I'm a London-based iOS developer. I taught myself to code after being made redundant during the pandemic, and I built Artisan — the coffee-finder I wished already existed. This is where I write about specialty coffee and the app.
Why Artisan exists
For years my morning ritual was a Pret coffee on the way to work. Back then it was genuinely good — markedly richer and more flavoursome than Starbucks or Costa. Then the prices crept up and the quality crept down, and one morning it just stopped landing.
A few years later I moved to Croydon and wandered into a small independent café called Crushed Bean. The coffee was the best I'd ever tasted. I haven't been able to settle since. That gap — between what "coffee near me" returns and what genuinely good coffee actually is — is what Artisan tries to close.
I built it because I kept opening map apps, searching for coffee, and seeing the same three chains plus a petrol-station counter. No specialty filter, no way to tell a place worth walking to from one worth skipping. So I built the app for myself, and since I built it anyway, I put it on the App Store.
What's on this site
The main piece is a guide I wrote on how to find specialty coffee worth walking to — it covers the five signals I use to read a cafe before I order, what "specialty" and "independent" actually mean, and what Artisan promises. If you've ever typed "coffee near me" and felt let down by the results, that's the one to read.