About Us
Our Kahaani
Kahaani means story. The root is Persian, and the word travelled the same routes the coffee did.
Where we started
At home in Windsor. Small batches, a kitchen that smelled permanently of last night's roast, and bags handed to friends who were honest enough to say when one wasn't right.
We also roast in South London — properly, to schedule, on a drum that can keep up. The standard hasn't moved. We still cup everything before it goes out, and we still drop lots that don't hold up, which is expensive and correct.
Somewhere ahead of that there's Windsor. A roastery you can walk into, with the drum running behind the bar and the coffee poured a few feet from where it was roasted. We're building towards it in the least glamorous way possible: one account, one bag, one good week at a time.
How we roast
We roast to taste the farm rather than the roaster. Lighter than a high street bag, and more work to get right — a few seconds too long and you've flattened the thing you paid extra for.
Everything we buy is specialty grade, 80 points and up on the SCA scale. That's the entry requirement, not the achievement.
The bit we're serious about
Coffee is a spice-route drink. It came up through Yemen's terraces, left through the port of Al-Makha, and picked up its manners in Cairo, Istanbul and Isfahan long before anyone in Europe had tasted it. The word qahwa got as far as Turkish, then Dutch, then English, and arrived on your menu as coffee — worn down slightly by the journey.
Most of that got lost somewhere between then and now. We named the company after the missing part.
Coffee had spice before it had a style.
Kahaani. Every cup has one.