Sacred Grounds dad and son team roast their way to coffee success

Greg Phillips (left) and dad Rob at Sacred Grounds Coffee Roasting Company in Taupo. Photo / Laurilee McMichael

In need of a caffeine hit? Greg and Rob Phillips are your go-to men, roasting coffee beans in Taupō's industrial area. As part of an occasional series on local family businesses, LAURILEE McMICHAEL meets the father-and-son team behind Sacred Grounds Coffee Roasting Company.

With two generations of the Phillips family involved in the caffeine business, it would be no surprise to learn that dad Rob and son Greg have liquid coffee in their veins.

Decades of combined industry experience and dedication to all things coffee paid off recently when Sacred Grounds won its first silver medal at the Golden Bean Coffee Roasting Competition, an Australasian coffee competition run in New South Wales. It's the largest global coffee roasters' competition and conference in the world, with 15,000 entries from 1500 coffee roasters in 2019.

It's not the first success Sacred Grounds has had - in 2018 its Wharewaka, Mahia and Coromandel blends won bronze medals in the milk-based coffees category and their Acacia Bay blend won bronze in the espresso category. In 2019, Wharewaka and Acacia Bay blends again won medals and Sacred Grounds' Fair Trade Organic picked up a bronze in the milk-based and a silver medal in the espresso category, something the pair are justifiably proud of.

"It's very hard to get a silver in this competition. There was only one gold given over the whole competition in each category," Rob says.

Coffee runs in the Phillips family. Rob has made a career of it, starting in the early days with Coffee Specialists in the early 1970s when there were only four small coffee roasters in New Zealand and all the coffee sold was either percolated or filter coffee and "it was terrible".

A café would put the coffee perc on in the morning and the coffee it produced would sit there stewing all day.

"Everybody thought coffee back then was beautiful but today you wouldn't drink it," Rob recalls. "We used to grind percolator coffee and it was in a 3kg cardboard box. By the time it got to the customer, it must have been off, but we didn't know."

Rob worked his way up to coffee development manager with what was then LD Nathan. He says the demand for better coffee came from people who had been overseas and came back asking why they couldn't get decent coffee at home.

'I remember I sold the first espresso machine when the Sheraton [Hotel] opened up in Auckland many years ago and that was my first introduction to espresso machines. I didn't even know how to switch it on. Luckily there was a chef from France who was one of the head chefs from the Sheraton and he actually showed us how to work the coffee machine, which was embarrassing."

By the 1980s the demand for proper coffee was growing and Rob started his own small coffee roasting company. From there he moved to importing and blending coffee. By then Greg had joined him, first working in Rob's café in Papakura and then, after four years in the Army, selling coffee to cafés and restaurants.

In 2001 he trained overseas as a coffee machine technician and, fascinated by all the new coffees coming in, went on to learn the arts of coffee blending and cupping, the testing of coffee blends.

Rob Phillips (left) and son Greg inspect the coffee beans as the coffee roasting process finishes. Photo / Laurilee McMichael

In July 2018 Greg had moved to Taupō, where he began Sacred Grounds. He spent the first three or four months trying coffees from around the world and learning their characteristics and tastes.

"Roasting a coffee a certain way will give you a certain taste and like a game of memory you'll put that aside. When you do your blending you'll think 'I need something else' and think 'oh, the Honduras [coffee] gave me that' and you'll go back and add that, so blending is the key to any successful coffee company. There's 2000 reactions that go on in the coffee roaster so you've got to harness the right reaction at the right time to give you the right result that you want."

By now, Rob had retired and moved to Australia but Greg convinced his father to come and help him in the company. Rob jumped at the chance to live in Taupō.

At Sacred Grounds, Greg is the blender, or chef who comes up with the recipe, and the coffee roaster, in this case Rob, is the cook, roasting beans every weekday and taking into account all the different variables on the day to works out the right roasting temperature to harness those 2000 reactions.

Greg spends his time on research and development, constantly talking to bean suppliers and cupping the beans to find the best blends. Sacred Grounds' coffee beans come from all over the world but Greg admits to a particular fondness for Central American coffees, as well as a preference for fair trade organic beans.

In Taupō, you can drink Sacred Grounds Coffee at Dixie Brown's, Steaming Bean and Lava Glass café, as well as buy it directly from the roastery in Matai St. Rob says his and Greg's combined experience means they can help people make sure that their cup of coffee is the best it can be. And, he adds, coffee enthusiasts aren't slow to take them up on it.

"People like their coffee and whenever we go to a party we spend hours talking coffee."