Most people who drink coffee every day have never once thought about whether their espresso is made from Arabica or Robusta. The specialty coffee industry has spent decades making sure of it. Arabica became the default assumption of serious coffee, and Robusta was quietly written off as the bean that goes in the cheap stuff. Gabriel Shohet and Eirik Holth spent years traveling to origin farms across coffee-producing regions before arriving at a different conclusion.
Robusta is a different product. It carries more caffeine than Arabica, more protein, and lower acidity. The flavor is bolder. The experience is distinct rather than inferior. What the industry had dismissed as a commodity ingredient, Shohet and Holth recognized as an opportunity that nobody else had taken seriously. They built Black Sheep Coffee around it, and created a category that had never existed before: Specialty-grade 100% Robusta coffee, served at scale.
That product decision is the foundation everything else is built on. The sourcing is direct. Shohet and Holth still travel to the farms, still maintain relationships with the growers, and still apply the same quality standards to every bean that comes through the supply chain. The house espresso developed in the earliest days of the company is still on the menu at every location. Ceremonial-grade matcha, sourced directly from Japan, sits alongside it and has grown to represent 18% of total company sales. Norwegian waffles complete a menu where nothing was chosen for convenience.
© Black Sheep Coffee
Black Sheep Coffee is headquartered in Miami where its first Florida location just opened a few months ago, and currently operates locations across Texas, including Dallas, Plano, and Grapevine in the DFW area, with further US markets in active development. The brand has over 130 locations globally across the United Kingdom and the Middle East, where it has been voted Best Multiple Operator by consumers at the London Coffee Festival two years running. The founders have plans to double that footprint within the next 18 months. It has raised no institutional capital. Shohet and Holth financed the company’s growth entirely through private individuals, including NBA star Kristaps Porzingis, who invested after becoming a customer and has remained one of the brand’s most vocal public supporters. The founders have retained full strategic control throughout.
The physical spaces carry the same philosophy as the menu. Every location features original street art painted directly onto the walls, commissioned for that specific shop. Reclaimed timber runs through the furniture. Nothing is printed or framed. The look started because the first shop they ever built had cracked walls and a very small budget, and it has stayed because it turned out to be the truest expression of what the brand actually is.
For American coffee drinkers who have spent years in a category that quietly agreed on what good coffee was supposed to look like, Black Sheep Coffee is offering a different answer.
