We love coffee, like a lot.
The year was 2019. Ahhh, glorious 2019, coughing freely, blowing out birthday candles....oblivious to what was about to happen. I woke up one day and started thinking about coffee. This wasn't new, I think about coffee every morning, aggressively. But this time it was different. Something clicked and it felt real.
2 years in, we were slowly progressing with the new shop on Dundas West; our cast iron from Oigen was beginning to flow in, Konros were filling the basement, but the shelves felt just a little empty and the ever turning hamster wheel that is my brain looked for new additions to our growing inventory from our amazing smiths and providers in Japan. COFFEE! I freaking love coffee, our customers love coffee, our staff love coffee, it was a no-brainer. We were going to sell incredible coffee gear sourced from all over the globe, Japan focused of course.
We searched we travelled, we asked, we poked, we looked around and found some incredible companies that shared our same values of high quality handcrafted wares, functional everyday products that made our lives better and of course, gorgeous things to look at.
We started our journey with Loca. A fun, ingenuitive company out of Japan that primarily focused on water filtration and used that technology into crafting a filter for everyone's favourite beverage, coffee. It was incredible, a paperless pour over filter that not only looked good, it filtered out some of that astringent, bitter notes that we can sometimes find in coffee. The world has seen many renditions of this tech, but we feel that Loca is the best and clearest form. After a couple zoom meetings and online tutorials, we were quick to fall in love and placed an order.
March 2020.
Lets say our search for the best coffee gear took a bit of a halt during these next couple of years as we scrambled to maintain our sanity and open our second location in neighbouring Leslieville.
So here we are. 2023. The passion never died, it just took a bit of a pause as we re-grouped, re-focused and re-energized ourselves.
We here at KNIFE are incredibly excited to finally be able to offer our friends and peers here in Toronto access to some of our favourite coffee wares.
Please bear with us as we organize our inventory. We still have lots to arrive from Japan! We can't wait to welcome all you coffee nerds into our shop to discuss, geek out and most importantly start pouring and drinking some incredible coffee. This is going to be so fun!
We have many exciting and new plans to expand and develop the coffee side of KNIFE, so stay tuned!
We're aiming to carry the largest in-store hand grinder and manual brew gear selection in Toronto. And working closely with many local (ish) roasters to soon be able to offer Toronto and Canada some of our favourite coffee beans.
Our plan is to always offer one Canadian roaster / one Japanese roaster at a time. Look out for some tasty beans landing in Toronto! The shop is going to smell fantastic.
Bonus - come in early one day and you might just find yourself in an impromptu coffee tasting with us.
Check out our ever growing selection of coffee gear from around the world.
Stay caffeinated friends.
Thanks for reading.
Best.
Eugene
KNIFE