About Us

As a long time independent educational CQI/SCA member the aim is to make an open and accessible place to learn, share knowledge, experience and have fun. We do this through workshops, SCA and CQI education, competitions and other public events. 

Our focus is on collaboration with others, exchanging knowledge and opinions. We aim to connect the producers, roasters and cafe to create a bridge. We offer support to companies and people we believe in and who believe in us, helping them grow in quality and size.

We predominantly work in the coffee production side: Roasting, Green coffee (quality control and advice) and Sensory evaluation. This includes supporting coffee importers such as IndoChina (UK), Omwni (UK) and UnRoasted (PL). Being a certified CQI Assistant Instructor and having a pool of Q Graders on call we provide support and backup to these companies by roasting samples, creating evaluation reports and assisting with descriptions. However we are also able to support in cafe needs with Barista trainings and private label roasting.

RAF

Founder/Consultant/Educator

For years I had been running Raf Makes Coffee Consulting. Originally the aim was to provide effective and long lasting support to cafes but over time this evolved into more education based support as an SCA AST (Specialty Coffee Association, Authorised Trainer) CQI Q - Grader (Arabica) leading me further down the coffee chain ending up consulting with coffee importers, coffee roasters and producers.

After all these years I made it to be one of only around 250 people in the world to have achieved all the SCA education modules(*data from 2018) and within this even fewer are also CQI - Q Graders. This acquired knowledge along with my journey through the industry from Barista (starting over ten years earlier) through management, roasting, education, consulting and working with such companies as Keurig Trading and Nestle combined with my experience working with coffee importers in Europe as well as with coffee producers in Kenya and India has made me uniquely suited to help most businesses in the coffee industry.

Most of my clients have been start ups as I like to work with the industry outsiders who have a passion for doing things the best way rather than the cheapest way. No business is too small and no business is too big to improve, as such I have always upheld that I work with people and their vision rather than just on a monetary service basis.

However at some point I became limited working alone and started work on the next chapter, Raf & Co. the idea behind is to focus on working with others and to collaborate.

It can be said that my ethos is to support companies and people I believe in. This is something that is also upheld by the Raf & Co team.

For me helping focused and driven people/companies with their journey to better quality and success is at our root.

Raf has and continues to work with startups to existing businesses internationally and thus is able to offer a truly broad spectrum of advise and support. Having worked with coffee producers, roasters and importers as well as cafes there really isn’t much of the coffee industry he doesn’t know.