He Went Bankrupt at 21. Then Built One of Australia's Most Respected Coffee Brands. With Peter Wolff

Yeah, so Wolf Coffee Roasters was a business that my wife Penny and I founded back in 2008.

And it was sort of really a response to sort of me coming back out of Melbourne, you know, within a coffee business that had also started up down there called Veneziano Coffee.

So that's a business that I'd founded in Melbourne.

But also I think it was kind of a bit of a pivotal time for me to sort of about life sort of changes and sort of choices.

And I just sort of wanted to make some just sort of make some changes and sort of come back home to Brisbane, really.

And, you know, I sort of set about sort of taking all those sort of lessons that I'd learned, you know, sort of through my times with aromas and then Veneziano and try some things that are very different.

And I think what's important, it's always about the context of time, right, Dan? Yeah.

And in, you know, 2008 in coffee, it was, you know, it was the, it was the start of kind of the, I guess the third wave and especially the specialty wave, you know.

But I knew I wanted to kind of sort of contract a little bit, really narrow down my focus and we wanted to have these really two distinctive kind of approaches in 2008, my wife Penny and I, and that was to take on a retail business where that was um consumer folks so we wanted to be talking to the customers that was Dandelion in Driftwood and it was the first cafe uh that opened up in Hendra in on in of October of 2010 and then obviously we set about Wolf Coffee Roasters as being I guess our our business uh to business sort of um that also sort of incorporated coffee education, so the Wolf College of Coffee.

We were the agents for Probat Coffee Roasters as well.

So we were selling coffee roasting equipment.

So wholesale, you know, traditional sort of wholesale roasting and retail.

And so I think, you know, we kind of, off we went, you know.

And for those, for those that sort of know both Penny and I, we're pretty dynamic and we're a very powerful pair.

pairing and we do we do feed off each other very very well um and you know i think you know a lot of luck sort of drops in at the time too and we were we were very fortunate with daniel and driftwood that when we opened you know this tiny little shop you know 50 square meter shop six staff members well actually four because penny and i were included in that um Yeah, we were sort of like, you know, oh, gee, I hope we can give you enough hours and, you know, okay.

And I think within, you know, sort of four weeks, you know, we went from four staff to 27 staff, you know, and it took off.

We got some good press.

And, well, I guess in the day what we did was pretty unique, you know, four single – four espresso options that you could choose from.

We had a brew bar, you know, we were doing Chemex siphon brew, you know, we had, you know, I think 27 different types of teas that were all brewed immaculately.

So that was just something super, super unique.

And so that off it sort of went.

And then on the Wolf Coffee Roasters side, I guess I was still in this kind of headspace of I was a bit anti-brand, to be honest.

I'd sort of left Veneziano and I was really tired of the, you know, give me, you know, your investment, it was more investment on windbreaks and umbrellas than there was in terms of in anything else.

And I kind of realized, well, what am I doing here? So I was kind of anti-brand, I suppose, back in those days.

And so I was just basically roasting out of a smaller facility in Banyo.