Jamie Treby

thinking carefully about coffee

I came into coffee in 2000, fresh back from travelling and needing work. Speciality coffee as it was, was new to the UK. The country still mostly drank tea, and for a while the training budgets were generous. Three years later I was running a store on a high street where the three big names were fighting over every corner, and training and troubleshooting across the region on the side.

Management held little appeal, so when a new Amsterdam roastery asked, I went, and was living there three weeks later. The roasters were still being commissioned. I learned the trade from underneath: strip-cleans and rebuilds, a thermal cleaning process we worked out in-house, the analogue and digital guts of the roasting systems, and up to five hundred cups a day on the cupping table. Alfred Peet would drop by now and then to talk coffee. His father had owned a roastery on the other side of the river.

Back in the UK from 2006, things got more varied. A sole trader business ended with a robbery. Warehouse work taught me picking and fulfilment while I rebuilt. A café owned by international sports stars took us onto the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe competition circuit around 2009. Event work took me round the world with trade shows, backstage at festivals, and into private events for people with a lot of money, fame or both. Good coffee in odd places, under pressure. It was a blast.

Then the UK number one filter coffee provider (at that time) asked a question I couldn't leave alone, and I became their innovation manager for coffee. Products I helped develop are still on the shelves, and smaller speciality roasters use the format from the back of that work. Some projects went less well. Our capsules won an award and were withdrawn a few years later. The UK's first shelf-stable cold brew and tonic got through sampler approval and a fifteen thousand bottle trial with a science lab behind it, then never launched. A novel-food approved cascara drink went the same way later on. Such is the reality of innovation. Both were ahead of the brands that asked for them, and taught me more than the successes did.

Then came the green coffee importing field. Many visits to origin; Brazil most often, plus Rwanda, Guatemala, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and more. Going back is where you learn things: how a region's view of its own coffee shifts, how farming changes, which relationships last. I'm a believer in speciality Robusta and have written about why the future of coffee is as much Canephora as Arabica. I doubt they will stay the only relevant species too.

These days I'm most taken with the politics and ethics of coffee, how the trade works internationally, what authenticity means, and the stories behind the cup. I judge a few competitions and am happy to help.

I'm writing a book about coffee, and novels alongside it. I'm also building Groundsheet, a buying tool to help roasters buy with more confidence. And I keep an eye on AI, because some of coffee's questions are now AI's questions too. And if you want to talk Cocoa or chocolate too, well of course that world interests me too.

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