Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood

Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood is a British barista, roaster and author based in Bath, England. He has won the UK Barista Championship three times and competed for the UK at the World Barista Championship.¹² In 2009 he and his wife Lesley opened Colonna & Small’s, the Bath coffee shop his name is still attached to.¹

He is remembered less for a trophy than for a book. With the chemist Christopher H. Hendon he co-wrote Water for Coffee (2015), the work that turned “what’s in your tap water” from a shrug into a measurable variable that baristas argue about.²³ This wiki’s own Water for brewing coffee page traces most of its explanations back to that book and to the single peer-reviewed paper behind it.

Story

Competing

Two independent sources — his publisher and a UK green-coffee company’s profile of him — both state flatly that he won the UK Barista Championship three times and went on to represent the UK at the world final.²⁴ The UK title is the national qualifier: win it and you get the one British seat at the World Barista Championship, run by World Coffee Events under the Specialty Coffee Association.

His world-final placings are already recorded in this wiki’s own World Barista Championship results tables:

	Year	Host city	Place
1	2012	Vienna, Austria	6th
2	2014	Rimini, Italy	5th
3	2015	Seattle, USA	5th

Three world finals in four years, twice inside the top five, without ever taking the title. The 2015 final was the one won by Sasa Sestic of Australia.

Water for Coffee, and the paper underneath it

Before the book came a journal article: “The Role of Dissolved Cations in Coffee Extraction,” by Christopher H. Hendon, Lesley Colonna-Dashwood and Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in 2014.⁵ “Dissolved cations” means the dissolved minerals in water — chiefly magnesium and calcium. The finding that mattered to working baristas is that those minerals do not just sit in the water; they actively grab hold of the flavour compounds in coffee as it brews, so two cafés using the same beans, grinder and recipe can pull genuinely different-tasting shots purely because of what comes out of the tap.

Water for Coffee, co-authored with Hendon, followed in 2015 and remains the industry’s closest thing to a reference text on the subject.³ Its practical consequence is everywhere now: cafés that filter, remineralise or blend their brewing water rather than plumbing straight from the mains, and the whole vocabulary of hardness (how much mineral is dissolved) and alkalinity (how much acidity the water can neutralise before the coffee tastes flat) that Water for brewing coffee unpacks.

He followed it in 2017 with The Coffee Dictionary, an A-to-Z of coffee from growing and roasting through brewing and tasting, published by Octopus in the UK and Chronicle Books in the US.⁶²

That pairing — a competition bar and a chemistry lab — is what separates him from the other competitor-turned-explainers of his generation, James Hoffmann and Matt Perger, who both worked mainly through blogs and video.

The businesses

• Colonna & Small’s — the Bath coffee shop, opened by Maxwell and Lesley in 2009, and the affiliation listed beside his name on the World Barista Championship stage.¹ His publisher describes it as an award-winning independent roastery and coffee shop.² Its reputation was such that customers were reported to travel the two hours from London for it.⁴
• Colonna Coffee — the roasting and wholesale business that grew out of the café, now also selling direct to drinkers online. He is consistently described as its founder.¹⁴ Its early moves included a range of Nespresso-compatible capsules and work on biodegradable versions of them — an unusual direction for a specialty roaster at the time, most of which treated capsules as the enemy.⁴
• Peak Water — a filter jug sold under the Colonna umbrella. Unlike a standard supermarket jug, which strips minerals indiscriminately, this one is built to let you tune the water you brew with, which is the whole argument of his book turned into a physical object.¹⁷

Uncertain and unverified

To verify

Which years he won the UK title. Every source consulted says three times and none of them says when.²⁴ The years commonly repeated elsewhere are 2012, 2014 and 2015, and those do line up with the three years he appears in this wiki’s World Barista Championship finals tables — the UK champion is the person who goes. But that is an inference from the world results, not a national record. No official UK Barista Championship results archive was reached for this note. Do not state the years as fact.

