This photo is my favourite coffee at the moment. A skinny cortado. Over the last few years I’ve progressed from cappuccino to flat white. Now I’m liking a cortado. Skinny milk if possible. But sometimes I go wild and have an espresso…
There are some great coffee shops in Bristol. But most likely you’ll find me in Boston Tea Party. Early morning is favourite.
Boston opened on Park Street, Bristol in 1995, just two years after I set up my own business, Cardens. According to Wikipedia, Boston Tea Party is family owned (just like Cardens) and now operates 22 cafés six of them in Bristol.
On the 1st June Boston is making a brave move and banning plastic single use cups. This must be a big decision for them because they currently sell 340,000 takeaway drinks a year. And only 3% of those (10,200) were in customer’s own reusable cups even though they were encouraged with a 25p discount.
From June you will only be able to get a takeaway coffee if you either take your own cup, or you buy one of theirs for £4.50 (for a medium size).
If I’m taking out I try to remember to take my trusty Boston Tea Party glass keep cup in with me and benefit from the 25 pence discount. But this will be disappearing and instead they will be donating 10 pence to community projects.
So now if I forget my cup I’ll have to pay £4.50 extra to take away my coffee. Seems a bit steep. After all people don’t want to pay the extra 5 pence for a plastic bag. I suspect that a lot of people will choose to walk along the road to the next café instead.
But Boston have a ‘cunning plan’ – their ‘refundable loan scheme’. This is how they explain it on their website:
“We want to make it as easy as possible to get a takeaway coffee following our ban of single use coffee cups. If you forget your reusable cup, don’t have one or are buying a round of coffees for the office you can hire them from us, and return them to any of our cafes and get your money back”.
As Boston Tea Party quite rightly say: the onus is on all of us to change our habits and make a difference for our planet.
That said, I don’t fancy being a Boston Tea party barista for the first couple of weeks of June. Be nice to them people, don’t shoot the messenger…
For more information on the Boston Tea Party single use coffee cup ban click here