Costa

OUR EXPERTISE

1. WHICH BEANS?

To the untrained eye, a coffee bean is a coffee bean is a coffee bean. Well, not if you work at Costa. We have people who devote their entire working lives to sourcing, checking and blending our beans.

At our Roastery, for instance, Gennaro (he's our Technical Manager) and his team spend hours every day examining, cupping and charting the exact acidity, body, sweetness, bitterness and aroma profiles of our Mocha Italia blend. It's like an obsession. If any coffee doesn't make the grade, it doesn't make it to a Costa store, simple as that.

2. WE'VE BEEN ROASTING FOR 37 YEARS.

We only ever slow-roast our coffee beans. We've been doing it this way since 1971, and we're not about to change. Why? Because this is the only way you can only extract the true, as-nature-intended coffee flavour and aroma. And those are two things we're not prepared to compromise (even if other coffee stores would).

Every batch of beans is roasted for a minimum of 18 minutes (any less than 14 minutes is not officially 'Slow-Roasting') in a Petroncini or Probat drum roaster (the best available, naturally). When roasting, sound and smell is very important to an experienced master roaster. We stop the roast just at the point when the oils are still contained within the bean, ready to be released when we grind it in the Costa store. It's this release of oils that created the amazing aroma you can experience in any cup of Costa coffee.

3. COSTA BARISTAS, WE SALUTE YOU.

Every time a Costa barista makes you coffee, one all-important extra ingredient goes into your cup - coffee expertise. Every single barista in every single Costa store has been professionally trained in the art of coffee by qualified coffee experts, at our coffee academy. Coffee making is an exact art, you see.

Take the espresso for instance. Our baristas are trained to make sure their grind produces 30ml of espresso in 20 seconds. If it takes longer than 20 seconds, the flavour won't be perfect and we'll start again. Our coffee machines are also checked meticulously at least once a day to ensure both the grind and coffee dose are just right. These are just some of the quality measures we demand from all our baristas.

DID YOU KNOW?

• We source beans from as far afield as Colombia, Guatemala, Vietnam and Kenya.
• Costa is the only UK coffee chain to control the whole coffee making process from start to finish – we source, store, blend, roast, grind and pour all our own coffee. No one else is involved.
• The humble espresso is the most complex form of coffee. It requires a blend of different types of coffee beans to balance acidity, body, sweetness, bitterness and aroma.
• Our coffee tasters only taste before lunch, to avoid a tainted palate.