About Blue Kettle

Opened 2019. One roaster, six tables, a courtyard, and a stubborn preference for doing things in the room.

The short version

Mira Okonkwo and Tom Whitfield opened Blue Kettle in the old post office annexe on Harbour Lane in March 2019. Mira had spent eight years roasting, most recently in Wellington; Tom ran kitchens. The plan was a café that roasted its own coffee without making a performance of it.

Roasting

We roast on a 5kg Probat, Tuesday and Friday mornings, before the café gets busy. Everything we pour and everything on the shelf comes off that machine. We roast to order for wholesale accounts, which is why wholesale delivery is tied to the roast days.

We profile for clarity rather than darkness. The house blend is the darkest thing we make and it is still comfortably a medium roast.

Sourcing

We buy through two importers and, for the Ethiopian, directly from an exporter we have worked with since 2021. We publish what we paid per kilogram for green coffee on the chalkboard each time a new lot lands — not because it is a marketing point, but because customers ask and it is a fair question.

We are not certified organic or Fairtrade. Both cost money that we would rather put into the price we pay the producer, and most of the lots we buy are from farms too small to carry certification.

The team

There are eleven of us, six full-time. Everyone who works the bar has done our internal training, which takes about three weeks before you are left alone on the machine during a rush.

Waste

• Spent grounds go to two community gardens and anyone who wants a bucket — help yourself from the bin by the courtyard gate.
• Unsold cake and pastry goes to the Riverton Foodbank at close, six days a week.
• We give a 50c discount for a reusable cup. Takeaway cups are compostable but we would rather not use them.
• Coffee bags are recyclable through the soft-plastics bin in the store, not kerbside.

Working with us

We post openings on the window and on the chalkboard, not on job sites. If you want to be told when something comes up, email hello@bluekettle.example with a short note about yourself. We take on one or two trainees a year with no prior experience.