roastery and cellar door: bang on incredible coffee, off the beaten
track, great music selection and a relaxed setting where two different
single-origin coffees are available for tasting each day. If you can
manage to drag yourself away, there are four choices of beans to take
home when you leave. Owners Bernadette Stack and Trevor De Groot
began roasting twelve years ago at their organic café in Magill before
making the decision to move to Port Elliot. While the business has
grown from strength to strength, Trevor maintains they have always
had a focus on ‘quality over quantity and the move allowed us to
double down on our commitment to good coffee, strong community
and happy days’. Bernadette agrees, telling me that ‘coffee is a cool,
culinary art that forges lasting relationships and fosters community’.
Over in Kangarilla, two other coffee-loving city expatriates have also
sold up and moved to the country. Childhood friends, Dom Ossa
and Nick Suggitt, started out owning and operating cafés in Adelaide
before working their way backwards down the coffee food chain
until arriving at their latest venture, Dawn Patrol – a roastery offering
a unique cellar-door experience. ‘We started with the question, how
can we help people understand this product? We’re specifically not
a café,’ Dom says. While you can buy a flat white and chill in their
gloriously eccentric garden replete with roaming chooks, the focus
is on coffee tasting. ‘We chose this location because people already
come to McLaren Vale for tastings,’ Dom explains. ‘Coffee and wine
have been compared forever, but serious coffee tasting hasn’t really
been done before.’
‘The Fleurieu has such a diverse culture of food and beverages and
we wanted to open the door on coffee, to show how different origins
have unique flavours and how a variety of brew methods can impact
the taste. Quality coffee should be for everyone and it should be
simple and easy to get great flavours.’
I can’t recommend highly enough Dawn Patrol’s back-to-back
tastings in which punters are taught to recognise the unique qualities
of three different coffees. ‘We want people to come and understand
that it’s more than some brown stuff in a bag,’ Dom says. Right now,
they’re tasting apricot, orange-peel, honey and brown sugar in their
popular Cheetah Espresso blend. I might need a few more education
sessions with Dom, because my palate is still struggling to go much
beyond simply tasting ridiculously good coffee!‘The Fleurieu has such a diverse culture of food and beverages and we wanted to
open the door on coffee, to show how different origins have unique flavours and how
a variety of brew methods can impact the taste. Quality coffee should be for everyone
and it should be simple and easy to get great flavours.’ Dom Ossa, Dawn Patrol.Above left: De Groot’s Bernadette Stack tells us that ‘coffee is a cool, culinary art that forges lasting relationships and fosters community. Above right: Dom Ossa and Nick
Suggitt at Dawn Patrol in Kangarilla – a roastery offering a unique cellar door style experience with tastings and simply ridiculously good coffee!