Grind, the independent coffee and cocktail group, has launched its coffee roastery and training lab in Shoreditch, East London.
Founded five years ago, by entrepreneur David Abrahamovitch and musician Kaz James, Shoreditch Grind was designed to bring the ultra high-quality coffee experience of Kaz’s hometown, Melbourne, to East London.
Since then, Grind has grown to six locations across London that serve coffee, cocktails and food from day to night.
When Grind launched its crowdfunding campaign in summer 2015, they promised to build a state of the art coffee roastery to supply coffee to their locations around London.
After storming through their £750k target to raise a total of £1.3m, one year later Grind has now delivered on that promise, with a state of the art roastery in an incredible converted warehouse -alongside a barista training lab and space for the growing Grind team.
Remarkably, the building has a long history with coffee – it was originally built for coffee storagein 1895. The new Grind HQ is in the heart of Shoreditch, a few minutes walk from the original Shoreditch Grind locationon Old Street Roundabout.
From here, new Head Roaster Howard works with Grind Head of Coffee Sam to taste, select, and roast the coffee before it’s packed and shipped around London, twice a week. Around the world, coffee is harvested at different times of year – and Howard and Sam work closely with a team of boutique importers, guaranteeing fair pay to farmers, as well as investing in projects to improve the communities that they rely so much on.
Coffee is also delivered to Grind’s growing base of wholesale partners – the team have even found time to create a bespoke blend, Twitter Grind, only available at Twitter HQ, as well as recently roasting up a one-off blend for the Facebook Summer Fiesta. Grind havealso been busy helping Canadian cashmere aficionados Kit & Ace at their opening on Redchurch Street, and providing coffee, training and support to London’s PRESScold pressed juice brand.
Customers of Grind sites will continue to enjoy the Grind House Blend when ordering, and with the new roastery they will now be able to purchase the house blend in each outpost. Priced at £11 per 320g tin, with a free coffee, or £10 for a refill.
Grind founder and CEO David Abrahamovitch says: “Since that first day in 2011, its been our mission to bring the best coffee to all Londoners. Moving into our own roasting was a natural next step given that we now sell around 25000 coffees per week across our locations alone, and thanks to the help of Crowdcube in 2015 we’ve been able to take that step forward.
“Owning this process in house will allow us to improve the quality and consistency of our coffee even further, plus allow us to experiment and test new blends and single origins more easily and regularly.”
