Coffee Sketcher

Proud Mary Coffee

Properties3
descriptionThe Melbourne roaster-and-café group founded by Nolan and Shari Hirte in 2009 that exported Australian café culture to Portland and Austin — and whose free producer-profile library, Proud Mary Academy, is one of the most-cited sources in this wiki.
tagsorganization, roaster, cafe, australia, melbourne, usa, education
aliasesProud Mary, Proud Mary Coffee Roasters, PMCR, Proud Mary Academy

12 min read

Proud Mary Coffee

Proud Mary Coffee is an Australian specialty coffee roaster and café group founded in 2009 by the husband-and-wife team Nolan and Shari Hirte, in Collingwood, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch; Proud Mary — Portland Cafe, via the research report). It roasts, runs cafés on two continents, sells wholesale, and publishes a free coffee-education library.

Why it belongs in this wiki: Proud Mary shows up here twice over, in two completely different roles. It is a buyer — its name sits on Cup of Excellence auction lots and on Geisha microlots from the best-known farms in Panama. And it is a source — its education arm, Proud Mary Academy, writes the producer profiles that several notes on this wiki lean on for family history at Hacienda La Esmeralda, Mama Cata and the Hartmann farm. A roaster that is simultaneously a bidder at the top of the market and a reference work about the people it buys from is an unusual combination, and it is worth understanding both halves — including where the second half has been contradicted.

The company

AttributeDetail
Founded2009, in Collingwood, Melbourne, Australia
FoundersNolan Hirte and Shari Hirte (married couple)
Home marketAustralia — Melbourne café, Aunty Peg’s, and wholesale
US armPortland, Oregon (2017) and Austin, Texas (2022)
ModelRoastery + cafés + wholesale + online shop + free education library
SellsBlends (Humbler, Ghost Rider, Angel Wings), single origins, a “Deluxe” rarities tier including Geisha, decaf, and specialty instant coffee
Domainsproudmarycoffee.com.au (Australia), proudmarycoffee.com (USA), proudmaryacademy.com (education)

The Australian shop lists processing methods on the bag — washed, natural and honey — against named farms and regions in Brazil, Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua (Proud Mary Australia, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).

Aunty Peg’s is the group’s second Melbourne venue, listed on the company’s own site alongside the main café and the wholesale arm, open seven days (Proud Mary Australia, accessed 2026-07-23). A company profile describes it as a “Brew Bar and Kitchen” (LinkedIn, via the research report). A brew bar is a counter built around filter and manual brewing rather than espresso — the format where a roaster can put its rarest lots in front of customers one cup at a time.

Going to America

The Portland cafe opened in 2017 at 2012 NE Alberta St, in northeast Portland’s Vernon neighbourhood, and was the company’s first outpost in the U.S. (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch; Proud Mary — Portland Cafe, via the research report). A second US café followed in Austin, Texas, in 2022, a roughly 2,500 square foot space in the Zilker neighbourhood (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).

What travelled with the brand was not only the coffee but the Australian café menu — the all-day brunch format of avocado toast on sourdough, ricotta and vanilla pancakes, potato hash, meat pies. Melbourne’s café culture is an export in its own right, and Proud Mary is one of the clearer examples of it landing in American cities.

The company also states it moved its roasting operations into a new home on Williams Street (Proud Mary — Welcome to Williams Street Roastery, Part 1, via the research report), and says roasting is “a huge part of everything we do.”

To verify — which Williams Street, and when

The Williams Street roastery is stated only on Proud Mary’s own blog, and the post was not retrieved directly for this note (both proudmarycoffee.com and its Australian sibling returned HTTP 429, rate-limited, on 2026-07-23). There is an N Williams Ave in Portland and a Williams Street in Melbourne, and the research report does not say which country the roastery is in, or what year the move happened. Do not state a city or a date for it.

What it buys

This is where Proud Mary’s name is best documented, and it contradicts the research report behind this note — see the callout below.

