Freda's Story

From Brighton Coffee Shop to Independent Speciality Coffee Roaster

Founder of Bond Street Coffee and Freda Coffee in conversation about brew methods for better coffee at home

Freda is my small, independent speciality coffee roastery here in Sussex, built on nearly two decades of making, serving and obsessing over coffee.

Although Freda itself is relatively new, my story with coffee in Brighton goes back much further. I’ve been working in cafés since 2008, discovered speciality coffee properly in Brighton in 2011, opened Bond Street Coffee in 2014 and started roasting my own coffee a few years later.

Today, Freda brings all of those things together.

I source seasonal, single origin coffees that I genuinely love drinking, roast them in small batches each week, and then get the slightly unusual privilege of working with those same coffees behind the bar at Bond Street Coffee in Brighton.

For me, Freda has never really been about building a big coffee company.

It's about making better coffee, learning something with every roast and hopefully helping more people make really good coffee at home.

Pouring Coffee Latte Art Tulip, Silky Milk, Creamy Coffee

Where It Started: Coffee in Brighton

I've actually been making coffee since around 2008, although I was making pretty terrible coffee for the first few years!

Everything changed for me in 2011 when I started working with Taras and Ame at Coffee at 33 on Trafalgar Street.

That was my proper introduction to speciality coffee in Brighton.

They showed me how much attention could go into something that, until then, I'd thought was relatively simple. Suddenly I was thinking about where a coffee had been grown, how it had been processed, how we were extracting it and why tiny changes could completely alter what ended up in the cup.

Around the same time, I remember visiting Workshop Coffee in London and sitting at the bar watching the baristas prepare espresso with what looked like the precision of a scientific experiment.

This was at a time when weighing every dose going into the grinder and every espresso coming out wasn't nearly as commonplace as it is today.

I loved it.

Coffee suddenly seemed like this enormous subject where there was always another variable to understand and another thing to improve.

I've essentially been going down that rabbit hole ever since.

Founder of Freda Roasting Speciality Coffee Beans UK

From Brighton Barista to Coffee Roaster

Roasting became a natural extension of that curiosity.

I first roasted coffee professionally with Horsham Coffee Roaster around 2012. Then, in 2014, Bradley and Amelia from Horsham and I opened Bond Street Coffee in Brighton together.

Having my own coffee shop gave me somewhere to put all of those ideas into practice.

From the beginning, Bond Street focused on seasonal, single origin speciality coffee. Rather than serving one house blend all year, I wanted customers to be able to choose different coffees and actually experience how much origin could change the flavour of their espresso, filter coffee or even their flat white.

Then in 2017, I started roasting the coffee for my cafés myself.

That was when things really clicked.

Roasting has this wonderful combination of science, craft and frustrating unpredictability that I find completely addictive. You can make what seems like a tiny adjustment and dramatically change how a coffee tastes.

I've been learning how to do it better ever since.

Pouring premium Freda single origin filter coffee in Hario decanter

From Bond Street Coffee to Freda

In 2022, I took over Bond Street Coffee completely, and eventually the roasting side of the business developed into what is now Freda Coffee.

Freda officially launched as its own brand in 2025, but it really represents everything I've learnt from years of roasting coffee and working in independent coffee shops across Brighton and Sussex.

One of my favourite things about Freda is that I'm still connected to the café.

I'm not just roasting coffee, putting it into bags and sending it out into the world.

I can roast a coffee and then work with that exact coffee at Bond Street Coffee in Brighton. I can pull it as espresso, see how easy it is for our baristas to dial in, taste it with milk, brew it as filter and talk directly to customers drinking it.

Then I can take what I've learnt back to the next roast.

I think that's a pretty special relationship to have with the coffee I sell.

Coffee cup in Bond Street Coffee on a yellow table, with a Freda Speciality Coffee box in the background.

Seasonal, Single Origin Coffee. Never Blends.

Freda focuses entirely on seasonal, single origin coffee.

I've never been particularly excited by blends.

I understand why coffee roasters use them. Blending different coffees can help create a consistent flavour throughout the year. But personally, I find the differences between individual coffees much more interesting.

Coffee is an agricultural product.

It comes from a particular country, region, farm or producer. Different varieties are grown at different altitudes and processed in different ways. All of those things contribute to what that coffee eventually tastes like.

Why would I want to hide that?

