Before there was Jasper Coffee, there were two young artists.
My parents, Wells and Merilyn, spent the 1970s growing biodynamic vegetables in country Victoria, then disappeared into the world for a big adventure that would change the way they see things forever. They had restless feet, curious minds, soil under their fingernails and a taste for whatever might be around the next corner. Coffee was not part of the plan.
Then, in 1989, they opened a small shop on Smith Street in Collingwood knowing precisely nothing about the industry. In hindsight, this may have been their greatest advantage. They named the business after their three-year-old son, Jasper, which is how I came to spend part of my childhood asleep on coffee sacks and, for an embarrassingly long time, believing my full name was Jasper Coffee.
The secret machine
The first Jasper Coffee was a curious little place. There were coffees from around the world, chocolates, lollies, umbrellas and tin toys. Everything a coffee shop needed, plus several things it plainly did not.
There was, however, one small complication. Council rules meant Mum and Dad couldn't sell coffee by the cup, so naturally they hid an espresso machine out the back.
If you knew to ask, Dad would disappear behind the wall. The grinder would start, followed by the long, contented schhhh of the steam wand. A moment later Wells would reappear with a cup in his hand, looking every bit as surprised by its existence as you were.
Officially, it was a tasting. Unofficially, it was very good coffee from a mildly clandestine espresso machine. And if anyone asked Wells about it, he had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.
When he wasn't running this sophisticated underground operation, Dad was knocking on doors. Cafés, restaurants, delis, wineries and probably several businesses that had never expressed the slightest need for coffee. Back on Smith Street, every label was written by hand with a fountain pen that had an unfortunate talent for depositing great blobs of ink exactly where they were least wanted. Wells swore at it regularly. Wonderful for charm, terrible for productivity.
Then people started paying attention. Stephanie Alexander became one of our earliest supporters, which gave Mum and Dad the reassuring sense that perhaps they weren't completely mad.
Strangers, then friends
Before long, selling coffee wasn't enough.
Mum and Dad wanted to know where it came from and, more importantly, who it came from.
Merilyn went to Peru. Wells travelled through Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, Colombia, Cuba and wherever else coffee opened a door. They often arrived as strangers and left as friends.
Dad always packed Jasper Coffee with him. He wanted growers to taste what happened at the other end of the voyage: their harvest carried across oceans, roasted in Melbourne, then brewed back where it began. He used to say coffee was simply a vehicle for conversation, and Wells had a particular gift for conversation.
Sometimes those conversations changed everything.
In Papua New Guinea, we worked with coffee growing wild in remote forest near Lae. The people harvesting it had almost no equipment. Cherries were crushed with old jam tins, then rolled across bark by hand to remove the fruit. Coffee was their livelihood.
Once you've stood beside the person doing that work, coffee stops being an anonymous brown bean in a sack. Names replace origins. Faces replace lot numbers.
So we stayed. When leaf rust devastated crops in Honduras, we kept buying from the farmers we knew. When a cooperative had an entire container of coffee stolen and was left carrying the bank loan, we paid it out.
Because after years around kitchen tables, walking farms and meeting families, you don't disappear when things get difficult. You pick up the phone.
Coffee should leave something good behind
That belief eventually took us somewhere unusual for Australian coffee at the time. In 2003, Jasper Coffee became the first Australian roaster licensed to sell Fairtrade and at the same time we got our organic certification. Then came carbon neutrality and B Corp.
We mention these things on our bags, our website, in newsletters, to our accountant, at dinner parties and, once, at considerable length to a man who had only asked for directions. We'd apologise, but they matter.
Behind those little logos are real things: more value returning to growers, farming without synthetic pesticides, healthier soil and waterways, and a business measuring its effect on people and the planet. Carbon counted right down to the delivery van.
So yes, we'll continue going on about them. Not incessantly. Just at slightly unreasonable intervals.
And that instinct has never stopped at coffee. This year we sent a rather large quantity of coffee to one of Captain Paul Watson's ships, where the crew were campaigning to stop krill fishing. Krill are tiny, extraordinarily important and, as far as we can establish, entirely indifferent to specialty coffee. The crew, thankfully, are not. We are proud to support
And somehow, it has been 37 years
Dad died in 2024, but the DNA of Jasper Coffee has been fundamentally influenced by him: the curiosity, the appetite for flavour, the pull of faraway places and the need to know the person behind what is in front of you.
Most of all, there was his remarkable habit of turning a conversation over coffee into a friendship that could last decades.
Mum, I and our CEO Jeremy along side the incredible team carry that forward now. And somehow that little shop on Smith Street has become 37 years of Jasper Coffee.
Thousands upon thousands of coffees have been sipped, slurped and spat... roasted, then argued over and re-slurped again. It's a little bit of an obsession.
That is 37 years of growers and customers, friendships made halfway around the world and around the corner, experiments that worked and others best left politely in the past. Thousands upon thousands of coffees have been tasted, roasted, argued over, reconsidered and tasted again. Enough coffee, apparently, that some of us now dream in tasting notes.
So we're celebrating.
From Wednesday 28 October until midnight Wednesday 4 November 2026, we're taking 15% off seven of our original blends.
These coffees go right back to 1989 and 1990. Wells didn't begin them with a spreadsheet or a market trend. He began with a moment, curiosity and a commitment.
What should breakfast taste like? What coffee belongs beside a long Saturday morning? What do you want after dinner, when everyone is still around the table and nobody quite wants the night to end?
Then he went searching for the beans that could make those moments taste right.
Blend #1
The original. Sweet and gentle going in, with a long mellow finish and an extremely persuasive argument for another cup.
Blend #2
Creamy, malty and nutty, with milk chocolate running all the way through. Add milk and, in Wells' words, it becomes "a nutty malty milkshake."
Quite.
Blend #4
Rich and bold, with a lively fruity edge and dark chocolate lingering at the finish. Its original tagline remains difficult to improve upon:
"Not just another bitter disappointment."
Blend #5
Silky, sweet and beautifully rounded, with a fine finale. Enough character to sit beside a good meal without elbowing its way into the conversation.
Blend #6
Bold and smooth at once, which is considerably harder than it sounds. Plenty of body, silky sweetness and chocolate waiting at the finish.
Blend #9
Elegant, intriguing and in absolutely no rush. A bright, winey gooseberry note arrives late, like a soprano who has sensibly saved herself for the final act.
Wells called it "perhaps my finest coffee." He wasn't generally a man short of an opinion on these matters.
Blend #10
Rich, round and chocolatey from beginning to end. Wells' philosophy here was wonderfully uncomplicated: "Everyone loves chocolate anyway!"
The Blend 10 brigade have now been drinking Blend #10 for more than three and a half decades, showing no inclination whatsoever to reconsider their position. We respect the commitment.
Why these seven?
Add up the blend numbers.
We'll wait.
No rush. We've had 37 years.
Use HAPPYBIRTHDAY at checkout to save 15% on the birthday collection until midnight Wednesday 4 November 2026.
