Australian coffee is very insecure in a way that other food businesses aren’t.
There’s a baker in Inverloch, who makes really great cardamom buns, cinnamon buns… This weekend he’s working with a bakery here in Collingwood, making the buns together, selling the buns there...
Coffee doesn’t do that, you know. There’s no weekend when Market Lane invites me to come over and work on their roaster.
We’re so unsure of ourselves, so unsure about the quality of what we do, that we don’t have the core belief in the fundamentals of what we do.
Then we do two things - we get protective, and then we get gimmicky.
And that’s what Australian coffee seems to be based on.
That’s Tim Williams, founder, and CEO of Bureaux Coffee, a coffee roaster collective (now retailer) based in Abbotsford.
I’d forgotten how I stumbled across Bureaux. Mindless phone scrolling between lockdown 5 & 6, perhaps. (I remember now: yum cha along Victoria Street, then googled ‘coffee’ after.) They open 4 hours a day, a warehouse in a laneway with a brothel, a dog-care center, and panel beaters as neighbours. It reminds me of the old Seven Seeds, old Market Lane, Small Batch - secluded and introverted. Just a machine and rows of coffee on display.
Before going retail themselves this year, Bureaux was a collective, providing all the knowledge and facilities to anyone interested in roasting their own coffees. (Think shared workplace for coffee roasters.) Their graduates include Patricia, Wood & Co, Assembly, Everyday Coffee, Path and more.
I noticed and complimented the posters of the World Aeropress Championship on the wall, only to learn that the person making my cup of coffee was the organiser himself. Oh yes, there’s a World Aeropress Championship, the finals will be held in Melbourne this year. (Pushed back to 2022.)
The idea to write about WAC for the newsletter has always been slowly simmering until I saw that Tim’s recently done a podcast with Dani Valent, my writer partner during Fairfax days. They dived into some heavy stuff like coffee and the environment, sustainability, fair wages, like an intense cup of double shot ristretto. I wanted something lighter and easy, like a brew from an … Aeropress. I thought I should strike while coffee was still fresh on his mind. Tim was generous enough to accommodate me on a Monday morning.
So let’s start.
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