Hi! I’m Ash, the founder of brewstr. Way back in 2011, I was working in Melbourne, flying in/out from my home town every week, for about 3 years. I was subjected to coffee snobbery at its finest. Melbourne is known for its peak coffee culture; you get coffee wrong in Melbourne and people will literally fight you (exaggeration).

My idea at the time was to start a coffee analytics platform, which would have real time analytics of coffee shops (this is still a work in progress), but the vision was blurred for many many years and add many life challenges along the way, I’ve finally published the first round of my product.

brewstr (https://brewstr.coffee) is now a coffee review style site; crafted from thousands of researched cafes around the world, my team has been adding new cafes on the daily around the world; both from brick & mortar visits whilst travelling and trawling the bowls of Instagram and many other sites. I’m hoping that we have something for everyone, but the work has only just begun.

Next, we need users. This is my current focus; trying to get cafes to actively be involved with our site and to promote their patrons into reviewing their cafes; this is harder than I thought, but every user signup and review is giving me butterflies!!

At ‘launch’, we have over 3300 listings from the following cities:

  • Australia – Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Hobart, Adelaide, Darwin, Canberra, Perth (plus some regional towns)
  • New Zealand – Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch (plus some regional towns)
  • United States of America – LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, New York City, plus a few scattered states/cities
  • Canada – Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto
  • Turkey – Istanbul
  • Cuba – Havana
  • Italy – Rome
  • UK – London
  • Japan – Tokyo

Our biggest feedback to date is ‘only x number of cafes in my area’ which has almost always prompted my team to quickly research and add some; we’re very proactive in that manner, but it’s also a challenge to find the best local cafes; we are trying to find better ways to find those really awesome coffee shops which are hidden down alley ways or hole in the wall type stores which you just have to be a local to know. This is really what we’re trying to uncover with the app so that everyone can find these cafes without actually being a local.