Latest news with #coffee
The Sun
7 hours ago
- Business
- The Sun
Popular coffee shop suddenly closes permanently after four years as heartbroken fans say ‘you'll be missed'
A POPULAR coffee shop has unexpectedly shut its doors for the last time leaving fans heartbroken. An artisan coffee bar in South Queensferry, Scotland has announced its closure after only four years. Brew Culture in the town's high street decided not to renew their lease and will be closing down for good. The coffee shop shared a post on Instagram thanking their loyal customers. The post read: "Our shop lease expires in a few months and we've decided not to renew the lease. "We've had a great time brewing our lovely coffee for you and will miss you all. Thank you for your support." Fans flocked to the shop's social media to express their sadness over the news. One person wrote: "A really sad day. Thank you for all the lovely coffee and chats over the years. Another one added: "Sorry to hear this. You'll be missed on our wee high street. All the Best for the future and thanks for all the decent chat and awesome coffee!" Someone else wrote: "So sad to hear this we went down this morning and found shop closed. Thinking of u all. U treated us really good. "Loved the coffee and husband liked the Biscoff pastry. Good luck to u all for the future. Will miss u." Poundland to be sold for JUST £1 as frontrunner for shock takeover is revealed after wave of store closures Most customers have been left gutted at the closure news with many saying they will miss the lovely conversations with the owners. Brew Culture celebrated its fourth anniversary in March and had raving reviews on Google with 4.7 star rating. It comes after a legendary greasy spoon in London announced its closure after five years. The North London eatery Norman's Cafe has long been a hub for influencers and fashion-forward people looking for a greasy spoon with a difference. Opened by Sunday Brunch chef Elliot Kaye and Richie Hayes, the posh restaurant first opened its doors in 2020. Norman's Cafe began as a sandwich shop before widening its menu to include a range of British classics. Despite its immense popularity, however, the shop's owners announced that it will close its doors in June 2025. The shop's closure comes as luxury eateries have been forced to close across the UK. Soaring rent prices have led many to shut their doors, with some blaming the Government's decision to raise national insurance contributions for employers. However, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said that her decision was necessary to stabilise the economy - which unexpectedly grew in April. Others, like La Goccia in Covent Garden, blamed 'Covid' and 'Brexit' for making it difficult to hire trained staff.
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Amazon slashes 40% off coffee machine capable of making lattes and cappuccinos
There's nothing quite like the taste of a fresh, robust coffee made by a professional barista. However, regularly buying takeaway cups can quickly become a costly habit. As a result, many are now investing in home coffee machines, with many options available that can produce top-quality coffee at the touch of a button. Those looking to elevate their home coffee experience can currently snag the Philips 5400 Series Fully Automatic Espresso Machine for just £400, reduced from £679.99 on Amazon. This versatile machine is capable of making 12 different types of coffee. The coffees include espresso, cappuccino, latte macchiato, americano, caffe crema, caffe latte, ristretto, cafe au lait, and iced americano, ensuring there's something to suit all tastes. From superstar gigs to cosy pubs, find out What's On in Wales by signing up to our newsletter here. READ MORE: More than 50% off Oral-B toothbrush that 'leaves teeth really clean' LATEST: Dunelm shoppers rave about £29 padded chair that's 'ideal for snoozing in the garden' The machine also features a user-friendly touch display, allowing users to brew their favourite coffee quickly and effortlessly. Boasting an aroma extract system, the coffee machine is designed to strike the perfect balance between brewing temperature and aroma. It also includes a milk system that can be cleaned in as little as ten seconds, along with a durable ceramic grinder for coffee beans, reports the Daily Record. For shoppers still on the fence, an alternative budget-friendly pick is the Style Friendly - Cream and 'Coffee Shop Favourites' Bundle for £44.99 from Tassimo. The machine boasts a convenient one-button brewing system and comes with five packs of t-disc pods; it's also designed to be compact and space-saving. Alternatively, coffee connoisseurs might opt for the Ninja Luxe Cafe Premier Espresso Machine ES601UK, retailing at £549.99 from Ninja. This premier range machine features 19 settings, a dual froth system, an assisted tamper, can manage 15 drink recipes, and essentially combines three functions in one: espresso, filter coffee, and cold brew. The Philips model enjoys a glowing endorsement on Amazon, currently holding a 4.4-star rating out of 450 reviews. A contented customer remarked: "My husband and I love this coffee machine. I only had it a few days but it was very easy to set up and now also easy to use every day. The coffee quality is very good." Another shared: "Great product, I use daily. Lovely coffee, and I would buy it again." A third user, impressed by their experience elsewhere, noted: "I used this at a family member's home and was blown away by how easy it was to use and the quality of the drinks it made," further recommending the product for any regular coffee drinker with its custom settings and straightforward maintenance. But not all feedback was positive. One individual expressed a drawback, stating: "It's an easy-to-use machine, but the milk-based drinks aren't very warm - more ready-to-drink, but could definitely do with heating." One individual noted: "It's great and I won't deny the coffee is good. However, cleaning the internal part and greasing it is awful." That being said, at a discount of over 40%, the Philips 5400 Series Fully Automatic Espresso Machine is likely to be a worthwhile purchase for anyone who appreciates a good cup of coffee.
