It takes 350, 632 minutes for a coffee cherry to ripen. 10 minutes to roast it. Our job is not to muck that up.
Hey. I’m Joel, the big nosed guy in the photo above who roasts for you all at Jolly Bean, and alongside my other half, Lolly, and an ace little team (Ellie & Preet) run the roastery. I’ve been roasting coffee now for the last 15 years. It all started whilst looking for a bit of escapism from the endless games email ping pong whilst working in a corporate job after University. I’d finish work and roast at home on a 200g roaster and day dream of opening a coffee shop. This went on for a good few years until one day on the way home from work I happened to come across an empty retail unit a few doors from home. A couple of emails later and a month later, and I had the keys to our new shop and cafe (giddyarts.co.uk - say hey), this was back in 2018.
Around this time I took the next jump and bought a larger 1KG manual roaster – and Jolly Bean was born. We sorted our first proper bags and labels, and we began to source high scoring speciality lots from ethical sourcing partners, storing pallets of coffee at my parents in Manchester and making a weekly trip on the M62 after work from Yorkshire and back to get beans to roast.
In the years since we upgraded to a 2.5KG roaster, I still remember driving from Yorkshire to Portsmouth with my dad to pick it up, just about squeezing it into the back of a hatchback. We had this roaster, nicknamed Tony, for about 5 years, we had a lot of fun, roasting a load of beans, working on some exciting beer collabs that found their way to Tesco and keeping things ticking over. We’ve now moved onto a much bigger 10KG roaster from Besca, roasting from an old mill in Sowerby Bridge, in the heart of the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.
Approach to roasting.
We try to keep things simple. Really simple. Good coffee, ethically sourced, and roasted well. Our job is to do right by the farmers and producers at origin. A coffee cherry takes 8 months to ripen, 8 months, that’s 350, 632 minutes.
It takes anywhere from 7 -13 minutes to roast that coffee. Three hundred and fifty thousand minutes to grow, a fraction of that to roast it. Our job is not to muck that up. A lot of our coffee is on the lighter side, allowing all the work at origin and the coffee itself to shine through with its natural acidity, body and sweetness.
We also try very hard to make things as accessible as possible. It can feel like a dirty word to talk about ‘value’, but we work hard to keep our overheads low (where we can) so we can hopefully offer some of the more rare or exotic coffees at an accessible price point. This isn’t a race to the bottom, it’s about trying to get as much of the ‘fancy’ stuff out to as wide an audience as we can.
Hope you enjoy, Joel, Lolly & the team.
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