{"id":20257,"date":"2025-07-25T11:55:19","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T01:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/?p=20257"},"modified":"2025-07-25T16:01:34","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T06:01:34","slug":"riding-the-coffee-coaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/uncategorised\/riding-the-coffee-coaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Riding the Coffee Coaster"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mahalia and Paul Layzell have been on a caffeine-inspired journey for almost three decades.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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As a kid growing up in first Naracoorte and then Robe on South Australia\u2019s Limestone Coast, Paul Layzell says he couldn\u2019t wait to \u201cget outta there\u201d. So he worked in hospitality and, in the 1980s, spent years travelling twice around the world from Europe and the UK to Nepal and the US. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By the early \u201990s, he was back home in Robe visiting his mum (who, at 96, still lives in the beach shack the family built in 1967) when his friend, chef Steve Cumper, introduced him to his sister, Mahalia. \u201cMahalia had worked in restaurants in Melbourne so we had a lot in common and we became friends,\u201d Paul says. \u201cShe\u2019s a trained sweets chef, I\u2019m more of a short-order cook, but we enjoyed working together and romance developed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Paul moved to Melbourne in the mid-\u201990s, but as a couple they continued to visit Paul\u2019s family in Robe. \u201cIt\u2019s an idyllic little bubble that\u2019s been a holiday destination for 150 years,\u201d he says. \u201cBeautiful white sandy beaches and turquoise water that looks like the Greek Islands until you go for a swim and realise the water comes straight off the Antarctic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It was during one of those visits when the Layzells identified a gap in Robe\u2019s hospitality offerings. \u201cThere was nowhere serving decent coffee or breakfast,\u201d Paul says. \u201cSo, in 1996, we moved to Robe and opened the Wild Mulberry Cafe, introducing both decent espresso and smashed avocado to town.\u201d The couple bought what they describe as \u201ca pretty ordinary suburban brick home\u201d the following year. \u201cThat\u2019s all we could afford and it served us well as a place to raise our family,\u201d Paul explains. Edward was born in 2002 and Byron arrived in 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By 1999, Mahalia had taken her pastry-trained \u201cchemistry brain\u201d pursuit of the best cup of coffee to the next level and began roasting beans in a shed in their backyard. \u201cWe outgrew that pretty quickly,\u201d Paul says. \u201cWe moved to a building in Robe\u2019s industrial area and gradually the business evolved into a much larger operation. By 2002, we sold the cafe to concentrate on Mahalia Coffee and allow a bit more family time, but the coffee business really took off .\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 2007, in the middle of the GFC (global financial crisis), a much bigger building came on the market and the Layzells jumped at the chance. \u201cIt was just an empty factory full of crayfish vats,\u201d Paul says. \u201cBut the price was right and a lot of renovations later, we have turned it into a Victorian-era coffee emporium.\u201d Paul and Mahalia now roast coffee in one section, have developed a gift store\/cafe in another, serving gourmet toasties, cakes, scones and soups and packets of their coffee. \u201cWe were given an unexpected gift when the council built a children\u2019s playground on our back boundary,\u201d Paul says. \u201cSo we were able to put in a gate and glass windows so families can keep an eye on their children while they play and the grown ups have coffee on the deck\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mahalia Coffee has grown beyond their wildest imaginings and even the challenges of the pandemic delivered a silver lining when they pivoted to online sales. Customers grabbed at the chance to receive a taste of the holidays they couldn\u2019t take by ordering mail-order roasted coffee free of freight charges. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cMahalia is really picky about how she roasts and people have grown to appreciate that,\u201d Paul says. \u201cIt\u2019s basically cooking a seed to caramelise the sugars. Cook it too fast and it tastes sour, cook it too slow and it\u2019s stewy.\u201d The range now includes five blends ranging from high-caffeine through to mild, fruity and sweet, a blend with hints of berries and toasted almonds, caf\u00e9 crema with chocolate caramel accents to European dark roast. As well, they offer single-origin packs from all the world\u2019s leading producers \u2014 Ethiopia, Kenya, East Timor and Sumatra. It never ceases to amaze them how far their reputation has spread and they now serve customers from all over the world and employ about 14 staff during the summer high season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In an unexpected twist of events, Edward and his partner, George Kheav, have ended up helping out in the business. \u201cThey have a unit in Adelaide and divide their time between Robe and the city,\u201d Paul explains. \u201cEdward studied film and television so he\u2019s very good at socials, while George is everywhere, helping on the floor, with the roasting, wherever he\u2019s needed. It\u2019s great to have them involved as they bring fresh perspective to what we do.\u201d Byron is still at high school in Mount Gambier and lives in a house the family owns at Millicent, about midway between the two towns. \u201cWe divide our time between Robe and Millicent and somehow we make it all work,\u201d Paul says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Two years ago, the Layzells embarked on a major restoration of the Robe house and today the interiors bear no resemblance to its humble brick \u201980s exterior. Paul says he enjoys the renovation process and has even accepted commissions to help others with their interiors. \u201cCustomers see what we\u2019ve done at Mahalia Coffee and ask me for help,\u201d he says. \u201cI needed a creative outlet and there wasn\u2019t enough room for a painting studio, so I turned to interior design.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In his \u201cspare\u201d time, Paul is studying a course at the Interior Design Institute. \u201cI\u2019ve been working on it for a few years and I\u2019ve only got one module to go,\u201d he says. Meanwhile, he\u2019s exercising his creative urges by remodelling the Millicent house. \u201cIt will have a nod to the \u201970s and \u201980s with a bit of a [American TV Western] Bonanza feel,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t want to get in a rut, so its brief is completely different to the Robe house, which was more classical and whimsical.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As he reflects on almost 30 years in Robe, Paul says \u201ccoffee is the goose that\u2019s enabled us to live a pretty good life in the country\u201d. \u201cIt\u2019s a great place to bring up children,\u201d he adds. \u201cWe could have sent the boys to boarding school, but that didn\u2019t feel right. It\u2019s like asking someone else to bring up your kids and we didn\u2019t want that. It\u2019s interesting that Mahalia and I were once so city-oriented and now we\u2019re happy to be country bumpkins. The more you travel, the more you realise you live in paradise. We now know that the place I couldn\u2019t wait to get away from offers a very good lifestyle, with a great food and wine scene and cosmopolitan influences. We know we\u2019re lucky to have ended up here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mahalia and Paul Layzell have been on a caffeine-inspired journey for almost three decades. As a kid growing up in first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":20264,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[161,336,165],"tags":[71,24,74],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20257"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20257"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20268,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20257\/revisions\/20268"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}