We’ve come a long way since conceiving our first café/deli in 2006, adding our whole-foods kitchens and boutique catering, but at heart we remain a speciality coffee house – we’ve served over a million cups of ‘black gold’ to our regulars across East and North-East London.

We work with Pact coffee roasters having been impressed with their ethical sourcing and direct farmer relationships, and equally impressed by the calibre of the roasting team and the blends they created. Pact take care of the whole supply chain from farm to roastery, which means more money goes to farmers and less to middle-men.

Our house brew is a rich dark roast, balanced through a blend of beans from named terroir in South America, Africa and Asia, that score a coffee industry quality grade considerably above what is used in most high street coffee – we won’t say what happens to the beans we reject, but let’s just say they cost a few bucks less.

We showcase a number of single origin roasts at our filter bar in Wanstead, where the team grind and hand-brew to order, bringing out the sweetness in our rotating list of guest picks. You’ll also see the team having fun making summer favourite nitro-brew and our Neapolitan breakfast shot.

The beans are only half the story – or one-third to be precise – consistency is key to delivering quality coffee drinks day after day, and for that you need great kit. From our top-of-the-line La Marzocco workhorse machines, with twin boilers to ensure milk-steaming doesn’t divert pressure from the shot making, to the latest Mythos grinders for espresso, which warm or cool the grinding chamber to compensate for atmospheric and heat changes through the day, we cherish our machines! For filter coffee we tracked down a little known Romanian maker of unremarkable looking, but top performing, dedicated filter coffee grinder, so hand-brews can be calibrated quickly roast by roast.

The final and most important element is of course the skill and dedication of our baristas. Trained to make consistent shots, perfectly aeriated milk, and to look after the machines, the Larder’s baristas are led by our group head barista who supports them day by day to keep doing an incredible job.

The Larder cafés are barista-led – each and every manager and assistant manager having come through the ranks of barista then head barista, so our coffee, and your drink, is in great hands.

For more on our decision to work with Pact, and to read out interview with their head buyer, head over to our blog section.