Long-form articles you can edit and publish, delivered as Word documents, ready-to-publish HTML and Markdown.
It suits cafés, roasters and coffee carts. The wording, the mark and the colours are all yours to change, so it does not have to stay in that lane.
What you get
DOCX to edit in Word or Google Docs
Ready-to-publish HTML
Markdown to paste into any CMS
A README with the licence and your re-download details
The 5 artboards
Post 1 — Choosing our beans — 1200 × 2400px
Post 2 — Seasonal menu, honestly — 1200 × 2400px
Post 3 — Booking a function — 1200 × 2400px
Post 4 — The story behind the menu — 1200 × 2400px
Post 5 — Coffee at home — 1200 × 2400px
What you can change
6 editable fields, plus 6 ready-made colourways (Espresso, Matcha, Burnt Fig, Juniper, Charcoal Roast, Late Shift):
Business name · Suburb · Cuisine (lowercase) · Paper · Ink · Accent
Specifications
Price
$29 AUD, one-off. GST included.
Format
Blog pack
Suits
cafés, roasters and coffee carts
Artboards
5
Typefaces
Instrument Serif and Inter Tight — licensed for commercial use through Google Fonts
Delivery
Immediate. The files download in the browser the moment payment clears.
Licence
Yours to use for your business, including commercially, with no ongoing fee. You cannot resell the template itself.
Colour space
RGB. Australian printers convert to CMYK as a matter of course; the bleed PDF is built for them.
How buying works
Open the editor and type your business name. The artwork updates as you type — there is no preview step and nothing to wait for. When it looks right, you pay once and the files download immediately. Your order number and the email you paid with will retrieve the design again later at brandlaunch.shop/orders, at no extra cost.
Roast dates, harvest seasons, blind cupping and the case for a boring-looking bag — how the coffee in our hoppers actually gets chosen, and what to look for when you buy your own.
From the team at Wattle & Stone
6 min read
Ask a café why they pour the beans they pour and you will usually get a brand name, which is not an answer. The brand is the end of the story. The beginning is a chain of decisions about harvest, roast and freshness that either happen or do not — and you can taste the difference either way.
Here is how the choosing actually works at Wattle & Stone, told plainly. None of it is secret. Most of it is just unfashionably slow.
A famous name on the bag tells you about the marketing. A roast date and a farm name tell you about the coffee.
Coffee is a crop, not a constant
Coffee is harvested once or twice a year depending on origin, and fresh-crop lots land in Australia in waves — East African coffees tend to arrive around the middle of the year, Central and South Americans across the other half. Green coffee fades as it ages, so a menu that never changes origin is quietly serving older and older beans.
We rotate what we pour with the arrival seasons instead of fighting them. The single origin changes every several weeks, which keeps every cup closer to harvest than habit would ever allow.
What we ask before we pour anyone's coffee
Before a roaster earns a place in our grinders we want three things: roast dates printed plainly, not coded; traceability to at least the washing station or co-op, ideally the farm; and consistency across weeks, because one brilliant sample followed by a mediocre month is worse than steady very-good.
We also ask what the roaster paid for the green, where they will tell us. Transparent pricing up the chain is the strongest predictor of quality in the cup we know, because quality at farm level costs money and somebody either paid it or did not.
Cupping — the unglamorous taste test
Every candidate coffee gets cupped: ground into small bowls, steeped, the crust broken and the coffee slurped loudly off a spoon. It looks ridiculous and it works better than anything else. We taste blind, in rounds, scoring sweetness, acidity, body and how the cup holds together as it cools.
Blind matters. Labels are charming and palates are suggestible, and more than once the bag we were certain we would buy has finished last with its name hidden.
Why the house coffee is a blend
Most of what any café pours is milk coffee, and milk is a demanding partner — it flattens delicate flavours and rewards sweetness, body and a little chocolate weight. Our house blend is built for exactly that job: components chosen so the cup tastes like itself under milk, every day, even as harvests change underneath it.
