About QB coffee roasters
QB is a Czech roastery, situated in a small town in southern Moravia.
Our coffee journey starts with water. Michael and I (Dan) met while working for Mattoni during a time when coffee and Mattoni were an inseparable pair. We had the chance to peek into hundreds of coffee shops, but there was one specific coffee shop in Germany that changed our lives. Visiting ba.ro.co in Amberg gave us a complete change of perspective on the coffee world. It was a cafe unlike any other we saw back home. What made it so special? It was a roastery with its own coffee shop, behind the machine wasn't just any amateur, but rather a professional barista who knew exactly what she was doing. A luscious crema with latte art on top of a cappuccino, a perfect espresso, everything clean and well adjusted, and you could buy bags of freshly roasted coffee straight off the shelves.
And that's where our dream to get closer to coffee was born. We bought a four-kilo capacity TC4 Roaster, and our team was expanded by Honza, our current head roaster. He drank a lot of coffee (jihlavanka) and he had a barn conversion attached to his house which gave us the perfect spot to start with our early experiments. He was like a small, coffee-edition chemist. We roasted, we tasted, and we sipped our way through the world of speciality coffee, until we reached a phase when our coffee was actually drinkable, and even the people around us enjoyed it.
We started roasting small personalised batches for our friends from the gastro-world. And I guess we really weren't doing such a bad job because the demand for our coffee kept growing. But our roaster couldn't quite keep up, both in quality and quantity and we wanted to keep getting better. The time came to crawl out of our shed and move along. We bought a roaster that could handle 15kg of coffee, and we moved to newer and bigger grounds in the Znojmo region, a small village called Míšovice.