Yellow Jacket Coffee
The Most Decorated Young Roastery in SA
Founded by Shewaan Khan — a Certified Q Grader and (at time of writing) the only Q Processing Professional in South Africa. A Q Grader can taste and score coffee against a global standard. A Q Processing Professional understands the processing methods that produce those flavour profiles. Shewaan is certified in both — and you can taste it in the catalogue, which leans heavily on carefully-chosen processing methods: anaerobic naturals, double anaerobic thermal shock washed, carbonic maceration, red honey.
On the Shelf
Yellow Jacket's iconic colour-coded boxes — the Chelbesa Snap (Ethiopia, red honey, lychee & strawberry), Caxambu (Brazil, Carmen Lúcia, Fuji apple & floral), and Diego Bermúdez Castillo (Colombia, double anaerobic thermal shock). Pictured alongside other SA favourites: Seam, YAAWK, Origin, and Father Coffee.
The SA specialty lineup — Yellow Jacket's Chelbesa Snap centre stage
Chelbesa, Caxambu, Diego Bermúdez — the competition-grade range
Awards & Nominations
2023 — CMA — Best Packaging
The colour-coded box system
2024 — CMA — Roastery of the Year
The big one — presented by Jonsson Workwear
2025 — CMA — Excellence in Coffee
Second consecutive year on the winners' list
2025 — Joshua Machelm — Barista of the Year (shortlist)
Yellow Jacket team depth
Competition-Grade Single Origins
Pink Bourbon
Colombia · Diego Bermúdez · Finca El Paraíso
Double Anaerobic Thermal Shock Washed · 1,930 masl
Peach · Creamy · Apricot · Oolong Tea
Caxambu
Brazil · Minas Gerais
Natural · 1,200 masl
Fuji Apple · Cherry · Strawberry · Boozy
Nyabirongo
Uganda · Rwenzori · 44 smallholder farmers
Anaerobic Natural · 1,800–2,200 masl
Granadilla · Blueberry · Creamy Milk Chocolate
Bishan Wate
Ethiopia · Guji · Faysel Abdosh
Natural · 1,900–2,200 masl
Lemongrass · Jasmine · Bergamot · Blackberry
The Gesha Series comes in 80g tins, pour-over only — because the dial-in process for espresso would waste too much of an expensive, rare bean. Honest retail advice you don't see often.
How to buy Yellow Jacket coffee
Yellow Jacket sell competition-grade coffee to ordinary people, which creates an unusual problem: some of the catalogue is genuinely expensive and genuinely fragile. Here is how to buy it without wasting it.
The roastery and Ikigai café
The Kenilworth address at 46 Goldbourne Road is both roastery and café, which means you can taste before you commit — the single most useful thing about buying in person at this price point.
Online, in the colour-coded boxes
yellowjacketcoffee.co.za carries the range in the packaging that won a Coffee Magazine Award in 2023. The colour coding is not decoration — it is how you tell a washed lot from an anaerobic natural at a glance on your own shelf.
The Gesha Series, in 80 g tins
Sold pour-over only, and deliberately so: dialling in an espresso would waste a large fraction of a rare, expensive bean. That is honest retail advice you almost never see, and it is the reason I trust the rest of the catalogue.
Wholesale and trade
Shewaan Khan can be reached directly on 079 091 7753 or at [email protected] — useful if you run a café and want processing-led coffee rather than a house blend.
Competition lots rotate fast and sell out faster. Anything named here is an example of the style of coffee Yellow Jacket buy, not a promise that it is in stock today — their own site is the only current source.
Brewing Yellow Jacket at home
Shewaan Khan is a Certified Q Grader and, at the time of writing, the only Q Processing Professional in South Africa. That combination shows up in the catalogue as an unusual concentration of processing-led coffees: anaerobic naturals, double anaerobic thermal shock washed, carbonic maceration, red honey. These are coffees where the processing choice is the flavour, and they are noticeably easier to enjoy as filter than as espresso.
That is worth being blunt about as an amateur. A Pink Bourbon from Finca El Paraíso tasting of peach and oolong tea is a coffee that punishes a rushed dial-in, and at these prices a wasted shot stings. I would rather brew it well once than badly four times.
- Start every Yellow Jacket bag as pour-over, whatever you eventually plan to do with it. It is the cheapest way to find out what the coffee is supposed to taste like.
- Weigh everything. With fruit-driven anaerobic lots the difference between excellent and muddled is a couple of grams, not a couple of scoops.
- Buy the smaller size first. An 80 g tin or a single box tells you whether you actually enjoy tropical, fermented flavours before you spend on a larger bag.
- Filtered water matters more here than with a dark blend — our water quality tool scores South African tap and bottled water against the SCA standard if you want to know what you are brewing with.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Yellow Jacket Coffee based?
Yellow Jacket roasts at 46 Goldbourne Road in Kenilworth, Cape Town, with the Ikigai café on the same site. That means the roastery is one of the few places in the country where you can taste a competition lot before buying a bag of it.
Who is Shewaan Khan?
Shewaan Khan founded Yellow Jacket and is a Certified Q Grader as well as, at the time of writing, the only Q Processing Professional in South Africa. A Q Grader scores coffee against a global standard; a Q Processing Professional understands the processing that creates those flavours.
What awards has Yellow Jacket won?
Best Packaging at the 2023 Coffee Magazine Awards for the colour-coded box system, Roastery of the Year in 2024, and Excellence in Coffee in 2025 — a second consecutive year on the winners’ list. Joshua Machelm was also shortlisted for Barista of the Year in 2025.
Why is the Gesha Series sold for pour-over only?
Because dialling in espresso wastes coffee, and a Gesha is too rare and too expensive to burn through while you find your grind setting. Selling it in 80 g tins for filter brewing is a deliberate choice that protects the buyer rather than the margin.
What does “double anaerobic thermal shock” actually mean?
It describes a processing method where the coffee ferments twice without oxygen and is then hit with a rapid temperature change. The practical result is an intense, sometimes startling cup — the Diego Bermúdez Pink Bourbon lands on peach, apricot and oolong tea rather than anything you would recognise from a supermarket bag.
Is Yellow Jacket a good roaster for a beginner?
It is a superb roaster and a demanding starting point. If you are still learning to pull a consistent shot, buy one small box and brew it as filter; if you are already comfortable dialling in, this is one of the most interesting catalogues in the country.
Where to Find Them
46 Goldbourne Road, Kenilworth, Cape Town — Roastery + Ikigai café
079 091 7753
If you like this roaster, read these next
Origin Coffee Roasting
Cape Town
The elder statesman of the Cape roasting scene — worth reading straight after an award-heavy newer name.
Cedar Coffee Roasters
Cape Town
Another Cape Town roaster where the packaging and the cup are treated as one decision.
Tribe Coffee
Cape Town & Johannesburg
If you want to see how a Cape roaster scales across provinces without losing the roast profile.
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.
What the Google listing says
Read off Yellow Jacket 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.
When it is busy
Peak
Saturday around 12:00
Its busiest hour of the week on Google’s popular-times graph.
Quietest
Friday around 07:00
Roughly 18% as busy as its peak.
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
72 Google reviews in total, of which 3 (4%) 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(9)
- Seating and service
- Delivery · Onsite services · Takeout · Dine-in
- Parking
- Free parking lot
- Accessibility and facilities
- Wheelchair accessible parking lot
- Payment
- Credit cards · Debit cards · NFC mobile payments
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.