Hard LinesCoffee

Matt Jones and Sophie Smith started Hard Lines as a coffee pop-up in 2016, gave it its blunt, memorable name a year later, and have built it into one of Cardiff's serious coffee operations: a café in Canton, a roastery up the hill at Gwaelod-y-Garth, and a counter in the Central Market. They roast their own beans on the sort of low-emission machine the trade takes as a mark of intent, pay the real living wage, and put a slice of turnover toward environmental causes — the modern independent's full creed, and in their case not just a line on the website. The coffee is what earns it, though: carefully sourced, properly roasted, pulled by people who take it seriously without making you feel you have to. A decade in and, by their own reckoning, in the best shape they have been. The kind of home-grown roaster a city keeps hold of once it has a good one.