How do we choose who to work with?

It’s true that when we first started roasting coffee, we didn’t know much about sourcing. But that was in 2022. Now, we’ve built relationships with some fantastic importers that we absolutely trust.

We took our first origin trip in 2025, to Rwanda (I love a natty Rwandan, definitely my favourite). And, not to sound too cheesy, it was life-changing. It had a huge impact on the amount of care and attention we put into what we do.

We choose the importers we work with based on the relationships they have with coffee producers at origin. We want to know three things:

1. Is the importer doing everything they can to support and help the communities that grow coffee?

2. Does the importer support learning around sustainable agriculture, helping not only the planet but also farmers to sustain and improve the yield of their plants year after year?

3. Is the importer helping farms improve the overall quality of their crops so they have better access to the specialty market, and therefore get paid better? (And, quite importantly for you, dear reader, does all that hard work result in a cup that tastes bloody fantastic?)

Once we recieve coffee samples, we blind taste everythign and go with our gut!

Our Trusted Coffee Importers

We’re fortunate enough to have worked with some fantastic importers:

• Falcon Specialty
• DR Wakefield
• Cofinet
• Cafe Imports
• Minga
• Covoya
• Bossa
• Yun Dian

The knowledge and passion from our importers, not to mention how friendly and approachable they are, blows me away time and time again.

The Smallholder Farmers

We especially like working with smallholder farmers and cooperatives (but, just for clarity, we don’t exclusively work with them).

To be honest, when I first started my journey, “smallholder farmer” was something that felt quite abstract to me. It was just a phrase that sounded good and felt like something I should get involved with.

I know, I know. This doesn’t sound great. But believe me, all coffee shops and roasters are guilty of throwing words around because they sound cool.

Reading that a coffee I had blind tasted and been blown away by was a lot produced by more than 150 farmers sounded bizarre. Especially when I was seeing all these other roasteries I admired and looked up to naming beans after a producer. It was like looking at an elite fashion house or a rock star’s name.

It made me doubt my decision to pursue these smallholder coffees. But I always kept faith in what I was tasting and what I was learning from the importers.

What really brought this thing that had felt so strange and abstract to life was visiting Rwanda and seeing smallholder farmers in action.

Driving up mountainous roads to visit washing stations, we saw places where farmers gather their lots and receive payment. Places where huge amounts of care go into sorting, grading and processing these coffees.

We saw washing station owners putting their own money into nurseries, growing new coffee plants to distribute amongst their communities.

The smallholder farmers were everywhere around us on the approach to these washing stations. It was clear that almost every home we passed had its own collection of coffee plants, which people cared for and tended to, knowing that the yield from this crop could help grow their community.

Help build schools. Fund education for their kids. Create jobs. Create a positive future.

Pretty mind-blowing stuff.

Seeing the amount of care and effort that goes into every step of producing this coffee, from growing, picking, delivering, sorting, processing, grading and drying... phew.

Let’s just say we want to do it justice.

Because we just roast it and brew it. And we want you to enjoy the hard work that has gone into it at every single stage.

Those “Rock Star” Producers

We can’t ignore them.

These are the producers who have spent years, sometimes generations, honing their craft. They know their land inside out. They understand their plants, their processing and what it takes to produce something genuinely exceptional.

And sometimes, they’re doing things that are a little bit bonkers. Experimental processing. Unusual fermentation. Tiny lots. Rare varieties. Meticulous picking and sorting. The kind of obsessive attention to detail that can take an already great coffee and push it into completely different territory.

When we buy these coffees, we’re usually buying experimental lots or super high-quality microlots. They’re often more expensive, sometimes considerably so, but they’re coffees we feel like we have to share with you.

We’re not interested in buying expensive coffees just so we can put a fancy name on a bag. The coffee still has to blow us away.

It’s about finding great coffee, understanding the work that went into it and making sure it gets the attention it deserves.

How We Roast

We roast on a 10kg Roastmax LPG drum roaster, and boy is it a quirky beast. It’s fully manual and seems to like doing the opposite of pretty much every piece of roasting advice we’ve ever been given.

But once we learned its quirks, we figured out how to get some excellent results from it.

We roast in small batches, usually 6–7kg, and use Artisan to track all the data. But fundamentally, we roast using our senses.

That’s actually how I learned when to drop the coffee, before I learned anything about development times.

I like to roast our lighter coffees to around 9–12% development. For me, this is where the most intense aromas start to show up. How do I decide whether it’s 9%, 12% or somewhere beyond? That all comes down to the cupping, where I ask myself three questions:

1. Is this expressive enough?
2. What brew method will this shine on?
3. Do I like it?

When tasting, we focus on four things:

1. Fragrance/Aroma
2. Bitterness
3. Sweetness
4. Acidity/Sourness

From there, I’ll decide whether there’s balance in the cup, or whether one element is overpowering the others. And if something is a little out of balance, is it still enjoyable?

Through this constant trial and error of roasting and tasting, and crucially, customer feedback, we refine the roast profile. Then we use the data we’ve collected to help us replicate it.

The data helps us understand what happened. Our senses tell us whether it worked.