The Most Important Person In Coffee Isn't The Roaster

This is probably a strange article for a coffee roaster to write.

You'd expect us to sit here and tell you that roasting is where all the magic happens, because that's what we do every day. We spend our weeks tasting coffee, adjusting roast profiles, talking about flavour and trying to get the absolute best out of every batch that comes through the roastery.

But honestly... the longer we've been doing this, the less we've believed that.

If anything, the last few years have taught us how small our role actually is.

When we bought our first cafe back in 2017, we thought we understood coffee pretty well. We knew how to make it taste good, we knew customers appreciated consistency and we knew that if you cared enough about the details, people noticed. Looking back though, our understanding of coffee really only started when the bag arrived at our back door.

Coffee would be delivered.

We'd dial it in.

Serve it.

Order some more the following week.

That was about the extent of it.

It wasn't that we didn't care where it came from. We just hadn't realised how much happened before it ever reached us.

Roasting has changed that completely.

The deeper we've gone into coffee, the more people we've met and the more questions we've asked, the more we've realised that coffee isn't built by one person doing one job really well. It's built by hundreds of people, all doing their job well enough that the next person in the chain can do theirs.

And if we're being honest, that's probably what fascinates us most about coffee now.

These days, when we look at a bag of green coffee sitting in the roastery, we don't just see coffee anymore. We see years of work that happened long before we even knew that lot existed. Someone planted those trees years ago knowing they wouldn't see a meaningful crop for a long time. They looked after them through changing weather, changing markets, labour shortages and everything else that comes with farming. Then someone processed that coffee, someone exported it, someone imported it into Australia, and eventually it landed in front of us.

By the time we touch it, an enormous amount of skill has already gone into making that coffee what it is.

I actually think that's something the coffee industry doesn't talk about enough.

Roasters often get a lot of the attention because we're the last people to transform the product before you drink it, but the reality is we're standing on the shoulders of everyone who came before us. If a producer grows incredible coffee, our job is to respect that. If they don't, there's only so much we can do. We can roast badly and ruin exceptional coffee, absolutely. But we can't roast greatness into coffee that never had it to begin with.

That was a bit of a lightbulb moment for us.

It completely changed the way we think about roasting.

Instead of asking, "How can we make this coffee taste amazing?" we find ourselves asking, "How do we make sure we don't get in the way of everything that's already been done?"

They're similar questions, but they come from very different places.

One thing that's become really important to us over the last year is building relationships with people who are closer to origin than we are. The more conversations we've had, the more we've realised that buying coffee isn't really about buying coffee at all. It's about building trust with people who have spent years building trust with producers. That's one of the reasons we're so excited about the relationships we're developing through Mountain Journey Coffee. It’s because it gives us a better understanding.

We get to learn where the coffee was grown, why this harvest tasted different to last year's, what challenges the producer faced and what they're trying to improve next season. Suddenly that coffee stops being a line on a spec sheet and starts becoming someone's life's work.

We reckon that's worth knowing.

It's also changed the way we think about price.

People often ask why one coffee costs more than another, and it's a fair question. The simple answer is that price is incredibly complicated. There are exporters, importers, freight costs, roasting, packaging and running a business here in Australia. But we've also come to appreciate that when exceptional producers are recognised for producing exceptional coffee, the whole industry benefits. Better farming leads to better coffee, better coffee gives us something exciting to roast and, in the end, our customers get a far better experience in the cup.

Everyone wins.

So who's the most important person in coffee?

Honestly, we don't think there is one anymore.

Take the producer out and there's nothing to roast.

Take the importer out and that coffee never reaches Australia.

Take the cafe out and people never get to experience it.

Take the customer out and none of us have an industry.

Coffee only works because every person trusts the next person to care as much as they do.

Maybe that's the thing we've fallen in love with most about this industry. It's not just the coffee itself. It's the people behind it, all working towards the same goal without ever meeting most of the others in the chain.

And every time we roast a batch, we're reminded that we're only one small part of a much bigger story.

We're pretty grateful to be part of it.