Coffee for Connoisseurs started life as a ‘Coffee Shop With A Difference’ in 1985.

At that time Melbourne was well served with espresso coffee bars, but there were few places where you could buy fresh beans, and even fewer (none, as far as I knew) where you could choose to have any of the beans on offer individually brewed.

Having seen just this sort of setup in Japan, where the brewing was invariably done using Coffee Syphons, I pinched the idea wholesale. After three years we had a second shop running, and things were looking pretty good, but..!

My wife was expecting our son, and one of our landlords, inflamed by record stock market turnovers and interest rates, was graduating in greed and bastardry. I needed more hours in the day, so we said goodbye to our nastier landlord and consolidated into a single shop. We even kept 80% of the old shop's clientel. Just as well, because the stock market crashed, and the next few years were really tough. Then things picked up again, but..!

Way back in 1979 I had bought my first computer, an Apple II+ with 64k, twin disk drives and a CP/M card. This was followed by an 8086 with 640k and a 20 Mb hard drive (Whoo!!) in 1984, and a succession of upgrades after that. When the internet began in Australia (1995) I signed up, and had the first ‘Coffee for Connoisseurs’ website running in 1996. It was crude, but the orders started to come in, much to my amazement. I'd had some exposure to programming at Uni, mostly poking holes in punch cards, and I was already used to Wordstar (an early word processor).

The result was that HTML as it then was was fairly easy, as was building a working website. It was effort well spent.

Now the internet sales were really growing, and at the same time the hassles of running a full time retail shop were beginning to get me down. Dealing with staff, utilities, local, state and federal governments and long, long hours were wreaking havoc with my home life.

In 1996 we closed down the physical retail shop, distributed our web address and phone number to all our existing customers and launched full on into cyberspace, a decision we've never regretted. After only a few months coffee bean sales were far in excess of what we'd ever sold in the shops. It was at this point that I decided to roast my own green coffees, since the sales volume made it an economical proposition.

In 2001 we moved into new premises in Port Melbourne, a little office/warehouse complex in Turner St. The extra space gave us the opportunity to enlarge both the stockholding and kinds of the espresso machines and other equipment items we sold, as well as making the coffee packaging much more efficient. Most of the coffees we sell are on their way to the customers within 24 hours of roasting, some even sooner than that!

In 2014 we decided to get out of the coffee equipment business and concentrate on the beans, which is where we are today.