The sweet taste of success in a proper cup of coffee

By KIMBERLEY PATERSON

Take a walk around Sydney and you'll quickly notice the impact Kiwi entrepreneurship has made on the city's coffee scene.

From the takeout coffee being carried on Bondi beach, to that served at a small upmarket Italian eatery on the other side of town, even to the cup bought for an on-the-run NSW premier by his assistant - the name is Allpress.

It shows what a lot of good business can be made in a receptive city in only eight months.

It was in April 2001 that Allpress Espresso opened its 50s-style cafe-cum-coffee roast house-cum bakery in the rapidly regenerating suburb of Rosebery on the city fringe just past Surry Hills.

Michael Allpress and Tony Papas, lifelong friends and one-time surfer boys on Auckland's North Shore, have created an enterprise that is reintroducing Australians to the pleasures of drinking great coffee.

It may sound a cross-cultural reverse trend, considering Sydney's tradition as a city of fine food, but Allpress says years of price wars among Australian coffee roasters has often led to quality being traded for profit margins.

"The people who were selling espressos in the European immigrant cafes have had a culture of being really price-driven and margin-orientated operators," he says.

Now there is an emerging market of new operators that recognises the importance of good-quality coffee.

Any question about the premium nature of the Kiwi coffee disappeared when Allpress Espresso won a New South Wales Restaurant and Catering Association award for the number one coffee blend.

The business has been a matching not only of friendship and shared vision, but also of individual success.

Tony Papas' Bayswater Brasserie is synonymous with supreme Sydney dining, and Allpress Espresso is the done coffee across New Zealand.

Not a bad effort from two schoolmates from Westlake Boys High School who spent only half their school week studying.

"The other half of the time we were down at Takapuna or Milford or Daniels Reef surfing," laughs Allpress.

Allpress, 42, is also overseeing expansion on his own home turf.

From two coffee carts in Victoria Park Market and Auckland University, Allpress Espresso has become a full-time coffee roasting business buying the best green coffee beans from around the world and employing 20 staff in the Browns Mill building on the corner of Drake and Adelaide streets in downtown Auckland.

Allpress is a king of coffee in New Zealand, although he hates the title.

He is passionate about the stuff, attending international roasting symposiums and travelling to estates in Hawaii and Indonesia to talk agricultural husbandry and cupping quality with coffee growers.

He tells how a frost in Brazil or purchasing options of big future and retirement funds in New York can cause spikes in global coffee prices, about the influence of fair trading practices that aim to pay a better price to growers, and the developing palette of Kiwi connoisseurs when it comes to their coffee quotient.

But he has little time for coffee as a trendy global fashion accessory, which he calls "latte art".

Allpress would rather talk about the importance of premium estate and single origin green beans, or the Florence-made double boiler design La Marzocco machines the company distributes, or how his aim is to provide quality coffee education and information for people keen to know what they are drinking.

He grew up in a bohemian North Shore household with mother Barbara, an enthusiastic, passionate lover of life and people, and father Bruce, a textile converter - converting looks from European textile mills into fashion ideas for New Zealand - with strong theatrical underpinnings.

Allpress is one of six children. He remembers he and his siblings as blonde-haired hippy kids being dragged up to Albert Park on a Sunday afternoon by Barbara to see Tim Shadbolt tossing the city council bylaw books into the fountain.

The family rented a home in Pierce St, Milford, and poet Sam Hunt was the local teenage Tom Sawyer who would turn up to mow the lawn in his white rolled-up pirate pants and monocle.

Other parts of the Allpress children's childhood were spent running semi-wild on a Coromandel farm.

"I was introduced to good coffee early," says Allpress.

"I used to stay up late and play mah jong with my parents' friends and I'd be chief coffee maker.

"We'd nicknamed it 'latte Jed' and I'd grind the coffee and put it on a pot on the stove and heat a litre of milk and throw the coffee into the milk and then strain it into a cup."

