Brown gold

Amongst other things food- and drink-related, I love coffee. I started drinking it when I was quite young, and never really developed a taste for tea. Of course, the British and tea are widely considered to be inseparable, but a passion for coffee pre-dates the association of this beverage with the British Isles. The first coffee-houses opened in England in the 17th century, not in London as you might expect, but in Oxford. The essayist, wit and dictionary-compiler Samuel Johnson is reported, by his famous sidekick Boswell, discussing tea as a newly-arrived novelty a hundred years later. Lloyd’s of London, the famous insurance market? Named after the coffee-house in which its founder members habitually met. So don’t make the mistake of thinking that the likes of Starbucks were responsible for bringing coffee-drinking to the UK.

All of which brings me to newly-established Suffolk coffee heroes Thistledown Cottage Coffee. There is no better way to drink coffee than brewed from freshly roast and ground beans sourced from small producers, and if you want the real thing you can do no better than avail yourself of Thistledown’s mail-order service, choosing your preferred variety and grind from their selection of the world’s best. If you’re local, you can swing by the eponymous cottage and pick up your order in person.

As they say on the website, ‘With enough coffee, anything is possible.’