Colonna is driven by how exciting and incredible coffee can be, the character, flavour, and experience it can generate.
We look at how to achieve and realise this quality. Overturning norms and stigma to find the true quality is what drives us.
We seek to innovate and positively disrupt to explore and maximise quality.
Maxwell’s story
Career Altering Coffee
An epiphany experience with coffee a decade ago in Melbourne Australia transformed coffee for Maxwell. Coffee went from being a dull bitter stimulant to being a complex culinary product. It quickly became his passion, giving up his vocation as a portrait artist and pouring all of his energies into exploring coffee, learning about it and trying to understand this amazing beverage, everything it has to offer and what it means to people.
Travelling Coffee Brewers
Maxwell and his wife Lesley set up their first coffee company providing lovingly crafted coffees at events around the UK. Travelling far and wide, the couple brewed espresso through the night for revellers at music festivals and rain-soaked crowds at regattas.
The Golden City of Bath
This was fun, but they quickly wanted a physical space to build something special for people from far and wide to visit, as well as creating a hub to explore coffee. The fruit of this vision is the store Colonna and Small’s in Bath, which is dedicated to showcasing coffee as a drink full of flavour, complexity and experience.
Barista Champion
The search for perfection in coffee quickly meant the beckon of coffee competitions came calling. Barista championships comprise of an intense 15 minutes with a Ted-talk-like presentation, 12 drinks, a load of judges and a sound track.
Barista competitions provide a creative and explorative arena for the speciality coffee community. Maxwell went on to win the UK title three times and made it to three consecutive World Barista Championship finals.
Coffee + Science
If you’re curious as to what a Barista championship looks like, you can watch Maxwell’s water routine from 2014 here.
This routine is based around a collaboration with the scientific community. This research with computational chemist Christopher H Hendon resulted in a co-authored book entitled Water For Coffee.
Colonna and the Future
Colonna Coffee is an evolution of this journey, bringing together experience, expertise and passion to build a sourcing and roasting company that curates and presents incredible coffee. The goal of this company is to think big, to wonder how good coffee can be, to wonder how we can innovate to achieve this.
Why capsules? Good question.
Capsules offer the potential to be an enviable brew method for the world’s most spectacular coffee.
Coffee brewing is a crafted process that requires expert oversight to achieve perfect results.
The role of the professional barista is to oversee the process. Not just looking after grind but carefully measuring weights and temperature.
Capsule technology allows us to be the barista, for you. We precisely control dose and grind, whilst halting the perishable nature of coffee by preserving it in an oxygen-free environment — the capsule.
We even designed our own capsule machine — the OPAL One — to showcase the full potential of the coffees we carefully select. We want you to taste what we taste — the world’s most spectacular coffees, at the push of a button.
Get the best out of your capsules
The Nespresso® Machine you have is able to produce an incredible coffee flavour experience with our capsules and just a small adjustment. Each coffee we buy and roast specifically for our capsules is also prepared with a certain recipe in mind. The ratio of coffee to water is important in achieving the perfect cup.