Built by two people who couldn't find a decent coffee nearby

In 2019 the unit at 14 Floodgate Street was a leather workshop with a leaking roof and one very good north-facing window. Ellie had spent six years behind bars in Melbourne and Shoreditch; Tom had been roasting at weekends in a converted garage in Stirchley. They put everything they had into a second-hand La Marzocco and opened with four seats and a hand-written board.

Digbeth did the rest. Illustrators, sound engineers, the tattooists across the road and the theatre crowd from the Custard Factory all turned up, stayed too long and told their friends. Within a year the four seats became thirty, the workshop's brick was stripped back, and the fox — a genuine regular who used to sit outside the back door at closing — got a name on the sign.

The beans, and the people who roast them

Our house blend and rotating single origins come from Ridgeway Roastery in Stirchley, four miles south. We've worked with them since our first week: Tom sits in on the cupping table every Thursday and we agree the profile together before anything reaches the hopper.

Ridgeway buys through direct-trade relationships in Colombia, Rwanda and Brazil, paying well above the fair-trade floor and publishing what they pay. That matters to us more than any certificate on the wall — we can tell you the farm, the altitude, and roughly what the grower earned for every cup we pour.