Meet Brightside Coffee Co: Our Featured Perth Roaster for August 2026
Brightside Coffee Co roast out of Osborne Park on a simple premise: the day goes better when the first cup is worth drinking. Matt and Edith Muhl started the business after years in the industry, and they built it around approachability rather than authority. No decoder ring required, no lecture attached. Just well-sourced beans, roasted to order in Perth, with the name of the farmer who grew them printed on the bag.
Through August they are our Roaster of the Month. The lineup covers the full range: everyday blends, a collaboration blend we put together with them, single origins from two very different growing regions, and a decaf that holds its own against the caffeinated stuff.
It is a roaster that suits people who want to drink well without thinking about it much, and people who want to dig in. The coffees below are the ones we think are worth knowing, whether you take your morning cup with milk, drink it black, or are still working out where to start.
Roasted to Order, Out of Osborne Park
Brightside do not roast anything until you order it. There is no pallet of roasted stock sitting in a warehouse waiting for demand to catch up. Production runs off the day’s orders, coffee ships within a few business days of roasting, and where they can, it goes out the same day or the next. Order before 11am on a weekday and there is a fair chance your beans were still green that morning.
That sounds like logistics. In the cup it is the difference between coffee that tastes like itself and coffee that tastes like the bag it has been sitting in. Roasted coffee starts shedding aromatics almost immediately, and the compounds that make a Yirgacheffe taste like citrus rather than generic brown are the first to go. Roast to order and the customer gets the best of it instead of the shelf.
The second thing they do is name the farmer. Every bag carries the name of the person who grew what is inside it. Ethical sourcing is a common enough claim, and Brightside back theirs with close relationships upstream and a policy of showing their work. You do not have to take the sourcing on trust, because it is printed on the packaging.
The roasting itself aims at sweetness and balance rather than drama. Brightside are after a clean, delicate profile, which is why their blends keep converting people who were fairly sure they did not like coffee, and why their single origins hold their definition instead of blurring into roast character. Approachable is not the same as simple, and the range makes that case pretty well.
A Word from Brightside
Matt first walked into a roastery as a teenager and never really left. Edith came at it from the other direction, as someone who noticed how much a decent first coffee changes the shape of a day. Between them the business runs on a mix of technical knowledge and a fairly ordinary consumer instinct: make it good, make it easy to buy, and do not make anybody feel stupid for asking a question.
This Month’s Selection
Brightside coffees across three categories: blends, single origins and a decaf.
Blends
Good Times Blend Medium Roast | Cookies and Cream & Chocolate
The easy one, and their best seller for good reason. Two Brazilian lots and a washed Colombian give it a mellow cookies-and-cream sweetness with a creamy body, closer to dunking a chocolate biscuit in your coffee than drinking straight chocolate. It takes milk without losing its character and pulls a reliable crema on a standard home machine. Nothing about it pushes back, which is exactly the point.
Among Friends Blend Medium-Dark Roast | Dark Chocolate, Hazelnut & Dried Fruits
A bit more weight behind it. Dark chocolate and sweet hazelnut with a dried fruit note underneath, smooth and easy drinking without giving up depth. It holds its shape black or in milk, which makes it the bag to open when other people are in the house and you have no idea how they take it.
Scallywag Dark Roast | Deep Chocolate
The strong one. Bold and intense with deep chocolate running through it, and a smoother finish than the roast level suggests. Built for early starts and mornings that need shifting, and forgiving enough to survive a rushed extraction. For drinkers who want their coffee to announce itself.
Crossroads Blend Medium Roast| Berries, Dark Chocolate & Buttery
Our collaboration blend with Brightside, available only through PCX. PNG Okalu peaberry roasted a touch darker for punch, Ethiopian Hambella kept lighter so the fruit stays forward. Sweet berry and jam notes over a rich buttery body, finishing in dark chocolate. The comparison that keeps coming up is a dark chocolate mousse and berry tart sitting on a crushed biscuit base.
Single Origins
If single origins are where you usually start, our Single Origin of the Month feature picks fresh ones every month.
Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Medium Roast | Toffee, Citrus & Silky
A washed lot from the Amederaro Washing Station, grown at 2000 metres using 74110 alongside local landrace varieties. Toffee sweetness runs the length of the cup with a juicy citrus sorbet character sitting over the top, and the texture is the part people notice: smooth, silky and clean to the last sip. Bright without being sharp, sweet without being heavy.
Lass Malo, Papua New Guinea Medium Roast | Maple Syrup, Chocolate & Raisin
A washed lot from the Eastern Highlands, grown between 1450 and 2000 metres from Typica and Arusha. Maple syrup sweetness arrives thick and stays there, chocolate fills out the body, and a dried raisin note closes it. PNG coffees often run heavy and blurred, with the sweetness and the body merging into one flavour. This one keeps its parts separate, which is rarer than it sounds. Lass Malo was founded by Maureen Ken and her husband Ken Dumudi, and the operation gives smallholders in remote villages access to sorting facilities and pricing they would not otherwise reach.
Decaf
Our Decaf of the Month feature rotates a different decaf each month, picked the same way.
Surprisingly Good Decaf Medium-Dark Roast | Red Apple, Dark Chocolate & Cinnamon
Decaf worth choosing on purpose. A Peruvian base, Swiss Water processed, which pulls the caffeine out using water alone and leaves the structure of the coffee intact. Sweet red apple and dark chocolate with a hint of cinnamon warmth, and enough body to carry a milk drink, so a late flat white still tastes like coffee rather than a polite imitation of one. The name is doing less work than you would think.
Getting the Best From It at Home
The fundamentals do most of the work. Fresh beans, clean filtered water, and a willingness to change one variable at a time. If the shot runs bitter and slow, coarsen the grind slightly. If it runs sour and fast, go finer. Change one thing, drink tomorrow’s cup, change it again. Consistency helps more than expensive equipment does, and today’s cup is still fresh coffee either way.
If you want somewhere to start dialling things in, our free Home Barista Guide walks through it.
Beyond the Cup
Brightside’s approach holds across everything they do: source responsibly and say who from, roast only what has been ordered, aim for sweetness and balance rather than showmanship, and keep the whole thing approachable enough that a beginner and a nerd can shop the same range without either feeling out of place.
The blends are the backbone. The single origins are where the sourcing shows. The decaf is good enough to order on its own terms rather than as a compromise. You do not have to take any of that on faith, though. The cups do the talking.
Try Brightside This August
One roaster, available through the month. Pick them up individually from the Roaster of the Month collection, or let us send a rotating Brightside selection your way with the Roaster of the Month subscription. There is also a Brightside Limited Edition tasting box if you would rather line a few up side by side and taste the differences in one sitting.
A Perth roaster that keeps it honest, and prints the receipt on the bag.
