Workshop Coffee

Workshop Coffee was founded in 2011 by James Dickson on Clerkenwell Road, starting with a 12-kilogram Probat roaster — a modest-capacity machine for a roastery that has since built named, ongoing relationships with specific producers rather than buying anonymous lots by origin alone. Those partnerships are traceable to named sources: Gitesi Washing Station in Rwanda, Snap Coffee in Ethiopia, and Valle Inca in Peru, each a specific site rather than a country-of-origin label standing in for a relationship.

Workshop also runs a training academy in Belgravia, separating its education arm geographically from the Clerkenwell roasting site and giving it a dedicated space for teaching brewing and barista skills rather than running classes out of a working café.

Starting small — one 12kg roaster on one street — and building toward named producer partnerships and a standalone academy traces a specific growth path: depth of sourcing relationships first, then the infrastructure to teach what those relationships produce. For anyone tracing where a cup's beans actually came from, Workshop's named washing stations and farms are a rarer level of specificity than most roastery menus offer.