THE buyer had a suitcase of dollars and a revolver in the glove compartment as they hurtled along what was referred to as the most dangerous road in Bolivia to reach the remote region where the coffee is grown.

It was 1997 and journalist Fiona Grant had her first taste of the sharp end of the coffee trade, covering the traders’ sometimes treacherous story.

The experience never left her, and, as a new mother seeking a career other than travel writing, she set up Glen Lyon Coffee roasters from a Perthshire bothy, inspired by the episode.

The business has moved on from the firm she set up in 2011 with a second-hand Turkish coffee roaster bought online for about £2,500, shifting to premises in Aberfeldy, and now employing five.

Beginning by selling at farmers’ markets and now roasting 24 metric tonnes of coffee a year, the organic growth has prompted plans for expansion, on a sustainable scale, to include a formal visitor centre, cuppings, or tastings, and potentially a community space.

Not so much a white-knuckle ride across the Bolivian mountains, the 40 or so cafes across the Highlands and Islands who are regular wholesale customers can, in fair weather, expect an electric car delivering supplies in reusable tin pails, with compostable packaging, cups and lids.

The Herald:

However, Ms Grant, 45, travels on a regular basis to source sustainable coffee with a continued emphasis on the ethical, whether it is buying beans from small farmers in Kenya or large-scale roasters in South America.

The journey can still be “adventurous”.

She recalls her motivation: “I just bought an old coffee roaster off Ebay. My initial investment was just a few thousand pounds. It was a very ropey old machine.

“But I’d been inspired.

“You see, before this, I had been a travel writer. I wrote guide books for Lonely Planet, and I travelled a lot.

“I had worked as a journalist in Bolivia, and I actually covered a story on coffee buyers.

“We drove down this crazy road from La Paz down into Caranavi, where their coffee is grown. He had a suitcase full of dollars and a gun. I just thought, ‘this is so cool’.

“This is not actually how coffee buying is done anymore. But I think it was something that I always thought I wanted to work in.”

Ms Grant said: “I had my son in 2005 and thought I could just stick him in the papoose and carry on writing guide books.

“Little did I know, you always think before you have children that you can carry on your life as normal, but it wasn’t the case.”

On a family trip to the US, they came across micro roasteries in towns peppered across the west cost of America, in Washington, Oregon, and California.

“I thought that’s something that I actually could do back in Glen Lyon.

“So I bought the roasting machine, I attended a three-day coffee roasting course in London, and really it was just trial and error.”

She said: “I just love the fact that we are sourcing fabulous, amazing coffees from around the world, and getting to share them with people that come into our roastery, or find us online.

“Also we want to be as ethical as possible. That’s what’s great about the specialty coffee industry, you’re paying a good price for quality coffee.

“So the farmers get more money for their coffee, when it’s good quality, and we establish long-term relationships with our producers as well.

“With specialty you’re paying probably quite often twice the amount of the fair trade price, and having the direct trade with the producer, a good relationship with the producers as well. We buy from the same farmers year after year as well. So it’s a really good business to be in.”

The Herald:

The firm buys from 12 different countries and travels to origin.

“We have a really good relationship with some producers in Bolivia, because that’s where Jamie, my husband, and I, both worked as journalists there in the late 90s, and so it was the first country that we wanted to travel back to origin and try and source some coffee direct from.

“I love Africa and I love Latin America. My granny was from Zimbabwe, so I spent a lot of time there as a child.

“Just to be able to now be a proper grown-up and have my own family, but have work that takes me back there, it’s brilliant, I’m living the dream, I love it.”

Visitors are welcome but the space is limited. Ms Grant, now a Q graded cupper, said: “We’re so happy when people come in and we’ll talk for as long as they want about coffees, because it’s such a great opportunity to be able to let everyone know the flavours in coffee.

“You know, a coffee from Ethiopia can just taste beautiful, with floral, lemon, bergamot flavours. Then you might have a more chocolatey coffee from Brazil.”

Most afficionados seek their perfect, or their preferred, cup.

Ms Grant said: “I’m a huge fan of filter coffee. But I’m equally partial to flat white to get me started on a cold morning.

