Olympic Rowers, YouTube Tutorials
Sandro Torrente and Henry Torr are South African rowers who've represented the country at Olympic level and still race competitively. They learned to roast off YouTube tutorials and Giesen forums.
"I actually didn't have any roasting experience, just a lot of tutorials and seminars through YouTube platforms and Giesen forums." — Sandro Torrente
That is one of the most honest founder admissions in SA specialty. Olympic-level rowing discipline applied to roast profile development. The blend names — Timeless, Steady State, Flow State — are a rower's life translated to a coffee shelf.
Three Blends, All Named for Rowing States
Timeless Blend
R139 / R435The day-in, day-out cup that doesn't change. Omni-roast · Brazil + Colombia + Honduras.
Steady State Blend
R129 / R359The endurance cup. Named for the cruising heart-rate zone where rowers log base mileage.
Flow State Blend
R135 / R405The performance cup. Peak focus, peak performance — when the boat does the work.
Plus single origins: Dark Peak (Yirgacheffe) and Brazil Sweet. And Nespresso-compatible compostable pods — SA roasters who handle the pod question seriously are still in the minority.
Olympic discipline applied to every shot
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded YAAWK Coffee?
YAAWK was co-founded by Sandro Torrente and Henry Torr, South African Olympic-level rowers who taught themselves to roast using YouTube tutorials and Giesen forums.
Why are YAAWK blends named after rowing terms?
The three blends — Timeless, Steady State, and Flow State — are named after rowing training zones. The founders translated their athletic discipline directly into their coffee brand identity.
Does YAAWK Coffee sell Nespresso-compatible pods?
Yes — YAAWK offers Nespresso-compatible compostable pods, making them one of the few SA specialty roasters to handle the pod format seriously.
Where is YAAWK Coffee based?
YAAWK operates from 84 Western Service Road, Wendywood, Sandton, Johannesburg. They also have a wholesale portal at taste.yaawkcoffee.co.za.
How to buy YAAWK coffee
YAAWK publish their prices, which is rarer in South African specialty than it should be, and they take the pod question seriously. Both of those things make them unusually easy to buy from.
Retail bags online
The three blends run from about R129 to R139 for the smaller bag and R359 to R435 for the larger one. Timeless is the everyday cup, Steady State the endurance option, Flow State the performance bag — rowing language, but the pricing is plain.
Nespresso-compatible compostable pods
YAAWK are one of the few South African specialty roasters treating pods as a real format rather than an embarrassment. If someone in your house drinks pods, this is how you upgrade their cup without a household argument.
From the Wendywood roastery
The 84 Western Service Road address in Wendywood, Sandton, is the working roastery — easy to reach from most of the northern suburbs.
Wholesale portal
A separate trade portal runs at taste.yaawkcoffee.co.za for cafés and offices, which is a sign of a roastery that has thought about serving businesses properly.
The prices quoted here are the ones YAAWK published at the time of writing and they will move — check their site before budgeting. I have tasted their coffee, but I have not yet spent a morning in the roastery.
Brewing YAAWK at home
Sandro Torrente and Henry Torr learned to roast from YouTube tutorials and Giesen forums, which is the single most encouraging fact on this page for anyone teaching themselves coffee at home. Their blends reflect a rower’s approach to consistency: Timeless is an omni-roast built from Brazil, Colombia and Honduras, designed not to change from bag to bag.
An omni-roast is worth understanding before you brew one. It is roasted to work as both espresso and filter, which means it will rarely be the most spectacular version of either, and will almost always be drinkable. For a household where one person pulls shots and another wants a plunger at 4pm, that is the right compromise.
- Start Timeless as espresso at 1:2 and then brew the same bag as filter the next morning. Comparing the two shows you exactly what an omni-roast is trading away.
- Steady State is the milk-drink bag. If your flat whites taste thin, this is a more useful fix than a finer grind.
- The Dark Peak Yirgacheffe is where the range gets aromatic — give it filter treatment before you commit it to the espresso machine.
- If you are brewing their pods, still preheat the cup. A cold ceramic cup drops a 40 ml extraction by several degrees and flattens it.
Working through a new bag? The dial-in guide walks through sour, bitter and channelling shots step by step, and the grind size guide gives micron values for 20+ grinders sold in South Africa.
Where to Find Them
84 Western Service Road, Wendywood, Sandton, Johannesburg
If you like this roaster, read these next
Tribe Coffee
Johannesburg & Cape Town
The Joburg roaster to read next if you want a bigger, older operation for comparison.
Bean There Coffee
Johannesburg
Also Joburg, also single-origin-led, but built around direct African sourcing rather than blends.
Heavenly Coffees
Centurion
A short drive up the N1 and a useful contrast in how a family roastery grows.
Every roaster we have profiled sits in the South African roaster directory, and the ones with a public café are pinned on the coffee map.
More from Coffee Journal
What the Google listing says
Read off YAAWK Coffee’s own Google Maps listing in August 2026. These are Google’s figures and Google’s labels, not mine — useful for working out when to go and what to expect, but check before you drive.
Google files it under Coffee roastery — I list it as Roaster.
What reviewers keep mentioning
Keywords Google pulls out of its own reviews, with the number of reviews each one appears in. No review text is reproduced here.
How Google reviewers rated it
58 Google reviews in total, of which 1 (2%) are one or two stars. That last number is the one worth reading — a high average with a fat tail of one-star reviews usually means an inconsistent morning.
Listed features(2)
- Accessibility and facilities
- Wheelchair accessible entrance · Wheelchair accessible parking lot
Google’s star counts stay Google’s. They are shown here as a distribution only — I do not fold them into my own score, I do not republish review text, and none of it goes into this page’s structured data.