History

It started with forty pounds of coffee.

I tried to talk her out of buying so much. She listened, smiled, and told me she wasn’t going to drink it.

Forty pounds isn’t an ordinary household purchase. Nobody buys that much because friends are coming over for the weekend. So I gave her a long explanation about freshness, flavour, and why she should buy less.

“Oh, I don’t drink the coffee. I use it for enemas.”

I laughed. She laughed. Then she bought forty pounds of coffee. I didn’t walk away thinking I had discovered my life’s work. I walked away thinking, That’s a good customer. She buys forty pounds of coffee.

The questions came afterward. Why coffee? Where had the practice come from? Did the bean or roast matter? Those questions changed the direction of my life.

Before coffee

Software, bankruptcy, ice cream, and one permanent business lesson

Scott taught himself programming, built commercial software, operated a seasonal ice-cream business, and learned that every customer pays before product ships.

1997

The forty-pound order

An unexpected conversation at a Toronto coffee tasting sends Scott into a subject almost nobody discussed online.

January 1998

S.A. Wilson’s begins

Scott starts with no money and uses his own name. He researches, develops, tests, and builds Gold Roast from scratch.

The early years

The research and development overlap

Samples, laboratory reports, correspondence, and practitioner relationships slowly turn a strange question into a body of work.

Nearly three decades

A lifetime of unusual conversations

Enough coffee sold for more than 45 million preparations, paired with thousands of conversations and an international source archive.

The outsider advantage

I was the coffee fellow in a room with doctors. That was fine with me.

I wasn’t there to tell them how to practise medicine. I was there because I knew the coffee. I researched what I could find, developed the product, paid for laboratory work, and stood behind the part I could honestly claim.