Diary of a Shopkeeper, 30th November

A broken column.

Notes taken behind a cheese counter are not the natural place for a sombre obituary, especially when these notes often turn to whimsical humour. However, the recent loss of a good friend and business colleague cannot go unmarked. I’m talking, as many of you will guess, about Euan Smith, who passed away on November 9th, and whose funeral was held in a packed Milestone Community Church last Wednesday.

Euan made a remarkable contribution to many lives across Orkney over the last two decades. Most visibly, he founded, with Sara Tait, Orkney’s first coffee roastery of modern times. There are fleeting mentions of coffee being roasted here in the Victorian era, but documentation is sparse, and it’s hard to be sure how extensive the operations were. What’s for certain is that we’d been in a coffee desert for many years when Euan and Sara started their business, The Orkney Roastery, in 2016.

How things have changed since then! The Roastery perfected recipes for a wide range of different roasts, and distributed them to shops all across Orkney. They also provided dozens of cafes and restaurants with bulk coffee. Euan’s training in engineering made him a skilled and invaluable servicer of coffee machines, from grinders to espresso machines. He had a fanatical attention to detail, and would spend hours of focused attention to get a machine performing perfectly. And this after spending many more hours roasting coffee to perfection. It wasn’t unknown for him to throw a whole batch in the bin if he thought he’d misjudged the roasting by even a few seconds.

Of course the Roastery is no longer the only producer in the county. I’m aware of three others roasting their own beans and building a business out of it. Whether they were directly inspired by Euan and Sara I don’t know. But what is undeniable is that the Roastery pioneered the production of proper coffee in contemporary Orkney. They proved it was possible to achieve high quality roasting, and to build a brand that would sell both at home and away. Whoever follows them is walking in a path Euan and Sara created.

Before they roasted coffee together, Euan and Sara had worked as Sorton Partners, giving business advice to dozens of businesses across the isles, sometimes on a freelance basis, sometimes under the aegis of HIE and OIC. After Euan’s death, there was an outpouring of both grief and appreciation on social media from many people who viewed him not just as a business advisor, but as a mentor, even an inspiration.

He didn’t just talk the talk. He had walked the walk: he knew about business from the inside, and not only coffee. True, before moving to Orkney, he had worked as Operations Manager at the Edinburgh Tea and Coffee Company. But when I first met him, a few years earlier, he was Production Manager at Carrick Jewellery, based in Livingston, and at that time the biggest jewellery manufacturer in Scotland. It must have been painful for him when, in 2003, Carrick decided to close their Scottish factory and move production to China. I had some interesting conversations with him at that time. He believed strongly that the future for Scottish jewellery lay, not in a race to the bottom, but in a focus on quality and provenance. Certainly, the China venture did not end happily for Carrick, and Orcadian producers’ quality-focused approach has helped them survive and thrive. Euan was right, but he’d never blow his own trumpet about that or anything else.

To be exact, he’d never blow his own saxophone. I’d no idea he was a skilled player of that instrument till his wife Fiona, also a much-loved friend, mentioned it at his funeral. And a fellow jazz fan too! How had that never come up in conversation? Probably because there was so much else to talk about. Although I didn’t share his passion for vintage cars, I knew about it. How could I miss it when an ancient fire engine was parked outside his house in Sandwick? Mostly, though, we talked about coffee.

Euan offered a bespoke service for retailers who wanted their own unique roast. The first one I persuaded him to make us was a Christmas-themed one six or seven years ago. I came up with the idea of soaking beans in Port before roasting them. Everyone loves a glass of Port at Christmas. And everyone loves a cup of warming coffee. What could be better than combining the two? It turns out that just about anything would be better!

Our second bespoke effort was much more successful: Northern Light is a roast he came up with to satisfy my taste (a virus caught in trendy east London while visiting our daughter) for a light and bright coffee. Euan grumbled a bit about my request. ‘Half of these hipster coffees aren’t lightly roasted,’ he said, ‘they’re just badly roasted.’ Nonetheless he persevered, and eventually came up with a roast he was willing to sell to us – though he did insist we label it as ‘Lighter Roast’ rather than ‘Light Roast.’ That was Euan all over: intensely dedicated to what he believed was right, but also endlessly amenable and encouraging.

Euan Smith: perfectionism with a human face. We will miss him enormously.

In memoriam, Euan Mark Edward Smith, 24th September 1967 - 9th November 2025.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 4th December 2025. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.