OBROS’s Unexpected Encounter

OBROS COFFEE was opened in May 2016 by two brothers who were born and raised in Fukushima.

The name OBROS is a made-up word that combines our last name “Ogino” and “brothers.”

Ever since our foundation, we’ve strived to offer amazing taste experiences of specialty coffee.

Nowhere we looked did we find any coffee shop specializing in no-blend, single-origin only light-roast brews that bring out flavor profiles. But that was the very style we found most attractive and aspired to.

My younger brother started roasting a few years later, adding more clarity to the kind of tastes we want to make. That’s when we started to gravitate toward origins that produce high-quality green beans and clean cups.

OBROS COFFEE is now in its 7th year. We have more chances to introduce our ideas to neighbors and people in Fukushima.

But we sometimes run up against a reality far from our ideals, when we think about how we run a coffee business for a long term and how we can continue to deliver high-quality specialty coffee.

Our challenges include sourcing high-quality green coffee beans, a lack of knowledge of coffee and the difficulty in reconciling what we want to do and what we should do to keep our business viable.

Fortunately, we’ve been working with importers we can trust. We have hardly faced any struggle when it comes to green coffee sourcing.

Besides, ever since we started to work with TYPICA, we’ve been able to further grow as roasters.

We’ve been able to do things we weren’t and gain information surprisingly faster than before.

For instance,

we get to ask questions and get answers directly from coffee producers online in real time.

We can send a message to producers directly whenever we want to know something.

And we are able to track the location of coffee beans from loading to departure to port arrival in real time.

Now that we are able to do these things we previously couldn’t, we’ve learned things that we didn’t know before.

Thanks to that, we started to see the essence of things related to coffee.

What is sustainability?

What is traceability?

What is the supply chain?

What is fair trade?

What is carbon neutral?

Our criteria for selecting green coffee used to be only about whether the cup in front of us is high-quality or not. But through the services of TYPICA, we shifted our focus to the ideas and philosophies of producers as well as whether we have become good buyers ourselves.

At the same time, we also feel a positive sense of tension that prompts us to reexamine what kind of roasters we should be, to fit into the current times, and to deliver better services.

This changed OBROS COFFEE’s stance, too.

In our early days, the subject of a sentence was “we”, as in “We want to serve quality coffee.” But as time went by, we started to think more about our customers, what we want them to feel when they come to OBROS, and what we want our town to be like. There is a long way to go before our ideals come true. But we hope that we would like to be a bigger part of our guests’ lives.

To do that, we will further deepen our understanding of coffee and introduce as many people as possible to how amazing coffee can be. As a result, we aim to strengthen the foundation of our business.

OBROS is in its 7th year. But we have a long way to go. A long, long way to go.

Yumehiro Ogino, Wakaki Ogino