INDUSTRY PROFILE
Freeing the coffee entrepreneur Instaurator tells BeanScene what inspired him to write a book that will guide the future innovators of the coffee industry.
Espressology allows Instaurator to directly share his coffee experience with young coffee entrepreneurs.
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or many people in the coffee industry, their passion was ignited by a great coffee tasting experience. In the case of Instaurator, Director of Espressology and author of The Coffee Entrepreneur, this occurred with an Ethiopian coffee when he was in his early 20s. “I didn’t know coffee could be that good,” Instaurator says. “I don’t know what varietal that coffee was – probably an heirloom Sidamo – but I remember being struck by the exotic taste and aroma. It was very enticing.” While Instaurator would go on to literally write the book on being a coffee entrepreneur, it was his pioneering brother Robert Forsyth who lured him into the specialty coffee industry. Instaurator tasted that eye-opening Ethiopian coffee while on summer holidays from university when, out of curiosity, he went to see what his brother was up to –
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setting up his own roastery. Realising he’d struggle to make a career out of his Australian history degree without taking a further teaching component, Instaurator turned his attention to coffee full time. At the age of 27, he headed up a specialty coffee distribution business of his own, now known as Danes Gourmet Coffee. “Danes became a wholesale specialty coffee roasting business, and we did things the opposite way around compared to many other roasters who emerged in the 1990s and 2000s,” Instaurator says. “Whereas others started with a single café then developed the wholesale part of their businesses, we were already an established specialty coffee roaster before opening three successful cafés.” Before the end of the 1990s, Instaurator was headhunted by a large franchise chain, which tasked him with establishing a brand-new coffee division. The business enjoyed a great deal of success,
and within five years, was worth $16 million. The coffee chain was sold to another group with priorities that contrasted with how Instaurator believed a specialty coffee business should be run. Instaurator says with highs come lows, and this experience taught him some hard lessons about business. “When you start playing with the big boys, you’ve got to toughen up. It definitely gave me some hard life lessons on how to deal with people and protect myself in business,” he says. So Instaurator went back into business for himself in 2008, setting up Espressology, a private label specialty coffee roaster that allows him to share his coffee knowledge with others looking to start their own specialty coffee businesses. “During my time in coffee, I’ve seen the transition from the late 1980s, when consumers looked down on Australian roasted coffee and preferred Italian brands. In the last few decades,
