Carter Coffee
Edinburgh's newest specialty roaster — flavour-first blends and expressive single origins from three friends who used to run Obadiah.
Edinburgh, Scotland
The story
Carter Coffee
A young Edinburgh roastery from Sorley Richardson, Danny Allan and Craig Paul — building distinctive, playful blends alongside a proper specialty single-origin lineup, roasted for flavour first.
Carter Coffee is an Edinburgh specialty roaster founded by Sorley Richardson, Danny Allan and Craig Paul — three friends from the trade who, after five years working together at Obadiah Coffee, set out on their own. The firm has been producing coffee for retail and wholesale for more than a year, and in April 2026 opened a cafe and roastery-front at 4 Fyfe Lane in Bonnington, north of Leith Walk.
Where a lot of specialty roasters lead with terroir, Carter lead with flavour. Their signature is intelligent blending: taking coffees from disparate origins and joining them together to build a taste that goes beyond any single component. Their entry-level everyday coffee, Bread & Butter, is a rotating seasonal blend — currently natural Brazil, washed Ethiopia and washed Uganda — chocolatey, stone-fruited, with a buttery texture. Alongside it sit expressive single origins and playful, experimental co-ferments.
The whole project is built to strip a bit of the prestige out of specialty coffee. Carter want the entry-level coffee drinker and the high-end specialty geek pulling from the same shelf — hence blends that pair pineapple-lactic co-fermented Colombians with chocolatey Brazils to chase a Pineapple Lump, and a cafe that opens straight through into the production space so customers can see the work happening.