe such a thing exists,” he says. This is because I have a caffeine headache, or rather, a lack-of-caffeine headache. I didn’t sleep particularly well last night, and this morning I had to get up unhealthily early for me, rush round trying to pack lunch boxes and find lost shoes and stop the baby hurtling down the stairs nose-first, and then leg it all the way across town wearing high heels in an effort to look presentable and professional for a business breakfast meeting. I was still late, and I did not get time to make coffee. My body cannot cope with this.

My addiction may well be psychological, but the effects are very physical. My head hurts; there is some serious pressure on the top of my skull. I have little energy, I am pale, and I am irritable.

This never used to be the case. My British parents drank tea by the bucketful and when I was a baby, they used to give me a lukewarm bottle of milky tea every day. Possibly as a result of this, I have never touched the stuff since. But I never drank much coffee either. However, at age seventeen, I got what I consider the second most boring job in the universe – data entry. An entirely sedentary lifestyle, parked in front of a black screen with green text, typing endless addresses in over and over again, eight hours a day. The most interesting thing to do during those interminable hours was to get up and wander over to the monstrosity in the corner, press a series of buttons, and receive a plastic cup full of brown powder with metallic-tasting hot water poured on top.

Sometimes the powder still floated, or clumped at the bottom until poked by an enthusiastic plastic stick. And woe betide anyone who dared request “milk” – more powder, only off-white in colour, and seemingly even less soluble than the brown stuff. This was, apparently, coffee. Nescafé Instant vending machine coffee to be precise. It was foul. But it was hot, it had caffeine in it, it required moving from my desk occasionally, and as such, it was the only thing that stopped me turning into a brain-dead corporate zombie, gradually losing form and melting into the chair, just becoming a giant pair of fingers welded to the keyboard.

I left that job after six months, having put on a lot of weight, developed repetitive strain injury from the keyboard, and the beginnings of a caffeine addiction. However, I also had enough money to go to Peru for the rest of the year, which had been my goal all along. Peru produces a small amount of truly excellent, high-altitude arabica coffee, but such are the ironies of global capitalism, they export all of it, and getting hold of coffee in Peru is difficult and expensive. Nestlé produces something called Ecco, which is ground roasted wheat and chicory. When brewed, it is brown and looks like coffee. It has no actual coffee in it, no caffeine content, but if you ask for “café” in Peru, this is generally what you get. In short, I went cold turkey.

On my return to the U.K. from Peru with a love of Latin America permanently sealed in my heart, I started university in Durham, a B.A. in Anthropology. I did a lot of different activities outside classes and meeting friends in coffee shops became almost ritualistic. Anyone who has ever endured lectures on cranio-facial morphology of early hominids and phylogeny of various primates, or even quantitative research methods and statistics for social scientists, will know that at some points, major caffeine boosts are a medical necessity.

After graduating with no other ideas about what to do with myself, I started working in cafés and coffee shops. It was from these that I started to really learn about coffee. I initially thought that working with the stuff day in, day out would put me off, but this has never been the case. All the different strains and varieties, all the subtleties of flavour that can be produced, all the assorted methods of brewing, filtering, or extracting, all is fascinating to me. I am by no means a world-class barista, but I am at least relatively skilled in the art, and I intend to continue learning.

But just drinking a lot of the stuff does not warrant my level of obsession. A more vocational interest began when I had the chance to work in a new business that at least attempted to take coffee seriously. Due to a chance meeting with a man on a train (a recurring theme in my life: I met my husband on a long-distance bus), I somehow wound up, at age twenty-two, as the manager of the In Arcadia Café, a new and decidedly experimental café above an alternative clothing store and body piercing studio.

I had zero experience; I was on that train heading to my office job as a project coordinator for a small charity. I’d landed that role with my anthropology degree which someone, somewhere thought might be useful for outreach work with the local Gypsy community. The Gypsy job was going terribly at the time, stressful and with a bully for a supervisor, and I was well and truly in over my head. Suddenly, here was someone wearing big Goth boots, talking about a funky little café and coffee and Mexican food; it all sounded so far removed from my present situation that I just jumped in with both feet. I was sent on barista training courses, which were interesting as well as practical, and I practised my new craft very enthusiastically.

These training courses took place in Newcastle, in North East England, at Pumphreys Coffee, an independent, family-run coffee supplier with roots going back to 1750. We began the training with the son of the owner, a very earnest bloke a little older than me named Stuart Lee Archer. About halfway through the day, he said he had a special guest tutor for us as his friend was visiting. He introduced us to a quiet, skinny man who just said his name was Jim.

Jim attempted to teach us the basis of latte art – drawing pretty patterns in the milk and getting the espresso just right so that milk can balance on top. His latte was absolutely perfect, strong but with the milk naturally sweet. That was the first time I had ever managed to drink coffee without sugar, which is quite a strange thing for me to imagine nowadays. He guided us through some “free-pour” techniques (drawing patterns just by pouring the milk, no additional tools used), until we’d all made some quite passable drinks. Jim encouraged us to practise and, if we needed any more tips, to consult his blog. I did, and discovered his full name was James Hoffmann and his blog had quite a following. The year after, James Hoffmann won the 2007 World Barista Championship and then founded Square Mile Coffee in London.

