Coffee’s dirty secret

Mat North has a secret. The coffee that he serves in his speciality coffee shop Full Court Press on Broad Street doesn’t actually taste of coffee.

Not the dark and bitter kind we have been accustomed to drinking for generations anyway. The coffee you get out of a jar and drink for the caffeine hit rather than for any discernible flavour.

Walk into Full Court Press and you are confronted with four different choices of coffees, two filter options and two espressos.

A current choice from El Salvador has tasting notes of candied lemon, prunes and aniseed, turning to white chocolate and yoghurt in milk.

“Coffee’s dirty little secret is that it doesn’t taste like coffee,” Mat says. “It tastes like how it’s grown, where it’s grown, where it’s processed.”

The journey of the coffee bean from farmer’s field to flat white is one which Mat has written about in a book published next month by We Hunt and Gather.

Coffee: A Field Guide is the culmination of Mat’s own journey within the coffee industry, which started as a customer when, growing up in Keynsham and Congresbury, he used to come into Bristol to visit the Green Gold Café on St Nicholas Street, now the site of Bagel Boy. 

He had part-time jobs in cafes and bars while studying for a physics degree then after graduating started working as a manager at Caffe Nero in London.

“I enjoyed the contact part of it,” Mat admits. “The coffee was crap.”

He continued to bounce around the industry, returning home to Bristol to work for Boston Tea Party, Beyond the Bean and then Clifton Coffee, before opening Full Court Press last year, a speciality coffee shop which serves some 300 different varieties of coffee a year.

It could have all been so different though.

“Back in 1997 before going to Green Gold Café, I’d go into Spotless Leopard, buy a 50p book, go round to the cafe, sit on their sofas, have a bottomless cup of brewed coffee, finish the book, leave it on their shelf and go about my day.

“That was what I did. I wanted to open a place like that, with nice food, and a few coffees – all of which tasted basically the same. I’d have opened that. Comfy, cosy, really nice. Now, it wouldn’t be anything special. Back then, it would have been really good.”

Fast forward to 2014 and we are within what is known as the “third wave” of coffee, the drink viewed as an artisanal foodstuff rather than a basic commodity.

Bristol is among the frontrunners of this taste for speciality coffee – especially the triumvirate of Full Court Press, Small Street Espresso and Didn’t You Do Well on Park Row, with Playground on St Nicholas Street and Brew on Whiteladies Road not too far behind.

But of course, even with Starbucks closing more stores in Bristol than opening them in recent years, the coffee, at least the coffee served on the high street, is still dominated by the chains.

“They (the chains) keep feeding people caffeine. That’s what they need and there’s a market for that. But as they slowly start to do slightly better things with their coffee people become aware that there is more out there than just a double skinny machiatto.”

Mat says that he and his team of two, Dave and Rosie, are very careful never to tell anyone no when they ask for something like sugar. They recommend that customers try it without because they know it tilts the balance in terms of flavours. But then it’s always a personal preference.

Mat has also used his physics background to calculate the precise balance of minerals within water that can make a noticeable difference what you can extract from the coffee and thus affect the flavours imparted.

And it’s still the service side of his job that he loves as much as educating Bristol as to how exactly coffee should taste, whether that’s of candied lemon or yoghurt, or just even plain old coffee.

Coffee: A Modern Field Guide by Mat North is published by We Hunt and Gather next month.