Dark Woods is an adventurous, community-focused coffee roastery, dedicated to bringing you responsibly sourced specialty coffees from some of the world’s best producers. Our home is a converted Victorian textile mill at the foot of the West Yorkshire Pennines, surrounded by windswept moorland, drystone walls, and ancient woodland. This landscape, and the people who live here, help inspire how we craft our coffee. BEYOND SPECIALTY... Read any Specialty coffee roasters web site or promotional literature and you will be bombarded with phrases and claims about the quality of the coffee and the welfare for the farms they come from. These aims are welcome, most are well-meaning, but the generic messaging makes it hard to differentiate what each are actually doing. In order to understand the context in which we operate it is necessary to know what is meant by Speciality coffee. Strictly speaking these are coffees that score over 80 points in an industry (SCA) grading system. The system is not an external “certification”; anyone can grade coffee if they are trained in the correct procedures. Specialty Coffees usually come with better traceability and involve higher prices paid to the farms than their Commercial Grade counterparts but this is not actually accounted for in the current system (but should be under new plans). The result is that the term “Specialty Coffee” can still cover a vast range of prices, qualities and ethics. We believe that buying Specialty Coffee is the bare minimum that we should be doing as a quality focussed and ethical roaster. Over the last 10 years this philosophy has driven our behaviours and helped us develop a model that we call “Beyond Specialty”. We hope this approach drives our industry leading B Corp score, well over 100 Great Taste Awards, and our involvement in creating coffee education programs used worldwide.