Grindsmith

Grindsmith was founded in 2010 and opened its first Manchester shop in February 2014 in Greengate Square, near Manchester Cathedral, funded in part by one of the earliest Kickstarter campaigns used to launch a UK coffee business. The name comes from combining 'grind' with the '-smith' suffix used for craftspeople who perfect a trade — a goldsmith or blacksmith — reflecting the founders' framing of coffee roasting as a craft discipline. The company's roastery, the operational center of the business, is based in Ancoats, Manchester's coffee-and-craft-industry district, and Grindsmith now runs multiple sites including MediaCityUK in Salford, Bridge Street in central Manchester, and a location on Pollard Street East. It roasts both espresso and filter coffee, rotating its offering through the year to track the seasonality of the crop, and sells beans online sorted by brew method with a newsletter announcing each new release. The company has been profiled by industry press including Sprudge, which documented the build-out of its roastery space, situating Grindsmith within Manchester's broader specialty-coffee scene alongside other roasters that emerged in the city over the past decade.