When a watch company releases a 'carbon dial' watch, quite often it's actually a 'carbon effect' material (or even a badly printed approximation), but when Bamford say this watch has a 'coffee' dial that's literally what they mean!
According to the Bamford website, the inspiration for this watch came from the vintage world and in particular the expensive and desirable 'tropical' dial watches. These are dials which started out black, but aged by the sun the pigment in them deteriorated over time and they turned an uneven brown/red colour.
The website doesn't explain how they made the leap from genuine 'tropical' dials to forming Carrera dials out of actual coffee, I guess you just have to roll with that one... and to be honest I didn't even realise they had until I'd seen the watch about five times, I just (naturally) assumed it was a coffee 'effect' dial - I mean that makes sense, right?
Unfortunately, more often than not when a new Bamford / TAG Heuer turns up on the internet, it's a case of shaking one's head and then getting on with one's day. Not always, they do sometimes get it right; the carbon Monaco was pretty cool (although I wasn't sure about the blue subdials) and they did a gorgeous Monza with yellow highlights not too long ago that really blew me away.
But for every beautifully detailed Monza there seems to be at least three Carrera's with a badly drawn basketball dial and actually this watch shares some similarities with that particular horror, but thankfully they've seemingly learned from some of their past mistakes.
As with that watch, Bamford have stripped the dial of hour markers, but here they've gone even further and removed the day/date function (which I assume means there'll be a ghost position on the crown since this watch carries a Sellita SW220-1 movement which has a day/date wheel). For me this is an excellent move since without the hour markers the windows would have looked odd, and this gives the dial an exceptionally clean aesthetic, which I actually think looks rather smart.
I still think they could have pushed the text and TAG Heuer logo away from the centre of the watch a little bit, to compensate for the lack of hour batons, but on the plus side making the logo and text gold was an excellent move as it stands out magnificently against the brown dial. The case is polished, but has also been treated with a light grey (military grade) titanium coating and the watch is presented on a brown calfskin strap with cream stitching and a steel folding clasp.
But what about that 'coffee' dial then? Well apparently designer James Thompson (of the company Black Badger, who produce lots of items using luminous material and carbon fibre) came up with the idea. The special 'Badgerworks' coffee was roasted by Cafe da Mattao before being cast in resin to form the dial blanks for the watches. This was then hand finished to bring out the natural 'lustre' of the coffee. Not too sure what that means, but I suspect it might mean a process to ensure the longevity of the dial colour, since coffee is a natural material and could itself fade in sunlight perhaps?
All in all this appears to be one of the better Bamford TAG Heuer's of late and if you are some kind of 'coffee-obsessive' then maybe this could be no less than your dream watch... but if so, you'll need to be quick and you'll need to have relatively deep pockets as this one is limited to just 20 pieces with a rather eye-watering list price of £5500 (which seems rather high for a 41mm Carrera with no complications, but then I guess part of what you are paying for is the 'exclusivity'.)
If we leave the 'coffee' thing aside for a moment and view this as a brown granite dial instead (think 1500 Series pieces from the 1990s...) then suddenly it seems a lot more 'sensible' and actually rather attractive.
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