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 100 and 150 kilos per week.  Around a third of that is for online sales to individual customers - the rest to our wholesale friends in cafes and businesses and film studios.  We have a "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.  These festivals can be small 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 continue to be a small, artisanal, authentic coffee roaster focused on our customers, on quality and being as sustainable as we can.  We want to bring authentic, quality, sustainable coffee to people who want to explore new coffees and who are tired of their triple syrup shot buckets of flavoured milk.  If that's you - welcome aboard!