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Our Story
Hiya! We're BAD COFFEE, a coffee roastery and espresso bar right in the thick of Hackney Wick.
We've been meaning to do this for ages but got a bit caught up steering the PEARL (Hackney Wick's former favourite brunch spot 2016-2022) through pandemic times. Heading up the beloved cafe taught us a lot about coffee and coffee culture, it was a rabbit hole we fell into and became the part of the business we were most interested in. Anyone who visited will know the care we took preparing a cup of coffee, but to us it was a bit more than prepping an enjoyable flat white: we witnesses conversations and friendships forged over a brew; the people rocking up running a bit late for work and embracing it with a road coffee; all the WFH people taking a break from their screens, popping out for a coffee and a quick chat; and those who would sit alone, with a book or the papers, nowhere to be just having a lovely day. We're well aware of the power coffee beans hold, we want to facilitate those moments that happen around a nice cup and enhance that with a specialty coffee freshly roasted in East London. Buy coffee East London coffee beans here.
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We've carried over our DIY mentality from the PEARL days - and we don't just mean aesthetically. Learning to Roast coffee beans was very trial and error, and that is us all over. We love doing things for ourselves, being adaptable, learning through doing, and figuring stuff out. So far I've learned that coffee roasting is about trusting your instincts and senses. We've sourced some fantastic beans that our regulars love and keep coming back for. The aesthetic of the joint, the branding, even this website - it's all DIY. And anything we couldn't do ourselves we got our neighbours to help out - which incidentally is very Hackney Wick. Because of this we are extremely proud of what we've created to date. That's our story so far but stick with us because there's more to come.
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Oh, we're Mandi and Alex and the beans are bad because we grew up in the 90s when bad was good bad, not sh*t.
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I wrote about our coffee and commitment to being sustainable over here
