About The Fifth
Welcome to The Fifth
 with a flat white at Beans & Beats cafe in Brixton, London-2000x2000.jpg)
Then I started looking around. There are brilliant roasters all over the UK, producing coffees that taste completely different from one another. Some are tiny. Some have been doing it for years. Some have devoted followings in their own cities but are barely known elsewhere. The problem wasn’t a lack of great coffee. It was finding it.
If you already know the roasters, you can hop from website to website, keep a mental note of what you’ve tried and work out where to go next. If you don’t, the whole thing can become surprisingly complicated surprisingly quickly. I kept thinking there should be somewhere that brought it all together.
Not another coffee brand, or a subscription that decides what you should drink, and definitely not somewhere that tells you which coffee is objectively ‘best’. I wanted a place where independent roasters could keep doing what they do brilliantly, while you could discover their coffee in one place and start working out what you actually like.
That became The Fifth.
Flat white credit to Beans & Beats in Brixton.
The roasters are the point
This part matters. We don’t roast the coffee ourselves and we don’t want The Fifth to become the name you remember instead of the people who made it. The roasters are the heroes of this. They source the coffee, develop the roast, make the decisions and put their own character into what ends up in your cup. Our job is to make more of that work discoverable.
So when you order through The Fifth, your coffee still comes directly from the roaster. We don’t buy it, stack it in a warehouse and send it on again. You get their coffee, from them, while The Fifth gives you one place to find it, understand it and buy it.
It sounds obvious when you put it like that. It just took quite a lot of work to make the obvious bit work.
Try Our Flagship Coffees
From an idea to The Fifth
The original thought I kept coming back to was something like Naked Wines for coffee. Not as a blueprint, but as a simple way of describing the idea: a platform that could help brilliant independent producers reach people who might otherwise never find them.
As the idea developed, it became clearer what The Fifth needed to be. We wanted to bring together independent roasters from across the UK, make their coffee easier to discover and give people a better way to explore the sheer variety that’s out there. The roasters would remain firmly at the centre of it, while we built the experience around them.
What we didn’t have was a name. That came through conversations with Josh and Kate, who lead our platform and website development. We were kicking ideas around when they came up with The Fifth, and it stuck.
Coffee has been described as moving through a series of waves, from becoming an everyday habit, through café culture and the rise of speciality coffee, to the increasingly considered world we have today. The Fifth Wave is about taking all that progress and making it work for more people - combining quality and craft with a better, more consistent experience. That felt remarkably close to what we were trying to build.
We weren’t trying to create the next wave of coffee ourselves. The brilliant independent roasters we work with are already pushing coffee forward. We wanted to build the platform around them - somewhere that could make all that variety, expertise and great coffee considerably easier to discover. And so The Fifth felt right.
From there, the project began attracting people who understood what we were trying to make and wanted to help make it properly. That has probably been one of the nicest parts of building it. There hasn’t been a big corporate machine behind The Fifth. It’s been a group of people with different areas of expertise, working together because we think the idea is worth doing well.
Once we knew what The Fifth was supposed to be, though, we needed to work out what it should actually look and feel like. For that, I’m handing over to Ed.
Designing The Fifth
When Anthony first talked me through The Fifth, I wasn’t really a coffee person. What I did understand was the behaviour around it.
People who get interested in coffee don’t simply buy more coffee. They explore. They compare. They remember origins, roasters, flavours and processes. They find something they love, then immediately wonder what else is out there. I recognise that instinct because I have it with other things.
For me, it’s music. I care about the equipment, the format and the detail because all of those things change the experience. Other people have the same relationship with records, cars, watches, wine, books or any number of things. We like collecting knowledge around the things we care about.
That became the starting point for the identity. Rather than designing The Fifth as another online shop, I started thinking about it as an archive - something ordered and permanent, where individual coffees could be treated almost like specimens, documented clearly enough that you can look at them, compare them and gradually build up your own understanding of what you like.
That thinking runs right through the website. There’s a strict grid, information has a purpose, and products are presented in a way that encourages comparison rather than burying everything beneath sales language. Interactions let you discover more without constantly losing your place. It’s designed to reward curiosity.
Although there’s a lot of information available when you want it, the aim isn’t to make coffee feel more technical. It’s the opposite. Good organisation makes complexity easier to navigate, and the design gives the coffee room to be different while giving the whole collection enough structure to make sense.
The Fifth isn’t trying to be the loudest thing on the page. The coffee gets to do that - Ed.
Bringing it to life
Turning that thinking into the platform you’re using now has been a collaboration between Ed and Josh and Kate at The Glasshouse Project. We wanted to create something that didn’t look or behave like a standard e-commerce site, without reinventing perfectly good technology simply for the sake of it.
Underneath The Fifth sits Shopify, with a separately built front end and a wider technology and content setup that gives us considerably more freedom over how the site works. There are various platforms, systems and acronyms involved, but unless you share our obsessive interest in websites, the important bit is what they’ve allowed us to build.
Josh and Kate took Ed’s designs and made them work for real, while preserving the detail and thinking that made them distinctive in the first place. It’s been a great experience, with everyone involved caring perhaps slightly more about their particular part of the project than was strictly necessary.
That turns out to be quite useful when you’re building a website for people who care slightly too much about coffee.
Coffee without the rulebook
For all the thought, design and technology that have gone into The Fifth, what we’re actually trying to do is pretty straightforward. We want to get more people in the UK grinding coffee at home. Not because we’re coffee snobs - it just tastes so good.
Speciality coffee can sometimes look more complicated from the outside than it really needs to be. There are origins, processes, varietals, roast profiles, recipes and an impressive number of ways to spend money on grinders. All of that can be fascinating if you want it to be, but none of it is an entrance exam.
You don’t need to know your anaerobic natural from your washed Bourbon to start drinking better coffee. You can simply know that you liked the fruity one you bought last time, or that you prefer something rich and chocolatey, and go from there.
That’s why The Fifth is designed around discovery. You might love bright, fruity coffees. You might want something chocolatey and reassuring. You might become fascinated by unusual processing methods and end up weighing your water to the gram. You might care about none of that and simply want to find another coffee as good as the one you had last week. There’s room for all of it.
Freshly grinding a genuinely good coffee and making it yourself is one of those small things that can make an ordinary part of the day noticeably better. Once you realise how much variety there is out there, finding out what you like becomes part of the pleasure.
We’re not here to tell you what great coffee is. We’re here to help you find yours.