In 2018 and 2019 I struggled to sell coffee.

People queued on Walcott Street for cinnamon buns, walked straight past the espresso machine and went home happy. Our slogan was Coffee & Cinnamon Buns and I meant both halves of it, but Perth only heard the second half. As far as most people were concerned, we were a bakery that happened to own a coffee machine.

This is the story of how that changed. It took a lot of test roasts, an espresso machine shipped in from Italy, one blend that has never changed and a price that stayed put for five years while everything around it went up. By the end of it, Victoria Park had made up its mind about our coffee.

Coffee & Cinnamon Buns

When we opened the Walcott Street shop in October 2018, coffee was never meant to be the sidekick. I cared about it as much as the dough. The trouble with first impressions is that you only get one. People came in for a cinnamon bun, so in their heads we were a bakery, and nobody crosses town for a bakery's coffee.

Through 2018 and 2019 I kept making coffee I was proud of and kept watching it lose to the bun sitting next to it in the cabinet. Our regulars knew better. Everyone else had usually picked up a coffee somewhere else on the way over.

2020: I started roasting

Then came Covid Times, and everything got turned upside down. Somewhere in the middle of it I decided to stop hoping people would notice our coffee and give them a reason to. If Sinamon was going to be taken seriously for coffee, the coffee had to be ours, from the green bean up. So I started roasting.

I did not get it right the first time. I roasted, tasted, changed one thing and roasted again, batch after batch. I knew what I was chasing: a coffee that is sweet and strong at the same time, bold enough to hold its body through milk without turning bitter and sweet enough to drink black. Eventually I landed on it. One blend of arabica beans, one roast. I called it The Sinamon Blend.

A Sanremo Cafe Racer for Albany Highway

When 732 Albany Highway finally said yes, I knew the new store would be where our coffee got its real chance. The sign out the front would say Coffee & Cinnamon Buns, and this time I wanted the coffee half to be impossible to miss.

The counter needed a centrepiece, something nobody could walk past. I brought in a Sanremo Cafe Racer, imported directly from Italy. The Cafe Racer is built to look like a custom motorbike, with its workings on show, and as far as I know it was the first of its kind on Western Australian shores at the time.

We revealed it on 8 September 2020, two weeks before opening. The grand opening announcement went up on the 16th, and next to a hundred Sinamon flavours it promised the debut of our own coffee beans, The Sinamon Blend.

Opening week on Albany Highway

We opened on 23 September 2020 at 5pm and sold out. Then we did it again the next night, and the night after that, five days and five nights in a row.

Most people came for the buns, same as always. But nobody walked past that machine. They stopped and looked at it, and a lot of them did something they had never done with us on Walcott Street. They took a chance on the coffee.

Then they came back for it. Not for a bun with a coffee on the side, but for the coffee. For a lot of Vic Park, that was the end of wherever they used to get their morning cup.

One blend, one size, one roast

A lot of cafes give you a menu of beans, sizes and seasonal specials. I went the other way. One blend, one roast and one size: a double shot in a 12oz cup. The roast does not change with the season or with whatever is fashionable this month. The flat white you had with us in 2020 is the flat white you can order today.

That is what people loved about it. Classic and bold, and the same every single time. Most people start with a latte or a flat white, and if you want to taste exactly what the beans are doing, a long black or a double espresso hides nothing.

$4.50, then $5, for five years

We opened Vic Park selling a double shot in a 12oz cup for $4.50. By 2021 it was $5, and then I left it alone. For five years a coffee at Sinamon cost $5, while plenty of places around Perth were charging $6.50 and even $7 for theirs.

That was never a promotion. Coffee is something people buy every day, and I wanted ours to be something they could keep buying every day without thinking twice. People noticed.

Not everyone was happy

A $5 coffee is good news for the person drinking it. It is not always good news for everyone else selling one. In September 2024 our $5 coffee turned into a cost of living debate, on Reddit and in Vic Park community groups. Some people in the industry were angry, and a few of the comments went well past coffee.

That same week Pete and Kymba asked me onto MIX 94.5 to give my side of the story, and I was glad of the chance to clear a few things up. My side was simple. The price came from good intent. I wanted people to keep going out and enjoying simple things like a good coffee, without being scared of finding places that charge $8 for one. Then I went back to the counter and kept charging $5.

100 kilos a week

Today I roast around 100 kilos of arabica every week, and I still roast it myself. It starts with green beans, pale and grassy and nothing like coffee yet. They go into the roaster in batches and I stay with every batch, watching the colour through the glass and listening for the crack until the beans reach the point where the sweetness is there and the bitterness is not. Then they tip out into the cooling tray, turning and crackling as they cool, and the whole room smells like the best part of a morning.

Once they have rested, the beans are packed into our own Sinamon bags. The same blend goes into every cup we pour, every bag on our shelves and every order for the cafes and venues we supply across Perth. One blend, roasted the same way, every week.

If you want it at home, The Sinamon Blend coffee beans come in 1kg bags and in 5kg and 10kg boxes, with wholesale for cafes across Perth.

How Vic Park crowned it

Nobody handed me a trophy. The crown came the way it counts in a suburb like Vic Park, one cup at a time. It came from the people who stopped at the counter in opening week to look at a strange Italian machine and came back the next morning for the coffee. It came from the regulars who have ordered the same flat white for years, and from everyone who has told us they found their coffee on Albany Highway.

Coffee & Cinnamon Buns was always the idea. It took a roaster, a Cafe Racer and one stubborn price for Perth to believe the first half. If you have only ever had our buns, come and try the other half. A flat white and a creme brulee bun is a very good place to start.