Rooted in Birmingham
Written by Dale Harris, cover photo by Rayaan
The best coffee businesses are often associated with global cities, London, New York, Melbourne; established specialty scenes, where every corner and alleyway holds an excellent cafe with a queue out the door. Places already recognised for their culture or prestige.
Birmingham is not always the place people expect, in so many ways, and that is precisely why it felt right. We chose Birmingham as it reflects how we think about craft, community, and the kind of future we want Ithaka to have. The city’s past, its present energy, and its emerging coffee culture all point toward the same idea: meaningful things are often built slightly away from the spotlight, by people more interested in making than performing. Birmingham is Ithaka’s natural home.
Industrial Origins
Long known as the “City of a Thousand Trades” Birmingham’s identity was never defined by a single industry or institution, but by countless small workshops, metalworkers, jewellers, engineers, printers, fabricators, inventors, each contributing quietly to something larger. Unlike cities shaped by aristocracy or empire, Birmingham grew through craft and industry. It was practical, experimental, and collaborative. Innovation here rarely arrived fully formed; it emerged through iteration, problem-solving, and shared knowledge between skilled people working side by side. That spirit resonates with the origins of specialty coffee, if not its more commoditised present, a spirit that shaped our founder, our values, and our perspective.
Specialty coffee at its best is a craft built on accumulated skill: agriculture, sourcing, roasting, brewing, hospitality, sensory understanding. It rewards patience, curiosity, and incremental improvement. Like Birmingham’s historic trades, it values expertise developed over time. We see Ithaka as part of that lineage, another small workshop within a city of makers. And whilst we’re ‘making’ coffee, our real intention is to be a workshop that crafts coffee-people, new baristas, cafe owners, coffee drinkers, and helps them understand its history and its potential, leaving them with a compass strong enough to guide them safely on their journeys. A place where quality is earned through process rather than proclaimed through scale. We believe that quality prevails, that rather than the short lived trends of social media, showing up honestly, working hard at our craft, and endeavouring to make our products and experience better every day, are the path to lasting value.
The Cities Future
Modern Birmingham is one of Europe’s youngest and most diverse cities, a place shaped by migration, reinvention, and cultural exchange. Walk through the city and you encounter overlapping worlds: music studios beside workshops, independent galleries next to food markets, students and entrepreneurs sharing space with long-standing communities. There is momentum. Artists, musicians, designers, and creative workers are reshaping the city’s identity in real time. The energy is exploratory rather than polished, collaborative rather than exclusive.
New means pliable, a city still forming, able to be shaped, free from a calcified way of doing things. For Ithaka, this matters enormously. We are not trying to build something fixed or finished; we are building something evolving. A café that experiments with flavour like a cocktail bar. A roastery that values conversation as much as product. A business that responds to people rather than dictating to them. Birmingham’s youth (mindset as much as actual!) and openness create space for that experimentation. There is curiosity without cynicism, an optimism that encourages new ideas rather than immediately categorising them. The city mirrors our own philosophy: confident without arrogance, ambitious without losing humanity.
Coffee in Brum
Despite being the UK’s second-largest city and serving a wider population approaching two million people, Birmingham’s specialty coffee scene remains relatively small. That isn’t a weakness, it’s an opportunity. A small but growing number of quality-led coffee businesses have begun to shape the landscape, each bringing distinctive perspectives and raising expectations around sourcing, roasting, and hospitality. Rather than a saturated market defined by sameness, Birmingham is a place where new ideas can genuinely contribute side by side, instead of a direct competition for attention.
What excites us most is the audience. Birmingham is full of curious, progressive people with broad interests, food, music, design, craft; who are ready to explore coffee more deeply. Many have not yet been invited into the complexity and diversity that specialty coffee can offer. The appetite is there, waiting to be met with honesty and care. We believe coffee grows best where curiosity meets accessibility: where expertise exists, but remains welcoming. Birmingham offers that balance. Our goal is not to dominate a scene, but to contribute to one, to be one voice among many pushing quality forward.
Things are shaped by the places they are built in. Think of the balti, created in the 70s by migrants looking to blend home spices with local tastes, or the heavy sound of factories influencing the music of Black Sabbath, or George Cadbury creating affordable homes for the factory workers.
After years of travel and international experience, there is value in staying still long enough to build something lasting. A sustainable business requires roots: relationships with customers, collaborations with peers, and a sense of belonging that cannot be replicated remotely. Birmingham allows us to invest locally while thinking globally. To build careers, not just projects. To create a space where people can encounter coffee differently, sometimes for the first time, sometimes in ways that challenge long-held expectations.
Like Ithaka itself, the city represents possibility rather than certainty. We don’t know exactly where our journey will take us, or what it will look like to reflect back after five, ten, or more years. The café will evolve. The roastery will grow and change. The community around us will shape who we become as much as we shape it. But Birmingham is the right place for us to begin: a city of makers, alive with new voices, and ready for the next chapter of coffee. And for a business built on journeys, beginnings matter.
