My Journey Into Specialty Coffee: From Coffee Drinker to Coffee Roaster

From office bean-to-cup machines to roasting coffee over a camping stove — how curiosity about better coffee eventually became Al-Gharb Coffee Roasters.

☕ It started with a lot of coffee. Not necessarily good coffee.

I often get asked how I got into specialty coffee. This is actually really simple. I have been an avid coffee drinker all my life. I am not claiming that the coffee was any good for the majority of it. I started at around 15 years old, drinking about a pot of filter coffee every day. Like most people, I wasn't thinking about varieties, processing methods, extraction or where the beans came from. Coffee was coffee.

I have good memories with my buddies, playing D&D and hydrating with one coffee after another. You know that bitter dark roasts where the coffee looks more like tar than coffee, especially after sitting in the pot for hours. It needed milk and sugar to cut through the bitterness.

I then graduated to a bean-to-cup machine at my first job, which was probably the best coffee of my pre-specialty phase. My co-workers provided the beans, and it was a world apart from anything I had before. At home, I had a pad machine and then later a capsule machine with a rainbow of different flavours. It was easy caffeine and pure convenience that drove this. I really didn't know anything about good coffee at that point.

When I travelled through Scotland with my converted Defender, I took my Moka-pot and had a tonne of fun fighting gale force winds to get my camping stove going. This part of my pre-specialty coffee journey was fun and memorable, especially parked up on an empty St.Andrews beach sipping my sugared moka at sunrise. That was really something.

I was not a coffee snob, but I drew the line somewhere.

“I can claim that I did not have a cup of instant coffee in my whole life.”

I was offered a sip once while travelling on that same trip and ended up drinking tea instead and I would make the same choice again now.

I worked in IT for most of my adult life (about 20 years) and my coffee consumption was high, about 6 to 8 cups a day. When I gave up my career to do “something different”, I started reading about coffee and then my curiosity got the better of me. It wasn't long before I ordered my first bag of specialty coffee beans and I never looked back.

Then I tasted specialty coffee

I never knew coffee could taste like this. No milk, no sugar needed to cut through the bitterness, instead only fantastic flavours in my cup. Just like a little bit of magic.

The more I read, the more I wanted to know. Before I knew it, I bought a popcorn pot and started roasting green beans (of unknown origin) over my camping gas hob, smoking out the neighbourhood. I was pleasantly surprised by the results and the next thing I know I bought a sample roaster and ended up making some of the worst coffees my wife had ever tasted.

If I said it just clicked, I would be lying. It was more like, I kept reading and experimenting, and reading and experimenting, until the beans started to resemble something I would drink. And then the world of specialty coffee opened up—and the more I learned, the less I knew.

Now I love good quality food and try to live without mass-produced produce wherever possible. I know the flavours are different and unique and I love it. The same is true for coffee. How would I have known about a fruity Ethiopian bean? Or a chocolatey Brazilian. There are more amazing coffees out there than I will ever be able to sip - but I'll try and get to all of them. 

The beginning of Al-Gharb Coffee Roasters

This is how my fascination with coffee beans turned into a coffee business. We had the idea, the brand even what we wanted to do, but it took another year to find our perfect location. The lush garden setting in the middle of Albufeira, Portugal.

Now not only could I enjoy a wonderful scenic lifestyle in the sun with my family, I had the opportunity to share my crazy coffee obsession with everyone and find like minded coffee geeks like me.

I am eternally fascinated by the fact that a little bean inside a cherry-like fruit can fool us into thinking there is mango in the coffee - or raisins - or jasmine tea, without any infusion of those flavours. It's just there, packed with personality and waiting for me to roast it and show off what it can do.

I love being able to bring out these flavours and to create coffees that bring a sparkle to whoever tries it.

Still learning

Coffee is like a Pandora's box - full of Pandora's boxes.

Even after years of being a professional roaster, there's always another origin, process, variety, brewing variable or roasting question to explore.

So this is my story. What started with a popcorn pot over a camping stove had somehow become a real coffee roastery. I find myself constantly being surprised by it. Every day I learn something new, and it still feels a little bit like magic. 

I am certainly under its spell.

— Henning Al-Gharb Coffee Roasters, Algarve

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