Got round to picking up some beans from Sainsbury's.
Picked up some Taste the Difference Guatamalan Espresso and some Taylor's Rich Italian as the Taylor's was on offer cheap.

Started with the own brand, is good, definitely worth the minimal effort of grinding your own. I kept the grind fairly coarse, probably needed a slight bit longer brewing.
Really silky smooth, not especially rich but like I say could probably brew a bit longer.

Haha

That's brilliant.

LivDiv wrote:

Got round to picking up some beans from Sainsbury's.
Picked up some Taste the Difference Guatamalan Espresso and some Taylor's Rich Italian as the Taylor's was on offer cheap.

Started with the own brand, is good, definitely worth the minimal effort of grinding your own. I kept the grind fairly coarse, probably needed a slight bit longer brewing.
Really silky smooth, not especially rich but like I say could probably brew a bit longer.

i think ive tried the entire Taylors range of coffee. My pallete isnt good enough to tell the differences between the various taylors bags. the writing on the back seems like bullshit. "Subtle notes of walnuts and caramel". Nope just tastes of coffee.

Pfft coffee snobs! I just use Taylor’s coffee bags. I don’t have time for the gourmet shit.

One of my colleagues appears to be a monster.

She uses one herbal teabag all day long, for many cups of tea. Just leaves it in there. All day.

Well, yes. We’ll all be on the herbal teas when it gets hard to source fresh milk.

I look forward to more of this foreign muck, speak English proper and so forth, as Brexit kicks in hard.

poprock wrote:

Well, yes. We’ll all be on the herbal teas when it gets hard to source fresh milk.

That was a joke, but …

The barriers to buying milk are going to be lack of affordability (exchange rates and price rises combined), difficulty in getting deliveries through to local shops, and lack of low-wage workers along the supply chain.

Milk’s actually one of the very few dairy products we export to the rest of the EU. That’ll stop overnight as high tariffs come in. We’ll have a milk surplus, but it’ll go rancid quicker than we can buy and drink it.

We import most other dairy products though. We’ll be running out of butter, cheese, etc. And we can’t magically create the necessary factories to turn that milk surplus into all the other refined products we’ll be missing out on.


Our society can’t suddenly up and switch to local sustainability. You’re underestimating the scale of food and drink industry required to affordably feed our population, especially in cities. This is the day to day stuff that’s likely to cause riots in the coming year.

cockbeard wrote:

Leaving Brexit completely out of it, for the general economic health of any nation it makes sense to consume as much local produce as possible. You support your own community, you don't pay for transport costs, and it should be a lot fresher. That's just straight logic surely

Except you don't have the capacity to feed all of your own country, and without the EU subsidies the cost of trying to would be untenable.

EU can set internal tariffs for milk, surely, so it can import from any other EU country I suppose? UK isn't the biggest exporter of milk in the EU, not even top 5 I think.

Changing the subject back to actual coffee the best beans you’re gonna get are from either that coffee shop sort of underneath the train station in Glasgow* or a Filmore and Union. I’m sure both will probs have an online shop to source for those too far away. I’ve had about three years now of experimenting and these are the two best batches I’ve come across. Some of the Taylors stuff is fine and some of the Sainsbury’s TTD stuff is good enough too, sort of. All the other mainstream stuff can just get off into the bin with (weirdly considering the quality of everything else they do) M&S being the worst offender with their vile Italian bean blend being actual spit out wtf.

There you go. Back to brexit now probably.

*I brought some back from the recent ‘stock but will need a local to fill in the missing shop name.

Not sure how in date this is, but I do like this sites visualisations

https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/gbr/

I was also being facetious. I get that we have become far too reliant on supermarkets, and it's something that has always peeved me. Just that now I see the dangers have come to fruition. I was lucky enough to grow up on what used to be a small holding, my grandfather also had a small dairy linky and even after that we all lived near each other and would grow our own veg. Other stuff we'd have local shops for, even when I was growing up in the 80s. Maybe it's just the old man in me complaining and pining for a simpler life, but it seemed better. Harder, more personal responsibility, but more personal satisfaction as well

The advice I got was its actually ok to boil quick, what you don't want is to let it boil for ages after.

I would actually boik water first. Poor in then quickly get on the hotplate. It'll perk almost immediately, turn off and away you go.

Illy?