Underneath the arches in Abbeyhill, with trains rattling by overhead, sits one of the most highly regarded coffee roasteries in the city: Obadiah.
Founded in 2017 by Sam and Alice Young, Obadiah Coffee has built a reputation for its minimalist aesthetic and its focus on single origin clarity. I’ve walked past the roastery many times, and drunk their coffee in places across the city, so I was keen to go in and see it for myself.
On Saturday, Obadiah held a ‘soft launch’ for its new tasting room, serving seasonal coffees to drink in or take away. It will open on a regular basis from the end of August. The team see it less as a café than as a place where people can come and sample the coffees roasted on site.
Something secretive going on
There are perhaps some parallels with Santu, who successfully opened up their roastery to the public, creating one of the most visually striking places to drink coffee in the city. Obadiah’s tasting room is rather different. It has a clean, fresh feel, but the metallic walls give it something of the atmosphere of an underground bunker, or a wartime Nissen hut. There’s a sense of something secretive going on down here. In a way, there is, given the quality of the coffee produced on site, some of the best in Scotland.
A constant flow of people
On a damp Saturday morning, the tasting room was busy: customers keen to get out of the rain, but also to sample the goods within. If Obadiah needed a test of how the space would cope with high volumes, this was it. Despite the crowd, there was a calm feel about the place, with gentle music and conversation filling the room. As one of the Obadiah team put it, they had seen ‘a constant flow of people’ throughout the morning, and it gave the team confidence that this public-facing side of the business had real potential. There was an easygoing feel to the event, with the Obadiah team genuinely interested in chatting with visitors, happy to field various coffee enquiries.
The crowd notably included a number of people from the specialty coffee world. I spotted the former manager of Lowdown, who has since moved into roasting with Module Coffee, along with several of the team from Cafen, who were there for a day out. In other words, the coffee needed to be of a high calibre to satisfy such a discerning audience. It was: the cortado I had, made with Haru beans from Ethiopia, was creamy and satisfying.
The theatre of coffee making
Sitting with my coffee, having managed to get one of the few seats available, it was enjoyable to watch the Obadiah team at work. There is a theatre to coffee making, and the music provided a soundtrack to their methodical, careful process, moving through each stage without anything rushed. It was clear there was a great deal of expertise in the room, a world away from the slapdash work you often see in busy branches of the big chains.
Not everyone nearby was as familiar with specialty coffee. One couple liked the idea of trying ‘some different types of coffee’, keen to give something new a go, a small sign of how specialty coffee is no longer the preserve of coffee geeks alone, but has gone properly mainstream.
A specialty coffee hub
Obadiah has been based in Abbeyhill for six years, and has spent around 18 months fitting out the new tasting room. It will be open on a regular basis on Fridays and Saturdays from the end of August, and the team believe there is considerable demand for it in the area. There are certainly other good coffee spots nearby, including Fortitude, a couple of minutes away, and Little Fitzroy, at the top end of Easter Road. Obadiah’s new venture adds to what is becoming something of a specialty coffee hub in this part of the city.
The roastery may also pick up passing trade from tourists, given its proximity to Holyrood, and to those heading into Holyrood Park, which is easily reached via Croft-an-Righ. In fine weather, it would be a pleasant walk from Obadiah to the park, coffee in hand.
Obadiah’s beans are roasted in three other units the company owns nearby, and with unused units beside them, there may be scope for expansion in future. With a good deal of new housing nearby, this is a part of the city that is getting busier, and is now more established on the visitor map as somewhere to seek out, rather than just pass through.
Obadiah: Units 4-5, The Arches, Abbeyhill, Edinburgh EH8 8EE.
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