In early 2024, a few months after opening Project Zero in Melbourne’s CBD, Kirk Pearson sent a text to his friend Chris Maybury, who runs Beta Coffee in Sydney. A staff member had called in sick, so he was going to do something unheard of in an Australian cafe. That day, every milk coffee order would be made using pre-batched espresso.

“It was Thursday, our busiest day of the week, and there was no one to cover. I was kind of panicking because it was a new business,” Pearson recalls. “I thought, ‘The only thing I can do is pre-prepare all the espresso.’”

He set to work before the cafe opened, extracting shot after shot from the cafe’s La Marzocco machine until he had enough espresso to cover the morning rush. The plan was simple: he’d store the batch in a thermos, then use a plastic squeeze bottle to dose each cup with 20 grams before topping up with freshly steamed milk.

Pearson and Maybury had been dancing round the idea for almost two years. For his part, Pearson had given out samples to customers “here and there”. Maybury, meanwhile, had experimented for longer, at cafes around Sydney including Only Coffee Project in Crows Nest, where he’d bank up to 10 espresso shots in advance. “I found I was able to get through the rushes much easier,” he says. “But then my bosses would see me doing it and say, ‘Hey, make it fresh.’”

Project Zero’s Thursday morning Hail Mary was the first time either man had gone full steam ahead with the concept. “We actually ran more efficiently with two people and pre-prepared espresso than we did with three people,” Pearson says. “I did a full day of service. Not one customer could tell.”

Pearson, who also hosts a popular coffee podcast, ignited a minor firestorm on social media in February by moving his two Project Zero coffee shops to pre-made espresso. He and Maybury, a Michigander with 20 years’ experience in the US and local coffee scenes, believe it could be a lifesaver for an industry that’s been struggling with declining margins for decades.

In the early 2000s, a flat white cost about $3. Since then, the cost of green, unroasted arabica beans, the variety used in nearly all cafes, has roughly tripled due to climate change and increased demand from countries like China. The cost of milk, energy, wages and rent have also ballooned.

Despite this, on average, a small flat white now costs a little over $5 in major Australian cities – far less than cafes need to charge in order to stay profitable long-term. A quick look around the world shows just how cheap coffee is in Australia’s hyper-competitive market. Adjusted for local purchasing power parity, a small flat white is typically $7 in London, $8 in Singapore and $10 in Athens. Yet Australians baulk at paying anywhere near these prices.

“I don’t want to pay more for anything ever. So I get that sentiment,” Pearson says. “But what left is there to do for a cafe owner to improve things? You can’t pay your staff less … You can’t pay less for the beans.”

“Wages are high, everything is high, but people are scared to put their prices up. So I feel the cafe industry just gets this pressure. There will be less of us if things continue like that,” says Alicia Feng, who pre-batches espresso at Atelier Enso, the Melbourne cafe she opened last month. “Why are we fighting automation? Technology helps you if you use it well.”

But critics of pre-made espresso – and there are many – don’t buy the concept for a few reasons. The obvious one: how could pre-made espresso ever taste as good as fresh? Even if you don’t drink espresso, you might be familiar with the lore that a shot “dies” and loses flavour after 20 seconds due to oxidation, as oxygen interacts with the coffee and degrades its essential oils and aromatics.

Neither cafe refutes this outright, and both brew their black coffees to order, often using rare and interesting releases. But when it comes to milk-based drinks, which make up 90 per cent of Project Zero’s business, both operators believe some of the “fresh is best” dogma is moot given how far industry standards and technology have come in the last decade.

Barista Hustle, a coffee training and research company founded by two-time world champion barista Matt Perger, ran a blind tasting of fresh versus pre-batched espresso last year. Tasting 14 milk coffees, five expert panellists (including Pearson) correctly identified the pre-batched espresso 77 per cent of the time. But here’s the kicker: the group slightly preferred that taste, noting “[the] prebatched cups were a little less intense but smoother, and what they didn’t have was that slightly acrid crema taste.”

I sampled fresh and pre-made espresso side by side in a blind tasting at Beta, and the only noticeable difference between the two was temperature: hot and tepid, respectively. As the base for a flat white, the difference was imperceptible. 

Technology plays a central role in all this. Project Zero still uses a traditional espresso machine to prepare ahead of service, but the squeeze bottle has been replaced by kegs. At the newest Project Zero location on Flinders Lane, baristas dispense four different types of espresso instantly from a bank of stainless steel taps equipped with individual touchscreens. Their milk comes perfectly heated and frothed, from a German-made Ubermilk machine. Unlike a traditional steam wand, it doesn’t introduce air, so the resulting drink is silkier and more intense.

