Could you introduce yourselves, your name and your role at Pilgrim.

Hi, my name is Will Priestley, I’m the owner of Pilgrim Coffee.

 

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.

I’m a little bit old school so I got my first job in coffee back in 2005. It wasn’t in a specialty coffee shop but back in the day there wasn’t many around. I decided to leave uni and become a barista much to my parents’ dismay. I moved to Melbourne when there were only five specialty coffee shops.

In hindsight it was a great time to be there. I wasn’t one of the first, but I was definitely there when the industry was still young. And so, I’ve seen so many great coffee shops open and pillars of the industry and really got to meet the people who make the industry what it is today. Cool.

And then what about here?

So I actually, in 2010, came second in the World Light Art Championships. I had always looked up to the Barista competitions and I actually watched  the worlds and was down here in Tassie saying, “I think I can pour those patterns”. Part of me moving to Melbourne was to, you know, compete. In 2009, I competed in my first comp and came third in Australia, which was pretty fun. Very much a surprise, I was carrying a Rover 5K, those things are like 30 kilos, by the way.

The Nationals were in on the Gold Coast, and I could only afford to stay in a hostel with bed bugs and carry this grinder for miles to get there on time. You know, all the other competitors were in the resort across the road. So, in hindsight it was worth it. But man, it was a slog. Like I had organized to catch the bus from the event centre to the airport. The bus cancelled last minute, and I literally had to go around finding someone who was catching a taxi because I couldn’t afford to catch a taxi by myself. I was very young then and I’d just moved to Melbourne. I was working, not many employers in hospitality paid properly then so I was making the best with what I could. And so, from that second in the world I used it as a springboard to come and open my own cafe.

I’m originally from Hobart. My family was quite sick. My grandparents were quite sick and elderly, so I wanted to move back and be with my family. It was also a four-children’s time as there was a few gaps in the market down in Hobart.

I’d been on the ground watching amazing cafes like Proud Mary’s and Seven Seeds open. You know, St Ali was in its absolute prime then. I was there for Axil opening all these crazy shops and there wasn’t that in Hobart. So, my aim was to bring a bit of that back home.

Can you tell us a little bit about the local area community? Why did you choose to open up the cafe here and what makes it special and unique?

So, like I said, I feel like Tasmanians are a bit different. I still to this day believe it takes the Tasmanians to understand Tasmanians. I see a lot of people come, move from the mainland to open shops with these big dreams and they don’t understand why they can’t quite make it work. You know, Tasmanians can be loyal to the point of absurdity. Like they will not change cafes for a better-quality product. They will not change, they will not betray their barista.

You really have to give them a bit of over-service. What flies in Melbourne doesn’t necessarily fly down here. Yeah, it’s really important to be genuinely friends with a lot of your regulars. That was one of our points of difference when we started. I told the staff, make sure you’re talking, make sure you’re making friends, make sure you know the customer’s dog’s name. That’s how you kind of insert yourself into the Tasmanian industry.

The reason, I think I said before, the reason I moved home was for family. And it was a good time with business, with an open opportunity. The exact location we are is, opposite the hospital. We’ve all seen how busy shops in the big cities get and I bought out this dodgy second-hand shop for 50 grand. Yeah, and I just had person after person after person telling me we were crazy. Day one was like 400 coffees, which is big for Hobart, potentially at the time the biggest in Hobart.

So what can someone visiting this space expect to experience?

Well, it highly depends when they come. If they come on a weekday before 12 o’clock they can expect to experience a lot of people. We’re just starting to come back to our pre-COVID numbers which is nice. It’s busy, which is good. The dream was always a small cafe where it’s an interpersonal experience. However, that’s not how this cafe evolved.

You know, we do have a mod bar and if people are ordering single origins and black coffee, it’s great to have that chat over the counter with them. We try and take as much time as we can, but really we get absolutely slammed. And so what I’m proud of is how professional our outfit is. Our customers come and they watch a team of professional baristas go at it and so many people come up to us surprised about how quick their coffee is made. Tasmanians hate waiting in line. They hate waiting in line. So, watching people marvel at how efficient you can be, and people understand that this is a profession for the baristas here. I think that’s what people like to see here.  We’re a bit different. We’re in the city so it’s very quiet. So yeah, we love to have a chat. We love to have good service.

If there was one thing that Pilgrim wanted to be known for, what would it be? What do I want it to be known for?

I think busyness aside, I think we have a really cool fit out. The building was built in 1812, so we’re now more than 200 years old. Beautiful sandstone walls and they were cut by convicts back in the day. That’s nice, it’s not really what I want to be known for. We also have like a little farm where we grow a lot of our ingredients, but once again that’s not what I want to be known for. What’s truly near and dear to me is a lot to do with coffee ethics. We serve strictly, especially coffee.

We don’t take any shortcuts on that. So many people around town are what I call “specialty washing”. Like the equivalent of green washing where they pretend, they’re selling specialty or they’re blending with c-grade coffee.

Not everybody is willing to pay to do the right thing and that’s the world. But what I really hate people doing is serving bad coffee and pretending it’s great because that does so much damage. So, I would like everybody to know that Pilgrim strictly uses specialty coffee, nothing else.

What does the future look like for Pilgrim?

Look, it’s been a journey.

COVID was really tough. In 2017, I had a cardiac arrest and that threw the business into chaos. It wasn’t managed well while I was recovering. And in 2018, the building, with the cafe burnt down.

So that was another hurdle. And when we finally got trading again, we’d lost so much money. We had to try and open on a shoestring. The way it all worked out is we had to open in 2020 in the middle of COVID. Because we hadn’t been trading, we had no support from the government. So, we had to compete with all these businesses with free employees and we had to get back on our feet in COVID. It’s definitely not sunshine and rainbows for us but I think we’re persevering and getting through I do believe we’re somewhat of an institution. We’ll get there, we’re not going anywhere but I think for us it’s the battle of dealing with work from home. That changed the CBD. It’s like Melbourne, it’s very flat. So, we keep doing what we’re doing, and we believe in our product and what we do, and we’ll be here. But the future, I have no idea.

Why have you chosen to partner with the Alternative?

Alternative milks have been around for a decade now. I remember some of the big companies launching. And they launch, and then they don’t change their product for years. I know the really, really bad almond milk that was created ten years ago by some companies is still out there being peddled.

For me, The Alternative, froths the best, it tastes good, it’s been developed to work with coffee, and they’re using the latest technology to do it. We’re not dealing with something that looks like a baby chino after foaming it We’re dealing with oat milk that is sometimes hard to tell from regular dairy, and for me that’s great.

Alternative milks are here to stay. You know, that’s definitely the way the world’s going and I think our cow milk orders are going down and down and down. So why not use what’s best with coffee?

And then lastly, if you could have a coffee with anyone in history, who would it be and why?

That’s a really big question. There’s not too many people that I idolise. However,my family heritage is British. My dad immigrated when he was a teenager. So, anyone that I could speak to would probably be Queen Elizabeth 2. She was a battler. She was never meant to be on the throne.

What a change of events her life went through. Going through the wars and that kind of thing. Our generation sees nothing like that. We’re on an easy streak ahead compared to those guys. Maybe nothing more than just to have a coffee and a chat. Not looking for any secrets, I’m not looking for get rich quick schemes or anything. I just think she’s honestly, maybe one of the greatest monarchs in history.  I reckon if you had a chat to her when she was younger, she wouldn’t be that far from a regular person, which would be a nice gratification for the rest of us – we’re all the same.

Check out Pilgrim online & socials:

Instagram: @pilgrimcoffee

Facebook: facebook.com/Pilgrim.Coffee/