We had the coffee bit sorted from Tim. We also had extensive experience in cocktails throughout the team at Worksmith, our hospitality company. And so Grada's story really starts in that community, with a few great minds and a love of things done exceptionally well.
When we looked around, most coffee in the bar world - from batched Espresso Martinis to all the major coffee liqueurs - was usually low-quality, made from concentrate and took away the unique flavours both individual producers and regions as a whole can boast.
As modern consumers, this felt totally at odds to how we treat ingredients and their provenance. The time was right to introduce proper coffee to the bar world. Over 18 months Darren Leaney, who heads up everything liquid in R&D, and Tim worked hard on a proprietary hot-extraction technique to ensure Grada was complex, innovative, worked by itself and in recipes, and above all was delicious.
Grada Coffee + Spirit's first batch features a flavour profile we know will always be what we want this product to give. It's rum’n’raisin, butterscotch
and chocolate notes. A far cry from the atypical coffee liqueur.
We've found this initially in beans from Fazenda Progresso, it really is the very essence of Brazilian naturally processed coffee. Run by the Borrés family, the farm is nestled in the heart of Bahia, Brazil. Their meticulous approach results in clean, emblematic Brazilian cup profiles.
From there we added Australian grain spirit to fortify, sugar to sweeten and the result is a coffee liqueur that doubles as a batched Espresso Martini. The result is Grada - a single estate coffee + spirit.
