In 2017, Liam and his business partner Stevie set up a coffee stall on Brick Lane with a bench made of pallet wood, a two-group machine they plumbed in by hand every morning and plumbed back out every evening, and not much else. They were only supposed to be there for a weekend.
"We were the pop-up that stayed up," Liam said. The location worked. The coffee worked. Customers came back. Within a few years, High Grade had expanded to two additional pop-up sites and was running an events business alongside the market stall. Then COVID hit, and everything but the original stall disappeared.
Nine years later, High Grade Coffee occupies a bricks-and-mortar café in a Grade 2 listed building beneath the arch of the old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane — and a roastery across the road in what used to be somebody's office. Between the two spaces, a team of six people produce around 150 to 200 sacks of coffee a year. The roastery runs two Bellwether Shop Roasters in a room roughly 5 by 5 metres, during office hours only, without a single ventilation duct in the building.
The building said no. The Bellwether said yes
The shift from sample roasting to a proper in-house programme came toward the end of COVID. High Grade had discovered roasting during the slow months — a company had offered them the chance to try small sample roasters, and Liam describes it as finding "another element of control and geekery in coffee that we wanted to explore." By the time things started returning to normal, the logical next step was clear: move into a dedicated roastery.
But the café that High Grade had just moved into during COVID sat inside a Grade 2 listed building — one of England's protected historic structures, where even minor alterations require approval. Venting a roaster through the walls wasn't on the list of permissible changes. "That was kind of the main impetus for us actually looking for somewhere else initially," Liam said. The plan was to leave the café behind and set up a separate warehouse roastery.
Then a friend from the coffee industry walked into the café and mentioned Bellwether. As it happened, the person running Bellwether in the UK was someone Liam already knew. They spoke. The deal came together in about two weeks.
It was like a knight on a white horse type thing. It just literally rode in at the exact moment that we needed it.
A ventless roaster meant no ductwork, no structural changes, no reason to leave. High Grade could stay on Brick Lane and roast right where they were.
First in the UK — and learning as they went
When High Grade took on the Bellwether, they weren't just early adopters — they were the first people to officially put a roast on in the UK. There was no established UK support network, no other roasters to call. "It was quite daunting, but exciting as well," Liam said. "It was very much that we wanted to do it, but we definitely needed to take the plunge and hope for the best."
Neither Liam nor Stevie had any formal roasting background. Their approach to dialling in profiles was, by Liam's own description, straightforward: "Stick green coffee in, move curve around, and then look how brown the coffee is on the other end." The software made that experimentation possible without needing to already know the answers. The visual representation of what was going to happen made it approachable for two people who had never roasted professionally.
Over time, that trial-and-error became genuine expertise. High Grade has since condensed some espresso roast profiles down to around 6.5 to 7 minutes. Other roasters began reaching out — asking for advice, visiting the roastery, running test batches on the Bellwether when their own machines couldn't handle small enough lots. In one case, a roaster friend had acquired what Liam described as "hen's teeth" coffee — a tiny, rare lot that would have been destroyed by a minimum 10 kg batch size on a traditional drum roaster. High Grade ran it at 1.5 kg, adjusted two points on the curve between the first and second test roast, and produced the result the roaster was looking for. That profile now lives in the archive, ready to pull up if the same coffee comes in again.
“Stick green coffee in, move curve around.”
Liam, founder, High Grade Coffee
Once you land on something that you like, it's super, super consistent. Like, genuinely robotically so. And that's kind of its strength.
Consistency as a business advantage, not just a roasting metric
Before Bellwether, High Grade sourced from some of the best roasters in London. The coffee was good — but it wasn't perfectly consistent. Week to week, the same coffee could come in slightly over- or under-roasted. Liam describes what that variability actually costs a café: "What we end up doing in the industry is becoming variable management specialists as much as anything else. It's like just trying to narrow down the things that could go wrong to the point where you can consistently produce a good drink."
Once a profile is locked in on the Bellwether, that problem goes away. High Grade has worked with one particular green coffee as a single origin and as part of two blends for several years. They know how it behaves. They know what adjustments it needs if there's variation at origin. And beyond that, the result is the same every single time — consistent enough that QC sometimes feels almost redundant: "It kind of feels like a pointless exercise sometimes because it's like, well, I know what this is gonna taste like."
“Once you land on something that you like, it's super, super consistent.”
Liam, founder, High Grade Coffee
That reliability does something less obvious but equally important: it frees up cognitive and operational space. When coffee is stable, service can focus on atmosphere, rapport, and experience — the things that actually differentiate a great café from a forgettable one.
