Specialty Coffee Wiki

Has Bean

Properties3
descriptionThe Staffordshire roaster that turned a market stall into Britain's best-known mail-order specialty coffee business, sent Dale Harris to the 2017 world barista title, and no longer exists under its own name — it merged with Ozone Coffee in 2018 and the two rebranded as Ozone at the start of 2024.
tagsorganization, roaster, united-kingdom, stafford, mail-order, third-wave, competition, defunct-brand
aliasesHasbean, Hasbean Coffee, Has Bean Coffee, Has Bean Coffee Ltd

11 min read

Has Bean

Has Bean — written Hasbean on its later packaging — was a specialty coffee roastery in Stafford, Staffordshire, England, founded by Stephen Leighton.12 It sold almost entirely by post, built one of the earliest large online followings in British coffee, and supplied the coffee behind a world barista title.

The brand no longer trades under its own name. Hasbean and Ozone Coffee Roasters “joined forces in 2018,” and “the two businesses rebranded together as Ozone at the start of 2024.”12 Today the old web address, hasbean.co.uk, returns a permanent redirect straight to ozonecoffee.co.uk — the clearest possible confirmation that the name has been retired rather than merely quietened.3

Why it belongs in this wiki: Has Bean is Britain’s clearest example of a specialty roaster built on mail order and an internet audience rather than on cafés. Compare Square Mile Coffee Roasters, which was founded on two world titles and sells mostly to other businesses, or Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Blue Bottle Coffee, whose shops are the brand. Has Bean’s shop was a website and a postbox, and that shape arrived in the UK roughly a decade before subscription coffee became normal — see Third wave coffee for the movement it sat inside.

The company

AttributeDetail
FounderStephen Leighton14
StartedA market stall in Stafford, three days a week, in 1999, reselling coffee roasted by someone else1
Founded as a company2002, Stafford — the date given by trade press and business databases25
BaseStafford, Staffordshire, United Kingdom12
RoasteryUnit 16, Ladford Covert, Ladfordfields Industrial Estate, Stafford ST18 9QL — still the roastery under the Ozone name1
ModelPredominantly mail order and subscription, roasting “every day of the working week”2
Merged withOzone Coffee Roasters, 201812
Brand retiredRebranded together as Ozone at the start of 20241

From a market stall to a roastery

The company’s own history, published by Ozone, tells the story in stages.1 In 1999 Leighton began buying roasted coffee from a roaster and reselling it on a Stafford market stall three days a week — “the internet was still fairly much in its infancy,” as the account puts it. A small shop in Stafford town centre followed, described bluntly in the same account as “VERY small, and in an awful location, but cheap and affordable”; it became The Has Bean Cafe. Roasting moved into a 750 sq ft industrial unit, then 2,500 sq ft, then 5,000 sq ft.1

The plain-English version: this was a one-person reselling operation that grew into a roastery by degrees, not a funded launch. That matters for reading its later reputation — the mail-order business came first and the roasting equipment came after, which is the reverse of how most roasteries in this wiki started.

To verify — the founding year is given three different ways

The sources do not agree on when Has Bean began, and the disagreement is probably about what counts as the beginning:

  • 1999 — Ozone’s own company history dates the Stafford market stall to this year, but at that point Leighton was reselling someone else’s roasted coffee, not roasting.1
  • 2002 — Sprudge states the company was “founded in Stafford in 2002,”2 and a business database gives the same year.5 These are the two most independent sources and this note treats 2002 as the company founding.
  • 1999 garage roasting, a 1 kg roaster, and an e-shop opened in 2003 with a 2 kg roaster — a secondary roastery profile adds this sequence.4 Nothing consulted confirms it, and it conflicts with the official account’s market-stall framing of 1999. Do not repeat the garage, the machine sizes or the 2003 e-shop date as fact. No incorporation record from Companies House was checked for this note, so the legal entity and its registration date remain open.

The Ozone merger and the end of the name

The two brands came together in 2018, and this is confirmed independently: Ozone’s own history says “Hasbean and Ozone joined forces in 2018,”1 and Sprudge reported the same year for the acquisition.2

For four more years the Hasbean name kept running as its own brand. In May 2022 the combined business launched a full Hasbean redesign, debuted at the London Coffee Festival — new home-compostable bags, a refined word mark, and a seven-colour flavour-profile system meant to make specialty coffee legible to newcomers. Ozone’s head of design, Ed Hughes, described “about six months from our first mood board sessions to the launch of the new Hasbean.”2 See Coffee packaging for why compostable bags are a harder problem than they look.

Then, at the start of 2024, the two businesses rebranded together as Ozone and the Hasbean name was dropped.1 The 301 redirect from hasbean.co.uk to ozonecoffee.co.uk is the live evidence of that.3

The sequence — separate brand, shared owner, shared brand — is worth noting because a 2022 rebrand of a name that would be retired 18 months later is an unusual thing for a company to spend six months on.

To verify — whether anything still ships as "Hasbean"

Nothing consulted states whether Hasbean-branded coffee was still sold after the start of 2024, whether any subscription customers were migrated, or what happened to the Has Bean Cafe in Stafford.13 The roastery address is stated in the company history as current under the Ozone name, but no source consulted dates that statement.

Competition record

Has Bean’s name appears in this wiki in two places, and one of them is a world title.

