Our Story
About us
A small roastery on the Yorkshire coast.
It started with just us two and a small sample roaster in 2024. We had come back from the coffee farms in Bali knowing how good coffee could taste, and we wanted to make something that lived up to it. We still buy, roast and pack every bag ourselves.
How it started
It began on a coffee farm in Bali
From a sample roaster on the kitchen side to a 5kg Golden in a unit in Scarborough.
A visit to the coffee farms
We spent time on the coffee farms in Bali and came home with a much better idea of what coffee can taste like when it is grown and handled well.
A Gene Café on the kitchen side
We bought a small sample roaster to see how close we could get ourselves, and started roasting for family and friends. Then we built a website, mostly to see what would happen.
More than a sample roaster could handle
Orders started coming in faster than we could roast them. For a while we worked alongside a local roaster so we could keep up without cutting corners on the coffee.
A 5kg Golden, and somewhere to put it
We bought our own 5kg Golden electric roaster and moved into the unit we are in now. Everything since has been roasted on that machine, by us. Wholesale, online orders and subscriptions.
What we set out to do
How we work
We buy specialty grade, roast it the week it goes out, and print the roast date on the bag so nobody has to guess how fresh it is.
That last part sounds small. It isn't. Coffee is at its best from about four days to three weeks off the roast, and past six weeks it flattens out however good your grinder is. Most bags on a shelf don't tell you where in that window they are.
Of us. Every bag is roasted, checked and packed by one of the two people who own the place.
The score a coffee has to hit on the Specialty Coffee Association's scale before we will buy it.
From our roaster to your door, so it reaches you inside the window where coffee is at its best.
The word itself
What "specialty" actually means
It is a grade, not a marketing word.
Coffee is scored out of 100 by trained graders on aroma, flavour, body, acidity, balance and aftertaste. Anything scoring 80 or above is specialty. Below that is commodity grade, which is most of what gets sold in this country.
In practice the difference is whether a coffee tastes of something in particular, like a stone fruit or a chocolate or a citrus, or just tastes of coffee. That comes from how it was grown, picked and processed, long before it reaches us.
Our job is to not waste it.
The bags
Every coffee gets its own artwork
Each bag is drawn around where the beans come from, so you can tell them apart at a glance on a shelf or a back bar.
House Blend
Dark Roast
La Nueva Era
Yirgacheffe
Who drinks it
Cafés, farm shops, and a lot of kitchens
Cafés, restaurants, farm shops and workplaces around Yorkshire and across the UK. The rest goes out to people at home, a good deal of it on subscription so they never run out.
It is the same coffee either way, roasted the same week, with the same date on the bag.
Same coffee, same roast week, whether it is one bag or twenty kilos.
Come and try it
Two ways to start
For your kitchen
Order a bag whenever you fancy one, or set up a subscription and have it turn up freshly roasted on whatever rhythm suits you. Change it, pause it or stop it any time.
Shop the coffeeFor your café
If you run a café, restaurant, farm shop or workplace, tell us what you pour now and we will send you something to compare it against. Free, and there is no contract or minimum order.
Wholesale