The story behind Moss Blend Pathyx

Haruki Nishimoto opened Moss Blend Pathyx in March 2019 in a narrow machiya townhouse on Rokkaku-dori in Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto. The building had been a textile merchant's storage space for most of the twentieth century. The walls still smell faintly of indigo dye when it rains. He brought in a second-hand Probat L12 from a closing roastery in Sapporo, spent three weeks calibrating it, and on the first Tuesday of April roasted his first commercial batch: a washed Yirgacheffe from the Kochere cooperative that he had sourced through a contact at a Tokyo green importer. The first batch was too light. He roasted it again the next morning.

In 2021, Haruki made his second trip to origin, this time to the Huila department of Colombia, where he visited the Finca La Palma estate run by the Gutierrez family at 1,750 metres. He spent five days there, picking alongside the workers, and came back with a 60-kilogram lot that sold out in eleven days. That trip changed how he thought about pricing. He had been charging 1,400 yen for 150 grams. After seeing what the Gutierrez family earned per kilo, he raised the price to 1,800 yen and published a full cost breakdown on the product page. Nobody complained. Several customers wrote to say they were glad he did it.