On a leafy ridge on Joslin Street, Kotara, a short row of modest shops has become my everyday destination. At one end of the strip there is a butcher so friendly and a baker so obliging that I may as well have grown up with the both of them.

Instead of a candlestick maker there is a good value fish and chip shop and a Chinese family restaurant. They both open early and they both close early.  In a perfectly dependable, ordinary and quintessentially suburban kind of way, it all looks like it has been this way for as long as anybody can remember. 

At the other end of the row there is a café called The Letter Q. This place achieves a very different class of dependability.

The caffeinated class.

In fact, it is testament to how vibrant and fertile the coffee scene is in Newcastle that such an excellent espresso can be found hidden away on a little strip like this one.

Not that the crowd that buzzes about this place is ever easy to miss. If it is tucked away in the streets of Kotara, then the regulars love it that way, even if they have to sometimes queue out the door for their morning dose.

It used to be that professional baristas like Amie Golding could be found only along an eat street down in Hamilton or Cooks Hill. Golding has poured plenty of coffees in these busier neighbourhoods too, but working up here on the ridge she might have been planning to slow down a bit.

I would ask her about this, if she wasn’t surrounded by coffee dockets every time I visited. Great baristas never really retire. The blend that the queue has been forming for is the Forza, the strongest and most darkly roasted offering from Melbourne roasters Veneziano. It is a distinctly almond sweet combination of Brazilian, Colombian and Indian beans that maintains the boldest of finishes without being overpowering.

The Sethuraman Estate, robusta bean from India might initially seem to be an unusual companion to the other two in the Forza blend. But there is nothing new or experimental about Veneziano sourcing beans from this origin. Robusta beans have been grown on this farm for six generations. Some of these beans have now, in a world first, been certified as a Fine Robusta by the international Coffee Quality Institute.

Owner Deb Sowerby and her daughter Kendall Sadler have not only designed a popular café menu, but operate a busy catering business.

“Over the years we have been here, it has been so interesting to watch our customers change along with their tastes. Young families have moved here. I like that we can be popular with them as well,” Deb says.