Of course, the more you learn about the stuff, the more gourmet your tastes become, and in the case of coffee, the more expensive too. If I look back now, twelve years later, on the “experimental” coffees I was serving up then, the mind boggles. I also vividly remember the look of absolute horror on my boss’s face when we were told that the portafilter handles on the machine actually come apart so you can clean them. We had no idea …

Despite having a pristine, top-of-the-range espresso machine and a well-trained staff, that first barista job in the In Arcadia Café mainly involved concocting abominations for a group of adolescents usually known as the “Teenage Fan Club,” who took up residence in the café very early on. None of them ever had any money, and were very tight with their meagre “education maintenance allowance” of £40 ($80 in 2006) a month. I often found I was making one large drink that six of them would share – for three hours. It wasn’t a café business as much as it was a homeless shelter, or maybe a youth hostel. They also had strange tastes, all being self-confessed emo, Goth, or “scene” kids.

Often as not, I had to make things like Love Potion #9, a very old music reference which none of them appreciated but all liked to believe they understood. A Love Potion #9 was a vanilla latte – the milk dyed pink with cochineal food colouring – with a chocolate heart sprinkled on the top. I also offered uber-coffee – four espresso shots, cocoa, and cinnamon – so thick that the spoon could stand up in it, and referred to by Grem, self-appointed ringleader of the Teenage Fan Club, as “kidney-kickingly good.” When they realized that you could dye milk odd colours with food dye, they wanted all sorts (note: green coffee is especially off-putting).

One lad once asked, “I want something really Goth. Can you make black coffee?”

I hesitated for a few seconds and you could see the realization dawning across his face. He went on to drink six uber-coffees that day before writing his final maths exam at college. We didn’t see him for a few days after that, but his friends reported he was fine after he’d stopped vibrating.

I shouldn’t laugh. My own exploits with excess caffeine consumption are no less silly. At one point during my undergraduate degree, I was heavily involved in student theatre and landed the role of stage manager on a show where everything that possibly could go wrong was going wrong all at once. I spent sixteen hours straight in a technical rehearsal and worked my way through an entire packet of Pro Plus caffeine tablets as well as numerous coffees. The results were almost hallucinogenic. Things moved in the corners of my eyes, but never stayed still long enough to focus on them. It is very, very difficult to design lighting when you keep seeing shadows that no one else can see. Caffeine is essential to this form of existence. However, it is also my downfall, sometimes. But back to In Arcadia Café.

Apart from seriously risking the health of a few emo teenagers, making some atrocities that I can hardly bear to admit to now, and grilling quesadillas so well that the fire alarm frequently cheered me on, the In Arcadia Café was a very valuable learning experience. Seeing the process involved in opening up a new café and experiencing first-hand how it developed really inspired me. The boss was a pretty regular guy, and he had never been in business before. The café came about solely through hard work and ambition, and also a desire, like mine, to get out of a frustrating work situation. I also learned, above all else, that here was something I was good at – flaming grills aside, I’d increased their takings tenfold inside a year – and thoroughly enjoyed. I thought, I could do this myself. One day.

Of course, I enjoyed some aspects of it – namely trading casual insults with the stench of teenagers (now the offical collective noun) that weren’t strictly profitable. As weird and wonderful as the place was, without profit there was no café business to be enjoyed, and eventually the boss had to make difficult decisions about the future of the operation. He closed the shop downstairs before the café; apparently coffee and cake are more lucrative than New Rock boots and body jewelry. But changes were afoot, and soon the focus of the café shifted from coffee and simple snack foods to full restaurant meals, late-night opening, and a newly installed cocktail bar. Inevitably, this saw the end of the teenage hangout as they could no longer afford to eat there and couldn’t use the bar because most were still underage.

The opening hours were then too long for me to handle on my own, and the cooking soon became way beyond my level of expertise. (A term I used very loosely anyway.) Ironically, the boss’s solution was to bring in his wife – a militant vegetarian – as head chef in the evenings. She drove me quietly insane. Very reluctantly, I decided it was time to move on. To give credit where credit is due, the place is still going and has actually won awards for being the best Mexican restaurant outside London.

2

Caffè Nero:
An Academic Perspective

I left the In Arcadia Café as quickly as possible in an attempt to make a clean break and not get too upset about saying goodbye to somewhere I felt I’d helped create. I cast around urgently for another job and managed to continue my coffee career in a far more mainstream, stable, generic, and, dare I say it, boring environment: I went to work at Café Nero. Sorry, I mean Caffè Nero, with two f’s because they were pretending to be Italian. Caffè Nero is, in fact, a chain of cookie-cutter coffee shops that was then entirely based in the U.K. – all seven hundred stores. The owner of the company is a guy from California and their coffee is a blend of mainly Central American beans roasted on the Isle of Dogs in South East London. Oh, and their pastries are sort of French. At that time, most of their staff were Polish immigrants. So … very Italian, obviously.

Each store was the same: same layout, same product menu, same coffee, staff all trained in the same way. Their blue branding was everywhere, and there were even the same rather dated photo canvases on the walls in each store. (Hint to café designers: if you are going to photograph a group of friends meeting for coffee, do not put a mobile phone in the picture. Apparently, if you drink Nero’s coffee, you will be transported back in time to when everyone carried a Motorola flip phone.) Nero baristas had a uniform (black pants and the official Caffè Nero black T-shirt) and there were strict guidelines to adhere to, a “Nero Way” of making drinks, and even semi-scripted customer service speeches: “The 6 Steps of Sales.”

It was excruciating. After a while, I began to feel a strange affinity with the long-suffering espresso machines in there, as I was essentially a minimum-wage button-monkey. All I really had to do was press buttons to make drinks and pretend to be nice to people. It was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• 20
• 21
• 22
• Epilogue