We buy greenby the pallet.
It started as arithmetic. Splitting a sack four ways cost more per kilo than the coffee did, and the coffee had been sitting in a warehouse for a month by the time anyone drank it. Buy the whole pallet, roast it twice a week, and both problems go away.
How it went
- 2017
One sack, one garage
A second-hand sample roaster, bought to work out why good coffee kept arriving flat. It had been roasted five weeks earlier. One sack of Brazil, split with three other people, and the split cost more than the coffee.
- 2019
A real drum, and a stall
A 5kg drum, bought at auction and rebuilt over a winter. Saturdays at the Vic Park markets, roasting Thursdays for whatever sold. Roast on Thursday, sell it Saturday, buy more green on Monday. That loop is still how the place runs.
- 2022
Room to hold the green
A tin shed in Bayswater with three-phase power and a pallet bay. That is the year buying changed: whole pallets instead of part sacks, which is cheaper per kilo and lets us commit to a lot before somebody else takes it. The stall lasted another year and was beaten by the Friday post run.
- Now
Five constants, and the rest
Five coffees we never let run out, roasted Tuesdays and Fridays, and beside them whatever single lots we managed to buy. Those are roasted once and listed until the sack is empty. People ask us to make the good ones permanent. Usually there is simply no more of that coffee to buy.
We hold a lot of green and almost no roasted coffee.
That is the whole trick, and it is why the board moves. Green keeps for a year in a sealed sack. Roasted coffee does not, so we only roast what we can sell inside a week. Five coffees are always on. Everything beside them is a single lot that runs until the sack is empty, which means one you liked in March may be gone by May. We get asked to roast ahead and hold the stock. It is a reasonable request and the answer is no: coffee is worth drinking somewhere between five and twenty-five days off the roast, and holding it burns that window for the sake of a tidier shelf.