Handpicked Coffee Roasters is a small-batch coffee roastery on New North Road in Mount Albert, Auckland, easy to spot by its cheerful sheep logo and quietly serious credentials — the banner across its website reads '2017 NZ Brewers Cup Champion'. Behind the shopfront is a team that roasts its own beans, supplies coffee capsules and drip bags, and sells the brewing equipment to match, all through a friendly online store.
The roastery's competitive record speaks for itself: Nara Lee's second-place finish in the compulsory service at the 2017 World Brewers Cup is documented on the Handpicked blog, alongside the news that it roasts for two New Zealand coffee champions, and a feature in Metro's Top 50 Cafes. Away from competition, the team are inveterate tinkerers — their blog charts home-made brewing tools like a sous vide V60 and a PID temperature-controlled Hario V60, plus notes on water temperature and filter recipes.
Visitors to the Mount Albert roastery will find champion-grade coffee without any of the fuss: beans roasted in-house, single-serve drip bags for the road, capsules for home machines, and gear for anyone keen to brew better. There's even house-made bacon — the blog insists on it.
On a stretch of New North Road in Mount Albert, Auckland, a cheerful sheep logo marks the home of Handpicked Coffee Roasters — a small roastery with credentials that would be the envy of cafés many times its size. The banner across the website says it plainly: 2017 NZ Brewers Cup Champion. This is a place where coffee is treated as both craft and competition, yet served with neighbourhood warmth. Mount Albert locals have a genuine specialty roastery on their doorstep, and coffee lovers further afield get the same beans through the online shop.
Handpicked's honours are real and well documented. Nara Lee's second-place finish in the compulsory service at the 2017 World Brewers Cup — the pinnacle of filter coffee competition — is recorded on the roastery's own blog, alongside the proudly shared fact that Handpicked roasts the coffee of two New Zealand coffee champions. Metro magazine has also listed the roastery among its Top 50 Cafes.
What makes these achievements endearing is the setting. There are no megastore trappings here — just a dedicated roastery and shop on a suburban Auckland road, run by people who care intensely about what lands in your cup. Whether you're a competition judge or a commuter grabbing beans on the way home, the coffee comes from the same roaster.
The range is simple and focused. Coffee beans sit at the heart of it, with five varieties listed in the online shop at any given time. For those who'd rather not fuss with grinders and scales, coffee capsules bring the house style to home machines, while single-serve drip bags make quality filter coffee possible at a desk, in a hotel room or out in the hills. Rounding things out is brewing equipment, so newcomers can pick up the gear alongside the beans and walk away ready to brew.
Everything is available through the website's online store — add items to the cart, check out, and create an account to make repeat orders easy. A newsletter and an active Instagram feed (@handpickedcoffeenz) keep customers across new releases and promotions.
Spend a little time on the Handpicked blog and a picture emerges of a team that cannot stop experimenting. Their first home-made tool was a sous vide V60 setup, followed by a PID temperature-controlled Hario V60 (a test version, they admit). There are articles on water temperature for brewing, on the relationship between dripper, coffee and heat, and even a playful post titled 'World second-best filter coffee recipe'.
This spirit of experimentation is exactly what you'd expect from a Brewers Cup champion's roastery: brewing treated as a repeatable science, with findings shared freely so customers can brew better at home. If you've ever wondered why your filter coffee tastes different from one morning to the next, these notes are a very good place to start.
In among the brewing science sits one of the blog's most delightfully unexpected headlines: 'Do you know? we are making bacon.' It's a reminder that this is a working café-roastery with a sense of humour, and that a visit might hold more than coffee.
Handpicked Coffee Roasters is at 918 New North Road, Mount Albert, Auckland. You can phone 021-144-0897, email coffeehandpicked@gmail.com, or use the contact form on the website. Opening hours aren't published on the site, so it pays to check Instagram or ring ahead before making a special trip. Whether you come for champion-grade filter coffee, a bag of freshly roasted beans, capsules for the machine at home or a piece of brewing kit, you'll be dealing with the people who roasted it — and who are genuinely happy to talk about it.