Our Story

Prologue

We believe coffee is a fresh crop with the ability to taste many different ways, and it is a conversation we want to be part of. Idle Hands is not just for the people who enjoy drinking, tasting and making coffee, but the people who enjoy discussing and researching it too. Exploration and the accumulation of ideas are everything.

We are not here to preach, just to make our shop somewhere anyone can enjoy. With a range of quality coffee and brewing methods, we want every drink to be consistently special. And if it is not, we want to know.

We put that ethos into everything we do here: coffee, baking, food, wine, service.

Established in 2014, after many conversations about wanting to, we jumped off the deep end and started doing. In early 2015 we scraped together enough courage and energy to pop up on Piccadilly Station Approach. After a few months that felt like a lifetime, that little platform helped us find a permanent home in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.

That is just the beginning.

Chapter one

After leaving Station Approach the floor opened up and swallowed us whole, forcing a nomadic sixteen months upon us: popping up here and there, set up temporarily, taking on any odd event that we… you know what, it has been a hard, bumpy ride.

Those of you who know the full story can fill in the blanks. Anyone who does not can ask us over a beer sometime. But we hope we are now in the super happy, really long, final chapter*… like every good story ends, right? RIGHT?

*spoiler: we were not. This was written before covid happened. We might actually write the book one day. It is mad.