Cup of Excellence Brazil 2019

Proud Mary was a winning bidder at the 2019 Cup of Excellence Brazil auction, on the coffee that placed second in the country: a Geisha from Fazenda Primavera, grown by Leonardo Montesanto Tavares in Chapada de Minas, processed natural anaerobic (see Anaerobic fermentation), scoring 92.15. It took a share of two separate lots from that coffee:

LotScorePriceBuyers
2a92.15$30.50/lbSaza Coffee, Maruyama Coffee, Proud Mary Coffee
2b92.15$25.10/lbTime’s Club, Coffee Libre, Proud Mary, Coffee Me Up

Source: Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Brazil 2019, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch and already recorded on this wiki’s Catuaí note.

Two details worth reading off that table. Both lots were bought by groups of roasters splitting a single lot — the Buying consortium pattern that lets a mid-sized roaster get a few kilos of a trophy coffee it could never absorb a whole container of. And Proud Mary appears in both consortia on the same coffee, at two different prices, which is what happens when a lot is auctioned in separately-bid sub-lots.

To verify — the research report claimed no competition record exists

The research report behind this note stated flatly that it could find no competition results, no auction prices and no named buyers for Proud Mary, and warned against inventing any. That absence claim is wrong, and this note does not follow it: the Alliance for Coffee Excellence Brazil 2019 results page — an official auction record, the most authoritative tier of source — names Proud Mary on two lots, and that page was confirmed via WebFetch when the Catuaí note was written. Treat the report’s “nothing found” as a limit of its own search, not as a fact about Proud Mary. It also follows that the auction record above is very likely incomplete — no systematic search of other Cup of Excellence years, Best of Panama buyer lists, or Panama Cup results was run for this note.

Panama microlots

Three Proud Mary product listings are recorded elsewhere on this wiki, all from farms with their own notes here:

CoffeeFarmVarietyProcessDetail
Mama Cata Estate Geisha NaturalMama CataGeishaNatural1,500–1,700 m; dried on custom raised beds at the family mill; florals, kiwi, mandarin, tropical fruit
El Velo Geisha NaturalEl VeloGeishaNatural1,800 masl; from the “Buena Vista” section of the farm
Finca Hartmann Caturra NaturalFinca HartmannCaturraNaturalSanta Clara, Panama — the Hartmann family’s farm

Sources: the Mama Cata, El Velo and Kelly Hartmann notes, each citing a Proud Mary Australia product page, all accessed 2026-07-23.

That buying pattern puts Proud Mary in the same tier as Grand Cru Coffee in Hong Kong and Gardelli Specialty Coffees in Italy — mid-sized roasters taking small, named, single-farm Geisha lots off the Boquete and Volcán estates that dominate Best of Panama.

Proud Mary Academy — the roaster as reference work

Proud Mary Academy (proudmaryacademy.com) is the group’s public education and help centre, serving both its Australian and US customers, with articles written by named staff (Proud Mary Academy, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). Its collections include:

  • Coffee Producers Profiles — biographical write-ups of the families it buys from
  • Learn About Coffee Varieties and Coffee Processing Methods
  • Brewing Coffee Basics and brew guides
  • plus ordinary customer-service material (orders, subscriptions, rewards, café FAQs)

The producer profiles are the part that matters for this wiki. They are among the few places on the open web that publish multi-generational family history for Panamanian coffee estates, and this wiki cites them on Peterson family, Price Peterson, Daniel Peterson and Kelly Hartmann — including the detail that Rudolph A. Peterson bought Hacienda La Esmeralda in 1967 as a retirement venture when the land was mostly cattle pasture.

But it is a roaster’s marketing-adjacent publication, not a neutral archive, and this wiki has already caught it disagreeing with other sources twice.

To verify — Proud Mary Academy conflicts with other sources on two dates

Finca Hartmann’s founding. Proud Mary Academy dates Ratibor Hartmann’s founding of the farm to the 1960s; Kima Coffee says 1940 (Proud Mary Academy and Kima Coffee, both accessed 2026-07-23, via the Kelly Hartmann note). Unresolved. When the Garrido Pérez family got Mama Cata. Three roaster sources say the family purchased Mama Cata in 1997; Proud Mary instead says Teodoro Garrido started the family’s first Boquete farm in 1959 and acquired the farm now called Mama Cata in the mid-1970s (via the Mama Cata note, accessed 2026-07-23). Unresolved. Neither conflict means the Academy is unreliable — family oral history genuinely varies, and Proud Mary may be repeating what the family told it. It does mean an Academy date should be corroborated before it is quoted as settled.

