Soho Grind Feature. Man, we’re in the presence of some coffee shop royalty in this post today. Much like a couple of features before this one, I’ve been putting off writing this blog post for quite a long time, simply due to the fact that I’ve wanted to make sure that this could be the best it could possibly be! Heck, I could simply stop the blog post there, since that’s evidence enough that these guys are good. Right, let’s get right into it with a bit of context behind the

Oh I’m happy. Oh i’m so so happy. My offices are located on Carnaby Street, which to any of you who don’t know London well, is just off of Oxford Street. As of today, this area has been cordoned off to set up the wonderful display that is ‘Lumiere Lights’, which is definitely a must see if you’re in or around the area. But you know what this meant? No buses were travelling down Oxford Street and I sure as heck wasn’t taking the doubly busy tube line (I mean it was 5:30pm on a

Wahey! My internet seems be coping long enough for me to write and upload this. If you haven't heard yet, I'm having a huge problem with TalkTalk internet and they're refusing to fix it. So heck, writing these once a day blog posts are harder than they ever were before! Once my internet is sorted, I'm definitely not allowed to complain about this! So today, I skipped the regular office location of Kingston upon Thames and went for a new view over at Esher. Well, when I say 'n

I feel totally bad for saying this, but I've meant to have written this post for a good year so now. Heck, I think the place has been open for well over a year now, and I've wanted to write about this place as soon as it landed in Kingston so for that I am genuinely sorry that I have only just gotten my backside into gear. But heck, that's what this whole 'blogging once a day' New Years Resolution is all about. So here it is. Beanberry Coffee. Deep breath Izzy, don't mess it

I've managed to follow my New Years Reso- of posting daily for two days now...and that's already longer than what I originally thought I'd do! I've ended up with a massive flu-like bug, which isn't great, but I'm plowing through because I've got one heckuva brilliant blog post today. Because today, we're celebrating those of 2017 who made the coffee and blogosphere glorious. It was quite difficult to narrow these down and only select a handful of people, as there were some ab

Isn’t it just typical that when a speciality coffee shop opens up in my area, that my camera has run out of battery? I’m not going to be around Waterloo for the rest of the week, so I wanted to get this blog post out anyway so took some relatively average looking photos on my phone. It’s only a small space so hopefully it does it justice. But hey ho, sorry about the lower-than-usual quality photos. This isn’t their first site, and the name ‘Urban Baristas’ does ring a bell. H

Wellness is a huge deal at the moment, and fair enough a lot of it may be some smushy gobble-dee-goop designed to make money off the average stressed person. However, I do firmly believe that everyone should adopt small mindfulness tactics which can be implemented easily into their routines, to allow time for the simpler things in the ever-increasingly rushed and anxiety-prone world. So I thought I’d share with you my way to have ‘me-time’, as well as practice a well-deserved

Oh, I'm going there today. I'm in a down-n-out mood today, so probably shouldn't be touching upon any hardcore topics at the moment, but this is way too much of a serious and important topic to cover. And it's something which is brushed off and overlooked for the most part, which is very scary. However, before we get into this, I want to emphasise that, like many sexist parts of an industry, this does not affect everyone and anyone who is a part of the coffee industry. If you

Working in both the blogosphere and specialty coffee industry I don't go even a day usually without seeing extravagantly decorated lattes in my face. There's swans left right and centre, as well as a constant race to try and put as many 'layers' as possible on their tulip's flat white. However, more often than none I'm left sipping what is a relatively mediocre cup of 'specialty' coffee and thinking...when did espresso theory start to come second to making instagram-friendly

And you know what, working on the border of Vauxhall/Kennington has its perks, as all of this has been given to me through the ever-amazing coffee shop that is Vanilla Black. I first became acquainted with Vanilla Black after they started following me on Instagram a while back. From then on I thought their aesthetic of the place was absolutely gorgeous, and definitely my kind of coffee shop if I ever wished to open one in the future. Until I started working in the area, howev