How an award-winning coffee roasting business is transforming the future for the next generation on a Cheshire dairy farm
When dairy farmer Robert Bostock wants to enjoy a coffee, he no longer sits at his farmhouse kitchen table. Since 2022, he strolls over to join a thriving community for drinks made with locally roasted beans at The Lost Barn Coffee Roasters – a beautiful coffee shop run by his daughters, and son in-law on land that was once part of the family farming business.
After an idyllic childhood growing up on the farm, daughters Jo and Faye both wanted to follow more creative career paths. Leaving the cows well and truly behind, the pair ended up pursuing other interests on the other side of the world in Melbourne, Australia. But soon after Jo met her partner Blair McKerchar and started a family, she wanted to give her children the same upbringing she had enjoyed on the farm.
“We were typical farmer’s daughters, just enjoying being children, playing, throwing tyres on the silage and getting in the way in the milk parlour,” remembers Jo. “I hoped my children could have that same experience.”
New Zealand-born Blair has been a chef and managed restaurants in London and Australia, amassing over 20 years of cooking experience. On returning to the UK, he was disappointed to find nothing had improved when it came to finding a good cup of coffee.
“Being a chef, I can cook,” he says, “and I understand about flavours.
“We’re spoiled for coffee in Australia and New Zealand and we had noticed that a lot of coffee in the UK hadn’t really moved on, it was still very dark roast. We felt that there was an opportunity to bring a quality medium roast coffee to the UK market.”
While Jo helped back on the dairy farm, the couple started setting up an artisan coffee-roasting business. They invested in a copper coffee roaster, ethically sourced top quality beans and started roasting their own blends in a converted shipping container. They sold wholesale coffee to cafes and restaurants and built up a business for consumers to brew their coffee at home. The micro-roastery proved to be a hit, with their Bloomsbury Blend quickly earning an industry-standard Great Taste award and in 2020 a Great Taste Golden Fork for the North of England from the Guild of Fine Food for being the best-tasting product in the North.
“All of a sudden our brand was alongside others that we had been inspired by and had looked up to,” says Jo.
Around this time, Faye Larsden also came back to the UK with her four children and remembers the lightbulb moment from her dad.
“He’d been reading about how farming families were bringing the younger generation back to the farm, not necessarily to work in farming, but to do their own thing and bring their own skills. He’d seen the success that Jo and Blair had had with the coffee roastery and thought, okay, we might be on to something here, why don’t we make this bigger? I’ve got an under-used farm up by the road, why don’t we build a bigger roaster, a café, a farm shop? And that’s where I came in to help expand the business.”
Originally funded through the farming business, they decided to refinance to expand the Lost Barn business. However, convincing their existing bank to help support the expansion proved difficult.
“To be honest, we weren’t even dealing with a particular human being,” says Jo who found it hard to get anyone to understand the details of the project and the funding they needed, until they found Oxbury Bank.
“We couldn’t have done this without Oxbury,” says Faye who helped design the café interior and stocked the adjacent farm shop, where they sell coffee blends and unique items. “They were so open to our ideas. They looked at the success of what we had already done, including the farm, and our knowledge and our skills and they were so keen to support the vision that we had.”
The result was that Oxbury not only invested in the family’s diversification project for The Lost Barn but the dairy farm business switched to using the bank too.
“It was really important for us that Oxbury was an agricultural bank. Our diversification project is so tied in with the farm – it’s a key point of what we do here. The fact that Oxbury understood the unique challenges farmers face, everything from cash flow to facing challenges that farmers have no control over – it’s really for the long term,” explains Jo.
“We’re still a young business and we feel we have a lot of growth ahead of us and we’re looking to the long term too. For us, Oxbury was a really good fit.”
For Oxbury, the investment was a no-brainer – they could see how the diversification was benefiting the farm, the family and had the potential to grow much bigger than their rural location.
“We see so many different types of diversification on farms today,” says Agricultural Relationship Manager Mel Shipley. “Some work and some don’t, and I think it’s important to have a point of difference. I don’t know of any other coffee roaster in this country operating like this. The roaster is in the café so you can see them roasting the coffee that you’re drinking and, most importantly, it is a really good cup of coffee.”
Business is booming and due to multiple requests to use the café for events, they have recently invested in two large teepees as a separate event space for everything from parties, to art classes, to yoga. This Christmas they are welcoming locals to the teepees for festive activities – and, of course, coffee!
“The teepees just fit in really nicely in the landscape and work really well with the meadow and complement the café and the roastery building. So far, it’s been a resounding success,” says Faye.
The Lost Barn Coffee Shop has become a popular destination for local coffee lovers and cyclists exploring the rural lanes around Cheshire. While the farm and the coffee business operate separately, the dairy farm is still very much at the heart of it all. The next step for the family is to pasteurise the milk from their own herd, not only for their own coffee shop, but for the 170 other venues they supply coffee to.
It’s a move that Faye says will feel like they have come full circle.
“The milk our cows produce is actually very favourable to baristas,” explains Faye.
“It will be the final link really between Dad getting on board with the diversification and cementing the relationship between the dairy farm and the other businesses.”