From our humble beginnings early in 2004, the home roasting hobby has turned into a business, an obsession and a life consuming pastime. And now, 8½ years later, we have etched a little mark in local coffee history as a Golden Bean Winner; it feels surreal, but also feels pretty damn good.CoffeeSnobs has always had an ethos of learning, sharing and teaching the art of better coffee via the public website. There is nothing that gives us all more joy than seeing people learn to roast or seeing them have their epiphany moment on an espresso machine, when they go from “pouring bitter gushers” to “pouring liquid chocolate” off a group handle. While we call ourselves snobs, the whole community of CoffeeSnobs is encouraging and helpful without judgement to new users, and it’s those same new users who will one day be providing guidance to someone newer than them. It really is community collaboration at its very best.The CoffeeSnobs business model is a very odd one. Apart from the obvious internet based “store open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week”, a busy website means that we can sell advertising space. That advertising revenue covers the website overheads and also subsidises some of the bean and freight costs for all of the CoffeeSnobs membership. Members get amazing beans at a great price, and they also support the advertisers by purchasing their products. While not your typical manufacturer/consumer relationship, it is a complete circle that gives everyone great value.Of course, CoffeeSnobs is far from a one man show. Website moderators do a stellar job of making sure the community runs smoothly, and most of what they do is hidden behind the scenes where we have discussions about policy and direction. The whole CoffeeSnobs community is mostly self policing, and members always encourage positive, helpful posts. Typical small business workload of 16 hours a day, 7 days a week is little surprise to most business owners, and being able to selfishly follow your dreams is only possible with the support of your family. My wife, Paula, and the kids (Sarah, Zed and Tiana) along with Dad are hugely supportive, helpful and tolerant of my odd working weeks, and they also look after the business while I shoot off around the country and around the world a few times a year. Any accolade we ever receive is thanks to all my friends, family and customers, as you all play a big part in the punch-line.

To all the guys at Café Culture, I applaud your yearlong effort to put on Australia’s biggest coffee roasting competition. It’s a huge amount of work and every year it gets bigger, better and runs smoother. For those who don’t know the team, they are incredibly hardworking and have a sincere and friendly passion to make everyone welcome and to promote the industry for the betterment of all of us.

Winning a competition using two custom blends created for Fiefy’s Specialty Café in Pirie St, Adelaide was a stunning result for us and hopefully for her café too. It really emphasises to me that it’s possible to provide your customers with great coffee at a commercially viable price, without having to cut quality corners.

CoffeeSnobs has been an exciting journey so far. I love the industry, I’ve met some awesome people, and our wonderful customers allow me to play with some of the most amazing coffees in the world. Life is good, and I look forward to enjoying the next exciting chapter.

– Andy.

TIMELINE

2004: Coffeesnobs started out as a small group of home roasters looking to buy a bag of green coffee to share. Soon after that, it became a website where home roasters could discuss their process. Topics about coffee roasting turned into questions about coffee machines and grinders as the website grew. More people joined in the discussions.

2005: With a membership totalling 200 and the monthly distribution of green beans growing, the existing co-op style started to unravel, and it became obvious that CoffeeSnobs needed a fresh injection of ideas. Many different ideas were trialled, some worked and some didn’t, but everyone was having fun experimenting and we were selling some interesting green coffees in cotton bags that we would cut and sew together in front of the TV at night.

2006: The popularity of the website and the monthly green coffee sales was causing slow server performance, and our clunky system of manual invoicing meant that the user experience was far less than optimal. New computer hardware was purchased, and a new web based store called BeanBay was born. The 1,200 members could now order without the long waits and website timeouts.

2007: With 2,100 members on the site talking about the wonderful coffee they just roasted, the regular question from those who don’t roast at home was, “Why don’t you sell roasted coffee too?” So we purchased a 10 kg roaster and built a small 6 m x 6 m roastery in Dad’s paddock to supply roasted coffee. The actual roasting was only done on weekends (as I worked full-time in IT during the week), so all the orders for the week were collated, roasted and then shipped out Monday lunchtime.

2008: Having originally been Fair Trade certified, we wanted to do something with even more impact for the farmers and their families at coffee origin, so the FairCrack fund was started mid 2007. In 2008, we funded our first project, which was to purchase and supply two coffee pulpers for farmers on Kilimanjaro, Tanzania.

Farmers could now take a much higher quality coffee to the mill, and that season they received $5.50 per kilo, instead of $0.50 per kilo, which was a huge difference in income and obvious had a great impact on the village too.

2009: We were bursting at the seams in our garage under the house, so we found a property for lease in an industrial area that had a nice view across a lake. A second hand forklift was purchased (no more hand unloading pallets) and for the first time we could source and land in higher volumes, so less people would miss out on the beans we offered.

2010: After spending 18 months building and commissioning a computer controlled roaster, it finally gained Energy Safe certification and we retired our trusty 10 kg roaster. While we had used the CoffeeSnobs Roast Monitor software for years, this was our first opportunity to control a roaster from the same software. This was a huge leap forward in roast consistency and has opened up a whole new world of tweaks and scope to play.

2011: Having roasted mostly for domestic and small business customers, 2011 saw a move to creating better custom blends for some of our café accounts. Dozens of roasts with different components and different profiles are required as the building blocks for each custom blend. It’s a lot of fun creating something special for a café that is unique to them and gives them a style all of their own.

2012: The CoffeeSnobs website is huge and has outgrown the original software and hardware. A new, state of the art computer server was purchased and new software was installed to run the forum. 22,000 members and more than 5,000,000 page views a year requires a lot of behind the scenes infrastructure and after some upgrade teething problems, the new equipment looks up to the task. Along with sourcing beans from many Australian and overseas brokers, we have been landing record amounts of coffee direct from farms. Sharing these finds with CoffeeSnobs members each month is a lot of fun, and obviously the real highlight of the year is to win the 2012/2013 Golden Bean Roasting Competition.

2013: If you have read this far down the page, then I guess you must have some involvement in the coffee industry. Please consider sharing some of your knowledge with others via our website; it’s a lot of fun and you might just find your next employee via the website too. People with a passion for great coffee and a willingness to learn everything about the industry have the potential to be the future of your business and our whole industry.

Get involved and join in the fun at
W. www.coffeesnobs.com.au