Maude Coffee Roasters: The Leeds high-end speciality coffee roasters celebrating ten years of excellence
For over a decade, high-end, small-batch speciality coffee has been roasted beneath the railway arches of Leeds.
In 2014, Matthew "Matt" Van Elkan, a former food photographer and barista, decided to forge a new path and founded Maude Coffee Roasters. Located on Railway Street, between Leeds city centre and East End Park, Matt and his team produce exclusive coffees sourced from around the globe.
To celebrate their tenth anniversary in November last year, Maude launched the Summit Box Set - a meticulously crafted £500 wooden box featuring a curated collection of coffees from the past ten years.
Matt told the Yorkshire Evening Post: "We've had the privilege of working with people all over the world and really working to help make our side of the industry better.
"We've been carefully preserving and freezing these coffees, and we've made 30 limited edition box sets available to celebrate our 10 years in business."
The idea for Maude Coffee Roasters first came to Matt while working in a Leeds coffee shop.
Matt said: "I got together with one of the owners of [the] coffee shop, and we kind of hatched this idea that we wanted to start a roastery.
"For me, I wanted to move into the next side and the next development of the industry and try to push my knowledge base and my skills forward."
What sets speciality coffee apart from supermarket brands is the dedication to sourcing and farming beans with care and precision.
Matt explained: "We are interested in highlighting the hard work of producers and farmers, and we're interested in really exploring the boundaries of how far coffee as an agricultural product can go.
"We work a lot with really small speciality producers that will do quite experimental things, [and] we're interested in really seeing how the industry can be pushed forward on more than just a growth perspective.
"It's what can be done agriculturally, agriculturally, what can be done technologically on our side, and how can we push the boundaries of what the idea of coffee can be."
Maude sources its beans from countries like Colombia, Brazil, Panama, Guatemala, Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. Each origin offers distinct seasonal flavours.
Matt said: "Because we're buying directly from farmers we have a seasonality to it, so these products change regularly.
"So we'll buy a certain amount of coffee, but then that lot will only last so long, and then when we cycle it through, we're not necessarily going to get the same lot again.
"We might buy the same coffee from the same farm every year, but the harvest is very different every year, and throughout the year that harvest changes.
"So different countries will come into season at different times, just in the same way that vegetables grow at different times of the year."
Leeds boasts several independent roasters, including North Star, Echelon, and Chipp Coffee Co. Despite steady growth in the industry, Matt believes there’s still room for healthy competition.
He said: "The industry as a whole, grows so much every year that I think it's we're not quite at the point where the competition's problematic.
"If anything, the competition just keeps us all accountable, because it's healthy and because it helps us all raise the bar.
And it's, I think we all everyone in this side of the industry, in the speciality coffee side, we all know each other for one so it's, it's not like where we have this like feud against each other.
"And where what we see other people do just helps us hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard ... and helps the industry rise and develop into what it can be."
While Maude Coffee is available online, its primary customers are businesses, including Northern Ballet's cafe and Coffee Synthesis. Matt attributes the company’s steady growth over the past decade to an unwavering commitment to quality.
He said: "We've had really good feedback from customers over the 10 years, and we've grown pretty steadily over that period.
I think we're quite renowned in the industry for our quality, and it's where uncompromising and we strive to deliver the best possible product that we can.
"And it's a repetitive piece of feedback we get from customers is how good the quality of our coffee is."
With a growing customer base, Matt and his team are looking to expand beyond the confined space of the railway arches into a larger facility - and perhaps even invest in another roaster. For now, their focus remains on fostering a better industry for everyone involved.
Matt said: “We will always strive to better our industry as a whole, whether that be how we can work with farmers better by having better communication and fairer prices, or whether it's through sustainability causes.
"We're always trying to find things where there are ways of improvement, and then doing everything that we reasonably can to achieve that.”