Reputation

Proud Mary’s own homepage leads with two claims: that it is the “4th BEST COFFEE SHOP IN THE WORLD” according to The World’s 100 Best Coffee Shops ranking, and a quote from the chef Heston Blumenthal — “I think they’re one of the best coffee roasters in the world” (Proud Mary Australia, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).

Independently of that, Wikipedia records a run of editorial mentions: Lonely Planet calling the coffee “stellar” with “Insta-worthy” brunch; inclusion in Yelp’s top 100 U.S. brunch spots (2024); Eater Austin’s best-coffee guide (2024); and The Infatuation’s 15 best Austin coffee shops (2025) (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).

To verify — the "4th best in the world" ranking and the Blumenthal quote

Both are self-reported on Proud Mary’s own homepage and neither was checked at source. The World’s 100 Best Coffee Shops ranking was not consulted — its publisher, methodology, year, and whether the 4th-place placing is current are all unknown here. The Heston Blumenthal line is an undated promotional quote with no original interview cited. Neither belongs in a sentence that begins “Proud Mary is.”

To verify — the $150 cup of coffee

Wikipedia states that both the Portland and Austin cafés have sold cups of coffee at $150 each, drawing media attention about specialty coffee pricing (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). This is an extraordinary claim resting on one tertiary source — the underlying news coverage was not retrieved, no year is given, and the coffee served is not identified. If true it is a notable data point for Premiumisation and would sit alongside the record auction bids recorded at Klatch Coffee and Angelino’s Coffee. Do not repeat the figure without finding the original reporting.

What is not documented

No cupping score sheet, Q Grader grading, Specialty Coffee Association or Coffee Quality Institute record was found under Proud Mary’s name — the 92.15 above is the coffee’s score, awarded by Cup of Excellence judges, not a score Proud Mary produced. Nothing consulted documents the company’s legal entity, ownership structure, roasting volume, staff numbers, or revenue, and no barista or roasting competition result under the Proud Mary name was found.

To verify — Collingwood Coffee College

One company profile lists “Collingwood Coffee College” as a fourth arm of the group, alongside the roasters, the café and Aunty Peg’s (LinkedIn, via the research report). It appears nowhere on Proud Mary’s own website as read on 2026-07-23, and may be a former or renamed business — possibly the predecessor of Proud Mary Academy. Unconfirmed either way.

Sources

  1. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Brazil 2019 results — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch (via the Catuaí note); official auction record naming Proud Mary as a buyer
  2. Proud Mary Coffee Australia — official homepage — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
  3. Proud Mary Academy — official education and help centre — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
  4. Proud Mary Academy — Producer: Peterson family, Boquete, Panama — accessed 2026-07-23, via the Peterson family note
  5. Proud Mary Academy — Producer: Hartmann Family, Santa Clara, Panama — accessed 2026-07-23, via the Kelly Hartmann note
  6. Proud Mary Coffee — Panama, Hacienda La Esmeralda, El Velo, Geisha, Natural — accessed 2026-07-23, via the El Velo note
  7. Proud Mary Coffee — Panama, Finca Hartmann, Caturra, Natural — accessed 2026-07-23, via the Kelly Hartmann note
  8. Proud Mary Coffee — Panama, Mama Cata Estate, Geisha, Natural — accessed 2026-07-23, via the Mama Cata note
  9. Proud Mary Coffee USA — official homepage — returned HTTP 429 (rate-limited) on 2026-07-23; not read
  10. Proud Mary Coffee — Portland Cafe — returned HTTP 429 on 2026-07-23; content cited via the research report
  11. Proud Mary Coffee — Welcome to Williams Street Roastery, Part 1 — cited via the research report, 2026-07-23; not read directly
  12. Proud Mary Coffee — Wikipedia — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Austin 2022 opening, the media mentions and the $150-cup claim
  13. Proud Mary Coffee Roasters — LinkedIn company page — cited via the research report, 2026-07-23; source of the four-arm company structure claim

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