Ask the Roaster
Click the link to read more from Nicola about the Taylors Discovery roastery.
About
You might know Taylors of Harrogate for sourcing and roasting some of the best speciality grade coffee you’ll find on Supermarket shelves. We’ve spent the last century doing this and we’re not about to stop. Travelling to the world’s best coffee growing regions, building face to face relationships, reinvesting in our producers and perfecting the arts of roasting and blending – all while being true to our independent family business values.
But Taylors Discovery is a little bit different. We set it up as a place to take risks with coffee, to have more fun with coffee, and to build a vision for the future of coffee. Through our producer relationships, we’d always had access to mind-blowing beans. And through our friends, we’d always had interesting collaborations in the pipeline. We just needed a place, a team and a shop to start making these things happen.
The starting point was to set up a micro-roastery in a disused part of the Taylors of Harrogate space, and to open this online shop. In time, we hope to build partnerships with coffee shops that share our passion for quality and sustainability, to open a separate roastery, training and event space and to create an online community to host a conversation that’s much bigger and wider reaching than ourselves.
But for now, our focus is on finding, roasting and delivering outstanding coffees with stories. Some from producers we’ve worked with for years, some from those we’ve only just met, but all scoring 85 points or more on SCA’s quality scale and sourced in a way that benefits the producer. We roast fresh to order on our 6kg Giesen, with our team of Q Graders tasting each batch that goes out the door to make sure the coffee and the roast is just right.
For us, standing up for the future of coffee means many things. As well as working with coffee growers that are pushing the boundaries of growing and processing, or experimenting to create new coffee drinks, it means looking after the lives and landscapes that we source from.
Whether we’re buying a 70kg micro lot or a much larger supply of coffee for our supermarket speciality range, our approach to sourcing is always based on quality, sustainability and relationships. As well as working with our growers to build long term contracts, we often reinvest part of our profits in projects that help them improve their quality, market access and sustainable practices, or improve the lives of their communities.
With climate change, disease and and low yields all threatening the future of the industry and the people that work in it, we need to collaborate to find farming techniques and varieties that will survive in years to come.
Leading this collaboration is our partner World Coffee Research, who’s aim is to grow, protect and enhance the supply of quality coffee across the world while improving the livelihoods of those who produce it. They do this by combining cutting edge research and hands on field testing to get these new techniques and varieties into the hands of producers as quickly as possible. We’re the UK’s biggest contributing roaster, funding 45 climate resistant varietal trials in Rwanda and Uganda, as well as supporting their full portfolio of research.
Dog and Hat
We love challenging peoples perceptions about coffee... and coffee roasters. In this case, we loved the fact that Taylors is such a well known coffee roaster on supermarket shelves but they have this secret, small-scale speciality coffee roaster hiding away on the premises.
The first coffee of theirs that we tried - The Tripple Staggered Gesha - blew our minds and is in the Top 3 coffees we've ever tasted.
Coupled with the fact that Nicola used to run one of our favourite York-based coffee shops, we knew it would be a winner to include them in the subscription.
