About Goat Story
In the heart and soul of Slovenia, Ljubljana, there is a nest of innovators and dreamers who with the will achieve whatever they set their minds to. The Goat Story team.
It all starts with inspiration. As some may know, coffee has a reputation. A shepherd named Kaldi, who had a herd of goats, once allegedly lived in Ethiopia. He noticed that when his goats bit the bushes with red cherries, they ran wild and simply went crazy. Kaldi recognized the magic of the coffee tree and began growing it and making coffee from its fruits. Anže Miklavec (today's CEO) and his team wanted to follow up on this story and involve you in it, thus creating the Goat Story. They also summarized it's origins in this video.
In 2014, they first ruled Kickstarter when they placed their GOAT Mug, a travel coffee mug with a very unconventional design in the shape of a goat's horn. 10,000 coffee enthusiasts came together and donated almost half a million dollars to bring this vision to life.
However, the goat story did not end there. Just two years later, they placed another project on Kickstarter - an intelligent setup for the preparation of GINA coffee, which we also had the honour of selling. The coffee lovers of the world didn't even flinch and again brought this project to the world with more than half a million dollars. In 2018, their GINA even celebrated another success with the victory in the prestigious Reddot design award.
Goat Story has not stopped since then and is moving on and on. With love and enthusiasm, they let themselves be carried away by the Third Coffee Wave and bravely try what all the coffee can bring them. That's why they decided to become a roastery. Pražič, Dušan Matičič, joined the Goat story team in 2017. He himself writes: "Back then, those were very chaotic times. Gina was just about finished and starting to be sold. The only thing I knew was copywriting and marketing and my role was to help Goat story work as a company. But as a new world opened up - varieties, origins, processing methods, preparation methods, suddenly we had cuppings at work and I tasted so many different coffees every day, but I was still gnawing at me, is it possible to change the taste of coffee? Change its character, perhaps through altering the way it's roasted? It's quite funny when I first joined the team, I asked Anže when we were going to sell our coffees, he told me never. And then we started playing with our little home roaster Hottop, and I started learning to roast and I was fascinated by all intricacies of roasting. It completely engulfed me. In the end, we decided to start roasting, and it wouldn't Anže if he didn't go big straight away. I wanted to buy a five-kilo roaster, Anže went straight for the 15kg one. I wanted to buy a couple of bags of green coffee, but Anže wanted more. Finally, we have our 12.5kg Dietrich IR-12 and we ordered 1.5 tons of coffee, including our most beloved Ethiopia's SUKE QUTO. And since March 2020 we have been selling! By October, we had time to roast 3 tons of coffee, we're really are micro-roastery, aren't we?'
So that's the Goat story we know and love today. And I believe that in a moment they will be on a completely different mission, rising higher on the Third Coffee Wave, because visionaries like these guys from Ljubljana don't just stop there.