About Us

small (read this as - patched together) beginnings in at our Brunswick East Store - The Brunswick East Project - we've been supported by very loyal coffee loving locals and grown up to become....well not much bigger actually.

We've added some and a couple of stores along the way
- Padre Coffee South Melbourne Market opened in Dec 2009, and The League of Honest Coffee in April 2011.
We've moved our admin, office thingy into a warehouse in June 2011 and bought a bigger shinier roaster. Someone also bought a new van but we're still arguing over who gets to drive it.
We now employ five roasters (and they're all star baristas too) who roast, cup and sample coffees for our stores and a few of our good friends who stock Padre in their cafes.
Why Padre ? Well no real reason except we like the name from a typographical perspective and it sort of defines how we see coffee... sort of... something we do more for the love of it than for the money
- Father. Used as a form of address for a priest in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America.
Informal A military chaplain or field medic

Why do your stores all have a different name ? they are all different cafes and local hang outs. We're not spruiking our brand as the mightiest and the greatest (Mohamed Ali of coffee) no we certainly ain't. We're working on a coffee for you to drink, we're making sure you come in and get served by friendly staff, drink coffee in a store that cares and stock everything we can find that complements what we do. This sort of business needs to be part of the local scene and giving our stores all the same name and processes (they are all different) would just be dull and at odds with our local philosophy.

How do you choose/source your coffees ? , we're still not sure exactly why we choose the coffees we do, because they are all different from farmer to farmer, mill to mill, origin, season to season. We simply stock . This means cupping any and everything (yep you can read into that that we'd love it all to be socially and morally produced too people!) but ultimately it comes down to taste.
Our coffees change with the seasons, their availability can be linked to political upheaval, a hurricane season or even a Nescafe buyout. We try and keep a range of up to 15 origins in our stores, and sometimes will have up to 30 origins in our green store. We'll source 4-5 coffees from the same region just to narrow down a process or wet mill or farmers growing ethos. A necessary step in managing the fluctuations in seasons, price and quality. This also allows us to experiment with different varietals, origins, estates, mills and regions and gives us a broad range of coffees to try. We also experiment with brewing techniques (shameless plug: I'm drinking a of Nicaragua La Esmeralda Estate as I write this.....damn it's good) - our stores offer cold drip, aeropress, chemex and syphon brew options and we also sell the equipment.

What else ? Come in and say Hi Chaps...Hey Gals... we'll brew you some coffee and hangout. Peace.