We visit Well Roasted Coffee, near Market Harborough

Will Scott has been roasting coffee in rural Leicestershire since June 2015. After undergoing a research trip to Columbia in February last year, Will came back with a plan. He purchased two Gene coffee roasters and set up shop in the picturesque Welland Valley. No stranger to the world of coffee, he first encountered the drink in Kenya in the 1960s. After spending more and more time passionately researching coffee, he decided to make his hobby into a business and started roasting.

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For Will, research is key and he has gone on many courses and trips to find top quality coffees. After galvanising his ideas in Columbia, he launched Well Roasted Coffee from his HQ near Market Harborough.

Well Roasted Coffee provide ‘interesting’ coffees from around the world – from Columbia to Guatamala to Sumatra. Will has invested much of his time ensuring that Well Roasted provides coffees it can proudly stand behind. All of the coffees are top grade, rainforest aligned and high grown. Will says: “At high altitude it takes longer for the cherry to mature so you get much more flavour.” He uses his extensive research to educate coffee drinkers, informing that it takes two years for a farmer to produce a coffee bean, and after an anticipatory 52 weeks before the first flower, they must wait a further 48 weeks for the cherry to develop.

Roasting usually takes place at Well Roasted on Mondays and Wednesdays, but when asked about the process, Will kindly offers to roast some Indonesian Sumatra beans – volcanoes formed many of the islands of Indonesia and therefore they are mountainous and have rich soil, making an ideal environment for growing coffee.

In a little over half an hour we have perfectly roasted, sweet smelling coffee beans in our hands. Will has clearly spent plenty of time ensuring that he gets the roasting profile of each bean right. Offering only a handful of different coffees allows him to make sure every roast is delivered to perfection. He points out that he is yet to roast any blends and acknowledges that this could come across as slightly cautious. However, quick to establish that he likes a single blend, Will is happy offering the single-origin coffee that he has carefully selected. He adds: “There isn’t such thing as a strongest coffee, you get different nuances from the different origins and varieties.”

Will is clearly excited about coffee and all that he can offer with Well Roasted Coffee. He is using social media to engage potential customers and has found that coffee is a very social drink, and believes that by connecting with customers on social media he can transmit his enthusiasm. Additionally Will has hosted many open days at his roastery, where current and potential customers carry out tastings.

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Future plans for Well Roasted may include a subscription service and certainly more visits to food markets and festivals. Will says: “People don’t want great big mugs of coffee anymore”, and he is pleased that many more coffee shops are moving toward single-origin coffees. He is humbled to have turned his hobby into a business and is clearly looking forward to developing Well Roasted Coffee further.

For more information about Well Roasted Coffee, visit: www.wellroastedcoffee.com

The author:

Mel is a journalist living in Northamptonshire