The Dreamers.

Interviews and articles dispatched weekly

map magazine

Josh Russell

On roasting days at cup coffee in West End, a mouthwatering stream of coffee-scented clouds puffs from the cafe’s rooftop flue, luring caffeine lovers like camels to water. The heady aroma emanates from the cafe’s roasting machine, the trusty Probat L5, located in the back room-cum-roastery. cup coffee owner Josh Russell, 31, can often be found hovering over the humming machine, as if staging a bedside vigil. He feeds it a diet of green coffee beans and waits patiently for the beans to roast before tasting and refining. His humble mission? To make coffee that counts.

Creatures of habit might find their feathers ruffled at cup coffee, the specialty cafe and roastery opened by Josh Russell and wife Sarah in West End’s Russell Street in early 2010. Keep an eye on the cafe’s chalkboard menu and you’ll notice the coffee choices change every three months or so, depending on which green coffee beans are
in season.

Right now, Josh is roasting the Kimuli, a new blend from Tanzania, which he describes as being sweet, clean and nicely balanced – the type of coffee you can drink all day. Josh is also roasting a smooth espresso blend, called the Five-Star Day, crafted with a mix of beans from two sustainable family-owned farms in Brazil and Guatemala.

Soon the menu will change to herald the arrival of coffee from recent Central American harvests. Sure to feature is the Santa Clara, a Guatemalan coffee that Josh has
fallen in love with. It is cultivated on a sustainable farm by a family that has been growing coffee for over 100 years. What doesn’t change at cup coffee is the commitment to quality. Peek in the cafe’s back-room roastery and you’ll find Josh’s beloved Probat roasting machine surrounded by bulging hessian bags of green coffee beans and petite brown paper bags of roasted beans ready for sale. There’s also a coffee machine ready and waiting for tastings.

It is here that Josh and his team strive to roast green coffee to its utmost potential for customers and their cafe clients, including Sourced Grocer at Teneriffe and Blackboard Coffee at Varsity Lakes on the Gold Coast. Inquisitive coffee-swilling folk can also visit cup coffee for free workshops in cupping, which is the
art of coffee tasting.  While Josh’s roastery is important to him, he respects that many customers aren’t interested in cup coffee’s obsession with roasting and seasonality. To many who visit daily, cup coffee is simply a cruisy cafe serving moreish cups of specialty coffee, tea and whole food. And Josh is quite happy for his customers to enjoy his venture in this unassuming way.

He explains that he initially dreamt of opening a simple cafe without a roastery. His brainstorming sketches from five years ago depict a tiny espresso bar of 15 sqm. “It’s funny – you change everything as you go,” he says. “You update and make everything bigger the more you think about it.” Josh has carved a zigzagged and daring path to his cafe. He grew up in his hometown of Inverell in country northern New South Wales and worked as a carpenter for nine years from age 16. He got a taste for coffee when a new cafe opened in town and he started buying ground coffee to make at home.

In 2005, Josh and Sarah moved to Brisbane for a change of scenery and Josh began working as a freelance graphic designer – he’d studied online design courses and taught himself the rest. That’s when he began dreaming of opening his own cafe. “A few people tried to talk me out of it and told me it was a horrible job and I should
go and actually get a cafe job before I got too much more into it,” Josh recalls. And so that’s what he did. Over two years Josh worked as a barista for Brisbane brothers
David and Jason Narciso, now owners of Elixir Coffee, and at Veneziano roastery in West End.

Josh began hunting for a shop space in 2009. It took six months to find the right space and cup coffee opened in January 2010. “West End works really well for us. There’s a good mix of people,” Josh notes.  The more Josh learnt about coffee making, the more he realised a quality cup of coffee relies on much more than the barista’s skills at the espresso machine. For starters, you can’t spin gold from hay. The tastiest coffee requires seasonal, high-quality,traceable green coffee beans, and meticulous roasting.

To achieve this, Josh sources his beans from reputable brokers in Sydney and Melbourne who have direct links with small, often family-owned, sustainable farms around the world. And, of course, he roasts every batch in-house at cup coffee. For the first 18 months of trade, Josh and Sarah worked six days per week. Sarah stopped the relentless schedule when she was seven months pregnant with their child, Henry – now 14 months old. “It was hard but it was fun as well,” Josh admits. And they’ve only recently started to turn a profit. “I guess it’s always been a long-term thing – to have staff and equipment and things that are going to last and building a brand that’s really strong,” Josh says. “We spent more money at the start but it’s worth it now.”

Josh isn’t really prone to micromanaging and prefers to employ people who are keen to open their own cafe one day. “Hopefully in five years everyone working for me has a really nice cafe and there are more places to drink coffee around town.” The neverending quest to master coffee making is what keeps Josh motivated. “Coffee for me is really frustrating and I think that’s what got me sucked in … The more I learn,the more I realise I don’t know that much.”

Asked why he cares so much about what he does, Josh says: “I can’t really do anything without trying to do it the best way possible. I find if I can’t do something really, really well, I don’t want to do it.” He constantly reminds himself of the wise words: “Do the best with what you have. Quality is the most important thing.”

Josh’s dream now is a work in progress. “I have a few ideas,” he says casually yet somewhat mysteriously. Now that his coffee hobby is his day job, he’s returned to making things with his hands for fun. “I wouldn’t mind learning how to make guitars one day,” he says. “I don’t know, maybe I’ll retire to a shed next to a river and go fishing and make guitars and do nothing else. That would be pretty nice.”