Coaltown Coffee
Location: Carmarthenshire
Established: 2018
No. of coffees: 16
Scott's roastery serving a new black gold shaped by the area’s coal mining heritage
Scott James set up Coaltown in Ammanford, a South Wales town that ran on anthracite coal for generations, with a straightforward idea: that great coffee could give a post-industrial community something to rally around again. The team roasts daily in small batches, working a range that moves from easy-drinking espresso blends through to more expressive single origins.
Their Coffee Range
The blends are a good place to start. Black Gold No.3 is the everyday espresso - nutty, milk chocolate, biscuit - the kind of cup that works morning after morning without demanding anything of you. Candle Light No.1 goes a little deeper, with dark chocolate and cinder toffee, and has picked up multiple Great Taste Awards along the way. If you want something with more fruit and drama, Anthracite No.2 is the one: a natural process coffee from Uganda's Rwenzori Mountains with strawberry, peach and honey running through it.
For filter brewing, The Union No.4 is worth a look - blackcurrant, orange and cocoa, clean and medium-bodied, developed specifically for that slower, longer brew. The single origins push further still: Unearthed Vol 3, an Orange Bourbon from Colombia, brings papaya, peach and mandarin, while the Komothai AA from Kenya delivers redcurrant, hibiscus and something close to oolong tea. Coaltown also covers the full range of caffeine needs - the Jenkin Jones Decaf No.5 offers chocolate, sweetness and citrus without compromise, and the Drifft Half Caff No.6 sits neatly in between, with chocolate, butterscotch and a hint of Daim.
More About Coaltown Coffee
Ammanford's last colliery closed in 2003, and with it went a good deal of the town's sense of itself. Scott James set out to do something about that. The name Coaltown is deliberate - a nod to the anthracite that once defined the place, and to the idea that a new kind of industry could carry some of that same pride forward. The roastery opened in 2018, and at its centre sits Geoffrey, a 75kg Probat GG75 drum roaster originally built in Germany in the 1950s. Scott spent four years restoring it from the ground up, fitting it with copper cladding, modern temperature sensors and an afterburner that burns off emissions at over 1,200 degrees Celsius. It's a working piece of history, roasting up to three tonnes of coffee a day.
The B Corp certification, achieved in December 2019, wasn't a marketing exercise. Coaltown scored 98 on the B Impact Assessment - well above the 80 required for certification and almost double the median for ordinary businesses. Their roastery runs on zero-carbon electricity, packaging is fully recyclable or compostable, and they pay above the National Living Wage across the board. Community work is woven in too, including support for the Jac Lewis Foundation, a local mental health charity based in Ammanford.
