Just when you've recovered from the excitement of reading my blog about water I am coming at you with one about about paper bags.......

In all seriousness though, our packaging is not just there to look pretty and get your coffee to you. We have spent a lot of time selecting the right bags for our coffee.

There is an enormous array of bags on the market these days; paper, plastic, metallised and some that make claims such as easy to recycle and even compostable bags.

Sadly the recyclable offerings are bit like the recyclable coffee cups we see available, whilst technically they can be recycled, they have to be sent to specific facilities of which there are currently less than a handful. You cannot throw these bags in to your curbside recycling. In actual fact throwing them in to you household recycling can actually cause major problems down the line and result in bales of truly recyclable materials being rejected and sent to landfill.

Ok you are thinking, use compostable bags then. The problem with compostable bags is that while they are technically compostable they have to exposed to very specific conditions to compost. This consists of lots of heat, moisture, and even certain bacteria. They chances of this just happening to exist in your garden compost heap are virtually zero so they need to be sent to specialist centres too. These are difficult to find, expensive to get them there and also result in more transportation and therefore more CO2.

At the moment we will be sticking with our traditional kraft paper bags and we will continue to work with our suppliers to find genuinely environmentally sound solutions

WICOVALVES.

When coffee is roasted it produces gas for a number of days after. If coffee is placed in a fully sealed bag eventually they would inflate and pop. To get around this we use a bag with a degas valve built in. We specifically use bags that have WICOVALVES. These valves have been developed to allow coffee to be packed immediately after roasting. This means you get perfectly fresh coffee with its fresh off the roaster aroma and taste.

They are the best valves on the market and that is why we use them, simple as that.

Read more about recycling and compostable bags here -