Twelve years, three sheds
Dawn Patrol has moved house three times and never once turned into a cafe. Four of their coffees land this fortnight.
Roaster Feature
Dawn Patrol has moved house three times and never once turned into a cafe. That is not an accident, it is the entire point of the business.
Dom Ossa and Nick Suggitt started it in 2014 in a purpose-built timber shed on Dom's property at Kangarilla, about forty-five minutes south of the city, open to the public on Sundays. People drove out anyway. Around 2021 they took a warehouse and tasting room at Chandlers Hill alongside Watkins Family Wine, pouring coffee next door to people pouring shiraz, and stayed roughly two years. Growth pushed them out of that one, and in 2023 they landed in an old tractor shed at 402 Main Rd, McLaren Vale, where the roaster now runs on site.
Dom had form before any of this, having run SAD Cafe on Ebenezer Place in the city years earlier. What he and Nick built instead was closer to a tasting room than a cafe, and the sourcing followed the same logic. Dawn Patrol aim for full traceability, which means knowing the farm, the grower and the process behind every lot they buy. Two of the four coffees in this release are named after the person who grew them.
Four coffees land this fortnight, the whole board covered. An all-African espresso blend, two Colombians split across espresso and filter, and a Mexican decaf.
Cheetah Espresso Blend
Ethiopia · Kenya · Wet and dry fermentation · 1,700 to 2,550 MASL
Most espresso blends reach for Brazil and Colombia because those origins are forgiving and cheap to hold a profile with. Cheetah does not bother. It is three African lots and nothing else, which is a harder blend to build and a much more interesting one to drink.
Sixty per cent is an Ethiopian lot from Gera Estate in Limu, grown alongside cherry picked by around 350 smallholders farming plots averaging under two and a half hectares, mostly organically, with coffee growing under native shade trees next to their corn and bananas. Another thirty per cent is a natural-process Yirgacheffe from Jabanto, hand-picked and dried over twenty-one days. The last ten per cent is Kenyan, from Kiambu, sitting between 2,050 and 2,550 metres.
The Limu carries the sweetness, the Yirgacheffe brings the fruit, and that small slice of Kenyan sharpens the whole thing so it does not go soft. Sweet citrus, red fruits and caramel. It takes milk well but it is not built to hide behind it.
Néstor Lasso, Wet Caturra
Huila, Colombia · Caturra · Wet fermentation · 1,750 MASL
Néstor Lasso inherited a family farm in Huila that grew coffee the way most Colombian farms have always grown coffee, as a commodity crop sold by weight. He moved it to specialty, and the lever he pulled to get there was fermentation. That is the part of the process most growers historically treated as a step to get through rather than a variable to control, and it is where he has spent his attention ever since.
The variety is Caturra, a natural mutation of Bourbon that turns up all over Colombia because it is compact and productive. It is not an exotic pick. What makes this lot worth its own tin is what happens after picking, not what is in the ground.
Water strips the skin and pulp, then the beans ferment so that the remaining mucilage breaks down. Enzymes convert the sugars into acids, gases and alcohol during that window, and how long you let it run changes the cup. Then it is rinsed, dried and milled. Watermelon, butterscotch and peach, which is a strange and good combination of a light summer fruit and something much heavier sitting underneath it.
Fabián Muñoz, Pacamara
Huila, Colombia · Pacamara · Washed, wet fermentation · 1,930 MASL
Finca El Encanto is three hectares in the hills of Primavera, Huila, and Fabián Muñoz only started it in 2018. He picked Pacamara deliberately, which is a decision with consequences: it is a large, awkward bean that ripens unevenly and takes patience to process well, and it rewards you for that with a cup nothing else quite matches.
The farm sits at 1,930 metres, high enough that the cherries mature slowly and the beans come out dense. Everything is hand-picked so only ripe fruit goes in, then de-pulped on the farm and fermented under control in concrete tanks. After washing, it dries slowly across patios and raised beds rather than being rushed through a mechanical drier.
Lime, tropical fruits and brown sugar. It is a clean cup rather than a wild one, and it wants a pour over so you can actually see the separation between those three things.
Mountain Water Decaf
Chiapas, Mexico · Catuai and Typica · Mountain Water Process · 1,600 MASL
Chiapas holds Mexico's oldest coffee country, with farms that go back more than a century. The Sierra Madre runs through the middle of the state with the Pacific on one side and the Atlantic influence on the other, which chops the region up into a lot of small microclimates. This lot is Catuai and Typica grown at around 1,600 metres.
The decaffeination is where it gets good. Mountain water is drawn from Pico de Orizaba, the tallest peak in the country. The beans are soaked and washed repeatedly, and the water carrying the caffeine is passed through a filter that strips it out before the same water goes back to the coffee. Nothing chemical touches the bean, and the flavour compounds that would otherwise wash away stay put.
Cooked apple, butterscotch and milk chocolate. This is the after-dinner one, or the third cup you had already decided against.
Who's behind Dawn Patrol
The thing Dom has said repeatedly over the years is that Dawn Patrol has never been a cafe, and that this genuinely confuses people, because coffee and cafe are the same word in most heads. What he means is that the format was always tasting first. Flights of espresso and filter, a few fresh roasts at a time, someone talking you through what is in the cup.
That idea has survived three moves. The Kangarilla shed ran one day a week and people made the drive. Chandlers Hill put them next to a working winery, which turned out to be a fairly natural fit for a business already borrowing the language of tasting rooms. The McLaren Vale site roasts on the premises, with Neighbours Crumpets running the coffee shop out the front.
There are records on the shelves alongside the coffee, mostly what you would expect from a roastery founded in 2014 by two people with firm opinions: Dinosaur Jr, Dirty Three, Death Cab for Cutie. None of it is set dressing. A roaster who built a business on making you taste before you buy is a roaster with some confidence in what comes out of the drum, and these four coffees back that up.
Founded in 2014 by Dom Ossa and Nick Suggitt in a timber shed at Kangarilla, now roasting out of an old tractor shed at 402 Main Rd, McLaren Vale. Full traceability on every lot, and a tasting-room approach to coffee borrowed from the wine region around them.
Dawn Patrol Coffee is in the rotation now
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