Yellow is a cafe and roastery on Cranford Street in St Albans, Christchurch, holding a 4.5 rating on Google, with news and updates shared through its Facebook page. As the name suggests, coffee roasting sits alongside the cafe rather than being left to someone else.
A roastery cafe lives by freshness: beans are roasted in small batches, often close to where they are poured, so the coffee in the cup can be days rather than months off the roaster. Black coffee shows this best — a filter or long black will tell you more about an origin than a flat white will — while the house blend is usually tuned for milk drinks. Beans are typically sold by the bag, and asking for the roast date is a habit worth picking up; anything within a couple of weeks is near its peak.
For a proper flat white and a bag of freshly roasted beans in this leafy corner just north of central Christchurch, Yellow is an easy call.