After five years of being late in announcing the Coffee Spot Calendar and vowing that next year I will be better prepared and get it out earlier, I’ve given up. Instead, I’ve decided that 4^th December is perfect for launching the Coffee Spot Calendar (although this year I have a decent excuse since I’ve spent the bulk of November in America). So, with that out of the way, please say hello to the 2022 Coffee Spot Calendar, which is now on sale.

As always, it’s professionally-printed on glossy paper, each month featuring a landscape, A4 picture from one of my favourite Coffee Spots of the last 12 months. The calendars cost £15.00 (£10.00 for the desktop version) with a flat £2.50 postage and packing charge, regardless of order size. If you think we’re likely to meet up in the near future, then there’s a no-postage option: pick this and I’ll hand your calendar over in person! If you’re ordering from outside the UK, then the postage will be more, I’m afraid (full details after the gallery).

If you order by the end of next week, I should be able to get your calendar to you before Christmas (for UK orders).

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This time last year, I remember writing that 2020 had been a very strange year, so much so that I almost forgot the Coffee Spot’s birthday! In many ways, the last twelve months have been even stranger, but at least this time I remembered the birthday, the Coffee Spot turning nine years old today. Not that I realised what I was unleashing on myself when I launched the Coffee Spot on Friday, 28^th September 2012 (at 14.15 to be precise), with just a vague idea that it might become a useful resource for coffee (shop) lovers and an entertaining way for me to spend (some of) my spare time.

I ended last year’s birthday post noting that the country was at another crossroads in its journey through the COVID-19 pandemic, wondering what the Coffee Spot’s ninth year would bring. Sadly, it ended up being more of the same, with soaring infection rates leading to more restrictions through the winter. For a little while in the early summer it seemed that vaccination had COVID-19 under control, but the delta variant put paid to that. As the Coffee Spot enters its 10^th year, we’re back to an uncertain future with far higher infection, hospitalisation and death rates than this time last year…

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Regular readers know that I don’t often write about coffee books, so today’s Saturday Supplement is the exception that proves the rule. Coffeeland, by Augustine Sedgewick and published in 2020 by Penguin Books, was a chance discovery in my local bookshop while I was looking for something else (Howul, if you’re interested, an excellent debut novel by my friend David Shannon).

Back to Coffeeland: I hadn’t previously heard of the author, and was completely unaware of the book, but there it was, sitting on the shelf. I was intrigued by the title, so picked it up, read the blurb on the back and made the impulse decision to buy it.

Coffeeland is ostensibly a history of coffee in El Salvador (the “coffeeland” of the title), with the focus on James Hill, who went from the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester to El Salvador, where he founded one of its great coffee dynasties. However, Coffeeland is a lot more than that, a fascinating, multi-threaded book which weaves together many strands of the modern, industrial world to tell the story of coffee from the perspective of those who produce it. A harrowing read at times, it shines a light on some of coffee’s darker corners.

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