Barbara describes Allpress and Papas as neat kids, who were like chalk and cheese.

Papas was the outgoing kid from a more conservative family who loved the chaos and disorder he found in the Allpress home; Michael the quiet one who loved the calm sensibility of his friend's home.

"Tony was inspired by my family and the people involved in my family who would go and do enterprising projects," says Allpress.

Allpress' first job was making surfboards.

But that gave him a severe bronchial cough, so he and Tony Papas got a flat in Whangamata and lived as surf bums, driving a $400 Humber Super Snipe, juicing their way through sacks of carrots and lasting four days at a forestry job planting trees.

Later, Papas went overseas and settled in Sydney.

Allpress followed his own circuitous route, working as a cutter for his parents' jeans-making business Rozx, in the kitchen of the Bronze Goat with Garth Kennedy and then Patrick O'Reilly, as larder chef at Raffles (now Plusone) and in Sydney restaurants.

After a couple of seasons as head chef at Kings Court Lodge in Ohakune, Allpress went to Seattle to investigate the US dining car scene for an Auckland business venture that ultimately fell flat.

In Seattle, he met his wife Carolyn and his destiny.

"Seattle initiated the speciality revival of coffee in America," says Allpress.

"It was focused around the Elliot Bay Bookshop and there was this guy who started an espresso cart, a really old form of merchandising which America has been doing for years with pretzel and hotdog and popcorn carts.

"This chap build a cart with an espresso on it and parked it right under the monorail."

The man was John Blackwell, with whom Allpress still does business, and the venture was Seattle's first espresso cart.

Allpress was 30, and decided the time had come to stop living out of a suitcase and get serious about life.

Back in Auckland, he borrowed $5000 off his father and wangled another $5000 from a Commerce Commission research and development grant to design and build his first coffee cart.

He remembers his first real day of business. A tile sale was being held at Aotea Square, so Allpress wheeled his cart through the rain to it and opened up shop.

"It just went crazy, ballistic. Yeah, I was thrilled, but I think my father was more excited than I was. He says it's the best investment he ever made."

Soon Allpress and his wife were operating two carts, one in Victoria Park Market and the other in Auckland University. As the business grew, the couple travelled to Australia to find an affordable second-hand coffee roaster.

They eventually found it - on Tony Papas' recommendation in bits on the floor of a business just around the corner from the Bayswater Brasserie.

Allpress shipped the roaster home, stripped it down and refurbished it, enabling the business to roast its then-12 kilo weekly requirement of beans.

Eventually the carts were sold to finance a fulltime roasting business and those Allpress Espresso packages began making their way across the land.

For four years Michael ran Allpress Cafe in Victoria Street next to the Les Mills gym.

Now, in a kind of reincarnation, his business is in the Browns Mill building, the new premises of the now-demolished Browns Mill in Durham Lane where Barbara once set up a co-operative craft market.

The old roaster has gone new ways too, first to Palmerston North and then to Taranaki.

Allpress now has the Rolls-Royce of roasters encased in a glass box in the heart of the Browns Mill building.

"It would be fair to say that the momentum of knowledge has increased and sped up in only the past four or five years," says Allpress of the intricate business of bean blend selection and roasting.

"For the first 10 years it was just building base knowledge. Now we can do things we couldn't afford to do when we were smaller.

"When I first spoke to various roasters, a lot of them had this attitude that it was a mysterious craft you could not learn unless you were born into a family of tea cuppers or coffee merchants, which just fuelled my desire to educate myself more."

And he has sufficiently mastered his craft that Rosbery's Allpress Espresso is now causing an urban migration as Sydneysiders abandon their old cafes in favour of the new Kiwi kid on the block.

Papas is managing director of the business, Allpress a shareholder.

The secret ingredient to their success?

"That worn-out word passion, I guess," Allpress muses.

"I think the relentless pursuit of something is always going to pay dividends.

"One of the things I learned as a young man with all these people around me was that you could do things on your own. You don't have to go and work for a corporation."