North West Coffee Connoisseur

In the North West of England, there are many curious specimens of the human variety. There’s the man who collects model buses, the woman who can tell you the exact whereabouts of every Blockbuster that ever existed, and then there’s the North West Coffee Connoisseur. A man on a mission, with a thirst for knowledge and a frankly alarming amount of caffeine coursing through his veins. His goal? To visit every single coffee shop in the North West before next summer. Not most of them. Not the good ones. Every single one. He’s got a spreadsheet, a laminated map and a complicated colour-coding system that would make the people at the Ordnance Survey sit up and take notice. He also refuses to visit the same establishment twice, which has made him something of a wanted man in certain circles. Apparently, there's a barista in Macclesfield that still gets the shakes whenever a bloke in a nice jacket walks through the door.

His bean of choice is Robusta. Arabica? Very nice, if you’re into that sort of thing. But Robusta is where the magic happens, according to our man, who considers himself something of a bean-based prophet. Should he enter a coffee shop and discover that the establishment is tragically bereft of his beloved Robusta, he simply reaches into his bag and produces a little pouch of his own. What follows is a fifteen-minute lecture on caffeine content, crema and why everyone else in the room has been getting coffee wrong their entire lives. The baristas tend to nod politely, though it kicked-off big time in Altrincham once. He’s not being difficult, mind. He’s doing them a favour. One day, they’ll thank him. Probably.

There has, however, been one dark chapter in his otherwise illustrious career. On a bleak Tuesday in Bolton, owing to a catastrophic equipment failure and a queue that had begun to resemble the M60 at rush hour, he was forced to order a cup of tea. What happened next is best described as a complete collapse of the human spirit. He stared into the cup as though it contained a message from a civilisation that had long since given up on Earth. He took one sip, went completely silent, and spent the next forty minutes wandering around the town centre in a state of profound spiritual disrepair. His exact words were, “It tastes like a wet envelope”. He’s since refused to discuss the incident, although witnesses report that he’s started carrying a small emergency cafetière in his Ralph Bag, alongside his beans, a pocket-sized notebook and a laminated photograph of a particularly good flat white. The spreadsheet is growing, and somewhere in the North West, a barista is about to have a very educational morning.

NW Coffee Connoisseur, you beautiful little bean lunatic.