Single origins get the opposite job. They go on filter and black espresso, where their harvest-season quirks are the point rather than a problem.
Freshness cuts both ways
Coffee is not at its best the day it is roasted. Espresso generally wants a week to ten days of rest before the flavours settle, and after about a month the brightness starts to fade. We date every hopper, dial the grind in each morning and keep adjusting through the day as the weather moves.
For home: buy quantities you will finish inside a month, read the roast date before the tasting notes, and store beans sealed somewhere cool. The freezer is fine for whole beans. The fridge is not.
Nothing in our hoppers is there by default. Call in to Wattle & Stone in Fitzroy and ask what we are pouring this month and why — the answer changes, and that is rather the point.
Wattle & Stone · Fitzroy
01 / 05
Post 1 — Choosing our beans — 1200 × 2400px
Wattle & Stone
Fitzroy · specialty coffee
Post 2 of 5
What a seasonal menu really means
Menus that follow the produce are not a fashion statement. Here is the buying logic behind ours — why the tomatoes vanish in May, what winter genuinely improves, and how a special earns a permanent place.
From the team at Wattle & Stone
6 min read
Seasonal is one of the most abused words in hospitality, right up there with artisan. Printed on enough menus, it means nothing beyond a font choice. Used honestly, it describes a way of buying that changes what lands on your plate every few weeks — and it is the cheapest way any kitchen can make its food better.
So here is what the word means when Wattle & Stone uses it, with the commercial logic left in rather than airbrushed out.
A tomato in July has travelled a very long way to be disappointing. Produce at its peak is better and cheaper at the same time, which is the whole trick.
Produce has a peak, and it is short
Everything that grows has a window of a few weeks when it is sweetest, cheapest and most abundant all at once, because that is how harvests work. In Australia that means stone fruit and tomatoes in high summer, figs in early autumn, brassicas and citrus once the cold arrives, asparagus announcing spring.
Buying inside that window means flavour arrives free. The same dish made with the same care costs less and tastes better, and no technique in the kitchen can replicate what ripeness does on its own.
How the buying actually works
Our week starts with what the growers have, not with what the menu says. Suppliers send their lists, someone from the kitchen walks the market early, and the gap between what looked good at six in the morning and what is on the specials board at noon can be a matter of hours.
It is a different discipline from ordering the same case of everything every week. It asks more of the cooks and repays them with better raw material, which is a trade every kitchen should want.
What winter genuinely improves
Winter has a reputation as the lean season and it is undeserved. Cold weather sweetens brassicas and root vegetables — parsnips and cabbages are measurably sweeter after frost. Citrus peaks. Slow braises and pies belong to these months, and the produce that suits them is at its best exactly when you want them.
So when the menu turns darker and richer in June, that is not the kitchen giving up on freshness. That is the kitchen following it.
Specials are the audition
Nearly everything permanent on our menu began as a special. A dish gets a weekend run, the kitchen watches what comes back on the plates, the floor staff report what people ask about, and most candidates quietly retire. The ones that survive several runs earn a printed place.
It is a slower way to build a menu and a far more honest one — the dishes are chosen by the people eating them, not by whoever shouted loudest at the planning meeting.
What never changes
A seasonal menu is not chaos. The bones stay put: the bread, the technique, the standards for stock and pastry, the way the specialty coffee we serve is made and checked every single day. Regulars should be able to trust the place even when they cannot predict the plate.
The change happens inside a steady frame. That frame — not the novelty — is what people actually come back for.
The menu at Wattle & Stone will read a little different next month, and different again after that. If your favourite dish disappears, ask us — it is almost certainly waiting for its season to come back around to Fitzroy.
Wattle & Stone · Fitzroy
02 / 05
Post 2 — Seasonal menu, honestly — 1200 × 2400px
Plus 3 more artboards, listed opposite.
Shown with the template's default wording. Every word, colour and mark on it is editable.