YearEventResultDetail
12005Cup of Excellence, NicaraguaJury serviceStephen Leighton served as a judge14
22010Nordic Roaster5thPlaced behind Tim Wendelboe (winner), Da Matteo, Solberg & Hansen and Gourmet Coffee, ahead of Viva Cafe6
32017World Barista Championship, Seoul1stDale Harris won the world title competing for the United Kingdom while working for Hasbean, with a recorded score of 526.57

Two things to read carefully here.

The 2017 world title is the big one. Dale Harris is described across the trade press as having spent around eight years at Hasbean, latterly as its director of wholesale — so this was a working coffee professional at a mid-sized roastery, not a sponsored competitor.7 The coffee behind it is now partly identified: an SL28 from Las Brumas in El Salvador, farmed by Ernesto Menéndez under his Wild Forest Project — see Dale Harris for the sourcing and its caveats.8 No lot number, processing method, altitude, price or score is recorded anywhere consulted.

The 2010 Nordic Roaster result is a different kind of signal. That competition gives every entrant the same green coffee, so the only variable left is the roast — see Coffee roasting. A British roaster placing fifth in a field otherwise dominated by the Oslo and Copenhagen light-roast scene puts Has Bean inside that conversation rather than outside it.

To verify — the 2005 Cup of Excellence jury and the 2010 placing

The Nicaragua 2005 jury service comes from the company’s own history and is repeated by a secondary roastery profile;14 no Alliance for Coffee Excellence jury list was checked, and the account does not say which competition round or whether it was the national or international jury. The 2010 fifth place is taken from this wiki’s Nordic Roaster note, which sources it to a single contemporaneous trade report; that report records vote counts for the top four but only a placing for Has Bean.6

Sourcing and roasting style

This is the weakest-evidenced part of the record, and it is flagged rather than asserted.

To verify — everything below rests on one secondary profile

A roastery profile published by a green-coffee trader states that Hasbean sourced from long-standing partners in Africa, Central and South America and Asia; roasted for espresso, filter and omni use at medium and medium-dark levels; and ran four Probat roasters.4 None of this is confirmed by any independent source, and the roast-level claim sits awkwardly with the company’s reputation and with a fifth place at a Nordic light-roast competition.6 Treat the whole paragraph as an unverified trade listing.

What is documented, and what is not, is worth stating plainly: apart from the single competition lot named above, no farm name, producer, altitude, processing method, cupping score, lot number, auction price or winning bid is attached to Has Bean by anything consulted for this note — not in Cup of Excellence records, not in any auction result sheet. Compare Klatch Coffee or Angelino’s Coffee, whose presence in this wiki is essentially a ledger of what they bid. Has Bean’s is a ledger of what it shipped, and nobody publishes that.

To verify — a name collision worth knowing about

Searching “Has Bean” also returns hasbeans.com, trading as Has Beans Coffee & Tea, which is a different business and not this roastery.9 Any biography, price or product detail found under that name does not belong on this note.

Footnotes

  1. Ozone Coffee — The Story of Hasbean: From Market Stall to Coffee Roastery — the owner’s own published company history; confirmed via WebFetch; source of Stephen Leighton’s name, the 1999 Stafford market stall, the town-centre shop and Has Bean Cafe, the 750 / 2,500 / 5,000 sq ft roastery progression, the Ladford Covert address, the 2018 merger wording, the “rebranded together as Ozone at the start of 2024” wording, and the 2005 Nicaragua Cup of Excellence jury service ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16

  2. Sprudge — Coffee Design: Hasbean Coffee’s Redesign With Ozone Coffee Roasters — trade outlet; confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 2002 Stafford founding, the 2018 acquisition, the Staffordshire roastery and daily roasting, and the May 2022 redesign, compostable bags, seven-colour flavour system and Ed Hughes quote ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

  3. hasbean.co.uk — checked via WebFetch; returns HTTP 301 Moved Permanently to https://ozonecoffee.co.uk/, the direct evidence that the Has Bean brand domain now resolves to Ozone ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Green Plantation — British roastery Hasbean — a green-coffee trader’s roastery profile; cited via the research report, not read here; sole source of the garage-roasting and 2003 e-shop sequence, the sourcing regions, the espresso/filter/omni and medium roast levels, and the four Probat roasters, all flagged unverified above ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  5. PitchBook — Has Bean Coffee company profile — business database; cited via the research report, not read here; second source for the 2002 founding and the Stafford base ↩ ↩2

  6. Barista Magazine — The Winners of the Nordic Roaster & NBC — contemporaneous trade report; the source behind this wiki’s Nordic Roaster 2010 table, including Has Bean’s fifth place ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Search aggregate — Dale Harris, 2017 World Barista Champion, Hasbean Coffee — confirmed via WebFetch; multiple independent outlets (Barista Magazine, Comunicaffe, Specialty Coffee Indonesia) confirm the 2017 Seoul title and the Hasbean affiliation, including the “director of wholesale” role and roughly eight years at the company. The 526.5 score is this wiki’s own World Barista Championship results table ↩ ↩2

  8. Barista Magazine — Dale Harris on Winning the WBC, Part Two — confirmed via WebFetch; sole source naming the Las Brumas SL28 and the Wild Forest Project behind the 2017 winning routine ↩

  9. Has Beans Coffee & Tea — Our Story — cited via the research report, not read here; noted only as a name collision with an unrelated business ↩

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