The loose end I couldn't leave alone
By trade I'm a designer, the sort who obsesses over the small details that make something feel right. I've also spent the best part of a decade deep in coffee: a home enthusiast with (let's be honest) far too much kit, happiest tracking down a new roast or working out how to make a service run beautifully.
I've organised things and cooked for people my whole life, and a coffee cart, it turns out, is just hosting at scale. Loose End is the idea I kept coming back to, the loose end I couldn't leave alone: take genuinely good coffee to people who don't usually get it. So I founded it. The name more or less wrote itself.
Years of tinkering, plus the training
I've been making and nerding out on coffee at home for years, dialling in shots and chasing a better cup long before there was a cart, and I've done formal barista training alongside all that tinkering and testing. The beans come from Horsham Coffee Roaster, a local roastery whose coffee I genuinely love, and our syrups are by Sip Syrup, additive-free and British-made, so even a caramel latte is made with proper ingredients. When an event needs more hands, I bring in professional baristas who hold the same standard, so the quality never dips, however long the queue.
Everything's dialled: Decent DE1 espresso machines, the right grinder, clean water, and a workflow I've sweated over for years. The cup that lands in your hand at 7am tastes like the one at 11.
Fully electric. Properly mobile
Most mobile coffee needs a van, a generator, a pitch and a long setup. Ours doesn't. The cart is small, completely self-contained and 100% electric, no power supply needed. A 5 kWh battery on board (about the same as ten e-bike batteries) runs it all day, so we can set up almost anywhere, indoors, up in a lift, in a field, off-grid. It fits through a standard doorway and is pouring within minutes of arriving.