We have five different cups of coffee here from five different suppliers. You're smelling them all. When you're smelling them, is there anything you're noticing just from smelling them?

Yeah. One of the things I can assess pretty quickly is how darkly the coffee has been roast. The longer you leave coffee in a roasting machine, the darker the color of the beans will be. For a long time, I think people associated darker roasts with better coffee, oilier beans looked fancier, whereas it swung the other way, and lighter roasts now are considered better or more expensive because they preserve more of the inherent qualities of the raw materials. These are all reasonably dark roasts just from smell. The smells I'm coming off there are more in the heavier, not burnt, smells. Well, some of them actually smell a little bit burnt and harsh. But nothing's particularly fruity or floral smelling. It's just for me, a gage of where things are going to be. There's going to be an expectation with that of bitterness.

In perfume shops, they give us sometimes Sometimes coffee beans to smell to try and wash out our nasal senses, I guess. Does that work?

Yeah, it totally does. It's why dogs sniff really fast, that you're looking for change. Your sense of smell works quite well on change. So, yes, you will get what's called suppression. If you smell the same smells over and over, they become less and less intense. It's why people end up wearing too much of the same perfume they've worn for 20 years because they literally can't smell it anymore. We can, they can't.

It's also evidenced when you go for a run and then because you can smell yourself, you have to ask your friend if you smell. So you go, Dave, do I stink? Yeah. Because your nose, I guess, is habituated to, though.

There's a good hack. If you ever want to break apart how something like Coca-Cola smells, if you take a component smell of Coca-Cola, like lime, right? Because just taste of Coke to people, but it's actually lime, Niroli, cinnamon, orange, nutmeg. If you smell a bunch of cinnamon and then smell Coke, it smells weird because you've deleted cinnamon from Coca-Cola's flip, like an aroma profile. You can do that with, say, and smell, and it's like, whoa, I've thrown the balance out by deleting that and suppressing that. It's a dull but fun trick.

The interesting thing with talking about Coca-Cola there is, I remember those Coke and Pepsi studies from back in the day where people would rate Pepsi as tasting better unless they had it in a Coke can. So when they could see the brand of the Coca-Cola, they rated it better. But when they could see it in a plastic cup, they rated Pepsi better. I wonder here as well, because you don't know what these coffees are. You don't know what brands they are. Neither do I, what the results are going to be. So coffee number one. Yes. Have a taste and a smell.

That's, to me, a pretty standard commercial coffee taste. There's not a lot going on there, relatively high in bitterness to me. I'd say that's a fairly bitter cup of coffee. That's coming, I would say, mostly from roast. If something's good or bad, It can be bad because it wasn't made that well that day. It could be bad because it was not great raw materials. Finding why is sometimes tricky. I wouldn't say it's a particularly expensive cup of coffee.

No, it didn't taste it. Patril Station coffee.

You can say that. I like that. You can say, Yeah, I'm going to just lead you into saying terrible things, and I'll say nothing.

It tasted like it came out of a vending machine or something to me.

Yeah, I'd be surprised if that was expensive. I'd be a little bit outraged if that was expensive.

What would you rate that one out of five? Let's do 10.

For me and what coffee can be, I'd say that's like a two.

I would say that was a five out of 10.

Yeah, I think it's fair. I probably should be fair and call it a four out of 10 because I've tasted way worse than that. Okay. It's good Number two. Now, this one would be a little bit more divisive for a lot of people because it got a little bit more acidity in it. It's like a little bit of, as some people might describe, it's sourness almost. It's a little zingy tasting. Generally, acidity is associated with quality in coffee, which is a real sticking point for a lot of people. It's down to the fact that when you grow coffee, the higher you grow it, the slower it grows, the sweeter it will ultimately be, but you do get more acidity in higher-grown coffees. Some people don't want that in their coffee. They really don't want sour coffee. So that tastes like it's got better raw materials in there for me than this one. Roast a little bit lighter, bruise a little bit better. I'd like it to be a less sour thing. It's a little bit old, obviously. It's sat around for a while. But I would say for me, For me, it's a better cup than this one.

It's got a little characteristic to it. It tastes of something that's a little bit fruity in there.

Yeah, it's got more of a personality, hasn't it? The aftertaste is a little bit something going on there. What would you rate that out of 10 in your preference?

