Wayne & Freda’s new coffee roastery creating a huge buzz
The scrumptious neighbourhood that surrounds Winnipeg Street and Westminster Avenue is only getting better.
Ryan and Jen Hawk, owners of Wayne & Freda coffee shop, one of the neighborhood’s mainstays, put a pair of repurposed shipping containers on their outdoor property this summer. They not only improved the landscape to match the area’s industrial chic mood, but they also added more outside seating to the popular coffee shop.
Not ones to rest on their laurels, the couple just acquired the vacant property next door. Enter Wayne & Freda Coffee Roasters, where I was given a sneak peek lately.
It’s a cool area with a zig-zag roof line painted in a dark slate colour. With its high ceiling and cement walls, the vast space maintains the industrial character. One wall is lined with a sleek black counter, while the other is lined with stacked bins of single origin coffee beans going for a sleek black and white coffee roaster. The solid stainless steel beast, a San Franciscocan SF-25, weighs in at a whopping 12 kilos and can roast a 20-pound pot of coffee in 912 to 11 minutes.
The pair — and their business — saw roasting their own coffee as a natural next step, and Ryan became absorbed in the process this past year. It all began with a week-long intensive with Nelson Teskey of Tug 6 Craft Coffee Roasters, a coffee mentor. They tested and evaluated coffee and roasts all around the Okanagan, then roasted coffee and tasted some more — a professional procedure known as cupping, which is a technique for focusing in on coffee’s complex scents and flavours.
“Like a chef, you can manage the roasts,” Ryan explains, changing mouthfeel, sweetness, body, and acidity.
Ryan’s current hobby is tinkering and perfecting roasts, and coffee lovers may enjoy the results of his labour at the Wayne & Freda roastery, where beans are packaged under the WAF label and sold through the coffee shop.