Instead, I source coffees seasonally and allow the range to change throughout the year.

Even our regular house coffees, Black Dog and Black Rain, are single origin. The coffee behind them changes with the seasons, while I look for something that fits the flavour profile I want.

It means there is always something new to drink.

And that's much more exciting to me.

Founder of Freda Coffee in Worthing, Sussex best coffee roaster

My Approach to Roasting Coffee

My approach to roasting is relatively simple: don't get in the way of good coffee.

So much of a coffee's flavour has already been determined before it ever reaches me.

The variety, climate, soil, altitude, picking, fermentation, processing and drying have all had an enormous influence on what's inside those green coffee beans.

My job is to roast them in a way that allows those flavours to come through.

I tend to love coffees that are clean and elegant, with crisp acidity, sweetness and clarity. I particularly enjoy lighter roasted coffees where you can really taste the differences between origins.

That doesn't mean everything has to be incredibly light or difficult to brew.

Black Rain, for example, gives me somewhere to explore a slightly darker and more traditional style of speciality espresso, while Black Dog lets me push things a little lighter and more vibrant.

Ultimately, I want the coffee to taste good.

That sounds ridiculously obvious, but it's quite easy to lose sight of when you start obsessing over roast curves and extraction percentages.

Freshly roasted in Worthing, West Sussex

Freda Coffee is a small speciality coffee roaster based in Worthing. We slot roast all our own coffee at Horsham Coffee Roaster, so we don’t list a public shop or roastery address, but every order is packed and sent fresh from the Sussex coast. We deliver across the UK, with local roots in Worthing, Brighton and West Sussex.

Finding Great Single Origin Coffee

I'm a very small coffee roaster, which means I'm not travelling around the world buying shipping containers of green coffee directly from farmers.

Instead, I work with specialist UK coffee importers who have those relationships.

I'm particularly lucky to have Falcon Specialty just down the road in Sussex. Working with good importers gives me access to interesting, traceable coffees from producers around the world without pretending Freda is something much bigger than it actually is.

I want to know where the coffees I roast have come from, who produced them and how they were processed.

Throughout the year you'll see coffees from places like Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Guatemala, Peru, Brazil and Colombia come and go as harvests change.

If I cup something and get excited about drinking it, that's usually a pretty good starting point.

Freda, Bond Street and Brighton Coffee

Brighton is still a massive part of Freda's identity.

I've been fortunate enough to be involved in Brighton's speciality coffee scene since 2011, and I've watched it change enormously during that time.

Brilliant coffee shops have opened and closed. Baristas I've worked alongside have gone on to become managers, roasters and café owners themselves. There is a lovely little network of independent coffee businesses and people across the city.

I'm incredibly proud that Bond Street Coffee has somehow survived through more than a decade of all that change.

It's also why I love that Bond Street is still the home of Freda in Brighton.

You can buy a bag of Freda coffee online, but you can also walk into Bond Street Coffee, order it as an espresso or filter coffee and have one of us make it for you.

If you're visiting and looking for speciality coffee in Brighton, come and say hello.

Better Coffee at Home

Working in cafés for so long has also taught me that making good coffee doesn't need to be ridiculously complicated.

There's a whole world of coffee equipment, recipes, ratios, extraction percentages and brewing techniques to explore if you're interested in them. I certainly am.

But the biggest improvement you can make to your morning coffee is often simply starting with better coffee beans.

That's one of the ideas behind Freda.

I want to source and roast really good coffee and then make it easier for you to get the best from it at home.

That's why alongside the coffee you'll find my brew guides and Notes from Freda, where I write about espresso, filter coffee, roasting and some of the conversations that come up while I'm working behind the bar.

And if you're struggling with a coffee you've bought from me, you can always ask.

There's an actual person at the other end.

Why Freda?

Freda was my Nanny.

Her encouragement and support had an enormous influence on the person I became, and when I decided that the roastery needed an identity of its own, naming it after her felt right.

It also suits what I want the business to be.

Personal, independent and small enough that I can still be involved in everything.

I source the coffees. I roast them. I drink far too much of them. I work with them in the café. And I'm usually the person packing the box when you order some for home.

As Freda grows, I don't really want that fundamental idea to change.

I just want to keep finding interesting single origin coffees, get better at roasting them and help more people drink better coffee every day.

Better Coffee, Everyday.