Dan Yee’s start into coffee involved casually consulting AIR coffee on lighting for their cupping room and eventuated into a job offer (and the rest, as they say, is history).

When Dan started in 2008, “People were just getting interested in having specialty coffee or even just fresh and locally roasted. That’s where the scene was at. People were mucking around with coffee and questioning what they were doing and what they were drinking.”

Since then, Yee believes that awareness of coffee is changing, with coffee moving from a just a caffeine hit to a product with more meaning to a wider audience; more people are wanting to know where it’s from and are actually able to access more information. This progression has been facilitated by “Traceability and getting coffees that don’t necessarily have to come through a broker, it’s so much more accessible to get great coffee than it ever has been. Now there’s more responsibility for people to choose quality coffee and do the coffee justice by roasting it well.”

Before he stumbled into being a coffee professional at AIR in Sydney, Dan was already involved in coffee as a home hobby, “I may or may not want to admit that I was home roasting. That may or may not have happened. Could have been a modified bread maker and a heat gun and could have possibly been hooked up to my laptop as well.”

The cross from coffee enthusiast to coffee professional can be a tumultuous one, and for Dan, “It was a bit hard because other people had been working as a baristas for so long but… when I asked them why they were doing certain things they had no idea. They were just like, ‘because it comes out really nice and that’s how we’re supposed to do it.’ And my response was always, ‘yeah, but what does it taste like? And what happens if you do this? What does it taste like then?’ – and I couldn’t get answers to that”.

“My most memorable coffee has been one of Hazel’s at Coffee Alchemy, before she had a coffee outlet, and it was Kenya Gethumbwini. It was the first moment where I thought ‘wow, I didn’t know coffee could taste like that.’ Every year since then I’ve tried to get my hands on some, and this year was the first year that I actually got a bag of it green so I started roasting it a hundred different ways. That was satisfying; it was almost as if it had come full circle.”

Dan’s stayed in coffee because, “it’s just been a constant curve of up-ness… it’s always been one of those things where the more you learn or the more you’re aware of, the more you realize you don’t know and the more you want to learn. Then you go and find out some answers and you realize there’s more - but it actually doesn’t get tiring trying to figure it all out.”

“Right now, the specialty coffee industry in Australia is moving in a good direction. It’s progressing in the right way with quality, traceability, sustainability, and laying good foundations for future relationships for getting awesome green in… I think that’s the really exciting thing.” And beyond the green process, there’s been progress in roasting technology, profiling, and treating the coffee respectfully all the way to the end product.

For Dan, his biggest frustration with the specialty industry at the moment is that “Lots of people are cashing in on something that’s apparently the new trend—only it’s not a new trend—it’s just progression. It’s no good because, for example, we try to get people to try out filter coffee (because we have such a big espresso culture) but they’ll say ‘oh no, it tastes really bad. I had one at so-and-so and it was terrible.’ And the sad thing is that that coffee was probably from someone who was just cashing in and had no passion or desire to represent the coffee the way it should be represented. They were just using a siphon that had a pretty light going through it and thought it was going to taste amazing because it looked cool. That said, there are a lot of people in the specialty industry who are doing a great job.”

What he likes about the specialty coffee industry is that it’s “… exciting because it is so new, there’s so much to learn, and there’s no one out there that knows everything. The people that I meet and that I think know everything are the first people to admit that they have no idea about certain aspects of coffee. And it’s definitely that thing where the more you learn the more you realize there is to learn. There’s often a pretentiousness with some people who are leading in fields, and you meet people in coffee where you think it would actually be okay if they had a bit of pretentiousness to them, but they don’t—I think that’s such a specialty coffee trait and I like that.”

“In the future, and in Australia in particular, I’d like to see better quality coffee. I’d like to see more of a correlation between the coffee we’re getting, how it’s roasted, how it’s made, and better representation of coffees that are particular varietals or from particular regions. Like with wine, the winemaker puts so much effort into preparing it and then because they have fewer steps than coffee (in terms of preparation) people can actually taste the representation of where that beverage came from – I’d like to see more of that in coffee. Creating a true representation of that coffee’s region or varietal and what it should taste like, so you’re not making coffee that all tastes the same. There’s no point in making coffee from all different regions and varietals if they all taste the same – I really want to see people appreciate it and where it has come from. You don’t have to like it, just appreciate it.”



All photography and articles © Eileen P Kenny