Patrick O’Malley

Expertise: Coffee roasting, coffee entrepreneurship, coffee education, coffee equipment servicing, Q Grader, café owner

Coffee insight: Coffee is a fruit, so it can (and should) taste like fruit.

Coffee fun fact: Roasting strategies change daily depending on the season and the weather.

“I tripped and fell,” Patrick jokes. “That’s what I always tell people. I literally tripped and fell. I had no intention to get into coffee.”

Thirty years ago, Patrick was studying to be a winemaker and was working in Hawaii, running a wine/ice cream/sandwich store. He says tasting Kona coffee was his first experience drinking coffee “that didn’t taste like asphalt,” and changed the way he thought about coffee.

The shop’s long hours had started to wear him down. “I talked to the owner,” he recalls, “who I got—out of pure selfishness—to sell the beer and wine license so that we could close the store before midnight or one o’clock in the morning. So we started doing coffee instead.”

Patrick is true serial entrepreneur, running four different coffee operations. He’s the owner of Infusion Distribution, a multifaceted business that offers a wholesale inventory of brewing equipment and beverage supplies business consulting, and equipment repairs and servicing. He’s also the owner of Infusion Coffee and Tea Crafters, his roasting company and cafes in Arizona, and the founder of the International Barista Coffee Academy (IBCA), where he offers courses and consulting for coffee professionals.

He’s also the owner of 3 Coffee Guys, a company he runs with two of his friends and fellow coffee educators, which offers “on-site coffee education” by organizing origin trips that allow coffee professionals to learn about the process of creating coffee, from farm to cup, and he’s working on producing a forthcoming documentary, Brewsed, that offers a window into the economic, social, and environmental impact of the coffee industry.

Patrick says the part of his job he enjoys most is his role as an educator. In 2010, he became the 43rd person to receive an SCA Diploma, and two years later, he first became involved in coffee education when he was invited to help design the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe’s (now part of the SCA) education program.

Being so closely involved in that processed showed him the importance of offering greater coffee education: “It’s something I saw a need for, and its something I really enjoy. I think that’s what I enjoy probably most, is doing the education.” Patrick is an award-winning coffee educator, and through the IBCA, he offers courses in everything from roasting to latte art to equipment maintenance.

Patrick wants consumers to stop being hyper-focused on getting the freshest roasted whole bean coffees, because coffee roast dates do not tell the full story.

“We actually did tests where we tasted coffee roasted last week and we tasted a coffee we saved for over nine months, and you could hardly tell in the bag. … Coffee doesn’t have to be roasted yesterday and drank today. It can actually age quite nicely, up to about thirty days, depending on the bag, depending on the situation.”

How can consumers educate themselves about whether or not their coffee is fresh? Patrick says to ask the roaster. “It should be something that the roasters should communicate,” he explains. “If they can’t communicate with you, they’re not very well-educated. They really need to be able to educate you.”

“I had always had this dream to take coffee people, or people that wanted to get into coffee, and do a seed-to-cup educational program,” Patrick says, which was the inspiration for 3 Coffee Guys, the company he runs with friends Ricardo Viellegas and Damien Burgas.

Patrick says the goal was to offer coffee professionals the opportunity to get a hands-on, immersive experience that showed them the entire coffee journey, and educated them on the entire coffee value chain. Over the past five years, 3 Coffee Guys has organized trips to numerous coffee-producing countries, which include shadowing coffee producers, cuppings, and SCA-certified coursework.

Patrick sees this work as an opportunity to educate roasters on the full value chain of coffee and create an understanding of the importance of sustainable pricing models: “What I love most about it is the people [at origin], the people are…what inspires me to continue to try to help and do whatever I can in my little corner of the world.”

Infusion Distribution: https://www.infusiondistributionusa.com

Infusion Coffee & Tea Crafters: https://www.infusioncoffeetea.com

IBCA: https://www.ibca-usa.com

3 Coffee Guys: https://www.3coffeeguys.com

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