Carbon-neutral coffee comes to UK – via sail boat from Colombia to Cornwall
If you’re prepared to wait for your coffee, this looks like a positive return to a glamorous and by-gone means of travel, which seems to have a really good fit with rural food policy.
The French schooner De Gallant docked in Falmouth harbour at the end of May, three months after leaving the port of Santa Marta in Colombia laden with tonnes of sustainably sourced coffee beans.
This wind-powered sail cargo of carbon-neutral coffee was worth the wait, according to Yallah Coffee, a single-origin coffee roastery only a few miles away in the Cornish port town.
Yallah’s special Colombian coffee grounds and beans are finding their way into coffee shops and restaurants across the country. Using a sailboat to import the beans into the UK made the first leg of their voyage almost entirely carbon neutral.
For Richard Blake, the owner of Yallah Coffee, the delivery was the culmination of almost five years developing the idea for a sustainably sourced coffee without the huge carbon footprint of most imported beans.