Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s more of a curious conundrum than anything else for a seasoned tea drinker like myself, but on my travels little coffee docks seem to be cropping up all over the place and I often wonder what the attraction is in paying maybe around €3 to €4 for a drink that has to be consumed in the great outdoors.

To put the record straight, there isn’t even the faintest hint of begrudgery about this trend; in fact the opposite, as one has to admire the entrepreneurship of setting up a mini roadside café beside a busy roadway and being able to make a go of the little enterprise.

There is though, a little bias with my thinking in that never in my life have I consumed as much as a half-cup of coffee, probably due to the fact that being a child of the ‘60s, Barry’s and Lyons’ tea were the only ones to adorn the beverage cupboard in the bottom half of the kitchen dresser.

I’ve made a few efforts to least have a go at trying out coffee but it’s a taste that I just can’t stand and that branches out into such treats (to some people) of coffee cakes, chocolates and scones. It’s just not in my taste buds repertoire and at this stage of my cycle of life, that’s unlikely to change.

Anyway I’m in a clear minority on this one with the annual global coffee market now being valued by ‘people in-the-know’ at around €100 billion, employing a total of 125 million people, and that’s not a misprint.

Even for a coffee ignoramus like myself, the Starbucks name and brand always rings a bell with nearly 40,000 outlets all around the world and a workforce now edging close to the 400,000 mark.

Legend always had it our house that one Sir Walter Raleigh was the man responsible for introducing tea to our neck-of-the-woods having discovered the plant during one of this trips to the east coast of the now United States as well of course as potatoes and tobacco sometime towards the end of the 1500s.

According to childhood fireside tales that I heard the courtship of tea and the Irish kitchen was far from a ‘love at first sight’ romance, with the natives somewhat baffled at what attraction this black stuff could have for a normal palate.