Meeting with CHRIS BERRY of GROUND EFFECT COFFEE ROASTERS
10 Oct 2025
If he had noticed the sweet synchronicity of his surname with coffee roasting, Chris Berry gave no sign of it, as we gathered in the Members’ Lounge at Disley Golf Club for his brew with pastries for breakfast. He knows the area well, he told us, as he worked in catering right through his Business Studies degree at Sheffield Hallam, including in the Dandy Cock pub nearby in Disley.
But he didn’t stay there. Instead in 2002 he began training for his APTL H (Airline Pilots Transport License Helicopters) and for over 20 years flew heavy helicopters over the North Sea, in weather conditions which would have grounded many other flights, working up from First Officer to Training Captain. Flying out of Aberdeen or Norwich, “You saw everything – killer whales, migrating birds..” It was never an easy job, especially once wind turbines were built on the Continental shelf not far from base. He showed us videos of flying by instruments in fog which had some of us hiding behind our hands. It was clearly a life he relished.
Then one day he failed a medical: “And that was the end of my career,” he said, though he was barely into middle age.
Chris had always had a vision of someday owning his own business, “a dream café and a roastery,” as he put it. The two were to some degree incompatible – a café has to be where the customers are, while a roastery is an industrial site, needing access for big trucks bearing pallets (R G Morris the Buxton seafood suppliers manage both by having the factory on one side of the A515 at Staden Lane and the very successful restaurant on the other). So he decided to get the roastery up and running first. That meant committing to a coffee roasting training course at the London School of Coffee, where Chris built on his skills as a home roaster.
Why coffee? He admitted he only drinks it in the morning and never after midday. Perhaps because of the romance of a product which has been around for centuries; legend has it that Ethiopian goatherds noticed their animals eating some bright red berries and becoming very frisky, and a new commodity was born, with its earliest mention in Persian literature in the 10th century. It spread through Muslim lands but soon became popular in France, Italy and the Netherlands. Brazil turned out to be ideal for cultivation and is still the biggest producer (there’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil). Today coffee is grown in many countries, from Costa Rica to Tanzania, each with its own climate, soils and varieties, the two main ones being arabica and robusta. That’s where the skill of someone like Chris comes in.
“It’s a fussy grower,” he said, and the fact that each “cherry” only produces two beans means that a lot of bushes are required for a decent crop which means a lot of space in an equatorial, high altitude region with both humidity and sunshine. There’s also a “pea-berry” with smaller cherries and a single bean – now available from Ground Effect Coffee Roasters. The process by which the beans (actually the seeds of the “cherry”) are extracted comes in two main forms – “natural” means dried in the sun and then milled to remove the skin, “washed” means soaked first and then milled to remove the fruit and skin, then the beans are sun-dried. “The higher the quality of coffee, the more labour intensive it is,” Chris said, which led to a discussion about environmental and employment issues. Nescafé, Kenco and the big brands deal direct with huge estates producing higher yield but lower quality, that’s why it’s cheaper. Smaller operators normally purchase via agencies, but broadly speaking, if we want people at the growers’ end to do well, we have to accept a fair, higher price for our coffee.
The raw green beans arrive at Chris’s roastery in Great Hucklow in 60-70kg sacks on a pallet. He invested in a good roasting machine – they can cost as much as £27,000 each, but temperature and moisture control are vital to a successful outcome. Filter coffee (lighter, longer in contact with the hot water when brewed) is typically roasted for 11 minutes up to a drop temperature of 200-205° C. Espresso (darker, stronger) is darker, roasted for around 14 mins up to around 210 – 215°C – it’s going to brew in under half a minute. All the beans are different and roast at different temperatures and rates. You can try and see what suits your tastebuds best or buy his Wings blend, with profits going to Wings4Warriors, a charity training injured ex-service personnel to become commercial pilots.
How is decaf made? That’s done before he gets the beans in a process called “Swiss Water Processing.” The arabica beans are soaked to remove the caffeine, then all the flavourings are turned intact. No chemicals, nothing artificial is used.
One problem is the cost of coffee as a commodity. It only needs a scare about drought in one country for commodity traders to bid up futures, as he found when his first business plan met reality. The benchmark price jumped from $1.52 per lb in 2021 to $4.66 earlier this year; of course the big companies had already locked in supplies at the lowest prices. Yet this is a growth market. China has discovered a taste for coffee, and generational change means young people drink coffee more and alcohol less; they’re interested in different varieties and tastes. My economist head tells me that sooner or later, high prices will generate supply increases, though maybe at the detriment of virgin land or other agriculture. No easy answers.
Once up and running, the next stage, as Chris ruefully admitted, was to develop his marketing skills and strategy. “I’m planning fewer market stalls and more wholesale clients,” he said, with a new website and relaunch recently. He needs the bread-and-butter of wholesale – quality restaurants an obvious target, preferably with his coffee on sale in a corner for impressed clients. My own feeling is that he can actually charge more for retail and online clients like myself. We know premium quality does not come cheap.
“You will need to borrow,” advised one member present who specialises in small business finance. “And to do that you need excellent accounts. So make sure you have a good accountant.” And don’t make the mistake of trying to do everything yourself – he’s drafted in more help from family members. Quite suddenly the session became one of advising a start-up on what to do and how to avoid pitfalls and common errors – for me, a joy to listen to, and to see many useful networking contacts made for Chris.
I can recommend the coffee, and you’ll find it both ready-ground and whole beans at https://groundeffectcoffeeroasters.com where you can also find advice on brewing great coffee easily at home with reviews and suggestions of equipment in “Ground School” https://groundeffectcoffeeroasters.com/pages/ground-school .
Wishing Chris and his beans well in the future. Bottoms up!