Sarah Lidwell-Durnin learns that small, independent concerns serve up fantastic drinks in side streets far from the madding tourist crowds

Imagine that you want to open a hip, stylish little café in Oxford. Fired up with enthusiasm, you search for online commercial property in the city centre and you find: a shed behind Oxford Railway Station for £100k and disused toilets under St Giles for £65k. Not daunted, you decide to rent, and you find a lovely shop on the Broad – but that’s 95k per annum (never mind business rates). Dejected, you recycle your bean sacks into cushions for the children’s bedroom.

If you are a serious coffee lover, you might find Oxford a challenge. Independent food retailers struggle with sky-high rents and limited commercial space in the city centre. Most cafés focus on food and drinks laced with sugary syrups.

But down side streets you can find several new independent cafés dedicated to lovingly brewed coffee.

It started a few years ago when The Missing Bean brought Oxford its first proper coffee menu. Although they serve food as well, their focus is on their drinks menu, and that, combined with their ideal location – a bright and wide, not deep, space – proved Oxford needed proper coffee.

Since then, more cafés have appeared run by people who know their roasters and where their beans are sourced.

Best known is probably Zappi’s, hidden upstairs over Bikezone on St Michael’s Street. The fantastic coffee there is an open secret as the two Dans who run it take coffee very seriously. The famished undergraduates might have their heads turned by the cheap toasties, but anybody in Oxford who cares about coffee knows that the Zappi’s team knows about steaming milk. Their main source of beans is UE Coffee, a roaster in Witney, but they also source beans from small producers for guest slots. Their partnership with Bikezone gave them a great start with the Oxford cycling scene, but it wasn’t long before they were discovered by the rest of the city.

More recent to the scene, and just outside the city centre on Cowley Road, is Quarter Horse. Serving coffee from Square Mile in London, their team is passionate about coffee and sell a wide range of coffee from Square Mile as well as kit to make your own coffee at home. They get their pastries from the wonderful Natural Bread Company (another Oxford business that cares about coffee), their cakes from Barefoot Kitchen and have built up a fantastic reputation in a very short time.

Nathan and James, the friends who run Quarter Horse, with backgrounds in psychology and human rights respectively, discovered the gap in the market in Oxford when Nathan’s wife was doing her DPhil at the university. High rent in the city centre and Jericho combined with a dearth of independent cafés in the area decided their Cowley Road location. They spend more on their beans than most, as they only serve Square Mile, although they use local producers for food and milk. Nathan says that economising on beans would betray their focus on quality, and feels that London-based Square Mile sells the best beans in the country.

Possibly the most unusual café in Oxford is the Pukeko coffee truck, which can be found at farmers’ markets as well as in Radcliffe Square in the warmer months. Owned by James Armitage, who also coaches college rowing and is a professional counter tenor, the idea was a combination of a response to the high rents in Oxford and a desire to bring top quality coffee to events and farmers’ markets. The Pukeko truck’s freedom to move means you can find it at farmers’ markets as well as (although not at the same time as) in Radcliffe Square and you can be sure of a queue of people thrilled to discover top quality coffee served by such a genial host.

The truck itself came about when James found a Vespa on the side of the road on the edge of Oxford. He tracked down the owner, bought it and embarked upon a loving overhaul leading to the vivid blue tricycle of today. His love of all things local means he uses UE Coffee beans and he values direct access to their knowledge. The Vespa is set up for espresso based coffees – he feels that it is the most effective way getting a finely controlled extraction from the bean.

All these entrepreneurs value the quality of beans.

Fancy opening your own unusual café? Check out the subterranean toilets built in 1895 opposite the Ashmolean Museum on St Giles marketed by Martin & Co. See oxfordtimes.co.uk/news/yourtown oxford/11043269.City_centre_property_is_ not_your_bog_standard_buy