bramah

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Edward Bramah, founder of the Museum of Tea and Coffee, wanders up to our table and raises an eyebrow at the perfect, faultless latte which his lady barista has just expertly served.
“Not drinking that rubbish, are you?” he enquires, only half seriously.

This is typical of the Bramah museum’s challenging attitude to the things the retail coffee trade takes for granted.
His museum takes in ten thousand visitors a year and opens seven days a week, and yet very few companies in the trade know of it or use it. Surprisingly, it remains a hidden gem.

The founder himself smilingly concedes that he is prepared to preach his subject to all audiences, and a well-known roaster tells the story of how Bramah was in a hotel function room when a question was raised about tea and coffee - without preparation or notes, he kept the entire bar enraptured and entertained for a clear half-hour on our subject.

This is value of the Bramah museum – it is a treasure of ideas for winning and keeping customers through the story and fascination of coffee..

Edward Bramah makes no secret of his own belief that we have sent the public off on an inadequate image of coffee as a beverage – there is far more to it that we can usefully promote, he observes.

“In the high street, our image is espresso, instant, cappuccino… all because of the power of TV advertising which persuades us that we need things extra-fast. In fact, we don’t, and if we rediscover our heritage, we can remind ourselves of the quality of orthodox teas and coffees, and how we can present them.”

Bramah talks with rare authority as one of the few in the trade who has actually been a planter. He began in what was then Nyasaland, where original planters from Ceylon had settled in Africa after walking up the Zambezi to find the best growing grounds.

“I was fascinated by the entire chain, from pickers to auctioneers. I worked in coffee and tea from Kilimanjaro to Mombasa, and to be honest, the coffee we were producing in Kenya in 1952 was supreme – the best in the world. It later became Kenco…!

“At about the same time, one man with an espresso machine opened up in Frith Street, Soho, and found that only the continentals living in the area wanted it. This made coffee producers realise that the British public knew absolutely nothing about coffee at all, which is still largely the case, and they wondered how to get the taste for it through to us – make us take it in tablets, or inject every baby with it at birth?

“Commercial TV was arriving, and the break between programmes was too short to make a pot of tea, for housewives who didn’t want to be stuck in the kitchen when they could be watching Dixon of Dock Green. So the advertisements hammered them with ‘instant’ coffee night after night, and sales rocketed.”

What can the modern retailer learn from this, to draw attention back to quality coffee? Edward Bramah’s museum offers many resources and little tips which the busy retailer can easily have missed. Not least is good buying practice.

“Sourcing your coffee is the most excruciatingly difficult thing in your life, and failing in it condemns your business.

“It’s a curious thing that in ten years at this museum and coffee-shop, we have never once been approached by a decent coffee salesman. Have all the good salesmen disappeared from this trade?

“When you are offered a new coffee, the first instinct is to taste, and a good salesman will appreciate that you never taste a product alone – you taste it against your own existing standard product, whatever that may be.

“I built two companies on the technique of demonstrating products… but in coffee, we are now paying the price for training salesmen to compete only on discount.”

By contrast, a visit to Bramah’s museum will unveil unexpected ideas for presenting and demonstrating coffee in ways that will stand out to the high-street customer.

“To present your coffee effectively, it helps to understand the whole evolution of coffee making, which we show here - the Baghdad Boiler, the Turkish Ibrik, and the Ethiopian Jabena.

“In many places today, the modern espresso machine gives a result somewhere between a milkshake and Camp coffee. The subtleties of coffee are often lost in espresso, so we may indeed reflect… why not make coffee in a jug?”

He is quite serious. Although early espresso machines are on display, and Bramah himself holds patents for inventing some equipment, his own favourite tactic is to fascinate customers with the theatre of making coffee in the most simple containers.

What he calls ‘the Bramah method’ intrigues customers in his own coffee shop, and he challengingly argues that in the right situation, in front of the right customers, the theatre of it will make any coffee-shop stick in a customer’s mind just as much as the theatre of an espresso barista.

Bramah grins mischievously.

“Four thousand pounds for an espresso machine against 40p for a jug? Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

Bramah Museum of Tea and Coffee, open 10am-6pm every day.
40 Southwark St, London.
www.bramahmuseum.co.uk