We embrace our history but are not bound by it. Our aim is to ally the traditions and artisan roasting techniques of our past with the latest available technology. When we installed Scotland’s first Loring Smart Roaster, a New Standard was born. New Standard is a curated collection of speciality coffees produced exclusively on our Loring Smart Roaster, these are exceptional coffees of unrivalled quality and true provenance. Our aim is to preserve the natural flavours that our farmers have worked hard to nurture while growing and processing the beans and to avoid masking them with generic roasted flavours.

We are proud to follow the same pioneering spirit that our founder David Thomson instilled when he opened his first shop in Glasgow all those years ago. We have been introducing customers to new and exciting coffees for over 175 years and we continue to do so. Thomson’s Lab is our testbed, a place for us to uncover the tastes of tomorrow - here we focus on exceptionally rare and unique coffees, micro-lots and experimental roasts.

On the coffees you will notice a circle with a number in it which represents the roast level and has nothing to do with coffee score. Click on it and our roast level chart will pop up. The low numbers refer to dark roasts while high numbers are pointing towards light ones. As a reference Full French is our darkest coffee and its value on the scale is 34 while a Light Roast will be 90 or over.

The scale used to measure the roast level is the Agtron Gourmet and the way it works is analysing the coffee color and translating it into a number scale from 5 to 140. This isn't usually shared with the public since roasters use it mostly for quality control and matching profiles but we thought it's the best and most accurate way of understanding the degree of roast in coffee. If you want to know more about measuring color in coffee we recommend this article from Roast Magazine