“But I’m no coffee snob. Everyone knows best how they like to have their coffee.

“We all know how we like to drink our coffee ... but I would encourage people to try a beautiful lightly roasted single origin filter. It’s just, it’s amazing, it’s mind blowing.

“I’ve been drinking beautiful Kenyan coffee for eight years now, and it still stops me in my tracks.”

The Herald:

Ms Grant was just back from the Guji region in Ethiopia. “Ethiopian coffees are very delicate, they’re very floral, and I think what hit home to me, travelling there just now, I think is how it’s grown.

“In most countries, like Brazil, it’s very planted out, the coffee trees, bushes really, are planted out on the estates and grown like a crop.

“In Ethiopia the trees just grow ‘wild’ everywhere, and the producers are just in their houses, literally mud huts in many cases, and they have a few coffee trees in their garden, and they’ll use that as a cash crop to take to the co-operative to sell.

“It’s the birthplace of coffee, and it’s almost like it is growing wild, and I think a good Ethiopian coffee is an incredible, special sort of flavour.

“The people in Guji were amazing, and just to see the care, the sheer effort that goes into producing is amazing. The women are standing at drying tables sorting through every bean, checking that each bean’s perfect.

“It’s quite humbling actually to see, it makes you realise, it makes me really think twice before just chucking away some coffee I haven’t used.”

She returns to Bolivia of the 1990s.

“It was my first experience in the world of coffee buying. I’d gone to cover a story on Bolivian coffee buyers, and I went down what they called the world’s most dangerous road. It’s this winding road that was a dirt road, I think buses and trucks literally go off the side once a week, and it would normally take about six hours, but the chap I went with did it in about three.

“He was a coffee buyer, not necessarily a very ethical one, I don’t know."

She added: “But we went, and he literally had suitcase of dollars like some movie, and a revolver in his glove compartment.

“We flew down this road, really fast, with vertical cliff drops on the side and driving under waterfalls and everything, trucks and buses coming straight at you in the other direction and got down to Caranavi, where he bought the coffee, gave cash and drove home and arranged for it to be shipped up. No one that we buy coffee from does it like that any more.

“It’s still very adventurous, the driving is still insane. I’ve never seen driving like it. In Ethiopia, they just drive with horns full tilt, goats and cattle crossing the road, trucks coming right at you.

“It definitely brings its adventures, coffee.

"That's what I just love about it, and the connection and making friends in all parts of the world."

Q&A.........

What countries have you most enjoyed travelling to, for business or leisure, and why?

Bolivia will always have a place in my heart. I worked there as a journalist in my 20s and it's where I met my husband Jamie. We travel back there every year together to buy coffee. It’s such a spectacular country. 
Rwanda, too, is an incredible place and it’s wonderful to see how specialty coffee has been such a success story for the country helping
rebuild both the economy and society after the genocide of 1994.
For family adventures though, I don’t think you can beat Costa Rica.

When you were a child, what was your ideal job? Why did it appeal?

I wanted to be an archaeologist. I was totally obsessed with Indiana Jones and became determined to find the Ark of the Covenant. 

What was your biggest break in business?

Very early on in Glen Lyon Coffee I received a grant from the Ellis Campbell Enterprise Fund through Foundation Scotland to develop our website and brand. It was a relatively small grant but it made a huge amount of difference at the time. But really the biggest break I’ve had is to have such an amazing, dynamic team to work with.

What was your worst moment in business?

Setting fire to my first roaster was a pretty scary moment but otherwise I’ll take the bad bits as you can only learn from them.

Who do you most admire and why?

The early women explorers and travel writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries in particular the fabulous Freya Stark who blazed a trail for solo women travellers. I have a pair of her earrings which is among my most treasured possessions.

What book are you reading and what music are you listening to? What was the last film you saw?

I’m reading The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski, an account of the last days of Haile Selassie. I’m listening to Nina Simone, Ray LaMontagne and Scottish folk artist Kim Carnie. The last film I saw was The Favourite – totally bonkers but in a good way.