Wholesale Coffee Supplier – Coffee distributor

It was in Melbourne, in the early 2000s, I started in the coffee industry. I met with Fabio Costa of Coffea Coffee while his family were holidaying in Noosa. It was at a café table along Hasting Street I expressed my interest in coffee, and soon he and his wife soon hired me. It was as simple as that. Enthusiasm can get you far.

Fabio had once been a coffee roaster for Grinders and took what he had garnered from his time at the famous coffee distributor to start Coffea near the Victoria Markets. When I commenced working, I was first put on coffee making duties, and soon started selling single origins—though the specialty coffee industry was yet to be born—from cane baskets. Through his selection of beans, I got to understand the general differences between origins: winey double A Kenyans; the honeyed, full bodied cup of Colombia; the sharp citrus acidity of Nicaragua Maragogype. Fabio’s house blend was shaped by Brazil and some Central Americans, peppered with a washed Indian robusta, and made to stand out in the milk by the addition of Papua New Guinea, not dissimilar to what Grinders’ bar blend was. When we made coffee, caffe lattes, flat whites, and cappuccinos were the flavour of the day, as they are now, but with only full cream and lite milk available. How things have changed.

I first roasted on Fabio’s L12 Probat. It stood on a platform in his store, presented majestically to the passers-by along Elizabeth Street through the coffee shop’s large glass windows. It was a simple machine, with a chaff collector located beneath the cooling tray, and a low-high gas burner only— unlike the modern modulating burners used now. It was absent of any computer profiling gadgetry, ubiquitous in today’s industry, with the operator relying simply on sight, sound, smell, a temperature gauge, and most of all experience to produce repeat results. It was on this I learnt some of the aspects of coffee roasting: the wonderful transformation of the coffee bean going from green to yellow to caramel brown, from first crack to second crack, and the smoky exit of the beans into the cooling tray.

During that time, I happened to go on a trip to Italy. Inspired by Melbourne’s Italian coffee community, I visited many coffee bars from Rome to Naples. I even went to a Rome Coffee convention. I suppose it was during this trip I realised what was on offer in Melbourne was not entirely as Italian as I had assumed. I became enthralled by the nutty, full-bodied flavours I had found in the south of Italy in particular, espresso poured from long limbed lever machines that the barista deftly wrangled behind the bars. When I had drunk Italmoka’s coffee one summer morning at a small Neapolitan bar amid the din of scooters flashing by along Naple’s narrow streets, I was changed forever. Could I reproduce something of that kind back home?

This led me to a job at Quists Coffee. Jim Baruta and his wife Doris were the owners of Quists, recognised as the oldest coffee roastery in Melbourne. Indeed, their small store in little Collins Street has been there since 1938. When I first met Jim, he was roasting out of a backwater warehouse in Clifton Hill, using an old Bath roaster, amid plumes of smoke from the poorly sealed flue. During our conversation I talked about developing a blend that was authentically Italian in taste, something he showed great interest in (Jim, like Fabio, was first generation Italian). 

Not long on—after his newly commission 60Kg Brambati roaster was installed in his new warehouse in Epping—he offered me a job and soon we were developing the blend that I would later run round Melbourne wholesaling to cafés and restaurants. This turned out to be a hard slog, as every other coffee wholesaler was doing the same and with a lot more to offer. You quickly learn that selling coffee in the wholesale market is more than just a good coffee. Although the idea proved a flop, all was not lost. Even long after my departure from Quists, that coffee Jim and I had worked on together (now called Miscella Italiana) is an award-winning blend and their best seller.

Still, Miscella Italiana was not the taste I had sampled in Italy. I knew if I was to recreate why I had experienced I would have to roast myself. When I came back to the industry (after a seven-year break—another story), I was determined to revive my original dream. In 2013 my now-wife and I started a coffee cart, show casing a Pompei Izzo three group from Naples, which ran on gas. We had our coffee contract-roasted by Wolff Coffee distributors in Hendra using our own beans. Working various markets around Brisbane, we reinvested our earnings, and over time, shortly after moving from Brisbane to our new home on the Sunshine Coast, we started roasting coffee for ourselves using an archaic machine (we had designed and made in Australia) based on woodfire.

So impressed with quality of coffee taste that wood produced, we eventually invested in a Trabattoni ten-kilo roaster from Italy. A roaster made from mild and cast steel and lined inside with furnace bricks, it is a heavy, beautiful thing. There is no computer profiling, so one hones one’s skills sharply, and roast times are long in comparison, around twenty to the thirty minutes in general. The result is sublime. And because of it, our dream of roasting genuinely Italian coffee has been realised. Roasting with wood enabled us to go darker, developing bigger body and those chocolate notes that everyone loves in a well-rounded coffee.

We now have four different blends. Our original blend, and still our most popular, Classico Italiano, is a coffee based on 75% arabica and 25% robusta. I took what I had learnt with Miscella Italiana from Quists and made it something more how I had imagined Italian coffee should be. We have a 100% arabica blend called A Fine Fellow, a premium type of Italian bar blend, which is cleaner and sweeter, a clear winner with those wanting something lighter. Our Aroma Intenso, however, is what I was truly after, an extra bold coffee inspired by those cafes in Naples I visited long ago, with 55% arabica and 45% robusta. It’s the coffee that finally gave us those nutty nuances I had been after for so long. We also have a specialty coffee blend made from quality Brazil and Ethiopian coffees, a blend to rival those contemporary lightly roasted coffees common in Australian cafes today. But it’s the Italian blends that standout above all others. As a result, we have become a coffee wholesale supplier with a difference. These blends, and the methodology of our roasting, have set us apart from other coffee distributors, allowing us to offer end consumers and businesses alike a range of unique products that they will enjoy.

You won’t be disappointed to buy Coffee wholesale from Fine Fellows.