“The best bread & coffee” – We have a lot of lovely comments like this from dear Friends of Rex, and Quality is a cornerstone of the Rex philosophy. Here’s 3 Rex coffee principles:
1) Freshly ground Monmouth coffee
We’ve blogged before about how important it is to us to offer you delicious Monmouth coffee – we are one of the few places outside London & Monmouth Street in Covent Garden that you can obtain this wonderful, original artisan coffee. Lots of you ask us about buying these expensive beans & yes, we might just sell them on one day!
The quality & freshness of the ground coffee is crucial to Rex hot drinks, but so is the milk in any white coffee.
2) Unhomogenised Guernsey cow local Farm milk
Milk has been in the news a lot recently, but not often for good reasons. Back in the day we were bombarded by Milk Marketing Board ad slogans such as “full of natural goodness”, “milk’s gotta lotta bottle”, “drinka pinta milka day”. Traditionally, Milk has been strongly recommended for athletes to drink & bulk up in place of water, due to its natural protein properties. And today fizzy drinks companies are planning to diversify into versions of milk. But it’s most likely that we will hear how unnatural it is to drink Milk after weaning, all about dairy intolerance, about milk farmers’ poor pay by the supermarkets.
Many lovely Friends of Rex are advised to cut out dairy first if they are suffering digestion issues and we do offer almond & soya milks (and Chocolate Buns!) suitable even for confirmed dairy intolerants. But we were very careful to choose Lacey’s Farm Guernsey Cow milk for several critical reasons:
- a. Guernsey cow milk is naturally fuller, richer & golden in colour but not fattier. So just absolutely delicious in Rex latte, cappuccino, flat white or even with our artisan teas, Americano, or Hot Chocolates. Lacey’s Farm told us that Guernsey milk “contains 12% more protein, 33% more vitamin D, 25% more vitamin A and 15%more calcium than average milk” Wow!! It’s practically a super-food!
- b. Lacey’s Farm is local. Located just miles away outside High Wycombe, you can be rightly proud to support a truly local multi-generation family business that’s thrived since 1884. We can all even visit their herd of pedigree long lashed caramel coloured cows, who eat food that’s 95% grown on the farm, with some extra brewer’s grain & molasses thrown in on top! That really is farm to table.
- c. Our Lacey’s Farm Milk is kept naturally unhomogenised. Of course it’s all pastuerised to remove pathogens, but further Homogenisation has been slated as a nasty unnecessary industrial process that renders the milk fat particles & undigestible proteins so tiny that they permeate your intenstine & pass into your blood stream, causing dietary problems & higher cholesterol.
Honestly we like the cream on top of the milk! With a shake of the bottle it disperses anyhow. It’s hard to find healthy unhomogenised milk in your supermarket because they like the longer shelf life, but we prefer natural in Rex 🙂 - d. We are paying wa-yyyyy more for Lacey’s Farm Milk than most folks pay for basic milk in the supermarket. But we do that because dairy farmers deserve a fair price for a quality product to make a decent living. When did we stop valuing milk as a nation? On average big business pays just 23.5p per litre for milk today (less than 50p for a 4 pint) which is shocking. A small bottle of still water costs all of us more!! As Rex is still a small self-sufficient family business which survives partly thanks to coffee sales, it’s a big profit decision to pay several times over the price of milk that other coffee shops use – but we feel strongly that this is the right thing for farmers, Rex friends’ health, our coffee quality.
3) A drink’s too wet without one – Rex Patisserie that’s artisan, organic, handmade on the premises
To ensure truly the best coffee experience, many Friends choose to also eat Rex pain au raisin, croissants & sausage rolls and more, all of which are unique to Rex in Little Chalfont. We don’t buy anything in, we make all of our products ourselves, fresh with the very best organic Shipton Mill flour, highest quality patisserie butter & highly skilled pastry making methods. We are really proud & grateful to have been voted Best Artisan Bakery in Buckinghamshire – and our organic Patisserie is part of the reason why!
So we know you have so much choice but hope you will continue to love your best Rex coffee AND its special milk 🙂
