A new opening means you could soon drink the same coffee as Jeff Goldblum, Ariana Grande, and Gary Oldman. A Guildford coffee roastery is opening its doors to the public for the first time, allowing for an immersive coffee experience.
The roastery on Clay Lane, near Sainsbury’s, usually sells directly to cafes and restaurants but is now letting customers in to see how their drink is made, and learn more about what they are buying.
Chris Foulkes, who works at Cannon Coffee told SurreyLive: “We supply a couple dozen cafes all based in the south. We also have a little workshop machine repairs, we install espresso machines. Everything we’ve done so far has been very wholesale.
“With the new unit being in such a high footfall area, we’ve just decided to change the business to be much more retail. People actually coming here and doing coffee tastings, being able to sell bags of coffee to people off the street. We’ve previously been very hidden away in the woods, so this is kind of our first time to get a retail audience.”
The team are hoping that people will be able to learn more about the entire coffee roasting process, and get some tasty treats. Chris said: “We’re going to have a coffee trailer there so as people walk in they can have a croissant and a coffee. As you walk in, we’ve just got a shop with your basic day-to-day coffee brewing things: Mocha drops, cafetieres, small espresso machines.Then when you get past the little shop, you actually get into the roastery. It’s quite nice for people to walk in and see coffee, being roasted, see coffee in green form.
“I mean, most people who come in, they don’t even know that coffee is a seed inside of a cherry. Its quite funny because you watch the adverts on TV, and you just see roasted coffee coming out of the farms, but it’s actually that the seed of the cherry is the coffee bean, and then once it’s processed to that stage, that’s when we take it and roast it.”
The green coffee beans
(Image: Cannon Coffee)
The company roasts roughly a ton of coffee a month, which is quite a process. Chris said: “It’s very technical which a lot of people don’t expect. It’s a lot of graph reading, temperature controlling, airflow controlling. Imagine a washing machine and a barbecue, had a baby, but with a lot more tech.”
As well as cafes the roastery has made its mark on some famous film sets. Chris explained: “Weirdly a niche we kind of fit into is, we supply quite a few movie sets. So it’s actually the craft companies which are the guys who make the coffee where we have established ourselves. They are working on Bridgerton, Slow Horses, and recently Wicked. We know that Jeff Goldblum drank our coffee. We know that Ariana Grande and Gary Oldman, assuming he drinks coffee on set.”
The roastery opened in 2021 and prides itself on its direct relationship with its farmers. Chris said: “Everybody knows the certifications like fair trade and organic and rainforest alliance. We buy directly from farmers, I mean we can pay almost 30 times more than the fair trade price for our coffee.
The roastery sells coffee to cafes and film sets
(Image: Cannon Coffee)
“We also know everything that’s happening at the farm. So we get transparency down to exactly how many workers were working in the fields, and what they’re doing from a sustainability point of view. We can just pick up the phone and speak to the farmers and see how things are going there.”
They stock coffee of four different origins which are Colombian, Brazilian, Chinese and Ugandan. Chris said: “We’ve always had good relationships with the farms. Some people like sweet or fruity coffees, that’s kind of where Uganda comes in, because it’s very sweet. It doesn’t have any bitterness or ashy flavours, you get with your darker roasts. But then if people want that, these heavier, dark intense flavours, lot of speciality coffee will say don’t go there, it’s not the way to drink coffee, but if 80% of people like coffee that way, then why not? Our signature blend is our gunpowder blend and that’s just your kind of UK people pleaser, it’s your chocolate, nutty, more intense.
“There’s a lot of roasters around, but locally, there’s none that allow walk-ins. We want more people to walk in and buy a bag of coffee after understanding more, smelling all the coffees, maybe trying a few coffees.”
The roastery is already open, but will be marking their official opening on January 11. You can find out more here.