“If someone walks in and sees espresso in a sauce bottle, there’s not much romance in that,” Pearson says. “We need to present this well, and with machinery that’s accurate. The language and the visuals of selling this concept is really important.”

At Beta, Maybury uses a “super-automatic” coffee machine by Swiss company Eversys to automate the extraction process. The barista’s workflow (grinding, brewing) is entirely built into the machine, with sophisticated controls for dosage, brewing temperature and extraction times. It’s the same tech that turned American coffee chain Blank Street into a US$500 million company in just five years, without hiring skilled baristas. 

Maybury programs the Eversys to pull consecutive shots into a carafe to save on manual labour. “How do baristas burn out? It’s because you become a cog in the machine,” he says. “You’re pumping out espressos all day. You’re not able to socially interact. Then you go home – your arm hurts, your elbow hurts.”

He says optics made him initially hesitant about using the machine. Super-automatics are usually found in places where “fast” is more important than “good”. Think servos, hospitals and fast-food chains. “Certainly not specialty coffee shops,” he says.

But after trialling one with his own “inputs” (beans, milk, water), Maybury was “gobsmacked” by the results and leased one immediately. “Within five minutes, I was pulling better-tasting shots than I’d ever gotten off an espresso machine,” he says. “I thought, ‘We can do anything we want now. There are no rules anymore’”.  

Speaking of rules, Maybury breaks another by skimming the crema off the top of the batch, as if it were scum on soup stock (“It’s disgusting. Dry, bitter and astringent.”). The batch is then strained through micron filter cloth to remove fine particles that might clog the cafe’s unorthodox dispensing system: an Ubermilk repurposed for espresso as well as steaming milk (Maybury says his warranty on the machine is now voided). 

Though their processes differ, Pearson and Maybury say batching has been a boon for efficiency. Their systems can produce a flat white in around 20 seconds, making them among the fastest cafes in the world. Pearson estimates he can get 30 doses of espresso into 30 cups using Project Zero’s current set-up in the time it once took to pull three shots into three cups. “As we scale, we’ll be able to produce our drinks 80 per cent quicker,” he says.

Reduced customer wait time isn’t the only benefit. Both operators say it’s helped their cafes become more consistent and precise. “We can program the amount of espresso that goes into each cup size to fit the ratio,” says Maybury. “Now, our small and large coffees taste identical. If someone wants coffee a little bit stronger, we can ask – what percentage?”

Pearson says that despite receiving “a lot of hate” from purists (“[some] people are just genuinely appalled with what we’re doing”), support from the industry has been “pretty much 100 per cent”. He believes Project Zero and Beta are laying the groundwork for inevitable uptake across the industry. “The owners of all the big major specialty roasters have come in and had a look at what we’re doing,” he says. “[And] people from all around the world are messaging us. I think everyone wants to watch what happens to us and then probably do it after.”  

Maybe, but maybe not. “Pre-batched espresso is against what we strive for in the specialty coffee industry,” 2025 World Barista Champion Jack Simpson of Melbourne’s Axil Coffee wrote on Instagram in response to all this. “In a time where the cost of running a cafe is increasing, we need to be showing why specialty coffee is different, why we should be charging more and what separates us from the traditional market. 

“Farmers go to great lengths and risks to achieve even small incremental gains in cup scores. We invest in high quality equipment and highly skilled baristas. While some customers want their coffee fast, specialty coffee is an experience, not a convenience.”

The concept has controversy baked in from an industry perspective. It’s not a stretch to see pre-batching opening the door to complete automation, which has been creeping into the industry for years. Automatic grinders, tampers and milk steamers have been industry standards for a while now. What role will baristas even play in future?

“For me, the point is to free the barista to do hospitality and have that be the focus,” Maybury says. “So they can be more like a sommelier and a community builder, rather than a robot. I got into coffee for hospitality. Now, 20 years in, I’m actually able to do the thing I’m passionate about.”

He also says he couldn’t keep his business afloat with a traditional set-up. “The Eversys machine is worth $21 grand, but you can rent one for $200 a week,” he explains. “That’s $200 a week for seven days of labour. Or $300 per day, per staff member, to do the exact same thing. 

And Pearson, of course, was able to replace a staff member for an entire day’s trade by implementing the concept – a handy saving for an industry that’s chronically short on labour. Still, there’s that pushback from purists and other coffee professionals. 

“It does make you want to be at the top of your game,” Pearson says. “I want to prove them wrong and I have so much faith in this concept. There’s no going back. I think the coffee industry changed forever … when we opened.”

Additional reporting by Nick Connellan and Audrey Payne.