If you're thinking about starting a cafe or changing your coffee,
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
You need to try our coffee. We have a cafe at 57 Broughton Street where we serve espresso, cafetiere and filter coffee. If you like it, our job is then to work with you to get your place serving the great tasting coffee that gets repeat customers and builds your reputation as a quality establishment.
We enjoy working with our customers to provide the best service we can for them. From feedback from our customers we have introduced monthly training sessions for training new staff members and introduced a full day head barista programme.
Our service goes well beyond simply supplying coffee. We provide clear and unbiased expertise in an industry full of marketeers and salespeople. Our experienced staff are able to advise on the design of your workstation, equipment and espresso selection.
We are a small company dedicated to giving the best possible service to provide the best possible espresso and filter coffee. We roast on site at 57 Broughton Street and at our trade roastery outside Edinburgh.
Come to us for:
- consistent espresso coffee using beans available all year
- advice on all aspects of equipment selection
- FREE unrivalled training for espresso preparation
- FREE monthly newbies training sessions
Why are we so good?
Real passion - not just corporate marketing passion, pride in our product and no bull.
There are six tenets that we follow in our business:
Great beans, great roasting, freshness, instant feedback, great service, great training.
Great Green Beans
We buy from the top 2-3% of coffee beans on the planet. Because taste is our over-riding factor in our buying doctrine, we only buy the consistently best tasting beans we can get. Have a look at the following three pictures:
This is a sorting machine that shakes the beans on an angle down a conveyor belt grading the coffee. All the coffee on the machine is high grown quality coffee but the grades at either side of the machine are very different.
Right hand side of the belt = low grade coffee. The coffee is very inconsistent resulting in smaller beans burning when the larger are at a good level of roast. Roasters that buy this grade of coffee either have very inconsistent coffee or burn the coffee to mask the poor grade. Roasting this high creates carcinogens and burns off all of the good compounds present in green coffee. This is the coffee predominantly used in Southern Italy where they traditionally used the cheapest coffee and serve four-sugars-to-a-cup espresso. My major issue with Fairtrade is that due to a premium guarantee regardless of quality, the growers fetch the same price for all grades. See the section on ethics for our position on Fairtrade. 
Left hand side of the belt = high grade coffee. Because all the beans are the same size we can get a consistent roast. Because of the greater amount of work involved and the relative scarcity of speciality grade beans, these beans fetch a high price on the open market, one that is consistently higher than Fairtrade and with consistently better quality.
For the taste we look at the origin, which is why we use quality estates and coops that we can go back to time and time again and for roast consistency we look at the grade. We need both to get the flavours we're after at Artisan Roast.
Great Roasting
Each of our roasters are trained in an apprentice manner to scent roast. We tend to drink our coffee. Scent roasting is the oldest manner of roasting coffee, but is not very common nowadays as it can't be taught by books or video and takes a long time to get good at. Other roasting methods use sight to roast or using computers.
Sight roasting tells you only how the beans are cooked on the outside; like looking at a cake in the oven without prodding it to see if it's cooked in the middle. Computer profile roasting is very common with larger roasteries. Coffee is an organic product and changes from batch to batch and season to season. The computer doesn't sample the beans rather the temperature.
The difference between a great roast and dull lifeless coffee can be as little as eight seconds.
Freshness
There's a big secret that large coffee companies don't want you to know: Coffee is perishable and should be drunk within 10-14 days after roasting for cafetiere and 3-4 weeks for espresso. If the bag doesn't tell you the roast date; it's probably stale. If the best before says drink within the next nine months, it was probably roasted three months ago.
Coffee beans release CO2 gas after roasting. This is protective and prevents O2 getting into the bean and oxidising the essential volatile aromatics. These compounds are what gives fresh coffee its liveliness. Most of our taste is really scent and it's in the retro-nasal cavity that the volatile aromatics jump up and switch on your olfactory bulb. As the CO2 runs out the O2 increasingly oxidises the aromatics leaving the coffee dull.
For espresso, the beans can be too fresh and need to be put down to settle a bit before being used in an espresso machine. The time that coffee lasts depends on the seasons. We do the work to supply coffee to our customers when it's ready to be used and delivery weekly so that your coffee is always fresh.
Instant Feedback
We have a coffee tasting lab at 57 Broughton Street. Some people call it a cafe. We use the same beans as our customers use and so always know what's happening with our beans, no matter the weather or season, and can adapt accordingly.
Great Service
Service is what we've built our business around. We treat each customer as a friend to be helped as much as possible. We get machines and equipment in at cost price to us for our customers because we're about the coffee, not making money on equipment. We have organised for staff of our customers' to come and work with us and we are always open to feedback/criticism. We want to help you increase your coffee sales; it increases ours.
Great Training
A great espresso uses 14-21g of coffee with a 20-35 sec extraction and cut with reference to the blonding so the tasty chemicals are in the cup and the bitter ones are kept in the puck.
