From a pop-up in a church hallway on borrowed equipment, via a custom built VW Transporter Espresso Bar, to an established beautiful speciality coffee and brunch restaurant, along with a brand new espresso bar serving the very best coffee along with a growing selection of books.

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Way back when we had our first child, what we did in our spare time was go for coffee. With little to no knowledge of “speciality coffee”, not even knowing where to begin with it. No choices where we lived, other than your regular, big-chain coffee spots. Along came Square Peg Coffee House in Sketty. A place that finally seemed to bring the coffee up to where we always thought it should be. On top of that, they had incredible customer skills, and we felt totally at home and valued. It got us dreaming almost straight away. Why couldn’t Llanelli have something like this? Doesn’t Llanelli deserve some nice places? With good coffee? And to be treated well as a customer?

I’m going to do the shortest “to cut a long story short” ever here but, to cut a long story short, after gaining valuable experience in the speciality coffee scene at Square Peg followed by some time at Coaltown Coffee in Ammanford, in 2019 we took a punt on Shire Coffee Company. It was one of those “now or never” moments. Either we make a go of this, or I go back to a civil service job and get back to a place of “stability”. And so, in November 2019, using some equipment that we were so generously lent to us by Square Peg (as you’ll see by now, instrumental in our story) in a borrowed hallway in a chapel in Furnace, we started something. Just to see if we could do it. Did we want to do it? In February 2020, along came a global pandemic to put a stop to our plans and make us rethink everything.

After a long old year in hiding, we re-appeared with a custom built Transporter, that we were intentional about (at least in our mind) not feeling like the back of a van, but like you were at our cafe. Setup at a beautiful, underused spot near the coast in Llanelli, this became home for the next couple of years. Our approach was very much, even though we don’t have a physical, permanent cafe, we’ll treat this like one. As long as it was safe and reasonable to do so, we would do our very best to be parked up at the Water Park, serving the best coffee on our little La Marzocco, powered a little bit by the rarely-sighted sun.

In what was already a crazy couple of years of pivoting, adapting and rolling with whatever the world in 2020-2023 had to offer, we were then approached about the possibility of taking over a recently but well established brunch restaurant and speciality cafe in HWYL. And so, come February 1st, 2023, we took over the reigns at what was now “Shire Coffee at HWYL”, understanding that to most, this would still be HWYL, but Shire Coffee were now running it. Making some changes as we settled in and found our feet. Adding in a guest coffee spot alongside our long-standing partnership with Triple Co Roast in Bristol.

And in one, most recent of chapters—In October 2024, we decided that the van at Sandy Water Park would be saying farewell. But not for no reason. When we started trading there in 2021, it gave us the opportunity to finally begin creating a community. Seeing what we could do, given time and consistency. We were there 5 days a week and it was our sole focus, however during all of that, we had been going through a lease process for a property that we had our eyes on for many years prior and by the end of 2024, things with that project were finally about to kick off and so, the time was right for us to say a massive thank you, and step away from Sandy Water Park and to say hello to our second brick and mortar location, in the centre of Llanelli, on Stepney Street, another beautiful old building, like HWYL—Shire Coffee at The Bookshop. Is it a bookshop? Not really, not anymore. Many years ago, it was an old Christian Bookshop, and so it became affectionately known by us and all our closest friends and customers as “The Bookshop”. It has a very large (and apparently removable—if you know you know) bookcase, that people have generously donated towards the filling of it but this place is a coffee focussed, light bites, set up on a laptop or grab a quick coffee on your way to or from work kind of espresso bar and we could be happier to finally have it open.

Our simple goals from the beginning were to put Llanelli on the proverbial coffee map - which we’ve done with a couple of entries in to the Independent Coffee Guide; and to bring the best coffee, from the best roasters to the best people - which we continue to do and push harder to do better.