A Quick Look Back

For a brief rundown of some key figures, see our recent Instagram post here, but if you’d like a bit more detail and context, keep reading.

2024 was our busiest year to date during which we roasted a total of 27,489 kilos of green coffee. That equates to about 1.3 million cups!

As we grow, as opposed to sourcing coffee from more producers, we are increasingly returning to producers that we have bought from before, and increasing the volume of coffee that we buy from them. Aside from providing many of these producers with more income security, this is simply a more interesting and rewarding way of doing business.

We have visited the majority of the producers that we buy from, in some cases on multiple occasions. This means that the people behind the coffee are people we know personally - good people, doing good things, whose stories we can tell more compellingly, and whose work we are proud to support. As we return to these producers year on year, we can also explore the diversity of their coffee offerings, and in some instances participate in collaborative agricultural and processing projects.

Bee visited our exporting partners Red Beetle in Mexico, including visits to Yoloxochitlán in the Sierra Mazateca, and the legend that is Enriqué Lopez at Fina Chelín. She also visited the team at Muraho Trading Co in Rwanda, including the Shyira washing station that we source the majority of our Rwandan coffee from. Mike took part in Raw Material’s Plant to Port course at El Fénix in Colombia, covering all aspects of the coffee supply chain at origin, from agronomy and processing, to milling and export. He also attended Lucia Solis’s fermentation training camp in Kenya, which was coincidentally also attended by Eustache Mutakirwa, Operations Manager for Muraho. We are hopeful that this chance encounter will lead to some interesting projects in 2025 and beyond. James visited the team at Cocarive in Brazil, including a visit to Helisson and Sebastião at Baixadão, whose natural yellow bourbon provides the mainstay of our offering, Penny Rock.

I kept my own trips closer to home in 2024. In April I travelled to Oslo for Nordic Approach’s Spring Cupping, for first tastings of fresh crop Ethiopian and Kenyan coffees. Judging by the quality of our releases from these two origins, I hope you’d agree that it was a worthwhile trip. We plan to buy our Ethiopian and Kenyan coffee from Nordic Approach going forward, and I’m excited to be taking my first trip to Ethiopia with them in a couple of weeks. I also attended World of Coffee in Copenhagen, which was one of those rare and special occasions that brings roasters, importers, exporters, producers and manufacturers from all over the world together in one place, and in such an incredible city.

One of the most rewarding parts of the year is when I look at our revenue figures for 2024, and calculate the donations to our charitable partners and community projects on the back of our 2% commitment. In respect of revenues this year we will be making over £10,000 worth of donations to a number of charities and projects close to our hearts - Growing Well, Raw Material, World Coffee Research, and a rewilding project close to home that we will be sharing more details about in the coming months.

Spearheaded by Bee, we also made a big effort to engage the local coffee community more, with numerous public events at the roastery, including talks, cuppings, and a Latte Art Throwdown in collaboration with Minor Figures. We hosted another epic End of Summer Party, and brewed two delicious coffee beers with our pals at Lakes Brew Co - Breaking 300 and Don’t Worry, Be Frappé. Oh, and we took delivery of a brand new Loring S35 Kestrel roaster, tripling our production capacity!

There's so much more, but I'm cutting it fine and need to head off for New Year celebrations soon, so I'll leave it there.

We couldn’t have done any of this without your support, so all that remains is to say a huge THANK YOU, and to wish you all the very best for the year ahead.

Tom