Everyone in the beverage trade has their own stories of appalling hotel coffee, and every coffee bar can tell you about diners who leave nearby restaurants after dessert and walk across to the coffee house for a reliable final drink.

Some of the coffee industry's best-known names are no longer interested in supplying certain large hotel chains and many have stopped arguing the benefits of their coffee to catering groups, believing that the biggest companies have become so entrenched in a low-cost model that their accountants will not let them improve. It's all contributing to the downward spiral of the hotel and restaurant trade's reputation for the standard of their coffee.

"Any hotel with banqueting facilities has learnt that bulk coffee costs nothing," explains one senior player in coffee, who prefers not to be named. "This is because the quality of it has already been reduced to meet the price that bulk customers expect.

"The obvious temptation for a hotel is to stretch this saving to the rest of their beverages. So they want to know why, if a cup of bulk coffee costs them 2p, they should pay 7p for seven grams of good coffee to go in an espresso machine.

"Everybody in the coffee trade has lost hotel contracts on price - and every time a hotel's coffee contract changes on price, the quality goes down. It is now down to a level where they can't possibly do a good job with the kind of coffee they buy."

In the Republic of Ireland, the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE) recently announced a "stop the slop" campaign, trying to show hoteliers and caterers that they cannot go on like this. Indeed, local SCAE convenor Joe Smith says the rush for economy in Ireland has seen the amount of coffee used in a three-pint brewer fall from 90g to 42g.

"A great filter coffee can be the perfect end to a meal, but in fact the slop that restaurants serve is a disgrace," he says. "This is a big challenge for our industry, and a core target for this year."

Many people in the coffee trade can tell of having ordered espresso only to be brought a demitasse of filter. The executive director of the Beverage Service Association recently told of having been to dinner at a high-profile hotel which was, in every respect, perfect until the coffee arrived and turned out to be instant coffee served in a cafetire. A famous (and true) story is of the Indian restaurant which complained that its espresso machine wasn't working well - the maker discovered that they had been filling it with cash-and-carry instant coffee.

So is there any hope for hotel and restaurant coffee? "It's fair to say that hotel coffee is unpredictable," says Barry Kither, food service director of Lavazza. "However, you'll certainly find that boutique hotels are now watching the high street closely, and are looking again at their coffee.

"We have recently had an issue with a small number of trendy private hotels in London who were having a problem with their coffee. We found the relatively quick fix depended on us being able to explain the effect of understanding coffee and what care and attention it needed."

The most significant evidence of the effect of the high-street coffee revolution is probably Nescaf's decision to develop the Nescaf Coffee Company for its move into roast-and-ground coffee. It is suggesting that hoteliers and restaurateurs should research the high-street coffee bars to see how it's done. What is novel about this move is that the new company advocates looking across both roast-and-ground and soluble to find a solution applicable for an individual caterer.

The main new product to go with this move is Roma, which is a Colombian 100% Arabica, supplied as beans (or ground for cafetire or filter) together with a dark-roast soluble version. The other new coffee is Milano, a powdered option. There are new machines branded to suit the new identity - typically, the Roma Azkoyen Spression is a self-serve bean-to-cup, suitable for conference and banqueting.

There are some pioneers in the hotel industry who have deliberately worked on improving their coffee offering. The City Inn in Westminster recently took on a very experienced barista to train its bar staff on espresso, at the direct instruction of the group chairman. "You will find that people who are in a hotel where they don't know the standard of the coffee will order a black coffee with milk on the side," reported the trainer, Fahmy Hilmy. "When asked for 'white coffee', we started making them latte, and for 'black coffee', we gave them an Americano. In these, however weak, you still get that espresso taste. Although customers didn't know why, they began to realise there was something about it they liked.

"Suddenly, this part of hotel business that was doing five or 10 coffees a day was doing 100 and waitresses liked being trained to make cappuccino because they enjoyed getting compliments from the customers."

It would be a big mistake to assume that customers don't notice coffee quality. Certain operators point to the effect their work is having. Marks & Spencer, with its 170 in-store Caf Revives, says it is responsible for taking cappuccino to a new, older generation. And the marketing manager of an espresso-machine company reports the delight of a coachload of blue-rinse pensioners who discovered that their refreshment break was at a place with a real espresso machine.

However, say the experts, investment in an espresso machine is by no means necessary, because a simple filter system will allow you to put the world's best coffees on a menu, all for the cost of a few flasks.

