Evan — The Heart of Proximal
Proximal Coffee started with one person: Evan Thompson.
From the age of 15, Evan was already working in Lilydale cafes — serving tables, learning the trade, and, when he was lucky, making the coffee. What began as a part-time hospitality job became something closer to a calling. While studying teaching at Deakin University, he kept working cafes on the side, and realised making coffee for friends and locals felt less like work and more like home.
Rather than take the conventional path into teaching, Evan chose to travel — working as "the Aussie barista" behind coffee bars in Ireland, Spain and Germany. It was there, he said, that he found who he wanted to be. Culture and community, he believed, were powerful enough to shape a whole life — and they shaped his.
Back home, Evan's first venture into roasting wasn't a shopfront at all — it was Double Park Coffee, an espresso machine rigged to the back of a motorbike, taking good coffee wherever it was needed. That same restless, make-it-happen energy carried him from behind the espresso bar at Locavore into his own roastery, set up right behind the Locavore building on Main Street — the same roastery Proximal still runs from today.
"Be Proximal. Bringing you closer to the coffee in your cup," he wrote the day he launched it.
Everything about Proximal, from the Best Friends Blend to the "mates" in our name, came from Evan's belief that coffee is really about the people you share it with.
Evan sadly passed away from brain cancer. Proximal Coffee carries on in his name, roasted the way he taught us, for the community he built it for.
For Ev.
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