How to be a conscious coffee drinker

Being a coffee connoisseur used to mean Maxwell House for everyday, Gold Blend for visitors and a vac-pack brick of Melitta for dinner parties. Now there are whole supermarket aisles devoted to a rainbow of blends and grinds and roasts. Coffee is big business, with a global market worth nearly £80 billion. Worldwide, we are drinking 10 million tonnes a year, more than twice as much coffee as we did 50 years ago, and production is set to triple by 2050.

But it’s not getting cheaper. Coffee prices hit a 10-year high last month, more than doubling in just 12 months. Part of this is down to climate change: Brazil, the world’s largest producer, was battered in 2021 by Hurricane Ida, drought and freak frosts. Add to that increased costs from pandemic-induced freight problems and container shortages, and we can expect the price of a cup of Joe to rise even more this year.

Given the squeeze on our wallets, it feels more important than ever to spend wisely when we are stocking up the coffee jar. We are bombarded by certifications, but does it really matter if it is Fairtrade, rainforest-friendly, organic?

And why is coffee so contentious?

Part of the problem with coffee is down to geography. Like chocolate, almost all coffee is grown in the tropics, largely in the ‘Global South’, the less developed, lower-income areas of the world. The red coffee ‘cherries’ are picked, raw beans removed, dried, then sold to processors and shipped to the affluent ‘Global North’, where they are roasted for sale in countries like

Germany, Italy, the US and the UK.

The price soars as soon as the beans are roasted, meaning that while coffee is a vital part of the economy of low-income countries, most of the money we pay for our bags of Continental Roast stays in affluent nations, rather than going back to the farmers and their teams. For £1 spent on coffee, 10p goes to the grower and 81p to the roaster and on margins.

But that’s not all. There’s an environmental cost, according to coffee expert Professor Mark Maslin of University College London, author

Most of the money we pay for our bags of Continental Roast stays in affluent nations

of How To Save Our Planet (Penguin, £7.99). ‘If you did the roasting in the country of production, you reduce the weight of the beans [by around 15 per cent]… saving a huge amount of carbon on the transport.’

As yet, there’s no coffee that’s roasted in the country of origin available here, perhaps thanks to the common myth that it needs to be freshly roasted. Maslin disagrees: ‘If you vacuum seal it and put nitrogen in the packaging it won’t go off.’

Maslin has other environmental problems with coffee. As his recent university paper points out, the least sustainably produced and transported coffee has a carbon footprint as high as half that of beef, which is much reviled by climate activists. In pursuit of freshness, there’s a growing trend for high-end coffee roasters to have their green beans flown in, rather than brought by sea. So 1kg of coffee brought to the UK from Brazil by air produces 6.275kg of CO2; by container ship it’s 0.18kg. With this carbon footprint it’s hard to justify even if, as Josh Clarke of Clifton Coffee Roasters in Bristol explains, ‘This is generally for tiny packages of super specialised, expensive coffee, too small to ship.’ And at the other end of the scale, Cornish Yallah Coffee brings some of its Colombian coffee to the UK by carbon-neutral sailboat.

It’s worth remembering, meanwhile, that Britain’s favourite coffee still comes in a jar. Instant coffee, a taste we acquired from the ration packs of American GIS, accounted for over two-fifths of our spend last year.