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Copperline started in 2017 with a lease on a leaky railway arch, a roaster older than both our dads, and a strong opinion about paying farmers properly.
The arch sits under the old South Yorkshire Railway viaduct, a two-minute walk from the canal basin. When we took the lease in spring 2017 it had a dirt floor, a family of pigeons and a hundred and forty years of soot in the brick. It also had three-phase power, a landlord who didn’t mind gas lines, and rent we could actually afford.
We tanked the walls, poured a floor, and kept everything else as we found it. Trains still rumble over the top mid-batch. You get used to it — the espresso machine rattles at 8:14 every weekday morning, regular as a kettle.
Dan spent eleven years keeping fermentation vessels and steam plants alive at a Barnsley brewery before deciding coffee machinery was more interesting than beer machinery. He runs the Probat, keeps the roast logs, and has strong feelings about drum speed. If it hisses, drips or seizes at Arch 11, Dan fixes it.
Amara came up through quality control at a green importer in London, cupping hundreds of tables a year before moving north. She buys every lot we roast, runs the Saturday cupping bar, and scores samples blind so nobody’s reputation gets a free pass. Her rule: the coffee speaks, the paperwork proves it.
She’s a 12 kg Probat, built in Emmerich in 1958, and she spent fifty years working in a family roastery near Hamburg’s Speicherstadt until the firm closed in 2015. Dan found her on a German machinery auction site at 2am, bid more than we’d agreed, and drove a hired Luton van to Hamburg and back — 1,400 miles, two ferries — to collect her.
The rebuild took eight months of evenings. The drum shaft was worn oval, so it went to a machine shop in Attercliffe to be re-turned and sleeved. The original burners were unsafe and unsalvageable; Dan replaced them with new gas jets and modern flame-failure valves, then fitted a temperature probe where the old thermometer well had rusted through. The bearings, belts and wiring are all new. Everything you can see — the copper cladding, the cast doors, the badge-less fascia — is 1958.
First batch under the arch: 14 November 2017. A washed Sidamo. We still have a jar of it on the shelf, and no, you can’t taste it.
Lease signed on Arch 11 in April. Probat rebuilt by November. First batch — a washed Sidamo — on the 14th.
First wholesale account: Brick & Ember in Kelham Island. They’re still with us.
Amara’s first buying trip to Ethiopia. We commit to Chelbesa and haven’t skipped a harvest since.
Café orders vanish overnight; the webshop keeps the lights on. We post 11,000 letterbox bags in twelve months.
First direct contract in Colombia — El Vergel, Huila. Weekly delivery round across South Yorkshire starts.
Saturday cupping bar opens. Nine bowls, one bench, no bookings. Still free.
New burners again — Dan wasn’t happy with the flame spread. Roast consistency improves measurably; he was right, again.
Twenty wholesale accounts. We cap it there. Better twenty cafés pouring it well than fifty pouring it badly.
We publish our green-buying prices next to every coffee at the cupping bar. Nobody asks us to stop.
Ninth birthday. Same arch, same machine, same two of us — plus four more of us now, to be fair.
Every contract above C-price, every FOB figure printed and pinned up at the cupping bar. If we can’t afford to pay well for a coffee, we don’t buy it.
Two roast days a week, ten-kilo batches, every batch logged and cupped. We’d rather sell out on a Friday than post you a stale bag on a Monday.
The roaster is 68 years old. The grinder is 15. The van has 140,000 miles on it. Things that can be repaired, get repaired — it’s cheaper, and it’s right.