Look at the Costa all these crazy coffees!
Ground down by the price of your £2.50 high street cappuccino? Well...
gone are the days when going out for a coffee meant ordering a mug of scalding instant.
Even the humble £2.50 cappuccino has fallen out of favour, as coffee connoisseurs demand more than a standard caffeine fix to help them through the day.
Last week, Costa Coffee – the UK’s largest coffee shop chain – announced that its pre-tax profits had slipped by ten per cent.
Industry experts say it has been hit by the rapidly growing number of artisan outlets, ever more unusual brews (triple macchiato with cashew milk and butterscotch syrup, anyone?) – and a willingness by consumers to pay crazy money.
The Mail on Sunday has discovered that The Wellesley hotel in London charges up to £35 for a single cup of premium coffee.
Elsewhere, at The Connaught in Mayfair, it costs £7.50 for any cup of coffee, while at nearby Claridge’s it costs up to £20 for a filter coffee for two people if you choose to have it brewed through a vacuum pot. The pot’s two chambers resemble an extravagant egg-timer and use vapour pressure to create the perfect cup.
Jeffrey Young, a market analyst at Allegra, said: ‘Branded chains have become a little bit ordinary and samey.
‘There has been a very fast-paced adoption of craft coffee with high quality beans and beautifully texLONG tured milk from artisan cafes which it is very hard for the chains to compete with.
‘It has a luxury feel to it and we are prepared to pay for it.’
There are now 22,000 coffee shops in the UK – more than double the number just ten years ago, according to retail analysis.
Experts say our love for coffee is increasingly stretching to caffeinefree vegetable-based varieties, with a growing trend towards healthy superfood lattes.
At the Farm Girl cafe in Notting Hill, West London, the menu includes a £4.30 latte with turmeric, cinnamon, honey, coconut milk and astragalus root, and a £4.10 latte made with bright blue matcha powder and almond milk.
At Hally’s in Parsons Green, West London, fans pay £3 for a bright pink latte made with fresh beetroot juice and coconut milk. The cafe is considering introducing a blue algae variety.
The trend is for style as well as substance, with several places even running ‘latte art’ workshops.
At Limini Coffee in Bradford, staff offer three-hour courses costing between £75 and £225. It says experts will show you how to ‘pour latte art in the shapes of hearts, rosettas and tulips’.