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Chiasso coffee goes from strength to strength

Flagstaff Team

Double shot. Brendan McKellar (left) and Jonathan Norton at Chiasso Coffee’s headquarters in Wynyard St Devonport

Devonport-based Chiasso Coffee won international awards last month. As founder Brendan McKellar steps back from day-to-day operations, he speaks to Geoff Chapple about two decades in the coffee business and his recent battle with cancer. 

Love of coffee – it’s been Brendan McKellar’s life, and when the Chiasso Coffee Roasters business he co-founded back in the 1990s notched a couple of international awards last month there was celebration, but also a certain poignancy within the little brick shop at 20 Wynyard Street. 

High fives in the shop – the awards weren’t the first Chiasso has received on the international stage, but they were the biggest. 

Along with the excitement, though, there was some quiet reflection. In the same shop that retails just about everything coffee – from takeout flat whites, to stovetop machines, and Aeropress filters –  not to mention the actual core business of sourcing, importing and roasting beans for its bespoke brands, almost exactly three years before the man behind it all had been slumped over his desk. 

As a former North Shore senior rugby player, McKellar had always kept himself fit. And he had a shop jammed with jute sacks full of coffee beans – stimulant sufficient to light up the entire Devonport peninsula. Yet he was feeling only a deepening fatigue, and the thought nagging him every hour was:  ‘Jesus. What’s gone wrong with me?’ 

The answer, when it came, was multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.  He was diagnosed late, by which time he was so ill with pneumonia that the doctors for a time withheld chemo. The treatment has won out since, and McKellar is now in remission. But he’s still on maintenance doses of chemo, and very aware that he has a type of cancer that can come back.

Such was the hammer blow to the business in 2015. But last month’s awards were tangible evidence of just how quickly a family concern can pick itself up, and carry on.  In the aftermath of the diagnosis, McKellar’s wife Valerie tended her husband, but continued on with the administration and the accounts, as she and McKellar shaped up an offer to Jonathan Norton – Val’s son. 

Norton had worked in the business off and on over decades – part-time work when he was completing a science degree, and subsequently getting experience in the UK coffee industry. The succession had always been viewed as a long-term possibility, but the cancer diagnosis suddenly compressed it into an urgent question. Would they take it on? Norton and wife Jaime set up the meetings with the banks that enabled them to buy into Chiasso as majority shareholders. 

So began a passing of the baton, or the bean. Last month’s award signalled just how far the new owners had travelled in their own search for the perfect brew. The 2018 Australian International Coffee Awards (AICA) handed Chiasso the gold medal in the filter coffee category, for its Ethiopian Yirgacheffe single-origin coffee, and the judges liked it so much they gave it the ‘best in class’ Filter Coffee Trophy. 

The strength of Chiasso’s coffee-roasting business has long been its two major blends, Metro and Milano, and Milano had won bronze previously in the AICAs. But the nod towards single-origin coffee in the 2018 awards underlined new thinking both within Chiasso, and the recognition of a new trend within the coffee industry as a whole.  Blended coffee, chosen and refined over years to give punch and flavour to espresso and flat white, was under a more esoteric challenge. 

 “Yes, I’m watching the business diverge,” says McKellar. “That’s a nice thing for me.”  Certain things stay the same though, he says. Chiasso’s resistance to selling in supermarkets remains because, in McKellar’s view, the ‘best before’ date of supermarket coffee is just too blunt an assessment for gauging freshness. Chiasso’s signature Metro and Milano blends continue to deliver the known body and grunt of espressos and flat whites. But the management’s new directions are plain also.  

The new team at the helm has introduced compostable takeout cups and won biodegradeability certification. They’ve been trialling new blends that match the requirements for certified-organic status, and there’s also the newly famous Ethiopian single-source coffee. To McKellar, this has been the biggest, most obvious change. 

Suddenly, provenance is important. The beans are certified as coming from the Yirgacheffe region of Ethiopia. More specifically yet, they come from organic plantations in the Kochere district, where smallholders labour at 2,000 metres altitude, within the intermittent shade of surrounding forest.

“Without wanting to categorise the Ethiopian thing too much, that’s what Jono’s been doing,” says McKellar.  “Hunting down single-source coffee from a particular area, because the local conditions impact so much on flavour. Whereas with blends, a lot of that can be lost. People want a story, don’t they? People want to know how it’s harvested, how it’s dried, not to mention how it’s grown and picked and then eventually goes onto a boat and comes here. Ethiopian coffee has got that story. And it’s highly regarded because it’s got this unique combination of elements: a high nocturnal/diurnal temperature range; altitude to attract moisture at different times of the day; and of course, soil type.”

Before he began in the coffee trade, McKellar was an events manager working on big shows like Symphony Under the Stars, and Christmas in the Park. Large crowds of people moving in the night. It was a satisfying job, as was Chiasso, which McKellar began with Chris Dickinson in 1997, in a small shop at Kings Store. He was soon on his own and based in Wynyard St.  

But now as he is taking a step back, McKellar is in a newly benign mode of observation, and is just as satisfied with the coffee crowd he sees dispersed around the Devonport streets. They’re sitting at tables, or on the move, arms crooked to hold the takeaway cup. There’s coffee-cup holders in the cars, and even, the baby strollers. He likes the way that crowd has brought the whole trade in Devonport to a high level. 

“We have that density of appreciative customers, and we have a lot of online sales. But I’m probably a bit more old school, meeting customers at the front of the shop, maintaining the experience. I do think the coffee drinkers are pretty highly attuned to quality now, and it’s become highly competitive. If you’re not making good coffee at a café level – just forget it. People go a long way for what they consider to be a good coffee. “

Meanwhile, the relationship between McKellar with 21 years of experience, and the new coffee entrepreneurs who’re just starting out under the Chiasso brand, remains collegial, warm, and productive. 

  “Whenever something comes up I’m not 100 per cent sure about, I can always ring Brendan, and he’ll help me,” says Jono Norton. “And when we’re low on staff he pops up and does a shift. It’s pretty awesome actually, and it’s that family thing – a loyalty you wouldn’t get in other circumstances.”

“It makes me emotional,” says McKellar, and there’s a catch in his voice. “Because a lot of my identity is here. It’s worked out well. We have a big coffee roaster out in Sunnybrae Rd, and we have the shop here where we’ve tried to replicate that Milano Espresso bar sort of style. Someone said to me just last weekend actually  ‘The whole place has got that real patina now that you get from just being here a long time.’  I said: ‘Does that mean we haven’t cleaned up properly?’ and he said ‘No no – it’s just it’s got coffee embedded in it.’ I kind of liked that. 

“But the diagnosis was a game changer. My doctor said to me ‘You’ll never be the same. Physically, emotionally, mentally, not the same.’  So what you have to do is adjust, and that’s been quite good.  It’s about every day and appreciating what you have got, and what’s good, and what I really like is not only the succession to Jono and Jaime, and Val’s perspective because she’s still doing administration, but just coming in here and seeing these guys with smiles on their faces. And the awards, it’s something to hang your hat on a bit, a kind of vindication for all the hard work, and it gives the business impetus and energy. 

“I used to be driving a desk all the time, and I was down the mine. And now at least I can look around and say – ‘Yes. That’s cool. We’ve established the business, the shop, the roasting side of the business, and people appreciate it.’ On we go. You know what Devonport’s like. There’s so much positivity.”