"The first thing is to dispense with any jug on a hotplate," says artisan roaster Jeremy Torz, of Union Coffee Roasters. "Even the very best coffee will taste sour after 20 minutes on a hotplate - but a thermos-type holding system means that your coffee will not bake.

"Remember that filter coffee is not a poor cousin of espresso, but a brewing method in its own right and a great way to offer speciality 'single estate' coffees. You can brew up as many different coffees as you like, and leave them safely in thermos pots. If you want to create a 'coffee for two' service, you decant some of the brew into an airpot"

Whatever you do, says Marco Olmi of Drury Tea and Coffee, don't buy on price without understanding. "Despite all the guff talked about our modern coffee culture, there is still a massive gap in understanding. If you're buying from a coffee supplier who does not provide a knowledge bank, then you're buying from the wrong company. Buying coffee at £3.50 a kg is not going to help your business and if you buy it, you deserve all you get."

Olmi has been working on helping caterers get their filter and cafetire coffee right. They might seem like almost foolproof systems, but many venues get them horribly wrong, largely because staff are not trained in the correct portions, either for economy or through sheer misunderstanding.

"The problem of weak portions is something we fight tooth and nail," he says. "Even when the fashion became 85g for three pints, we saw that certain fine-dining establishments stuck to 113gm.

"The idea of our pre-portioned cafetire sachet came from a customer who really did want to make sure his staff made coffee properly. We tested it for ages before coming up with the right quantity formula. Now we tell staff to use one of our sachets for a three-cup cafetire, two sachets for an eight-cup, and three for a 12-cup."

There are problems with larger quantities, but they can largely be overcome if the interest is there. Melitta says that a problem in bulk brewing is machines that hold coffee within metal containers, which quickly destroys the flavour. However, the Melitta 600 Series bulk brewer is the only bulk brewer on the market to feature porcelain-lined urns which hold coffee for long periods of time without noticeably diminishing quality; these urns are placed around a central hot-water boiler. Having a brew kept hot by a surrounding bath of hot water is referred to by some manufacturers as "soft heat" - it is similar to the bain-marie principle.

A competitor, Marco Beverage Systems, agrees that bulk-brew coffee is not in itself a bad thing - the difference is between coffee that is brewed in bulk and carefully maintained and that which is simply left to stew. Marco has worked with several top football clubs on the problem of serving 30,000 thirsty supporters in a 10-minute half-time break, and says that what they have learned is also applicable to the smaller operator.

"In a stadium, the critical spot is the 35-minute period around half-time," says sales director Chris York. "We have achieved 280 10-ounce cups from a machine in one half-time spell, without the machine running out of water. For the smaller operator, the equivalent problem is probably the arrival of a coach party and the need for 50 cups to be drawn off immediately.

"So the big question for any size of operator is - in a known really busy period, how much do you actually need to serve? It is very important to assess your throughput."

York's favourite hotel-coffee story leads to a significant trade truth. He tells of the famous venue where guests began complaining about the coffee. Investigation showed that the complaints centred on room service, and in particular the coffee made by the night porter. This poor chap was delivering coffee at a time when guests really needed it - and nobody had thought to train him on it.

Training is behind one of the most dramatic improvements made by a big chain caterer. Lavazza has just won the entire coffee contract for the JD Wetherspoon pub chain, which made an aggressive move for the morning coffee market two years ago, offering cappuccinos as low as 79p. Now, as a direct order from chairman Tim Martin, every single pub manager across the estate has been trained in the appreciation of coffee, with an instruction to pass the knowledge through to staff.

"I did the first training session myself, with 60 people on one site," says Lavazza's Barry Kither. "They had lost confidence in coffee, but when everything was set up properly for them and their confidence was back, sales increased.

"The thing I'm proudest of is that they have put their price up from 79p to £1.25, and putting the price up has had absolutely no adverse impact on their sales at all - which is exactly what we had predicted."

Contacts

• Speciality Coffee Association of Europe: 01245 350866, www.scae.com
• Beverage Service Association: 01923 848392, www.beverageserviceassociation.com
• Lavazza: 020 8740 3820
• Union Coffee Roasters: 020 7474 8990
• Drury Tea and Coffee: 020 7740 1100
• Melitta Systems Service: 01628 829888
• Marco Beverage Systems: 020 7474 4577
• Nescafé Coffee Company: 0870 950 1118