Don’t you think it’s one of the great myths of our time that we British have become a nation of coffee aficionados? Yes, our high streets may be blanketed by a competing froth of Starbucks and Costas and Caffè Neros, but can we really claim to be true lovers of the brew itself?

We all like hanging out in the comfy armchairs, and soaking up the Friends-like vibe, telling our trained barista (read foreign language student) “how we like ours”, but that normally means any way that doesn’t actually taste of the beans themselves. Why else would the decaf whipped caramel latte exist? Why would you flood a single shot of espresso with half a pint of milk and laughably call it a latte? These aren’t coffees, they’re milkshakes. Really, we haven’t come on that far from the milkbars of the Fifties.

It’s a situation that depresses Jeremy Torz, pictured above, co-founder of artisan coffee roasters Union Hand-Roasted, who feels that the bright new dawn of American-style coffee shops in the early Nineties hasn’t produced the nation of coffee connoisseurs he had hoped for. He started out sourcing, blending and roasting for the Seattle Coffee Company and was briefly a sales and marketing director at Starbucks before losing the big-chain faith and setting up on his own.

“Quality shot up in the Nineties, but the American market has commercialised it,” he says. “It would be difficult to sell a small 6oz cappuccino, the traditional Italian size, for much more money, so to make a viable business out of it, they started to make the drinks bigger. And how do you do that without overdosing everyone on caffeine? You add more and more milk.”

So we entered the Alice in Wonderland age where the smallest latte you can buy in Starbucks is the “tall”. “What should be a silky textured, sensual drink has become a 32oz big gulp suited to the movie theatres of middle America,” says Torz scornfully.

Actually, Torz isn’t completely down on Starbucks, saying that of all the chains, it probably buys the best coffee. But it’s not hard to see why a mass-market operator would fail to satisfy this obsessive coffee drinker. Ask him what makes the perfect espresso and he’s suddenly drawing graphs on a flip chart. “It’s all about controlling the time the water is in contact with the grounds,” he says. Each coffee will have a “sweet spot”, the point at which you are extracting maximum sweetness and body before any negative notes of bitterness come through. In the case of Union’s Revelation blend, this means an extraction time of 22 seconds. Five seconds too fast, and you’ll end up with a watery, insipid cup; five seconds too slow and there’ll be that hallmark taste of bitter woodsmoke that catches the back of your throat. It’s hard to believe such little deviation would make such a difference, but he pours three cups to prove it. They are as different as night and day.

The barista’s art lies in hitting the sweet spot every time, and this is done by altering the coarseness of the grind. The finer it is, the slower the water will flow through it. The trouble is, it’s not just a question of calibra-ting the machine and expecting it to work the same every time. When he was learning his craft in San Francisco, Torz had to adjust the grind four times a day because the morning and evening fog changed the way the coffee behaved. “Watch your barista and see how much attention he pays,” says Torz. “If he can’t do a standard espresso right, no amount of milk is going to make it any better.”

For details of Union Hand-Roasted’s next Espresso ER, in which Torz helps you get the most out of your home espresso machine, visit www.unionroasted.com.

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