There's things I'd like to change about it. So like six, seven, somewhere there. But it has, I think, better raw materials in it that does appeal to me.

Okay, I'm going to say 6 as well. Okay. I can reveal that number one was McDonald's coffee.

That's not surprising. That's what I would have expected McDonald's to taste like.

That cup of coffee cost us £1.30..

So pretty the cheapest thing here. I feel like McDonald's are aiming at the cheaper end.

Okay, your assessment there was probably fair. You did originally give it a two out of 10.

I feel not bad about that, but it's fine. There you go.

So number two, you talked about there being a bitterness to it and an independent- A little bit more acidity in this taste.

The raw materials are of a higher quality, certainly the number one.

That is an independent local coffee shop. Yeah. That cup of coffee is double the price of the McDonald's one at about £3 per cup. Let's move on to number three.

Okay.

Very different taste.

For me, it's more akin to number one than anything else. Again, it's a darker roast. It's got a bit more body to it. It feels a bit fuller, a bit a little bit richer, a bit earthy at the same time for me.

It's fuller, isn't it?

It is a little bit fuller.

The first one was quite watery to me.

Yeah, and that's in part how it's made, in part how it's roast, in part where it's from. Price-wise, I wouldn't expect it to be much more than the McDonald's, if I'm I guess that that tastes, again, like a reasonably commercial-grade coffee. I wouldn't say it tastes bad. Roasts a little dark. Yeah, it's another Yeah, three, four, three, actually. This is something about the earthiness that I don't enjoy in coffee. Some people really like earthy flavors. I really don't. That's just a preference thing.

That is Costa coffee.

Interesting. There you go.

Number You're doing a swirling, I can see. You're doing a real...

I like to slurp. Usually, you do a little aeration, but down a microphone, it's brutal. Okay. That's probably the darkest roast of all of them. I would say it doesn't taste like the raw materials are particularly bad until I could have a guess at who that's from, but it is definitely a darker roast. So more bitterness, again, quite full. My gut says that's a Starbucks-style thing to me.

Try the last one as well then before we reveal.

Before I get into trouble. That's weird. It's a little bit vegetably to me, if I'm honest. It's not my favorite. Again, within the world of coffee roasting, it's darker. It's not as dark as this one. Yeah, I like it probably less than this one here, so I'd probably be back to a four again.

So number four, which was the one you gave five out of 10, is Pratt. Is it?

Yeah. Wow.

Number three. Sorry, number five is Starbucks. Is it? Yeah.

There you go.

With the high street chains then, the coffee that you rated highest in our taste test was Pratt. Yeah. Second was Costa, and then third was Starbucks.

But I would say, from my point of view, the variance between them is surprisingly small.

Yeah.

I don't think they taste particularly different to each other in a big way. I think the independent stood out a long way from the others. It was clearly different. It has a lot more flavor and character going on, which is good, which is what I like about coffee. But I think the brand experience may be different, but at the root, there's not a huge variance in the coffee experience.

I agree. I wouldn't really... I can taste differences, but it's not as a profound One difference is the McDonald's taste and then the independent taste, which was really full of personality. Interestingly, the price variance is the independent cost £3, Costa is £3.20, Pratt is £3.20, and Starbucks is £3.60. Really?

Yeah. It always blew my mind for years and years, I would work with loads of essentially startup coffee shop owners, and their mindset would be, Oh, I need to be the same price as Starbucks or maybe a little bit more. What are you possibly thinking that you have the same supply chain that they do, that you're going to make. They make great margins. You're not buying 20 million paper cups a week. You know what I mean? Nothing makes sense. But people feel very tied to this idea that the price is set by the chains. I think that's changed now, and people are more comfortable charging above that. But for a long time, people were terrified to charge more than the chains, even if the product was noticeably better. A real frustration for me. That's why I'm always going to bat for independence, because it's not like you're going to spend more. You can get a better product by someone who cares deeply about it. I think there's a risk in going to an independent if you're traveling. Starbucks, the model is built on, I know where to queue, who to talk to, where to stand after I place an order, what food I can get there.

It's very safe. If I dropped you in Moscow and told you to get coffee, you'd go to a chain because you know how it works and you get it done. Independence feel like a risk, but the reward, I think, is often there for sure. There's more independents than they're better than ever now. I'm very pro independent coffee shops.