WHO WE ARE
Together we have over 20 years experience in coffee combined. Everything we do is in the pursuit of exceptional coffee. We specialise in suppling amazing coffee roasted in Aotearoa and equipment to cafes and bakeries across New Zealand’s north island.
Kowhai Coffee Roasters Co is an independent, family owned coffee roaster based in East Auckland. Our hospitality experience stretches for 15 years across Auckland, through café ownership to coffee roasting...
It’s been all about the beans ever since.
We are immensely proud to offer our Kowhai Coffee to coffee lovers across Aotearoa.
Our history
Our journey started over 15 years ago when we opened our first cafe in Auckland and over time we’ve been involved in opening and developing 8 different cafes. So we’ve got to know the cafe business very well along with the big range in quality and service coming from coffee wholesalers.
A number of years back I was fortunate to hire the #2 Auckland Barista Awards champion (#4 in New Zealand at the time) in one of our cafes and his fantastic enthusiasm for making the ‘perfect’ coffee rubbed off on me. It had always been our plan to roast our own artisan coffee, but I just didn’t know enough all those years ago. So I immersed myself in the coffee community, visiting and conducting informal interviews with anyone in the cafe, roasting and coffee importing business who would give me the time...and along the way had some wonderful mentors and made some good friends.
Then I spent the next six months experimenting with multiple blends using independent roasters to roast coffee for our own cafe. It was a huge amount of research, reading, experimenting, more roasting and more cupping until I was finally ready to do my own roasting. Finding the right roasting machine however was a quite a process. We wanted a traditional craft roaster, not some impersonal computer operated industrial roaster you have little control over which many large roasters use today. So we finally settled on a Turkish ‘beauty’. We invested in a brand new 15kg YÜCEL coffee roaster which we imported especially from Turkey.
This traditional “old-fashioned” craft coffee roasting machine I eventually came to master after much experimentation. It isn’t computerized, you roast coffee the “old fashioned” way, controlling every part of the process manually by hand. But the the end result is fantastic flavoursome coffee....Demand for our fresh roasted unique coffee blend just keeps growing as we continue to delight our customers in the NZ cafe market.