Member Article

Major contract for York Coffee Emporium as Castle Howard commissions special blend

A specially-created artisan coffee is being served to thousands of visitors to one of the North’s biggest and best-loved tourism destinations after the appointment of York Coffee Emporium.

The special coffee, which has a light caramel taste with a hint of fruitiness, was specially blended by York Coffee Emporium in its tasting laboratory at York Business Park for stately home, Castle Howard, York, (pictured) which is serving it in its two cafes and two restaurants.

The coffee – Castle Howard Expresso Blend - is available in Castle Howard’s Courtyard Café, Coffee Shop, Boathouse Café and Fitzroy Restaurant and is also being sold in packs in the estate’s farm shop along with other special blends including The Ninth, Stable Blend, Ethiopian, Kenyan, Brazilian, Sumatran and Columbian.

York Coffee Emporium first started to supply the Boathouse and Courtyard cafes in 2014 but has now also been contracted to supply the Coffee Shop and Fitzroy Restaurant, for which it is also supplying hot chocolate, making it the first hot beverage company to supply all the food outlets at Castle Howard which opened to the public in 1952 and had more than 270,00 visitors in 2016.

The company has also supplied Castle Howard with three automatic Expresso coffee machines, two hot coffee machines and a bulk filter machine for coffee, as well as providing barista training to café and restaurant staff. Vending machine and refreshments systems company, Upton Group, which acquired York Coffee Emporium last year, will service the machines.

York Coffee Emporium director, Laurence Beardmore, a qualified Q Grader – the coffee industry equivalent of a professional sommelier wine taster – says: “Castle Howard is achieving excellent quality food and drinks in its cafes and restaurants, often using suppliers within a 40-mile radius, and we are very pleased to be part of this.

“As many of the estate’s thousands of weekly visitors will visit the cafes or restaurant and drink two-or three coffees in a full-day visit, a high-quality artisan blend can be an important part of their day and it needs to be top quality.

“Supplying Castle Howard will involve at least two tonnes of specially-roasted and blended coffee beans each year. We are able to do this as part of Upton Group which allows us to create consistent, very high-quality coffees in large volumes with the service back-up of a big company experienced in handling large contracts.”

Head of trading at Castle Howard, Karen Hall, says: “We chose York Coffee Emporium as our local supplier to continue our delivery of a quality tasting coffee for the catering operation.

“The coffee receives a consistently high level of customer satisfaction and we are pleased to be able to extend its availability through our retail outlets. The decision to work with York Coffee Emporium was aided by the evident passion and experience the team has for the product and delivery of good levels of care in the service to Castle Howard.”

Sir Gary Verity, chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire, says: “It’s great to see two local businesses teaming up to offer visitors such a wholesome Yorkshire experience. Yorkshire has a huge variety of homegrown produce, so it makes sense for one of the region’s top attractions, Castle Howard, to be supplied by York Coffee Emporium. It’s important that the millions of people who visit Yorkshire annually get to sample the region’s fantastic produce.”

Castle Howard, set in 1,000 acres of parkland, was built for the 3rd Earl of Carlisle and designed by playwright Sir John Vanbrugh in 1699 as his first architectural project. The estate, which has a mix of Baroque and Palladian styles, took more than 100 years to complete and has been home to the Howard family since it was built. As well as the cafes and restaurant, there is an adventure playground, lakes, monuments, statues and fountains all set in a wider 9,000-acre estate in the Howardian Hills

The Upton Group supplies a wide range of refreshment systems for dispensing hot and cold drinks, confectionary and snacks, fresh foods and sandwiches, chilled water as well as artisan, hand-roasted coffees to a wide spectrum of enterprises from SMEs to international businesses throughout the UK.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Mike Clarke Communications .