South China Morning Post
14 hours ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Bali bomber Umar Patek seeks a second chance by ‘brewing peace' with coffee
In a quiet cafe in Surabaya, the scent of freshly brewed coffee drifts through the air – a far cry from the sulphur and smoke that once defined Umar Patek's past. 'Before, I was known for something that hurt the world,' he told This Week in Asia. 'Now I have chosen a different path.' Patek was once one of the most wanted men on the planet for the role he played in the Bali bombings that left hundreds dead over two decades ago. Now, the convicted bomber is brewing something else entirely: peace, he says – and a second chance. He plans to unveil his new coffee business, 'RAMU Coffee 1966 by Umar Patek', on Tuesday in the Indonesian city of Surabaya, in a symbolic departure from the years he spent on the run, in hiding and behind bars. Now, I am brewing flavours and brewing peace Umar Patek, former bomb-maker 'Now, I am brewing flavours and brewing peace,' he said, seated at the Hedon Estate cafe that will be the first to stock his beans, sold both whole and ground. 'Before, bitterness used to destroy, now [the] bitterness [of coffee] heals.'
Al Jazeera
16 hours ago
- Business
- Al Jazeera
India's latest coffee hub? Beans and brews offer new hope to Nagaland
Dimapur, Mokokchung, Wokha, Chumoukedima and Kohima, India – With its high ceilings, soft lighting and brown and turquoise blue cushioned chairs, Juro Coffee House has the appearance of a chic European cafe. Sitting right off India's National Highway-2, which connects the northeastern states of Assam, Nagaland and Manipur, the cafe hosts a live roastery unit that was set up in January by the Nagaland state government. Here, green coffee beans from 12 districts in Nagaland are roasted live, ground and served, from farm to cup. On a typical day, the cafe gets about a hundred customers, sipping on coffee, with smoke breaks in between. Those numbers aren't big – but they're a start. For decades, an armed rebellion seeking the secession of Nagaland from India dominated the state's political and economic landscape. Thousands have been killed in clashes between security forces and armed rebels in Nagaland since India's independence, soon after which Naga separatists held a plebiscite in which nearly all votes were cast in favour of separating from the Indian union. India has never accepted that vote. The state's economy has depended on agriculture, with paddy, fruits like bananas and oranges and green leafy vegetables like mustard leaves, the main crops grown traditionally. Now, a growing band of cafes, roasteries and farms across the state are looking to give Nagaland a new identity by promoting locally grown Arabica and Robusta coffee. Juro Coffee House is among them. While coffee was first introduced to the state in 1981 by the Coffee Board of India, a body set up by the Indian government to promote coffee production, it only began to take off after 2014. Helped by government policy changes and pushed by a set of young entrepreneurs, Nagaland today has almost 250 coffee farms spread across 10,700 hectares (26,400 acres) of land in 11 districts. About 9,500 farmers are engaged in coffee cultivation, according to the state government. The small state bordering Myanmar today boasts of eight roastery units, besides homegrown cafes mushrooming in major cities like Dimapur and Kohima, and interior districts like Mokokchung and Mon. For Searon Yanthan, the founder of Juro Coffee House, the journey began with COVID-19, when the pandemic forced Naga youth studying or working in other parts of India or abroad to return home. But this became a blessing in disguise since they brought back value to the state, says Yanthan. 'My father used to say, those were the days when we used to export people,' he told Al Jazeera. 'Now it's time to export our products and ideas, not the people.' Like many kids his age, Yanthan left Nagaland for higher studies in 2010, first landing up in the southern city of Chennai for high school and then the northern state of Punjab for his undergraduate studies, before dropping out to study in Bangalore. 'I studied commerce but the only subject I was good in was entrepreneurship,' said the 30-year-old founder, dressed in a pair of smart formal cotton pants and a baby pink polo neck shirt. The pandemic hit just as he was about to graduate, and Yanthan left with no degree in hand. One day, he sneaked into a government vehicle from Dimapur during the COVID-19 lockdown – when only essential services like medical and government workers were allowed to move around – to return to his family farm estate, 112km (70 miles) from state capital Kohima, where his dad first started growing coffee in 2015. He ended up spending seven months at the farm during lockdown and realised that coffee farmers didn't know much about the quality of beans, which wasn't surprising considering coffee is not a household beverage among Nagas and other ethnic communities in India's northeast. Yanthan, who launched Lithanro Coffee, the parent company behind Juro, in 2021, started visiting other farms, working with farmers on improving coffee quality and maintaining plantations. Once his own processing unit was set up, he began hosting other coffee farmers, offering them a manually brewed cup of their own produce. Gradually, he built a relationship with 200 farmers from whom he sources beans today, besides the coffee grown on his farm. Yanthan sees coffee as an opportunity for Nagaland's youth to dream of economic prospects beyond jobs in the government — the only aspiration for millions of Naga families in a state where private-sector employment has historically been uncertain. 