What happens when folk tales and coffee come together? Rory Waterman finds out by talking to Seven Districts Coffee founder Ben Southall.

Named for the seven districts of Lincolnshire, Seven Districts Coffee is one of the finest coffee roasters you’ll find anywhere. It also has four cosy shops. You can order bags of coffee from the website, and even find out how to get the most out of them with the French press, AeroPress or coffee grinder that you got for Christmas a few years ago and which is waiting at the back of your kitchen cabinet for the right moment.

Very helpful, and very nice, but what does any of this have to do with folk tales? Well, Seven Districts bills itself as a ‘Speciality Coffee Roasters of the finest Single Origin coffee and storytellers of the oldest of fables’. That got me interested, of course, so I visited the shop at Welton Hill, a former pub, and sat in the verdant, sun-splashed ‘coffee garden’ at the back, over a latte and beside a huge meadow littered with butterflies. I then perused the stall by the counter, and left with an armful of bags of coffee, each named for a folk tale from one of those famed seven districts: Blind Byard (Peru), Tiddy Mun (Rwanda), and The Lincoln Imp (blend). The packaging is almost as good as the contents, and on the back of each – along with tasting notes and all the stuff you’d expect – you’ll find an introduction to the tale that gave the coffee its name, alongside a QR code that links to the rest of the story.

Back home, caffeinated and intrigued, I emailed Ben Southall, who co-founded the company with Ellis Purvis in 2019, before they opened the first shop the following year. I had a cup of Blind Byard at my elbow, and I’m not sure what Ben was drinking, but he certainly seemed animated and enthusiastic. ‘That’s one of my favourites!’ he said. He’d just been working hard at planning for the opening of a new shop at Sutton on Sea, the first Seven Districts foray to the Lincolnshire coast, and said he was quite tired, but he has the elixir for that.

What made him want to bring coffee and folk tales together? ‘Well, what do you do over a coffee? You tell stories, you share connections, you build community.’ They were a natural fit, then. ‘We just thought it was pretty cool. And we knew Lincolnshire had unique folk tales. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a bit of a marketing gimmick as well, but I genuinely love this stuff and these mysterious tales.’

Well so do I, Ben. We share stories, we build connections. Ben grew up in Nettleham, about ten miles from me, so conversation moves to that. He tells me about the massive earthworks of the medieval manor of the Bishops of Lincoln on the outskirts of his village, and I tell him about the more modest earthworks of Nocton Priory. Does he think it is a shame that more people don’t know more of this history, or a greater number of local folk tales? He’s certainly doing his bit to combat that, after all.

‘Yes’, he says, ‘but I think it’s a broader thing. You get people from America who come over and they just love England, because of the history. And if you look around, it’s beautiful.’ Ben’s favourite folk tale is the localised version of the story of King Canute/Cnut, which seamlessly blends history, myth, Lincolnshire and natural beauty. ‘I just love the Viking sense of it, the Viking folklore and history. But I find them all really fascinating: Byard’s Leap, with the horseshoes you can still go and see, and so on. They’re just really bizarre.’

I’ll drink to that. In fact, I do drink to that. Blind Byard floods my stomach and my mind. What tales might he match to future coffees? He loves ‘The King of Cats’, the origin of which is unknown, but more likely to be in Scotland or Ireland. And who knows – perhaps one day there’ll be a Seven Districts in, say, Aberdeenshire or Monaghan. He asks me which tales I’d like to see, and I suggest Black Dogs might get a look in: not the demonic Hairy Jack or Black Shuck known elsewhere, but the ‘kindly beast’ the folklorist Ethel H. Rudkin claimed in 1938 to have met on the byways of our own county. ‘That’d be nice’, he says. Almost certainly. Their other brews are, after all.

Interview conducted by RORY WATERMAN