Missing Bean opened its first café among the colleges in central Oxford in 2009, and became, by its own account, “Central Oxford’s first independently owned coffee shop”. The founders, Ori Halup and Vicky Troth, both found their way into coffee as students in Sydney. Oxford is Vicky’s home town.

The roasting started in 2014 at a roastery in East Oxford, where the coffee is roasted five days a week. The Roastery Cafe sits in the same building, with a bean refill station and baristas who brew on methods from AeroPress to V60, and it hosts coffee tasting workshops. The in-house bakery opened behind it in 2023 and bakes the sourdough, pastries and focaccia sandwiches for every café, with regeneratively grown flour from Bruern Farms and Matthews Cotswold Flour. Besides the original café and the roastery, there are cafés in Cowley, Botley, Abingdon, Woodstock and Charlbury, and a café in Maidenhead that becomes a wine bar in the evening. Events include coffee tasting nights and a birthday Latte Art Throwdown for charity.

Missing Bean buys directly from farms where it can and uses independent green importers for farms too remote to reach. Its oldest direct-trade relationship is with Guillermo Cotrina in Peru’s Chilchos Valley, a 12-hour trek from the nearest road. The house espresso comes from the Salazar family’s El Calapo farm in Colombia, and other direct-trade coffees come from Finca Hamburgo in Mexico and from Gloria and Jane’s farms in Sakami, Kenya. Oxford City Farm collects the cafés’ used coffee grounds each week for compost, and the business pays the Oxford Living Wage. Bean-to-bar chocolate is now made in the same roastery.

The current retail range is listed below with the roaster’s own tasting notes.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Missing Bean