We met Callum via video chat in May this year. He was a bit late but for good reason - he was out and about making deliveries to wholesale customers. What’s the big deal, you might think? GoatHerd is one of the new kids on the block and Callum is off to a great start.
Callum has had a long career in sales for years and started roasting coffee for himself, friends and family on an IKAWA 100g home roaster. After getting such awesome feedback he upgraded to an Allio Bullet which is a 1KG roaster.
Fast forward a little while and Callum has a dedicated space to operate his business, a delivery van and 4 Allio Bullets on deck running all day. Of course, he’s gearing up to upgrade to a bigger roaster as his business scales. Considering he’s pretty new to the coffee game, I’d say he's doing really well with decent volume - so much so that he is dedicating all of his time to growing the business!
What’s the story behind the name, you might also be wondering. Well, legend has it that Kaldi, a goat herder in Ethiopia, noticed that his goats were full of energy and couldn’t sleep after eating some berries from a certain tree. Kaldi reported this to the abbot of the local monastery, who made a drink with the berries and found that it kept him alert through the long hours of evening prayer. The rest is history, as they say!
The other unique thing about GoatHerd is their approach to flexibility and choice when it comes to the roast level. Most speciality roasters define their perfect roast level during sampling then subsequent roasts aim to replicate this with each roast. In the spirit of choice and perhaps helping consumers along their path into speciality coffee, Callum offers light roast, medium roast, dark roast and (brace yourself) oily dark. We admire Callum’s approach and how well he’s done so far, that said we’ve gone for the light roast option for the espresso category and the natural Brazilian we picked out for you all.