'Every village you go to, parents are working day and night in the farms to make his son or daughter get a government job,' Yanthan told Al Jazeera. Coffee, to him, could also serve as a vehicle to bring people together. 'In this industry, it's not only one person who can do this work, it has to be a community,' he said. So what changed in 2015? Coffee buyers and roasters are unanimous in crediting the state government's decision to hand over charge of coffee development to Nagaland's Land Resources Department (LRD) that year. The state department implements schemes sponsored by the federal government and the state government, including those promoting coffee. Unlike in the past, when Nagaland – part of a region that has historically had poor physical connectivity with the rest of India – also had no internet, coffee roasters, buyers and farmers could now build online links with the outside world. '[The] market was not like what it is today,' said Albert Ngullie, the director of the LRD. The LRD builds nurseries and provides free saplings to farmers, besides supporting farm maintenance. Unlike before, the government is also investing in the post-harvest process by supplying coffee pulpers to farmers, setting up washing stations and curing units in a few districts and recently, supporting entrepreneurs with roastery units. Among those to benefit is Lichan Humtsoe. He set up his company Ete (which means 'ours' in the Lotha Naga dialect) in 2016 after quitting his pen-pushing job in the LRD and was the first in the state to source, serve and supply Naga specialty coffee. Today, Ete runs its own cafes, roasteries and a coffee laboratory, researching the chemical properties of indigenous fruits as flavour notes. Ete also has a coffee school in Nagaland (and a campus in the neighbouring state of Manipur) with a dedicated curriculum and training facilities to foster the next generation of coffee professionals. Humtsoe said the past decade has shown that the private sector and government in Nagaland have complemented each other in promoting coffee. Nagaland's growing coffee story also coincides with an overall increase in India's exports of coffee beans. In 2024, India's coffee exports surpassed $1bn for the first time, with production doubling compared with 2020-21. While more than 70 percent of India's coffee comes from the southern state of Karnataka, the Coffee Board has been trying to expand cultivation in the Northeast. Building a coffee culture in Nagaland is no easy feat, given that decades of unrest left the state in want of infrastructure and almost completely reliant on federal funding. Growing up in the 1990s, when military operations against alleged armed groups were frequent and security forces would often barge into homes, day or night, Humtsoe wanted nothing to do with India. At one point, he stopped speaking Nagamese – a bridge dialect among the state's 16 tribes and a creole version of the Indian language, Assamese. But he grew disillusioned with the political solution rooted in separatism that armed groups were seeking. And the irony of the state's dependence on funds from New Delhi hit the now 39-year-old. Coffee became his own path to self-determination. 'From 2016 onwards, I was more of, 'How can I inspire India?'' Ngullie of the LRD insists that the coffee revolution brewing in Nagaland is also helping the state preserve its forests. 'We don't do land clearing,' he said, in essence suggesting that coffee was helping the state's agriculture transition from the traditional slash-and-burn techniques to agroforestry. The LRD buys seed varieties from the Coffee Board for farmers, and growers make more money than before. Limakumzak Walling, a 40-year-old farmer, recalled how his late father was one of the first to grow Arabica coffee in 1981 on a two-acre farm on their ancestral land in Mokokchung district's Khar village. 'During my father's time, they used to cultivate it, but people didn't find the market,' he said. 'It was more of a burden than a bonus.' Before the Nagaland government took charge of coffee development, the Coffee Board would buy produce from farmers and sell it to buyers or auction it in their headquarters in Bengaluru, Karnataka. But the payments, said Walling, would be made in instalments over a year, sometimes two. Since he took over the farm, and the state department became the nodal agency, payments are not only higher but paid upfront with buyers directly procuring from the farmers. Still, profits aren't huge. Walling makes less than 200,000 rupees per annum (roughly $2,300) and like most farmers, is still engaged in jhum cultivation, the traditional slash-and-burn method of farming practised by Indigenous tribes in northeastern hills. With erratic weather patterns and decreasing soil fertility in recent decades, intensified land use in jhum cultivation has been known to lead to further environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions, exacerbating climate change. 'Trees are drying up and so is the mountain spring water,' Walling told Al Jazeera, pointing at the evergreen woods where spring leaves were already wilting in March, well before the formal arrival of summer. 