Flavours - another coffee shop!
I noticed activity in the shop unit which was Surrey Gourmet a while ago but then it all went quiet. Positioned just up from Sainsbury's on the opposite side of the road all has now become clear.
A professional sign stuck on the window reveals it to be 'Flavours', yet another coffee shop in the High Street!
posted by The Cockerel @ 7:41 PM
12 Comments:
Wonderful - just what Dorking needs is another coffee shop/eaterie. At least it is an independent retailer. What a great time to open - in a recession, when people are being squeezed by the credit card companies, the banks, the utilities etc. Is it too much to ask for the market to relocate to the High Street, that some big name retailers like Wilkinsons and New Look can be attracted into Dorking and the proposed increase in parking charges can be put on hold?? I guess not....:(
Very Annoyed Anthony:(
Anybody want to try and list all the places you can go if you want a coffee and a bun in Dorking? (Not including the pubs)
I'll start:
Cafe Creme.
Only one each, please. Lets see if there are more coffee shops in Dorking than there are contributors to this blog.
it's for shitty pretentious pricks but my coffee bar will be starf**kers
foulmouth
does the wimpy count?
Do you know what I think. Any independent starting a business at this time has got to be the bravest person on this planet or stark staring bonkers! Only time will tell which it is! As for all the various talk about which "BIG" names Dorking should be attracting - forget it. Will be lucky if some of the names suggested still exist by the end of the first quarter of 2009.
Wanna coffee in Dorking?? The choice is somewhat limited: Starbucks. Costa. Cafe Creme. Cafe Pandoro. Cafe Rouge. Viva. Subway. Doorsteps. Chimes. Jax. Jampot. Scoop. Fothergills. Christies Antiques Coffee Room. Get Fruti. Watsons. Kings Court Coffee House. Haskets.Harleys and the one next to the Star pub (cannot remember the names)and now Flavours. Surely that is not enough!!!! I want an extra large skinny latte with homogonised milk (organic of course)decafinated with a shot of vanilla, cinamon and chocolate sprinkles on the top. Where can i get that?
There is the definitive list of coffee shops and sadly it's growing. Superb!
I cannot believe that yet another coffee shop is planning to open up in this town. With the number of retail shops dwindling by the day, all there will be left to do is a grab a coffee, a sarnie and a muffin. With the planned increases in the parking charges, is it to late for the council to re-think their planned hikes and wait for the economy to settle down before they kill Dorking town centre off for good??????? Jo
I'm thinking of buying all the empty shop units and converting them into mini-NCP's. Then I'll undercut the council's parking charges! Make a killing, especially if I integrate coffee bars in each one!
OK we might not 'need' another coffee shop but rather that than another empty, decaying unit, surely?
I'm suprised that somebody actually managed to secure a business loan for a coffee shop in Dorking. As for the increase in parking charges, soon nobody will bother driving into Dorking as there's hardly enough there for a days shopping, perhaps they are hoping that they can get a steady income from the many opticians customers.
It's a very sad state of affairs.
Dorking has many coffee shops – but what do they serve and can it be called coffee? Mainstream coffee has become much more high profile through major coffee chains and Dorking consumers are enjoying coffee in new and exciting ways. From a high street prospective consumers have all but moved away from instant “coffee” left over from the 1970’s Café to real coffee (whole bean) introduced to the high street in the early 1990’s.
However, coffee at the mainstream level that chokes our high streets today ‘Liquid McDonalds’ - Starbucks, Costa Coffee, Coffee Republic, and Café Nero etc. have become anonymous, and synonymous with rather milky or bland espresso based drinks - production lines where you could begin to argue “where is the coffee and care in amongst all of this” particularly when most major coffee retailers are unsure exactly where their coffee beans came from, when and how they were roasted, how long they have been roasted and what they truly represent as a finished product in the cup.
The independents in Dorking slot between the majors and from this stand point it would seem that anyone can open up a coffee shop without worrying too much about the coffee itself and end up serving the same anonymous products (or worse) with the same fragmented coffee bean audit trail.
Green coffee beans (unroasted beans) keep for a long time, once roasted they lose most of their flavour after just a few days. This means that most coffee (whole bean or ground coffee) on the high street is already stale by the time it reaches a coffee shop. The bad news is stale coffee is drinkable and in the main is what people are used to drinking, that is if you have never had truly fresh coffee.
Once a coffee drinker has tasted truly fresh coffee, they’ll be hooked forever. That's because coffee, just out of the roaster and into the cup is nature’s most flavourful drink containing over 800 flavour compounds (much more complex than wine, with around 200 flavour compounds). After ten days from roasting however, coffee will lose on average 50% of its flavour compounds, a full month from roasting and you will be lucky if 10% of the coffee’s original flavour compounds are still intact.
All the major coffee chains and 99.9% of independent coffee shops use pre ground or pre roasted beans - not fresh in-store roasted beans and consequently can not and do not deliver delicious full-flavour coffee found in an artisan coffee house. http://www.monmouthcoffee.co.uk/
It can certainly be argued that we’re (the Dorking consumer) becoming more discerning about what we eat and drink. Championed by TV chefs and strong marketing campaigns by some major supermarkets there is a desire to know exactly where products come from, how they are made, who grows or farms them, why they taste like they do, and why some are much better than the standard, anonymous fare.
One thing the major coffee chains have accomplished is the making of coffee drinking more widespread and have created huge demand. Those people who can tell the difference between good and bad coffee end up searching out something better and those that stumble upon good coffee can’t believe the taste.
Those consumers that are lucky enough to have a local speciality (artisan) coffee shop / lounge that roasts and grinds its own single estate, single origin coffees and blends its own espresso beans in-store with a full audit trail to the cup - will be drinking a vastly superior cup of coffee - which when placed side-by-side with Liquid McDonalds’ and 99.9% of the independents will win every time.
Do we have a true coffee house in Dorking – answer no we don’t. Let hope the new coffee shop can produce real coffee.
Note: Most of the major chains need to supply their shops with roasted beans in vast quantities due to the volume of coffee consumed in their shops. In order to do this they use a flash roasting process where the coffee beans are roasted from the outside-in, in a 60-90 second process inside factory-sized roasters.
In order to be eligible for 'flash roasting' a bean variety will need to be hard and uniform, and available in very large quantities (these roasters can roast thousands of kilos at a time). This means that the beans are likely to come from the bulk green coffee bean channel, which is of a poorer quality than the speciality coffee channel.
Because the beans will be of a poorer quality, they will need to be over-roasted, so that the flavour of the bean is replaced by the flavour of the roast, which is why most bulk coffees taste overly 'toasted' and are very similar to each other.
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