Category Rides

It was my second visit to The Mixing Shed Café, tucked away near Saffron Walden. As always, the roads leading here did not disappoint. There’s long stretches of straight roads with countryside views for miles and a good mix of…

Riding into the Maulden Cafe of Wooden Hill Coffee, the smaller of the company’s two sites, feels a little like being transported back to rural Pennsylvania. That’s where I grew up. The former bait shed, which has replaced their old…

Tucked into weathered brickwork on a tiny side street in Northampton town, you could be forgiven for missing it entirely. A bold yellow-and-black entrance is marked only by a modest Yellow Bourbon Coffee Roasters sign above the door. Downstairs is…

What do you do when there’s no good coffee shop within walking distance of your home? Open one as a side hustle of course. That’s what Anna Potapova and Anton Potapov did when they launched Holy Grain & Brew in…

After twenty-four years of living in the UK I still come across British weather words I’ve never heard before. Mizzling is one of them, and that’s what it’s doing today as I head down the M1 on my way to…

Finding a specialty coffee shop and a free motorcycle bay right next to each other in Central London is proof that there is a god. Or, at least a saint. Saint Nine sits on Southwark Street, surrounded by offices and…

The trip down through north London to Crouch End took around an hour from St Albans, helped along by calmer weather and a welcome return to a bike with more presence than the scooter I’d been using the week before…

The Greeks are delightfully serious about their coffee. You only need to walk a few steps in downtown Rhodes and you’ll land on a coffee shop. But there are a few that stand out in my opinion, not least because…

I sit down with Nikos Kalamaras, one half of Unik Specialty Coffee Brewers. We talk through how two brothers from a village 20km outside Rhodes Town built one of the island’s few real specialty coffee shops. We also get into…