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Specialty coffee was our love at first sight, and since 2013, everything in our lives has revolved around coffee. That was the first time we tasted espresso from Kenya, and we were very surprised by its taste: clean, fruity, and sweet. We knew it was the coffee we wanted to drink and pass on. Having our own roastery is a dream come true.
How it all started
After the “fateful” espresso, we became intensely interested in specialty coffee and decided to bring it closer to the people of Ostrava.
We founded the COKAFE brand and bought a mobile café on a bike.
We planned to move around the city to wherever people were. But that wasn’t so easy because we ran into problems with the official permit, and the bike ended up sitting in one place.
That didn’t make much sense to us, so we moved our café to a shared space with City Folklore, an Ostrava-based designer clothing brand. We had our first store there.
After about a year of operation, we realized that there were many things we didn’t know about coffee and that we would like to gain some foreign experience. So we sold the café and went to Berlin, to the Five Elephant roastery and café.
We worked there as baristas, got to see how the roastery works, and learned all the procedures and processes, although we didn’t get to try the roasting itself.
We also met Bara, our friend and “liaison” at Falcon, which supplies our coffee. You can read more about our collaboration with Falcon HERE.
We came back from Berlin a bit earlier than we had originally planned because we were expecting a baby and wanted to be closer to family. The idea of having our own small roastery in Ostrava with deliveries to local cafes started to make more and more sense. It seemed much easier to combine with family life.
But we still had to wait for that. After returning from Berlin, we were approached by the owner of COKAFE, asking if we could help him open a new branch in Ostrava-Poruba. We accepted the offer and spent the next year and a half learning everything that opening and running a café requires: designing, learning to work with wood and iron, and finally, cooking and baking. But the hectic operation of the café didn’t really fit with the family life we wanted, so we gave up on COKAFE for the second time.
Opening of the roastery
By then, it was crystal clear: we wanted our own roastery. Thanks to our family’s support, we found a suitable space in Ostrava-Stará Bělá, where we opened the roastery in the spring of 2018 and roasted our first batch of coffee on a 5-kilo Diedrich roaster.
Two years later, a café was added to the roastery in the old rectory in Hukvaldy when we were approached by the Ostrava-Opava bishopric with an offer of a café. There was no use for the old rectory, and the bishop wanted to create a friendly and nice space to sit and enjoy. The rectory had an amazing genius loci, so it appealed to us at first sight, and we accepted the offer. Originally it was to help with the opening, but in the end, we stuck with running it.
Thanks to the roastery, we could equip the café exactly to our liking and also employ great people to help us run it so we didn’t have to spend all our free time there. Still, the café was taking up much of our family time, so we decided to close it in August 2023 and invest our time and energy only in the rapidly growing roastery.
Father’s today
Since then, our roastery has been growing, evolving, and making us happy. The 5-kilo Diedrich roaster has been replaced by a 12-kilo roaster and, in the fall of 2022, by a 35-kilo Loring roaster.
Our team has grown from mother and father to 10 employees, a few part-timers, and outside collaborators. We supply coffee to cafes, businesses, and individuals across the country, as well as in Europe and sometimes overseas.
The more we grow, the more important it is for us to run the roastery sustainably.
We roast only specialty coffee – that is, coffee of high quality with respect to organic growing practices, transparent trading, and improving conditions in the regions where the coffee is grown.
This is made possible by working with Falcon, a supply company that connects roasters with growers and works to educate farmers and improve their living conditions.
In all of this, we still try to maintain the original atmosphere and the quality of a small family business in the roastery. And we hope we are succeeding.
Thank you for being here and for supporting us on our journey.
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