Rikke's blog: lunch with Cafédirect

It all felt rather surreal, my afternoon with Cafédirect yesterday. We were a mixed bunch of journos, Fairtrade fans, a coffee-grower and a wine expert tasting tea, instant and gourmet coffee and eating a three-course lunch in a posh Mayfair restaurant.

One minute we would chat about the importance of brewing a gourmet coffee properly and the next minute the talk would focus on how the Cafédirect coffee- and tea-growers cope with the effects of climate change -- as if the topics were of equal importance. That's always the difficult bit with ethical living: marrying the desire for quality and worldly goods with the underlying issues, without feeling slightly odd.

Olly Smith, the charismatic blond wine guy from Richard & Judy's Wine Club on Channel 4, hosted the event and put some good fun into the seriousness of buying and tasting Fairtrade coffee and tea. Kissing Andrew Purvis, the Fairtrade journalist for Observer Food Monthly, and calling it perverse to add milk to our coffee, Olly performed as a great (unintentional, I think) double-act to Ugandan Fairtrade coffee-grower, Nimrod Wambette, who was there to tell us about Cafédirect from the growers' perspective.

Aside from the pleasure of watching Smith and Wambette's entertainment-duo-cum-information-powerhouse in action, the highlight of the day was tasting Cafédirect's new, improved version of its Fairtrade Classic Blend instant coffee. I'm not kidding. Hadn't I known, I would have guessed it was brewed ground coffee. It had a lovely toasted smell and flavour with a slight hint of burnt sugar. And the consistency was thicker than ordinary instant coffees, which I normally find too watery.

Looking at Wambette's proud face on the other side of the table -- beans from his cooperative go into the blend -- made it taste even better, and suddenly the little freeze-dried bits of brown seemed to have as much soul as any gourmet coffee I've tasted, but without the hassle of brewing.

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