About us
The people, the roaster and the building behind ConnectionCafe.com
We are a specialty coffee bar, a small all-day kitchen and eight rooms, all stacked into one brick warehouse on Kiln Street in Shoreditch. This is how that happened, and what we care about now it has.
Where it started
A ceramics warehouse, six stools and one stubborn idea
ConnectionCafe.com opened in March 2016 in a building that had spent most of the previous century storing ceramics. The kiln flue is still in the back wall. We left it there.
The lease was cheap because the room was cold, the floor sloped and the nearest passing trade was two streets away. What it did have was a basement with a working extraction duct, which is the only reason a 5kg drum roaster was ever plausible. We put six stools along the window, a refurbished two-group machine on the counter, and started roasting downstairs before we had enough customers to justify it.
The house blend is named after the street for the simplest of reasons: it was the fourth recipe we wrote for this room, and the first one that still tasted right at half past eight on a Monday with a queue out of the door. Kiln Street No. 4 is 70% washed Brazil and 30% Ethiopia, and nine years later it is still the coffee in almost every cup we serve.
Everything since has been an answer to a question someone asked at the counter. People wanted food, so we built a kitchen. People asked where they could stay nearby, so we opened the floors above. We have never had a five-year plan. We have had a lot of conversations.
How we grew
ConnectionCafe.com, floor by floor
Three expansions in nine years, each one because the last one was not quite enough. Nothing here was designed on a whiteboard.
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2016
Six seats and a secondhand machine
We took on a damp former ceramics warehouse, put in six stools, a refurbished two-group espresso machine and a 5kg drum roaster in the basement. The roaster ran on Tuesdays because that was the only morning nobody was serving.
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2018
The kitchen goes in
Two years of being asked for something to eat wore us down. We gave up the back store room, built a small kitchen and wrote a short menu we could cook properly rather than a long one we could only reheat.
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2021
Eight rooms upstairs
The two floors above had been empty offices since the 1990s. We converted them into eight rooms with their own street door, a grinder and brewer in each one, and breakfast at the bar downstairs.
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Today
62 seats and no time limit
Sixty-two seats, power at roughly two-thirds of them, 500 Mbps throughout the building and about 12kg of coffee roasted every week. The Tuesday habit stuck.
What we believe
Fresh, consistent and never burnt to hide a problem
Two things decide whether a cup is good before anyone touches a tamper: how recently the coffee was roasted, and whether it was roasted honestly. We print the roast date on every retail bag and we pull nothing off the bar that is more than twelve days past it. Beyond that point the sweetness goes flat, and no amount of barista skill puts it back.
We also do not roast dark. A very dark roast is often a way of burying a defect — an underripe cherry, a badly dried lot, a bag that sat too long in a humid warehouse — under caramelisation and smoke. Roasting lighter leaves us nowhere to hide, which is precisely why we do it. If a coffee is thin or papery, you will taste it, and we will have to answer for it.
- Nothing served is older than twelve days off roast
- Two rotating single origins on filter, changed every fortnight
- An 18-hour cold brew, kegged on site and poured on tap
- Recipes re-dialled every morning, and again when the weather turns
The team
The same faces behind the bar, year after year
Consistency in a cup is mostly a staffing question. A barista who has worked the same machine for three years knows what this grinder does when the humidity climbs, knows the Tuesday batch will need a tighter grind by Thursday, and knows your order before you have finished saying it. That kind of knowledge cannot be hired in a fortnight, so we try very hard not to lose it.
Everyone behind the bar trains to Specialty Coffee Association standards, and everyone is paid above the real Living Wage — the independently calculated rate, not the legal minimum. Tips are pooled and split evenly across the bar and the kitchen, because a good flat white served onto a dirty table is not a good flat white.
The kitchen runs the same way: one head chef, a small team, a short menu they know cold. Around half of it is vegetarian with vegan options marked, and the bread is the one thing we do not make — it comes from a bakery four streets away that has been proving sourdough since before we opened.
See what the kitchen sends out
Sourcing
We would rather know what the grower was paid
We are a 12kg-a-week roastery, which means we buy in bags, not containers, and we have no leverage over anyone. What we can do is choose importers who publish their transaction data: what they paid the producer, what the market price was that week, and how much of the difference stayed in the country of origin. When an importer will not tell us that, we buy elsewhere.
Every delivery is cupped before it goes anywhere near the bar — the same protocol each time, coffee tasted blind alongside the lot it is replacing. Occasionally a sample we loved in March arrives in June tasting tired, and it goes back. That costs us money about twice a year and saves us a great deal of credibility.
Certification is useful but not the whole story, and we would rather show you a price than a logo. If you want the wider picture of how the supply chain works, the Fairtrade Foundation explains the economics of it better than a cafe website can. Ours is on the coffee page, lot by lot.
The numbers
ConnectionCafe.com by the count
- 2016 Roasting since
- 8 Rooms upstairs
- 4.9 Guest rating
- 12kg Roasted weekly
Plus 62 seats, 8 rooms, 500 Mbps of Wi-Fi and one flue from a kiln that stopped working long before we arrived. Full rates and room details are on the stay page.
Our neighbourhood
Trying to be a decent part of Shoreditch
Kiln Street has changed more in the last decade than in the fifty years before it. We are part of that change, which is a reason to be useful rather than an excuse.
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The community table
The long oak table by the window is never reserved and never sold by the seat. Freelancers, a Tuesday knitting group and at least two novels in progress have shared it. If you need three hours and a corner, take them.
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Saturday cupping at 9am
Every Saturday morning we set up a cupping table with whatever is new on the bar and taste it properly, out loud, in front of anyone who wants to join. It is free, it lasts about forty minutes, and guests staying upstairs are always on the list.
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Hiring from the postcode
Most of our team live within a twenty-minute walk. We advertise in the window before we advertise online, and we train from scratch — three of our current baristas had never pulled a shot before their first shift here.
We are six minutes on foot from Shoreditch High Street station and ten from Liverpool Street, so most people arrive by public transport — which suits a street with almost no parking. Directions, a map and our full opening hours are on the contact page, and if you would rather read us before you visit us, the ConnectionCafe.com journal is written by the same people who pull the shots.
Come and say hello
Nine years in, the kettle is still on
Walk in for a flat white, book the community table for six, or take one of the eight rooms above the bar and wake up to the roaster running downstairs.