Remember a few years ago, when Australian specialty coffee felt a bit buttoned up? World-class brews, yes, but often served with solemnity: minimalist menus championed pour-overs and the austerely labelled “coffee with milk”, while ordering a large cap with two sugars felt almost like confessing to a crime.
That era is officially thawing. The large caps are back, rubbing shoulders with Mont Blanc iced lattes and coconut cold brews – creations that would make yesterday’s coffee purists shudder.
At a time when success in the industry can hinge on going viral on Tiktok, doing things differently from the rest can give cafes a leg-up – it’s one of the reasons Instagrammable and two-tone drinks are having a moment.
Industry Beans, a specialty roaster with locations in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, was riding this wave of flavoured coffees long before its noticeable rise in the last couple of years. Just don’t call them that around co-founder and CEO Trevor Simmons.
“We call them signature drinks, and they now make up around 35 per cent of our sales,” he says. That’s right – more than a third of the orders at the highly regarded roaster’s cafes aren’t traditional lattes or flat whites. “That’s the shift. And that’s massive.”
This embrace of flavour challenges rigid definitions of what specialty coffee even is. “Specialty coffee should be defined as the ingredient that you use to create drinks that people love,” Simmons says. Fretting over brewing methods misses the point for most. “I think about 95 per cent of people just want to enjoy their coffee. They want it to be good, and they want it to be made with quality ingredients.”
Industry Beans launched in Fitzroy a decade ago, at the height of coffee’s intense obsession with origin and process – the era of single-origin siphons taking an age to brew and served with terroir-focused tasting notes. And while there’s still a focus on top-notch sourcing and roasting, Simmons and his brother Steve (also his business partner) soon saw that customers’ wants and needs were changing.
“My brother and I always thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way to engage with customers on what they want rather than what we think they want’,” he recalls. That led them to start creating their signature coffees. “There’s a whole market out there that loves drinking bubble teas or those sorts of things, but they still want that coffee element.”
While milk-based espresso remains popular, these one-of-a-kind drinks can set a cafe apart from its competitors. You can go anywhere for a long black or strong latte; but where else can you get a pandan bubble tea with coffee-soaked tapioca pearls, or a cold brew infused with wattleseed syrup? Both are on the menu at Industry Beans.
For many customers, these aren’t just occasional treats. “It’s their daily drink, which is awesome,” Simmons says. And he bets this isn’t a fleeting trend. “I think that’s an indicator of where the market’s going. People want to find a coffee they really like,”.
That focus on quality beans should extend to the other ingredients, too – from using milks (and milk alternatives) that perform best with coffee through to the syrups that give these drinks their flavour.
“All these syrups are made in-house. I think that is a real key difference; you’ve got to make it from scratch. It doesn’t have a synthetic sugary flavour. That’s why it tastes so much better,” he says.
This philosophy towards both beans and syrups is obvious in the latest limited-edition range from Industry Beans, drawing inspiration from Simmons’s love of a seminal Easter treat: hot cross buns. It uses a potent house-made syrup with cinnamon, maple and brown sugar, which can be mixed into an oat latte, oat chai latte or bubble coffee. It’s available at all Industry Beans locations, including the newest one on Castlereagh Street in Sydney.
For Simmons, his team’s experience serving customers what they want trumps following what was once specialty coffee’s strict dogma. “Good coffee’s kind of a given now; it’s really about the service and a unique offering now,” he says.
The message is clear: coffee has loosened its collar and is having fun.
This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Industry Beans,
