Running alongside the coffee trailer build we (Coffi Dre) were also busy developing and creating our very first product, now known as Coffi Twthill.
The initial plan we had, was to serve other people’s artisan coffee from the trailer but then we quickly thought “why don’t we develop our own blend and serve that?” It would then be unique and something we could call our own, and to top it off we could sell the beans in bags to our customers as well as the liquid form of our coffee. We all decided that this was the route to go down, but the first stumbling block was roasting!
None of us had any experience in roasting coffee and even if we did, we didn’t have the capital to invest in a roaster, the equipment or the space needed to roast! We put our thinking hats on again and decided that the only way we could make it work was to talk to other roasters and see if any of them would be willing to work with us to create our coffee. After a few weeks of discussing ideas with different roasters we decided to go with a small independent roaster in Cardiff. We really wanted to keep the roasting process within Wales, so it fit in well with that and the people who ran the roasters were great to communicate with. Over the next few months, we tried a variety of different blends and decided to go with the one we enjoyed the most. We had our coffee!
The next hurdle was the packaging! I knew that it had to be on brand and that for me meant that it should be black. I searched high and low through the depths of the internet for black coffee packaging and ordered multiple samples from all over the world, but nothing was fitting what I had in my head. Then along came this fantastic company in The Netherlands that not only had black coffee packaging, but Matt Black Coffee packaging and it simply looked and felt great and the cherry on the top was that all the bags are CO2 neutral! They weren’t the cheapest by a long shot but these bag in my opinion had to be the ones we used.
Next came the name. What should we call our coffee? To me, this was a fairly easy decision. The whole ethos of Coffi Dre is to celebrate Caernarfon and its people and what a better way to do that than by naming our coffees after the areas within and around Caernarfon? If you know me, you know I love a Trig Point and if you know Caernarfon you know that there’s a trig point right on top of a small hill in Caernarfon… Twthill. From Twthill you can see, in my opinion one of the best views of Caernarfon, you can see the town, the castle right down to the Menai Straights and over towards Anglesey!
The artwork was something I really wanted on the packaging so after discussing it with Tom and Haydn I went to find an artist/illustrator that would be able to capture the incredible view of Caernarfon from the top of Twthill. I had come across Gwenno from Creu_Co on Instagram a few months prior. As I mentioned, I love a Trig Pont, but more than that I really enjoy walking the mountains of Wales and the first illustration that I had seen by Gwenno was a trio of illustrations of the Welsh three Peaks. Snowdon, Cadair Idris and Pen y Fan! I really liked her work and decided to contact her to see if she would be up for creating the artwork for our coffee. Without a hesitation she said yes and within a few weeks she came back with the beautiful illustration that you now see on our collector’s Edition of Twthill.
It was all ready to go! all we had to do now was put all the pieces together and put it out there. During all this time I had also been busy building the Coffi Dre website. Everything came together just under a week before we planned to launch, we crossed our fingers and on September the 14th 2021 we launched our website and posted for the first time on our social media pages!