The economics: 1 to 3, and what that unlocks
Liam's broad formula for the roasting margin is simple: something bought at one unit of cost can sell for around three. Buy at a tenner, sell for thirty. "It's like printing money sometimes," he said — then immediately walked it back. Electricity, maintenance, and labour all factor in. But when you start accounting for those costs, the model still holds up in a way that's genuinely hard to match buying roasted wholesale.
The staffing model reinforces the economics. A traditional large-scale roastery needs people to move green coffee, operate the roaster, sieve, pack, and ship. High Grade manages the full roasting operation with two people — and often one. Stevie, Liam's business partner and head of coffee, runs most of the production. The machine doesn't require constant attendance, which means roasting fits around everything else the business needs to do.
The whole roastery — including the first Bellwether — cost £26,000 to set up, financed by a loan that is now paid off. That figure, for a roastery producing 8.5 to 9 tons of coffee a year in central East London, offers its own argument for the model.
Had we not got this machine and started changing the way that we do business, I don't know that we'd still be here, if I'm being completely honest.
One machine. Four revenue streams
When the Bellwether arrived, Liam and Stevie had what he calls a light bulb moment: the portion of capacity needed to serve the café's own bar left significant room in the machine's day. That room translated directly into new revenue. "It honestly just changed the trajectory of our business," Liam said. "We were able to look at a multitude of ways that we were then able to operate as a coffee business and create new streams of revenue by having just one piece of kit, which was genuinely mind-blowing."
Today, High Grade runs four distinct channels from the same roasting operation. Service coffee supplies the bar on Brick Lane. Retail bags sell through the café and online at highgrade.coffee. A handful of partner cafés that curate from multiple roasters stock High Grade on their shelves. And a wholesale and white label programme supplies coffee to other businesses under their own branding.
“It honestly just changed the trajectory of our business.”
Liam, founder, High Grade Coffee
They did try Amazon. It was, in Liam's words, "a brutal, brutal marketplace." The rules around shelf life required nitro flushing. The FBA logistics were convoluted. Amazon eventually destroyed roughly a third of their stock with no clear explanation. After accounting for the additional kit required to meet Amazon's requirements, the business likely lost money on the experiment. It now serves as a useful reference point: retail coffee works far better through the café, the website, and selected partner accounts.
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Sourcing: importers, origin trips, and a patio built in Guatemala
High Grade sources through a mix of routes: UK importers connected to origin exporters, spot stock already in the country, and direct relationships built through origin trips. Those trips, Liam says, are impossible to overstate. "It will completely reinvigorate your passion for the business. It will add provenance and narrative to your brand. You make real human connections with the people attached to the coffee, and you tell their story through your story through coffee."
On one Guatemala trip, Liam and Stevie met a farmer directly — alongside an exporter and another roaster they happened to encounter at origin. That roaster turned out to be from Maine, and roasted on Bellwethers as well. The two businesses donated money together to help the farmer build a larger drying patio, which increased his yield and gave both roasteries access to more of his coffee. The other roaster, Revelstoke Coffee, is worth looking up.
Two machines. A 5×5 metre room. 9 tons a year
The current roastery setup runs two Bellwether Shop Roasters in continuous configuration in what used to be someone's office — a room roughly 5 by 5 metres across the road from the café. Each machine handles 20 kg continuous roasting, for a combined 40 kg ready to load at any given time. Three continuous roasts per machine per day yields around 60 kg of roasted coffee per machine — with roughly 15% loss from moisture and chaff — across a working day that runs from 7 or 8 a.m. to around 3:30 p.m. and stops at weekends.
That setup produces somewhere between 150 and 200 sacks a year — at roughly 60 kg per sack, around 8.5 to 9 tons — and Liam says it doesn't feel fully maxed out. The reason they're not pushing harder isn't capacity; it's quality of life. The team values working office hours and not running weekends. Rather than extend shifts or add weekend roasting, they're looking at adding a third machine to increase daytime throughput without stretching the working day.
On noise and smell: the machines produce somewhere around 60 to 70 decibels — Liam's estimate, offered without any sense that he'd ever needed to measure it. You can have a conversation over them. The only feedback they get from people walking past with the door open is that it smells good. The internal filtration system means no smoke, no exhaust, just the caramelly, biscuity aroma of coffee in process. They've never had a noise complaint. They've also never had a reason to cut a single hole in a Grade 2 listed wall.
Find High Grade
Website: highgrade.coffee