The Canberra coffee community has well and truly proven itself as a force to be reckoned with over the past couple of years.
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And there's yet another local company innovating the coffee industry - and it's not all just about what goes into your morning brew.
Jamie Royal and Nick Grunbaum are the owners of Air Roasters, a coffee roaster based in Queanbeyan.
It wasn't always about coffee for the duo. Royal started as an electrical apprentice after finishing school at St Edmund's College.
After falling down an elevator shaft and breaking a couple of vertebrae at work, Royal was forced into 12 months of rehabilitation, and then a career change at the young age of 21.
He secured three months of work experience at Price Waterhouse, which led to applying to study accounting at the University of Canberra, and he went on to top his course.
After many years working as an accountant, Royal decided it was time for a change, and he and his mate, fellow accountant Grunbaum, decided to start a business.
"We were deciding what we were going to do, and we decided that coffee was what we were going to get into," said Royal.
"We started with some little retail outlets in the foyers of buildings and that grew really rapidly. And the person that was doing our roasting for us, a local guy, was struggling with the demand we needed. So we decided to go into roasting and build the facility that we've done."
The duo set up their business in 2005 - they now have 12 coffee outlets across Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne, and supply coffee to over 100 retailers.
They came across fluid bed roasting, an alternative to drum roasting, which uses convection heating to deliver greater uniformity in the temperature, and takes about half the time.
"We always loved this type of roasting, and we always believed it was a better way of roasting coffee," he said.
"It was cleaner, it was more consistent, and it was more technically correct in that we can replicate exactly the same profile of a coffee, every single time we roast it to within 0.1 of a degree."
So they switched to fluid bed roasting, eventually designing their own specialised roaster with the help of an engineer from the United States - they have now built 10 of the roasters and sold them all over the world.
As well as selling coffee, Air Roasters has expanded into coffee pods for home use, which can be sold for fundraising drives, and even roasting coffee not destined for consumption.
"With fluid bed roasting, we're able to remove 100 per cent of the husk from the coffee beans, making it really clean," said Royal.
"So we supply coffee to quite a few medical and pharmaceutical companies - like we roast coffee for people making soaps and body scrubs.
"And they must have air roasted coffee, they're telling us, because they recognise how clean the product is."
Their next project has summer written all over it - they're working with local brewers to perfect the roasting profiles of the coffee beans for cold brew coffee.
