One of Australia’s best baristas just opened a coffee shop in the middle of Perth’s CBD

Sometimes a city’s greatest talents are hiding right under our noses.

How many times have you had a particularly great coffee (or cocktail?) and not realised it was made by a world-class champion? We suspect… More often than you might think.

Case in point: CBD workers may have noticed a new café arrive at the base of 140 William last week – one with an intriguing specialty menu and some especially friendly baristas.

March Coffee Studio is the brainchild of Ziggy Varamulia – who along with being a friendly fixture of plenty of Perth cafés over the years (Dine by Arrival Hall, Arlo, Max + Sons, to name just a few, then wholesale director and trainer at Micrology Coffee Roasters), is a champion, competition-winning barista.

His journey into coffee started by accident: as a 17 year old working as a dishwasher in a coffee chain, he was called up to the machine when one of the baristas called in sick. A degree in electrical engineering followed, and eventually Ziggy made the decision that coffee was the path for him.

“I was working in coffee part time, and then I got a job as an engineer in a Monday to Friday graduate program,” he tells us, sitting outside March a few days after the cafe officially opened.

“But something about coffee… I just couldn’t let it go. I was working as a barista Saturday and Sunday, so I was working seven days a week. And there was a big difference between me going to work Monday to Friday in an office, nine to five and just grinding it all out, and then waking up at four o’clock in the morning… Earning so much less, but I was just so much happier. So after about eight months, I made that decision: I’d rather be happy every day waking up than earning more. I’ve never been too money driven as a person – I believe that if I can be a happy person with less money, that’s a good thing.”

“I’ve worked in a lot of places, different places, honing my skills. I competed in barista championships, so I’ve been lucky enough to win the title a couple of times.”

Luck, sure – but Ziggy has also turned his knack for engineering to a meticulous, technical approach to coffee, now showcased across March’s three menus: comfort, adventure and experimental.

Comfort ticks all the boxes for the classics: flat whites, cappuccinos, lattes, espressos and so on. These crowd-pleasers are made with Micrology beans: “I know where they source their coffee from, I know they take care of farmers and I really trust them.”

“But where things get interesting,” says Ziggy, “is when we get to the adventure menu.”

“The adventure menu has three distinct items. The first one is the rare espresso – that is the competition grade coffee: something that you would use in a national championship or a world championship. The current coffee I have for the rare espresso is a Liberica from Malaysia.”

“Liberica is a different species of coffee,” he explains.

“The coffee that you usually drink is Arabica. So it’s like cats and dogs, two completely different things. And it’s quite hard to grow – that’s why it’s quite expensive to make, and to make it taste palatable there are a lot of things that need to be done after harvest.”

“And with the rare espresso, we have the designer latte – we use the rare espresso with cryo distilled hydrolysed milk.”

The what now? (We’ll take this moment to admit we’re in the “flat white, thanks!” camp of coffee connoisseurs.)

“It gets a bit scientific!” he laughs. “It’s what is used in competitions, so basically we design the milk to fit into what the coffee should taste like.”

“We freeze the milk and then we let it melt halfway, and then we sous vide the milk to break down the sugar. So melting it halfway makes it super creamy, super sweet, and putting it in a sous vide breaks down the sugar even more, making it really sweet, as well as increasing the pH slightly to neutralise the chlorogenic acid, which causes the bitterness in coffee, neutralising it and making it zero bitterness. So when you drink it, it tastes like ice cream. And that’s what competition’s all about. What else can we do with coffee?”

“And then the last one is V60 pour over. We have a couple of different varieties: we have a very standard approachable coffee, always! Currently it’s the Gakenke from Rwanda. It’s a nice, bright, spritzy, citrusy kind of coffee, typical of Rwandan coffee.” 

“Another one that we have is Las Flores Chiroso, which is a competition grade coffee. I think it was used in the 2022 World Championship and again, that’s for people who wants to get into coffee, the coffee connoisseurs, the nerds who want to get into that kind of stuff. It’s available for you to try, we don’t expect you to have it every day! It is something that you want to experience because the coffee tastes completely different than what you would expect with regular coffee.”

Ziggy will also have on offer – for an extremely limited time – the ultra-rare coffea eugenioides, formerly extinct and resurrected just 10 years ago.

“It’s the mother of Arabica coffee,” he tells us. “It’s very rare – they only produce about 50 kilograms a year, I secured one!”

“It’s very, very expensive. As a matter of fact, this year they couldn’t grow any: it’s just very difficult to grow. It comes from one lot, from one farm, called Finca Inmaculada in Colombia, and it is super hard to get. They cost about $3,500 a kilogram, and that’s green. So if you roast the coffee, in general, it would cost you about $7,000 a kilo.”

“That will be served in a pourover, because that’s the purest way of tasting coffee. I can’t explain it, it’s like yogurt, it’s like drinking strawberry yogurt with stevia, with sweeteners… It’s bizarre! And the texture is really silky, it’s incredible. They are very expensive – $100 a cup… But it’s like ‘I’ve got to try it once, I’ve tried coffee that went extinct, and that won world championships.’”

The third menu is titled “experimental” – which gives Ziggy a platform to test out competition beverages. On our visit, we try the refreshing “Experiment 001”.

“Currently we have flash brew coffee, which is batch brew that we flash brew in the freezer, with chrysanthemum tea, cucumber juice, and elderflower syrup. It’s wet shaken, and poured into a wine glass. It’s kinda like the cleanest, freshest, spritziest lemonade.”

“Another one I have is a non coffee option called Tokyo Spring. It’s my take on the strawberry matcha craze. So it’s blackcurrant syrup, yuzu soda, matcha, and umeboshi powder – umeboshi is salt and plum powder. So it’s nice, balanced – sweet with the blackcurrant, matcha is bitter, yuzu is acidic, and umeboshi is quite salty, so that gives you a beautiful balance.”

Also in the non-coffee options is a tidy selection of bites: a few pastries, brekkie muffin, granola, a salad, and, perhaps most enticingly, a selection of levelled-up toasties – think sous-vide chicken with wasabi mayo, miso mushrooms with furikake or bulgogi beef with kimchi aioli.

“I want the best quality stuff for Perth,” Ziggy continues. We’re chatting in between him warmly greeting familiar faces of old customers checking out the new spot, as well as fellow hospo operators visiting to wish him well.

“And people in the coffee industry who want to learn or want to get into a competition, this place is open for you.”

“The stuff that I have in here is specifically made for competitions. So the length, the width, the height of the bench is world championship level certified. The machine is world certified, the grinders are world certified.”

“Regardless of whoever you work with, you can come in, you can practice, I can help you as much as I can. I will always help people who love the industry.”

“The ethos of March Coffee Studio is we are human driven, we are quality driven, we are sustainability driven. We are never going to be profit driven. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to make money, and doesn’t mean I don’t want to make profit. But I truly believe that if we focus on the people, we focus on the quality, we focus on service and sustainability, that will come eventually.”

“It might not come straight away, but I think I can sleep better at night knowing I’m serving you a good coffee with a smile on my face, but I’m also supporting the future of the industry itself, right?”

March Coffee Studio is located at 140 William Street, Perth (Lobby of Government Offices of Western Australia).

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All images: Sally Hall / Perth is OK!