Everyone’s talking about… fancy coffee

It used to be simple (with milk or without), but now getting your caffeine fix isn’t so straightforward. We’re on hand to help…

WHAT ARE MY CHOICES?

Keeping up with what’s cool on the coffee scene can be exhausting! There’s traditional cappuccino (espresso mixed with warm, frothy milk, which the Italians drink in the morning), then there’s iced coffee, flavoured coffee, short coffee (espresso, macchiato) and long coffee (Americano), as well as new Instagramfriendly colourful coffees, including beetroot, turmeric and matcha lattes which, because of their plant bases, contain antioxidants.

WHAT, NO TEA?

We’re still a nation of tea drinkers (more than 165m brews are drunk in the UK every day), but coffee is catching up fast. Now, 95m cups are consumed – up by a third from 10 years ago. The first coffeehouse in England opened in Oxford in 1652, when the drink was just an exotic product of a plant that grew thousands of miles away. Now, there’s a coffee shop on almost every corner, and the ways we drink it are becoming more and more inventive.

HOW MUCH?

While most coffee shop servings cost £2-£4, one of the UK’S most expensive cups will set you back a whopping £15. Le Café Alain Ducasse in London’s Kings Cross claims its coffee is ‘one of the finest in the world’, boasting notes of orange, bergamot, cocoa nibs and grape. The price is down to the small harvest of beans exported in limited quantities from farms in war-torn Yemen.

WHEN DID COFFEE CULTURE KICK OFF?

The 1990s sitcom has been cited as the start of the explosion of coffeehouse culture, with Ross, Rachel and pals choosing to hang out in Central Perk instead of a bar. But coffeehouse chain Starbucks started in Seattle in 1971.

Black Ivory Coffee is the world’s most expensive coffee. It’s made from beans digested by elephants in Thailand and costs around £40 per cup.

Beethoven would count out 60 coffee beans per cup before making his brew. Today, a single shot in a high street chain contains around 56.