Ground down by the price of your £2.50 high street cappuccino?

 pic: Brian Moore

Given that the humble £2.50 cappuccino has fallen out of favour, coffee connoisseurs demand more than a standard caffeine fix to help them through the day, at a price!

The Daily Mail lists sources like The Connaught in Mayfair (£7.50 for any cup of coffee) and Claridge’s (up to £20 for a filter coffee for two people), apart from the ultimate deep-pocket source like The Wellesley hotel in Knightsbridge serving Wild Kopi Luwak coffee, at £45 a cup (More).

But the real issue has to be the contrast between High Street coffee at £2.50 a cup compared with home filtered at 9p a cup.

In other words, far from seeing up market varieties as a threat, a DIY approach might be more dangerous…

In fact, with street coffee priced at upwards of £2.50 a cup, I have reverted to grinding and filtering best quality French coffee beans, purchased from Waitrose at £2.60 per 227g bag. Each bag yields 5 x 6 cups, effectively costing me 9p a cup. If I could buy wholesale, the price would be no more than £2/bag...

OK, the ambience is worth something, but 30x 'domestic rates'?

In fact, when you think about it, apart from the bill, most people's memory of a great restaurant meal is coloured by the final course, a cup of coffee. Yet, even at these mark-ups, some restaurants risk diner alienation by skimping on the coffee, thereby triggering the 'tell a friend' mechanism' whereby, if you please a customer, they tell one friend, disappoint them and they tell ten, electronically.