Padre Coffee is a specialty coffee roaster, wholesaler and retailer, born in Melbourne in 2008 “in the dawning age of specialty coffee”. The first site opened that year in Brunswick East as The Brunswick East Project. The name has changed since, and many of its first customers are still regulars. Across the street, Padre HQ holds the roasting, warehousing and dispatch, and every online order is roasted there.

The Brunswick East café hosts Padre’s training sessions and workshops. The South Melbourne Market stall opened in 2009 among the market’s greengrocers, butchers and delicatessens, for a takeaway coffee or a bag of beans. Outside Melbourne, Padre runs a café and roastery in Noosaville, where open windows look onto the roaster and cuppings and workshops take place, and a concept store at Five Ways in Sydney’s Paddington with a brew bar, a retail section and a training space.

Padre works closely with its green bean brokers to build long-standing relationships through the supply chain, and every coffee it sells is specialty grade, blend components and pods included. Good Coffee Doing Good, launched in 2020, is its fundraising programme: a share of the sale price of products carrying the lilac mark goes to a current project partner at origin or in Australia. There are solar panels at the Noosa roastery, a partnership with Reground that collects coffee grounds and chaff in Brunswick East, and a refillable coffee tin as the packaging-free way to buy beans in store.

The range splits into espresso blends, a filter blend, an organic decaf and single origins that Padre roasts separately for espresso and for filter. The current retail range is listed below with the roaster’s own tasting notes.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Padre Coffee