Sprocket Roasters

Founded by a small, unlikely crew of farmers turned chemical engineers, a viticulturist and a Canadian expat lawyer, this Newcastle roastery built its name on solving a problem nobody else in the industry had bothered to fix. Australia sends roughly six million tonnes of spent coffee grounds to landfill each year, and the patented roaster here burns exactly that, plus other organic biofuel, instead of gas, a setup billed as a world first. The engineering has picked up recognition from the Australian International Coffee Awards, Bioenergy Australia and the Golden Bean circuit along the way. Beyond the hardware, the coffee itself runs through fair trade organics, Swiss Water decaf and single origins from Ethiopia, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Papua New Guinea, all roasted in the suburb of Lambton. The site also runs the Newcastle Coffee School, training baristas on the same machines. It is a genuine technological advance in roasting happening not in a capital-city lab but a Hunter suburb workshop.