'Infestation is also a major issue and we don't use even organic fertilisers because we are scared of spoiling our land,' he added. And though the state government has set up some washing stations and curing units, many more are needed for these facilities to be accessible to all farmers, said Walling, for them to sustain coffee as a viable crop and secure better prices. 'Right now we don't know the quality. We just harvest it,' he said. Dipanjali Kemprai, a liaison officer who leads the Coffee Board of India operations in Nagaland, told Al Jazeera that the agency encourages farmers to grow coffee alongside horticultural crops like black pepper to supplement their income. 'But intercropping still hasn't fully taken off,' said Kemprai. Meanwhile, despite the state's efforts to promote sustainable agriculture, recent satellite data suggests that shifting cultivation, or jhum, may be rising again. Though it is the seventh-largest producer of coffee, India is far behind export-heavy countries like Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia and Italy. And while the Nagaland government maintains that exports have been steadily growing, entrepreneurs tell a different story. Vivito Yeptho, who co-owns Nagaland Coffee and became the state's first certified barista in 2018, said that their last export of 15 metric tonnes (MT) was in 2019, to South Africa. Still, there are other wins to boast of. In 2024, the state registered its highest-ever production at 48 MT, per state department officials. Yeptho said Nagaland Coffee alone supplies 40 cafes across India, of which 12 are in the Northeast region. And Naga coffee is already making waves internationally, winning silver at the Aurora International Taste Challenge in South Africa in 2022 and then gold in 2023. 'To aim for export, we need to be at least producing 80-100 MT every year,' Yeptho told Al Jazeera. But before aiming for mass production, entrepreneurs said they still have a long way to go in improving the quality of beans and their post-harvest processing. With a washing mill and a curing unit in his farm, where he grows both Arabica and Robusta varieties, Yanthan's Lithanro brand is the only farm-to-cup institution in the state. He believes farmers need to focus on better maintenance of their plantations, to begin with. 'Even today, the attitude is that the plants don't need to be tended to during the summers and monsoon season before harvest (which starts by November),' Yanthan told Al Jazeera. 'But the trees need to be constantly pruned to keep them within a certain height, weeding has to be done and the stems need to be maintained as well.' Even as these challenges ground Naga farmers and entrepreneurs in reality, their dreams are soaring. Humtsoe hopes for speciality coffee from Nagaland to soon be GI tagged, like varieties from Coorg, Chikmagalur, Araku Valley and Wayanad in southern India. He wants good coffee from India to be associated with Nagas, not just Nagaland, he said. 'People of the land must become the brand'.
Globe and Mail
20 hours ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Climatic factors that should lead to a bear market in coffee futures & Will there be a frost in Brazil?
(KCN25) (KCU25) (KCZ25) (RMN25) (RMU25) (RMX25) 'Climatic factors that should lead to a bear market in coffee futures & Will there be a frost in Brazil?' by Jim Roemer - Meteorologist - Commodity Trading Advisor - Principal, Best Weather Inc. & Climate Predict - Publisher, Weather Wealth Newsletter Scott Mathews, Editor This 9+ minute video is a very detailed discussion sent out to WeatherWealth newsletter subscribers last weekend (Sunday Night/Monday morning) before the collapse in coffee prices. Also, this video highlights how I predicted, back in April, a potential longer-term bear market in coffee futures. 1) Where Robusta coffee (cheaper variety that is made into instant coffee) is grown and why production this year will be greater than a year ago. This has created a spiral down in futures contracts traded on the London exchange. Table and Graphic Image Source: in conjunction with (National Coffee Association) - used by permission 2) Image Source: graphs by NOAA - superimposed comments/markers by BestWeather, Inc. 3) How we use the weather over Antarctica to forecast if Brazil'a coffee freezes (or not) Source of above images showing South Pole projection map and Antarctic Oscillation graph: (used by permission) - superimposed arrows and captions by BestWeather, Inc. 4) Will El Niño neutral become a weak La Niña by the autumn. If so, how may it affect rainfall for Brazil's important 2026 crop and coffee bloom in October? Image Source: NOAA Just click this link for the free trial: OR… request an old FREE download of WeatherWealth with THIS LINK Thanks for your interest in commodity weather! Jim Roemer, Scott Mathews and the BestWeather Team Mr. Roemer owns Best Weather Inc., offering weather-related blogs for commodity traders and farmers. He also is a co-founder of Climate Predict, a detailed long-range global weather forecast tool. As one of the first meteorologists to become an NFA registered Commodity Trading Advisor, he has worked with major hedge funds, Midwest farmers, and individual traders for over 35 years. With a special emphasis on interpreting market psychology, coupled with his short and long-term trend forecasting in grains, softs, and the energy markets, he commands a unique standing among advisors in the commodity risk management industry.
