A TRIO of Edinburgh-based coffee roasters and retailers are hoping to shake up the capital’s coffee scene with the new brick-and-mortar enterprise.
Carter Coffee, offering distinctive, specialist blends will have a soft launch on Friday in Bonnington, Edinburgh, offering £1 coffees for the morning.
On Monday, they will proceed into a six-week work in progress period, where the shop will be takeaway only, but they hope to have their location at 4 Fyfe Lane full kitted out with tables and chairs after this.
Sorley Richardson, Danny Allan, and Craig Paul became friends through work years ago and will now bring their unique blends to Bonnington, a residential and commercial hub North of Leith Walk.
(Left to right) Craig Paul, Sorley Richardson, and Danny Allan
Their firm, for more than a year now, has produced blends for retail and wholesale, blending coffees from disparate parts of the world to create unique flavours and aromas.
For example, Danny, who hails from Australia, was inspired by Pineapple Lumps – a famous New Zeeland delicacy consisting of lumps of pineapple covered by a layer of chocolate – while travelling in Wellington.
His colleague, Sorley, described the process of attempting to recreate the striking flavour of the confection in a coffee:
“Danny came across this coffee, co-fermented with pineapples, from Colombia, and he thought, if we mix this really fruit forward, experimental coffee, that almost had this lactic pineapple quality, with a coffee that’s quite chocolatey, like a Brazil, then maybe we could recreate that same flavour profile.
“That represents what we want to do, that intelligent blending, creating a taste that goes beyond just the coffee.”
Their bread and butter, every day coffee is similarly made up of different origins, providing an accessible but still flavourful profile.
Sorley continued: “our entry-level, high volume coffee is called bread and butter.
“It’s a coffee-coffee, very chocolatey, it’s got, nice stone fruit, and it’s got a sort of buttery texture as well.
“That’s a seasonal blend, so the components will rotate, as the seasons change. Rright now, it’s got natural Brazil, washed Ethiopia and washed Uganda.
“We’ll start to see that change, but largely the profile will stay the same.”
Sorley and Danny also discussed their desire to strip away some of the prestige of specialty coffee.
They see their blends as a means of doing just that, as well as expressing their playfulness as roasters and placing own mark on the coffee they produce.
Danny described their approach: “Specialty coffee has kind of a prestige attached to it, so we kind of want to unpack that and appeal to everyone from the entry level coffee drinker all the way up and to the high-end specialty drinker.
“Blending kind of gives us the ability to capture the full spectrum of the coffee consumer.”
He added: “I think there’s this misnomer that single origin is best, but we believe in flavour first, whether we create something from all these awesome products, and join them together and like use our expertise to do that, or we celebrate one single producer.”
Danny and Sorley worked together for five years at Obadiah Coffee, and co-founded the new venture together, bringing Craig on board around a year ago.
They’re confident about the new cafe, having received positive feedback on their socials.
Sorley added: “I think having our personalities shine through is a big thing, and when it comes down to coffee as well, something we bonded over was flavours. We’re both big foodies and we’re into the sensory aspect.
“Something that kind of got us on the same page was, ‘if it tastes good, do it’.
“There’s a lot in the coffee industry about terroir and provenance and putting the producer first.
“We champion the producer for sure, but there should be a space to blend coffees – that’s typically a little bit unpopular though.
“But we thought it was really interesting to roast and to bring out flavours that we really like, but also blend in an intelligent way, which we don’t see loads of people doing – it’s very much single-origin led in the industry.”
They also expressed their excitement about combining their sales operation – shipping coffee domestically and internationally to retailers and consumers – and production with a cafe and retail space.
Danny explained: Originally it was going to be just a retail front – there was always a vision of wanting to see through into the production space and have that community connect with the product a little more closely, because not a lot of people do that.
“But his space came up, and we thought it was a perfect spot for a – hopefully – high-volume Cafe mixed with retail to connect with all the residents in the in the buildings around us.”
Bonnington seemed like an ideal location in part because of what the area lacks.
Sorley said: “Coffee-wise, what’s around here? There’s the Pastry Section, and Ardfern, but not much else.
“With all these flats shooting up and filling up quick, offices, and even more housing going up down the road, maybe this is where the next busy spot is.”
A small kitchen in the back of the coffee shop will provide food when the cafe is fully operational.
Carter Coffee will open at 4 Fyfe Lane for the soft launch tomorrow from 7am to 12pm and reopen for takeaways only from Monday next week.
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