The Stella Story

Stella is lead by Tim Varney, who's been doing coffee for some time and in various capacities - as a coffee roaster for Tim Wendelboe, as the co-founder of the World AeroPress Championship or as a co-founder of Melbourne's first co-roasting space Bureaux.

We're at the start of our journey, and we're excited to be working with Melbourne Coffee Merchants, Cafe Imports, Cofinet & Langdons - we're not quite at the stage of flying all over the globe to source green, and we're not even sure if that's what we will be doing at all.

Right now, we're dedicated to presenting beautiful coffees to you.

See the Coffee

Stella, fortified

Grada Coffee + Spirit is designed with one purpose; to bring great single-producer coffee into the world of spirits and cocktails.

Use Grada wherever you’d use coffee or coffee liqueur in a cocktail, or shake over ice for the perfect Espresso Martini, no other ingredients necessary.

Through Stella, Grada honours the enterprise of growing, sourcing, roasting and brewing great coffee.

Grada was created by Darren Leaney, Michael Bascetta & Tim Varney. It's the higest scoring coffee liqueur ever at the 2024 IWSC.

More on Grada

What's with the bags?

Label images used have come from either a repository of Bill Varney's slides from the 70s & 80s, or via a Mid Journey life crisis in collaboration with Tom Blachford, and now, we're back on the Varney fountain of archival photography with the talented member of the family, Abigail Varney.

They are simple bags - no "one-way" valve, no ziplock for resealing. We're not sure we can justify that kind of extra waste. Once you open the bag - pop it into one of the thousand sealable containers you have at home. Bag goes in your paper recycling. Easy.

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