Artisan Roast

Artisan Roast is primarily about service.  We take a lot of pride in our coffee and we believe it cuts it with the best, but what really sets us apart from other businesses is our passion and commitment to our customers as well as our coffee and the people who produced it.

We're based on the Antipodean coffee culture and take the same friendly attitude to our customers, but also the same critical attention to our coffee and to creating a great environment to drink it in. 

The cafe was set up as a bean store with education and fun in mind. We were on a mission to improve the coffee in Edinburgh.

We did away with barriers like the counter in order to make us more approachable and to make a space where people would feel comfortable conversing and meeting new people.  Our intention was to lure people into our bean shop and by the devious method of serving them a great coffee, sell them our beans.  It worked.  People who had previously used coffee as a turbo shot found to their surprise that it could also taste good, even fan-bloody-tastic.  We've got peoples' eyebrows plastered to the ceiling after tasting our espresso.

People have exclaimed "Wow! Is that how a coffee should taste?", "That's not bitter!" and "Don't you have any tea!?!"

The only thing was that we had set up as a bean shop with coffee samples.  Yet many people kept insisting that we were also a cafe. Despite attempts to deflect the punters by supplying our beans to cafes, the customers kept coming and in the end we had to relent.  We worked through the nights in January 2008 and opened the shop as a cafe in February.  We are still a bean shop and still dedicated to talking with anyone who's interested about coffee, but now we're Artisan Roast Cafe and Roastery.  And our ceiling is getting thick with eyebrows.