There are plenty of coffee roasters that are run by couples. Many of our most favourite names in coffee are.
Koppi, Man vs. Machine and Horsham Coffee Roasters immediately spring to mind and with The Naughty Dog from Czechia, we’d like to add a new one to the list.
While this company is still relatively young, it’s two founders are both big shots in the coffee industry. You might have heard of them?
Of course, you have. Gwilym Davies and his wife Petra are the coffee power couple who run The Naughty Dog alongside their renowned barista school from a calm location near the woods just outside Prague.
After Gwilym won the World Barista Championships back in 2009, he and Jeremy Challender went ahead and opened one of the British capital’s most iconic coffee bars, Prufrock.
Now, co-owned with James Hoffmann’s Square Mile Coffee Roasters, Prufrock set the bar high when it came to offering a consistently amazing cup of coffee, great service and tasty food.
I recall Prufruck being amongst the very first cafés that I ever reviewed for this site, way before I even knew who Gwilym even was.
And now, here we are teaming up for a fabulous Coffeevine edition.
Gwilym and Petra set up their training centre approximately seven years ago and recently launched their own coffee roasting arm, The Naughty Dog.
During a recent live Q&A with Gwilym, he revealed that his coffees are served across the Czech capital, in Hamburg and occasionally also at Prufrock. Keep your eyeballs peeled for the grey bags with the cute sausage dog logo next time you’re there!
The new roasting business was mainly intended as an additional field of expertise that Gwilym wanted to develop his own skills in.
While there are plenty of great cafés and roasters all over Europe, Gwilym agreed with me during our live Q&A that standards have slipped somewhat.
“Many people are just doing a lot of the same,” Gwilym said and I agreed. It seems that across the board, people have settled on crowd-pleaser coffees and avocado toasts rather than trying to push the envelope.
And with the current crisis leading to the large-scale shut down of many cafés across Europe, we don’t yet know who many of them will come back. Fingers crossed they all will.
When Gwilym sent us coffees for the most recent cupping, he didn’t know what to expect.
“I honestly didn’t think you’d even pick this one,” he laughed. But this washed Kenyan coffee from Rianjagi really stood out for us for various reasons.
One, it was super clean and really balanced and two, it was weirdly mellow for a Kenyan while retaining all the nice characteristics of a delicious Kenyan coffee.
Produced on the slopes of Mount Kenya, this coffee comes from the Rianjagi Co-operative that is located in the Embu North District.
It has approximately 1.100 active members who produce very high-quality coffees that are sorted, then depulped using river water and finally sundried on raised beds. Later, further processing takes place at the KOFINAF coffee mill.
This coffee has a fresh and fragrant aroma with a nice mouthfeel.
THANKS FOR READING THIS ARTICLE ABOUT THE NAUGHTY DOG
DID YOU KNOW THAT WE RUN EUROPE’S #1 COFFEE SUBSCRIPTION?
Every month, we work with three awesome roasters and deliver their freshly roasted coffees to customers all over the world. In our April ’20 coffee box: La Cabra, Cócora and The Naughty Dog.
