Mr bean

THINK of a cup of coffee. The proper stuff made from ground beans and not freeze-dried chemical granules watered from a hastily boiled kettle. All right, instant coffee has its place alongside other short cuts in life. But real coffee, roasted and ground and turned to seductive liquid, is a true pleasure.

A cup of coffee can go wrong, there is an art to getting it right. Good coffee is probably the best starting point.

There are plenty of opportunities for what ends up in your cup to be spoiled. Listen to Mike Riley, who has the grand title of Head of Coffee for Taylors of Harrogate, and you soon realise that the intricacies go deeper than you might imagine.

"Most people are drinking instant coffee all the time and I think the process that makes instant spoils the flavour," says Mike in his office, a cafetiere and cups in front of him.

There are so many coffee makers and methods, from the all-prevalent plungers to espresso machines, via filter jugs to little aluminium stove-pot espressos. All of these can affect the flavour. But there's more to it than that, as Mike explains: "From the seedlings that are planted to the beans that grow three years later, so much go can wrong. As you know the coffee bean is a stone in a cherry. And..."

Well, I didn't know that but there was no chance to say. Once started, Mike needs little encouragement. He bubbles away like one of those stove-pot espressos.

It's an understandable passion, as he has worked for Taylors for 15 years, after first training as a chef. Early on, he decided he didn't much like chefs so he studied food technology.

He started at Taylors as a trainee taster and quality sales assistant, dealing in tea and coffee. Later, he became assistant coffee buyer, a posting that sent him to Kenya for three and a half months, tasting 500 different coffees every week.

Now Mike is responsible for all Taylors coffee, deciding what to stock, experimenting with different roasts and blends, introducing new brands. In this, his 'cheffy' background helps, he says, as the beans are now his ingredients, with so many flavours hidden in the raw green bean.

Mike's profile has been raised recently, thanks to a series of newspaper adverts, and a few television outings too, in which he features prominently.

Long before all that, Mike was born at New Earswick in York, where his grandparents lived. He grew up at Robin Hood's Bay, where his parents fished for a living. But back to that cup of coffee...

"Then there's the roasting and the grinding and the way the coffee has been made," says Mike, who is slight, balding and seemingly full of energy; perhaps it's all that caffeine. "Small slip-ups can occur when it's not treated properly. So many things can go wrong that a good cup of coffee is almost a miracle."

Here, Mike nods to the cafetiere on the table and says: "So when that came in I was worrying, was it made properly, had it been stirred enough?"

Roast and ground coffee accounts for about 30 per cent of Taylors' business, which is nowhere near as high as tea, with Yorkshire Tea being the fastest drink off the production line at the factory in Starbeck, near Harrogate.

Coffee has, however, been on the rise since it was first sold pre-packed 14 years ago. Taylors coffee, as originally sourced, slurped, tasted and spat by Mike, is on sale at most supermarkets and at the Bettys tearooms in York and elsewhere. In seeking out new coffees, he has travelled widely in more than ten countries, mostly in Central and South America and Africa, along with the Caribbean, including Cuba.

The most popular coffee is the Lazy Sunday blend, which was developed because Mike recognised that for lots of people, Sunday is the ideal, perhaps only, time to drink real coffee.

Taylors, still a family-owned firm, has also moved into what might be called the ethical market. This takes most apparent shape in the Feel Good coffee, which has four social attributes, listed with enthusiasm by Mike. Edited down, this ethos sees that the coffee is organic, produced from sustainable crops, gives half of the profits back to the growers, and is packed voluntarily by Taylors staff on "feel good" Fridays, to keep costs down. It is a blend of beans from Nicaragua and Mexico.

From the office we go to the tasting room, where coffee has been prepared and is glinting darkly in white cups. Thanks to spoons and a spittoon, Mike is soon tasting away, sloshing the liquid in his mouth, expelling it and talking everything up like a teetotal Oz Clarke. He invites me to join in and, yes, it's true that Kenyan coffee has a citrus, almost lemony taste, while the Abyssinian coffee is dark, full-blooded and winey, and Javan tastes of good plain chocolate.

We part after a minor embarrassment, following that most traditional newspaper question. To which Mike replied: "Well, how old do I look?" Don't you hate it when people do that? Oh, er, um, 40 perhaps? As it happens, Mike is 35. So that's me wearing a red face then.

After all that, it's time to put the kettle on. I need a cup of coffee.

Updated: 08:44 Saturday, January 19, 2002