Eight years of good days at the roaster.

Hannah Tindarra and Sam Patel met in late 2016 at the back-of-house of a Brunswick roastery, where Hannah was a barista on the espresso bench and Sam was three months into a side hobby of trying to understand the chemistry of what was coming out of the cup. They spent a year reading every monograph the Specialty Coffee Association had ever published.

In late 2017 they found a 1996 Diedrich IR-5 on Gumtree, listed by a closing café in Bendigo for $7,400. They drove up on a Saturday and got it loaded onto a borrowed trailer the same afternoon. The first batch of green beans landed in March 2018 — 60kg of Antioquia naturals, the invoice for which still sits framed above the cupping table.

The first commercial roast went off on a Tuesday morning in March. The Castlemaine farmers' market that weekend sold all 40 bags before noon. By the end of 2018 they were stocking half of Mostyn Street.

We work with one green-bean importer, a small outfit in Brunswick that visits its origin partners twice a year. We've been buying through them since 2019 and know roughly 60% of the farms by name. The other 40% is single farms we've cupped but haven't visited yet.

Every bag has the farm or co-op on the origin sticker, the country, the variety, the process, and the year. If you want the exact green-bean invoice — what we paid, what the farmer was paid, what the importer's margin was — email us. It's not a number we mind sharing.

Our average green-bean cost in 2025 was $14.10 per kilogram, FOB destination. The Fair Trade minimum is $4.10. The C-market price last year averaged about $5.80. Direct trade isn't a marketing label for us — it's just the part of the business where the maths makes sense.

We roast Tuesday and Friday mornings, starting at 7am. The Diedrich is preheated for 45 minutes; the first batch goes in at 7:45. Each batch is 5kg of green beans, which yields roughly 4.2kg of roasted coffee after weight loss. A full roast day is nine to twelve batches.

Roast logs were kept on paper from 2018 until 2022. Sam digitised the back catalogue over the 2022 Christmas break — every batch since the first one is now in a spreadsheet with charge temp, first crack time, development ratio, and post-cup notes. The paper notebook still sits next to the Diedrich; the spreadsheet lives on a laptop on the cupping table.

The machine itself is serviced by a man named Trevor who drives down from Bendigo every June. He's been working on Diedrichs for 22 years. The last time we needed a part out of the ordinary it took him four days. He charges by the hour, brings his own tea, and refuses to take a card.