The School of Coffee

When you make coffee, wonderful things happen. You get delicious flavours and sensual aromas, followed by a lovely warming perk. When we actually make your coffee at our factory, different, but equally great things happen.

Like when we ‘do a roast’, for instance.

After our coffee buyers have tasted, selected then imported the best beans for our coffees, we roast them, in Harrogate, all under the same roof.

When the beans are blasted with red hot air, ‘chaff’ flies off and becomes airborne. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it can be a hazard as there is a risk of it catching fire.

We installed special extractors to remove the chaff as it flew off in our roasting chambers, and the chaff is then filtered out of the hot air and compressed into chaff pellets.

Now, they say that pigs will eat anything. That may be true, but we know one thing, pigs absolutely love our chaff. In fact, they can’t get enough of it according to the pig farmers who are always keen to take it from us.

We hate waste at Taylors of Harrogate and reducing it is just one of the things we do to lower our environmental impact. Where our coffee is grown, we work with communities to help plant trees, reduce the amount of agro-chemicals used, promote better waste management and improve the quality of their water. Look out for future blogs on our upcoming work in Rwanda and Uganda.

Here in Britain, we changed the port where our coffee arrived which saves around 100,000 road miles a year. Captain Rummage our recycling pirate works wonders promoting our mantra of ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ at local schools. In our factory we’ve installed a rainwater collection system, wash our vans with recycled water, and use natural light wherever possible.

Plus our Yorkshire Rainforest Project aims to save an area of rainforest the size of Yorkshire.

Turning chaff into pig food may seem insignificant, but as a certain supermarket tells us, every little helps.

So, if you like a coffee with your bacon sandwich on a Sunday morning, we may well have helped your bacon taste better too.