To verify

His world-final scores. The World Barista Championship tables on this wiki list 572 points in 2012, 499 in 2014 and 568 in 2015. That whole score series carries a warning on its own page — see World Barista Championship > Scores, and why you can’t compare them — because the scoresheet has been rebuilt repeatedly and the totals are only meaningful within a single year’s final. Nothing consulted here documents the coffee, farm, variety, processing method, roaster or grinder he competed with in any of the three years.

To verify

Peak Water’s founding, ownership and how it works. The official Colonna Coffee site carries Peak Water as a product collection,¹ and an interview host introduces it as one of his projects,⁷ but no source consulted gives a launch date, a company structure, his role or title in it, the filter chemistry, or who else founded it. Whether he is founder, co-founder or simply the public face of it is undocumented here.

To verify

Colonna & Hunter. An old Colonna & Small’s blog page, written in the first person, names him as co-owner of Colonna & Hunter in Bath.⁸ That is the only source for the business existing at all — no dates, no partners, no concept, no confirmation it still trades. His LinkedIn profile lists him as Managing Director of “All Things Coffee”, Bath,⁹ a company name that appears in no other source consulted and cannot be matched to any of the trading names above.

To verify

Founding date of the roastery, ownership splits, and his personal history. The Assembly profile describes Colonna Coffee’s wholesale arm as roughly one year old at the time of the interview, but the interview is undated, so that yields no year.⁴ Ownership percentages across Colonna & Small’s, Colonna Coffee and Colonna & Hunter are nowhere stated — only co-ownership with Lesley.⁴⁸⁹ His birth year, education and early career are not documented in anything consulted. Equally absent: any specific green-coffee purchase attributable to him or his companies — no Best of Panama or Cup of Excellence lot, price or cupping score. Any such figure attached to his name would be invented.

Related

• Water for brewing coffee — the subject his book defined, and the page that leans hardest on his work
• Total dissolved solids · Extraction yield — the two measurements water chemistry moves
• World Barista Championship — where he finished 6th, 5th and 5th
• World Coffee Championships · World Coffee Events · Specialty Coffee Association — who runs the competition circuit he came up through
• James Hoffmann — the 2007 world champion and the other British competitor-turned-author
• Matt Perger — the same generation, the same shift from competing to explaining
• Scott Rao — the other name most brewing-water advice traces back to
• Barista · Espresso — the craft and the drink the competitions are built on
• Prufrock Coffee · Square Mile Coffee Roasters · Has Bean — the UK specialty scene he competed out of
• Coffee Masters — the other UK-hosted competition format of the same era
• Green coffee buying · Best of Panama · Cup of Excellence — how a roastery of this kind sources

Official links

• Official site — Colonna Coffee — his roastery and shop; confirmed by fetch, including the 2009 opening of Colonna & Small’s

Footnotes

1. Colonna Coffee — official site — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 2009 Colonna & Small’s opening date, his founder role, and Peak Water appearing as a Colonna product line ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood — author page, Hachette New Zealand — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the three UK Barista Championship titles, the World Barista Championship appearances, the award-winning roastery-and-shop description, and the Water for Coffee co-authorship with Hendon ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. Water for Coffee — Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood and Christopher H. Hendon (2015) — publication details confirmed via Open Library ↩ ↩²

4. Assembly Coffee — Maxwell Colonna Dashwood, Colonna Coffee — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the three titles, the Lesley co-ownership, the capsule range, the London-tourist detail and the “roughly one year old” wholesale arm ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

5. Hendon, Colonna-Dashwood & Colonna-Dashwood — “The Role of Dissolved Cations in Coffee Extraction,” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 62, 4947–4950 (2014) ↩

6. The Coffee Dictionary — Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood (2017, Octopus / Chronicle Books) — first-publication year and publishers confirmed via Open Library ↩

7. Coffee Pals — Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood of Colonna Coffee (video) — interview in which Peak Water is introduced as one of his projects ↩ ↩²

8. Colonna and Small’s — About — the only source naming Colonna & Hunter ↩ ↩²

9. Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood — LinkedIn — self-authored; source of the “All Things Coffee” managing-director title ↩ ↩²