What have 35 tonnes of liquid nitrogen and a giant £500,000 chopping machine got to do with freshly brewed coffee?

First of all, don’t worry – we’re not adding anything strange to your cup. Quite the opposite.

After we blend and roast our filter coffees, the next step is to let them harden a little before grinding. Then we let the gases escape (up to 10 litres for every kilogram of coffee) – and finally it gets neatly packaged.

Or at least, that’s how things used to be done.

These days, we whisk the beans straight from the roaster into a nitrogen atmosphere. This keeps the coffee in tip-top condition. There’s no chance of it losing any of that fresh taste – because there’s no air to spoil the flavour.

It’s then rushed to our rather frighteningly named cryogenic grinder. Or should that be “Cryogenic Chopping Gizmo”? Because this is unlike any grinder you’ve ever seen before. It doesn’t grind – but finely chops. There’s even a steady supply of liquid nitrogen at –180°C to make sure the blades don’t heat up the beans, something which leads to undesirable secondary roasting.

And that’s nasty.

As Ewan Reid puts it, this new way of working “suppresses the loss of aroma volatiles”.

Which, in contrast, is a good thing. That’s why cryogenic grinding is used extensively in the spice industry – but we’re the UK’s first coffee roaster to use this futuristic technology.

Then again, what did you expect?

This article originally appeared in Fresh 11