If you are on holiday in Edinburgh sometime I would recommend taking one of the hourly trains out to North Berwick. Besides being an old fishing village with amazing views of the Bass Rock and it’s Summer colony of Gannets, this town is home to the Sea Bird centre, where you can watch the puffins and other sea birds using remote cameras. Not the place you would normally expect to find civet coffee (Kopi Luwak) though!
You can also take a boat trip out to view the rock at close quarters, and get up close to the gannets on their nests, as well as having a good chance in the Summer of seeing puffins floating in small groups.
Living fairly near North Berwick, we often travel out that way to walk along the beach, grabbing an ice cream if the S Luca’s van is there, and maybe a sandwich or soup in one of the restaurants.
One of my favourite shops in North Berwick though, is the Howdah Tea & Coffee Company Ltd retail outlet. I first went in there when following my nose – I love the smell of coffee! To my delight I found they sold coffee beans in chocolate, which I had only just discovered at the time and couldn’t get enough of!
Having seen bigger shops in city-central locations having trouble with their businesses, I wondered how they managed to keep a specialist coffee shop going in such a location. Now seven or eight years later, they are still going strong, and I can only believe that it is the quality of the coffee they sell, their welcome when you come in the shop, and a strong and loyal clientele that regularly use an excuse of visiting the sea-side to take the opportunity to visit the shop again and again that helps this specialist coffee supplier thrive.
Detail of a coffee roaster at the Howdah Tea and Coffee company in North Berwick.
They roast their beans on the premises – that big machine on the right as you come in is a coffee roaster. Barrels of beans are used to support jars of roasted beans that are ready to grind to order. Doing their own roasting means that their beans are always fresh – they do not buy in large amounts of pre-roasted beans to hang around losing their freshness!
Their prices are good as well – check out their website for details! However, the thing that really excited me was the jar of civet coffee – also known as Kopi Luwak – the first I have ever seen. This coffee is made from beans extracted from civet poo! The argument has been that the civet only eats the sweetest berries, and this is what makes the beans so special. However, research has shown that the unique flavour of the coffee is down (in part at least) to the fact that the proteins in the beans are broken down during their passage.
Most of the pictures on this site were taken in the shop – their courtesy in letting me take the shots was much appreciated!