Dominic is the middle kid in a big family of people who cannot easily answer the question ‘where are you from?’ Born in Scotland, to an Irish mother and English father, who moved fairly often as a family. Living in Aberdeen, then Cork, then Florida and then finally settling (for a while) in a small coastal town in South Africa.
Sometimes life takes you around an innocuous seeming corner and without knowing it, you start a long journey towards some vaguely defined thing. When he was 21 he turned one of these corners and ended up working for a relatively well-known café and roastery called Truth, in Cape Town.
He was enamoured by the product and enchanted by the scale and complexity of the industry.
Cape Town later became Bremen and Truth became a more personal set of projects. Dominic worked with some close friends on setting up a little restaurant/café and then a specialty cafe turned cocktail bar and live music venue. Heaping together a few of his very favourite things.
Throughout this period, he was hosting irregular barista and coffee appreciation courses for enthusiastic new coffee nerds.
After 4 years there, he wanted to test his commitment to the industry and his sense of self-assuredness. He wanted to go to origin.
Dogged and more than a little fortunate, he landed a gig in Rwanda. This period gave him some foundational knowledge, which he took across the border a few months later, into Western Uganda. This was an assignment that would absorb him for the next 2 years. He was put at the head of a team tasked with building two new, state of the art coffee washing stations and developing the local producer relationships and sustainability strategies that go along with that physical infrastructure. It was a dream come true, in many ways.
His part in that project finished in early 2021 and he was back to looking for new things to learn, places to be and experiences to have. And now Dominic is here, at Mercanta, in Berlin. And remains as enamoured and enchanted as he was nearly 10 years ago.
