Adelaide: You’ll Want Coffee From Monday’s, Even On A Sunday

Monday is inarguably the worst day of the week. From Garfield to The Boomtown Rats to Office Space, the word is associated with being bummed out, wishing it was still the weekend, and feelings of malaise: “a case of the Mondays“. You can’t change the tide of popular thought, but with a wink and a smile one new cafe in Adelaide, South Australia has set out to try and redefine the week’s most hated day.

Monday’s Coffee Store is a brand new coffee bar with sleek design serving top Australian roasters from a bevy of professional coffee making equipment. Adelaide, or “The City of Churches” (its nickname for the last 150 years) is Australia’s fifth-largest city, located around 8 hours northwest by car from Melbourne. This part of the country is perhaps better known for wine, but the coffee scene is starting to come on strong with top shops like Please Say Please, Exchange Specialty Coffee, A Mother’s Milk, Kafe Komodo and more.

Add to that list Monday’s, opened in April of 2015 by Jarrad Sharrock, an Adelaide native who is a veteran of Melbourne’s Market Lane Coffee and Everyday Coffee, two of that city’s very best specialty coffee brands. We’d be remiss not to mention that Sharrock is also a friend of this website, and the partner of Sprudge staff writer Eileen P. Kenny.

MondaysCoffeeStore2 — Jarrad Sharrock behind the counter at Monday’s.

Not unlike his alma mater Everyday in Melbourne’s hip Fitzroy neighborhood, Monday’s is a multi-roaster cafe sourcing coffees from some of the best roasters in Australia, including Small Batch’s Candyman espresso as a menu anchor, supplemented by fine coffees from Coffee Supreme, Seven Seeds, Market Lane and others. A bit more of the best of Melbourne has been brought by way of Assembly’s line of fine teas, and drinking chocolate from Mörk Chocolate.

Filter coffee is served in beautiful handmade cups from 4th Market, a Japanese ceramics company, while espresso service happens in vessels by Wellington’s Acme & Co. Espressos are pulled from a La Marzocco Linea Classic, served by Nuova Simonelli Mythos 1 and Mahlkonig EK43 grinders. All filter coffee service happens via Fetco batch brew system, a rarity in Australia and rarer still in Adelaide. Pastries come courtesy of Adelaide local favorites Abbots & Kinney.

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Thanks to the wonders of electronic mail, we sat down digitally with Monday’s founder Jarrad Sharrock to learn more about the project, its origins, and the differences (big and small) between coffee in Melbourne and Adelaide.

Sprudge: Batch brew is something still fairly new for specialty coffee in Australia. Tell us about your decision to only serve filter coffee via a batch brew system.

Jarrad Sharrock: Batch brew for us is a way of making a somewhat challenging concept more approachable. The idea of filter coffee being a whole song and dance can be quite alienating for most customers, kinda like ordering a champagne tower at a fancy bar: expensive and showy. The ability to give people a sip of coffee they are considering purchasing for home is also a major benefit.

What were some of the design inspirations for Monday’s, in terms of branding and interiors?

The branding for Monday’s was super fun. The name “Monday’s” was a joke at first—I try not to take myself too seriously, and I wanted Monday’s to be an extension of that attitude. I met with the designer Max Blackmore one morning over coffee to give him an outline of what I had in mind, at this point I just wanted a few fun illustrations to use as promotional material. Roughly 2 hours later Max sent me a drawing of the now-Monday’s logo and from there Monday’s grew its own personality.

I feel I should give special mention to Coffee Supreme and to my former employers and good mates Everyday Coffee. Their approach to branding and coffee in general were constant points of reference for me with every aspect of Monday’s, and I think that’s fairly self-evident.

From a design point of view, I’ve had the great fortune of working in some of the most well-thought-out, beautiful spaces in the world. Market Lane and Everyday were huge inspirations on how I wanted the space to feel. I spent so much time with these two companies and they left me with such amazing experiences, I think a part of me wanted to recreate both of them. Several times throughout the build I had these visions of [Market Lane founder] Fleur Studd walking through the front door and rearranging furniture, talking about flower arrangements and weighing in on workflow problems.

What are some of the biggest differences between the coffee scenes in Adelaide and Melbourne?

I haven’t found any real comparable difference between the two cities, not because they are too similar but because I don’t think you can compare the two. Adelaide is ready and has been for a while now. A few years back Adelaide had a huge youth exodus problem but today we can see that turning around. It’s exciting here! Adelaide is just now forming this really great identity.

When you look at Melbourne it already has its identity. It’s a big city with an ever-swelling population, always excited about the next big trend. Compare this to Adelaide, a city that considers the rejection of one of the world’s biggest coffee chains to be one of its greatest achievements. This is why Monday’s had to be so approachable; if I had come back guns blazing trying to evangelise a vision of the Melbourne coffee scene it wouldn’t have been true to Adelaide or myself.