All about Cannon Coffee Roasters

Cannon Coffee was born in 2021.  It was a relatively painless birth and there was no anaesthetic nor a Caesarean needed.  Chris and Lewis, having spent the previous few years working for a different roastery, realised that they would like to do things differently, authentically and better.  It took a few months but they saved their pennies and suddenly they had enough to buy their very own small, coffee roasting machine.  

So, in the back of a garage Cannon Roasters started with a 1kg roaster. What did we want to do differently and better?  Well, for a start we wanted to roast coffee the way we feel coffee should be roasted. That is to say - with care, and with the particular coffee being roasted in mind.  Too often coffee is roasted too darkly.  It easy to roast coffee to a dark, oily husk and call it "Italian roast".  However, dark roasts removes all the nuanced flavours and aromatics that makes coffee great.  

At Cannon, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to roast coffee to get the best out of it.  Actually we probably spend too much time working out the optimal roast times and temperatures - however that’s what makes this job fun!  At the end of the day we wanted to make sure that any coffee we put out is the best version of that coffee that we can make it.

Secondly, we wanted to offer coffees that are consistent.  Coffee roasting is an art rather than a science. Temperature gradients, first cracking point, second cracking point, bean and drum temperatures - there's a lot of variables.  Not managing these variables across each roast means inconsistency - and so your perfect coffee this week might not be the same next week.  We want to be proud of our roasting process.  We audit each roast to ensure that the Gunpowder blend you buy this week is the same as the Gunpowder you will buy next week. We do that through some clever bit of software that enables us to track and match each roast to the agreed roasting profile.

But hey, back to us.  As our 1kg roaster performed admirably through 2021 and into 2022 - it was becoming clear that we needed a bigger roaster.  Our retail sales - to online Customers were growing - but our wholesale business was also growing.  Cafes and film studios and festival sites need more than 1kg at a time.  So we then bought a 6kg roaster.  This still gives us small batch control - but allows us to satisfy larger orders without having to spend all day roasting 50 small batches.  In 2022 we were able to move into a larger location which served us well - up to now.  

We are currently roasting between 200 and 250 kilos per week. Compared to some roasters, this is actually a small comparative amount. Around a third of what we roast for Customers who buy online - individual customers.  The rest is mainly to our wholesale Customers, cafes and businesses and film studios. We also roast coffee for our "sister" company - well, it's more of a "step-sister" company - called Events Tree.  Events Tree is dedicated to bringing artisanal, speciality coffee to festival goers across the country. If you see our coffee van and anywhere from a single day "school sports day" events or "full on 3-day weekenders" such as Leeds festival.  Storm is our festival specialist and rarely a weekend goes by without her venturing out into the wild and only returning, exhausted on a Monday morning.

We are, and are proud to be, a small, artisanal, authentic coffee roaster focused on our customers, on the quality of our coffees and being as sustainable as we can. Everything we do we take into account our impact on the environment.  Our aim is to bring authentic, quality, sustainable coffee to people who want to explore the world of coffee, who appreciate the nuances and differences between various coffee roasts and who are tired of being offered over-roasted, burnt coffee inside buckets of flavoured, seasonal syrupy milk.  If that's you - we salute you and welcome you to Cannon!