Opening a Café: Our Updated Guide

From the cups your regulars hold every morning to the shelf that sends your coffee home with them, our Opening a Café guide has been rebuilt around the kit cafés are asking us about most.

There’s a lot to think about before opening a café, from the lease right down to the coffee. We first put this guide together to help new cafés work through the equipment side of that list. It has now been updated from cover to cover, with our current ranges, RRPs from our latest price file and three new sections on batch brew, try-before-you-buy retail and customisation.

Here’s what’s inside, and why it matters for your counter.

Batch brew that doesn’t taste like batch brew

It’s 8am, the queue is out the door and half of it wants a filter. Batch brew means great filter coffee is ready and waiting, with no barista tied up on a pour-over. Done badly, though, it’s flat and stewed.

Two things decide which: the temperature the coffee brews at, and what happens to it once it’s brewed. That’s why our pick for most cafés is the Wilfa Performance Thermo (£274.99 RRP ex VAT):

• Holds 92–96°C from the first drop to the last, and is ECBC approved
• Brews 1.25 litres (10 cups) in 4–6 minutes
• A stainless steel thermo jug keeps coffee hot without a hot plate, so it isn’t cooking while it waits
• A pump empties the system every cycle, so each brew starts with fresh water
• Designed in Norway, with a 5-year warranty

The guide compares the full Performance range, from the Zense at £132.50 to the Svart Performance developed with Tim Wendelboe, and covers grinders, filter papers from Filtropa and Hario, batch recipes, spare jugs and cleaning.

Let customers taste before they buy

Customers can’t taste a bag of coffee before they buy it, so most play safe and pick the one they already know. xBloom Studio changes that. It grinds, doses and pours any coffee on your retail shelf to a saved recipe, in a few minutes and with no barista needed.

• Pick a bag from your retail shelf
• Weigh the beans into the magnetic dosing cup. It’s your own coffee, so there are no pods to buy
• Choose that coffee’s recipe in the xBloom app, or tap its recipe card
• Pour into tasting cups and let customers compare, with the bag right there on the shelf

xBloom Studio comes in Midnight Black, Moonlight White, Sage Green and Twilight (£499.17 RRP ex VAT). We offer preferential pricing on demo units for in-store demonstration: £350 ex VAT, one per site opening. The guide also covers the accessories, including the Tea Brewer for loose-leaf tea tastings.

Put your name on it

Through our UK branding partners, we can put your logo on cups, mugs, drippers, filter papers, servers, kettles, grinders and reusable cups. There’s no minimum order on glass or ceramic projects: set-up starts at £330 for a one-colour logo, and application starts at £1.60 a cup.

For example, 36 Egg cappuccino cups with a one-colour logo costs £394.80 in set-up and application, plus the cups, and leaves you more than 660 decals for your next order. Want to go further? Fully bespoke Hario V60s, filter paper boxes and Loveramics products are all covered too.

Also inside

• Cups: the Loveramics Egg, Tulip and Twisted Glass ranges, the new Scandi and Boram Um cups, Egg in Classic, Reactive Glaze and Mineral glazes, and how many to order for a small, medium or large café
• Brew Bar: a Good, Better and Best kit list from £134.17 (now with Switch & Match, the Polaris scale, the Hario Lyra kettle, and Project Waterfall and Meteor papers), plus the new V60 NEO and W60 drippers, Switch, MUGEN, syphon and cold brew
• Espresso Essentials: Felicita scales and the everyday kit for your espresso bar
• Tea & Matcha: the Hario matcha collection and tea service
• Retail Wall: where to put your shelf, what to stock, and the best trade price for every line, so you can see the margin at a glance. Big-ticket items from Sage, Wilfa, xBloom and Comandante can be drop shipped, so you can offer every model and colour without holding the stock
• The Festive Season: eight ways to sell more in the run-up to Christmas, gifts for every budget from stocking fillers to showstoppers, and gift collections for adventurers, gadget lovers, travellers and everyday coffee drinkers
• Your Team & Getting Found: hiring baristas through Coffee Jobs Board, and listing your café on the Best Coffee Guide for free, so coffee lovers can find you from day one

Get the guide

Download Opening a Café Guide

Not trading with us yet? Register for a trade account at trade.brewedbyhand.com, or see what’s landing soon in New & Upcoming (trade.brewedbyhand.com/collections/new-and-upcoming).

Planning your counter and want a second opinion? Email sales@brewedbyhand.com or call 020 3876 9841. We’d be delighted to hear from you.

All prices RRP ex VAT from our September 2026 price file. The £134.17 brew bar figure is the Good tier total from the guide (p.17).