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All in Where's My Coffee
When you’ve been working in hospitality for 35 years, there comes a time to settle. Having run many businesses from cafes, to espresso bars, to restaurants to fine diners, in 2015, George Choutis opened Roastville, the spot that would allow him to stay in one place for the foreseeable future.
Dan Kim has worked in cafes all his life but it wasn’t until four years ago that he was able to commit wholeheartedly to a single thing; coffee. Having previous co-owned Heritage Coffee Brewers in Summer Hill, it was the birth of his daughter Ava that led to Kim to exclusively focus on coffee in his next outing, Primary Coffee Roasters.
Unlike most other fields, there’s no definitive source of knowledge in coffee. There’s no bachelor of coffee, or even a diploma. While short courses abound in the area of barista training or hospitality skills, these are focused on the process of making coffee in its final step, and ensuring legal hygiene standards are met.
Being many miles and many time zones away from those who grow our favourite coffees, it’s not often that the coffee community in Australia get to meet the farmers who tend to the coffee plants which produce the beans that go into our cups.
The legendary coffee varietal known as geisha has been keeping the specialty coffee world abuzz since its first introduction to the world stage in 2004, when it won the Best of Panama Competition. In the intervening 15 years, it has become the benchmark for coffee competitions and now, it is coming to café menus.
It is no stretch to say that coffee can be good, but taking the next step and making coffee do good is a whole other thing. While many coffee companies tout their impact on the communities they source beans from or their efforts to give back to the communities they serve, most still run as for-profit enterprises.
In a newly created laneway between Clarence and Barrack streets in Sydney’s CBD, St Dreux Coffee Roasters are counselling the rest of the coffee industry that what customers want and what the industry is offering are not always one and the same.
Announced on Monday morning, The Grounds will be opening a coffee-focused venue in Eveleigh South in mid to late 2020. Perhaps unfairly maligned for the hordes of Instagram-focused customers, The Grounds is now signaling its intentions to be a driving force in Sydney coffee, bringing its in-house ethos to all things coffee.
Located just up the road from the workaday hustle and bustle of North Sydney’s CBD, Humm Coffee Roasters are taking control of their coffee, and inviting you to do so as well.
While some people might tell you that everything in coffee has changed in the past decade and a half, Daniel Karaconji, of Double Tap in Marrickville, will tell you that while some things change, others stay the same.
Taking a passion from a side-project to a full-time job will always involve a learning process, and that is what Matt Troughton’s journey with coffee has been. After upping sticks from Brisbane to New Zealand, Troughton became enraptured by the lives of baristas he saw while taking care of his newborn.
