SPECIALTY COFFEE
ON PAG ISLAND

I was on gardening leave from Rimac. Before starting the next position, I went to Thailand for Muay Thai training. Fourteen years in the sport, trained to instructor level at Master Toddy's. A return to something that had been mine for a long time, before careers and programs and organizational charts.

I was not looking for anything.

Surin Beach, Phuket, 2025

There is a beach on the northwest coast of Phuket called Surin. In February the water is clear and the light comes in at an angle that makes everything look slightly better than it probably is.

On the road running parallel to the beach there was a converted Suzuki Samurai.

Two women were running it. Cold brew, espresso, something that had no business being as good as it was in a vehicle that old and that perfectly positioned. Small operation. No menu board I remember clearly. No corporate anything visible from where I was standing.

I ordered a coffee. I paid. I did not leave.

What I Was Actually Looking At

The coffee was good. That is true and also not the point.

What stopped me was the whole picture. The vehicle was exactly what it was. The location was exactly right for what it was doing. The two people running it were exactly where the product met the person who wanted it, with nothing in between.

I work in industries where that chain is very long. Powertrain development for a car that will be driven by a few hundred buyers on the other side of a dealer network and a logistics chain and a financing operation. I have managed 120 people across multiple countries to deliver a product to a client who builds cars for people who already own everything.

The Samurai on Surin Beach had none of that. It had two people, a machine, and whoever walked up.

I stood there for longer than was normal.

The Text

I took out my phone and sent one message to Vanessa.

I want to do this. Our version. In Croatia.

She responded in about four minutes.

That was February 2025. It is now the entire project.

Why Croatia. Why the Samurai.

Neither was a choice we made sitting down with a spreadsheet.

Vanessa and I had built our lives in Zagreb during the Rimac years. Croatia was not where we were from and not where we had planned to end up. It became home because we chose it actively, which is a different kind of belonging than the kind you are born into.

Pag Island was already part of the geography we knew. Limestone karst. Salt flats. The Bura wind off the mountains. Roads that go somewhere interesting. A coastline that makes you want to stay.

The Suzuki Samurai was the only logical answer to the problem of bringing serious equipment to serious locations. Compact four-wheel drive. Real off-road capability in a small package. Old enough to have character. The right size for what we needed to fit inside it.

A La Marzocco Linea Mini R inside a 1987 Samurai is not a design statement. It is the most direct answer to a logistics problem.

What It Takes

The distance between a text on a Thai beach and a functioning mobile coffee bar is longer than it looks.

We are doing the full build. Structural reinforcement. Dual battery system with solar-assisted auxiliary power for running espresso equipment off-grid. Water filtration designed for locations where the water supply is unreliable. Custom rear module. The whole thing engineered to run reliably in a Dalmatian summer with limestone dust on everything.

I have spent ten years learning how to engineer things that work under real conditions. That knowledge is the main thing I brought to this project.

Vanessa owns a La Marzocco Linea Mini R. She did not own one three years ago. She will be running the bar. That arc is its own story.

The Point of the Beach

The Samurai on Surin Beach was not the idea. The idea had been forming for years, as a low-frequency question about what I was building and for whom and how close I could get to the answer.

Thailand gave it a specific shape. One truck, two people, the right location, and a product that was worth going to.

That was all I needed to see.

Cafe on the Roast. Pag Island, Croatia. Launching 2027.

Follow the road.

People see a project manager quit his position leading the Bugatti powertrain program and open a coffee bar. They read the story and they reach for a diagnosis.

Burnout. Midlife crisis. Checked out.

It is the simplest explanation and it is wrong.

Not wrong in the way that facts are wrong. Wrong in the way that reading the last chapter of a book and summarizing the plot is wrong. The ending is accurate. The meaning is completely missed.

What the Story Looks Like from the Outside

Project manager. Senior position. Rimac Technology, Zagreb. The client is Bugatti. The program is the powertrain for the successor to the Chiron. 120 engineers across multiple countries at peak. Procurement, manufacturing, industrialization, quality, logistics. A multi-year program culminating in a car that carries one of the most recognized names in automotive history.

Then: gardening leave. Munich Electrification. And eventually, a Suzuki Samurai and a La Marzocco espresso machine.

I understand why people reach for burnout. It is a known category. It makes the math work. High-pressure career plus unexpected exit equals breakdown. The narrative fits.

It does not describe what happened.

The Decade Before the Exit

I was nineteen when I spent a year as a paramedic in the Austrian Alps. Not because it was strategic. Because I wanted to understand what mattered when things went wrong.

From there: Formula Student racing at TU Graz. Then AVL, where I ran powertrain testing including a MotoGP project. Then Valeo Siemens, technical project manager for the Mercedes and AMG EVA2 electric platform. Then Rimac.

At each stage, the work became more complex and the organization became larger. This is how careers in engineering are supposed to go. More responsibility. More scale. More distance from the thing being built.

I was good at all of it. I want to be precise about this. The Tourbillon program was extraordinary work. The team was world-class. I have no criticism of the engineering, the company, or the people. I am proud of what we built.

But somewhere inside that decade, I kept having a version of the same conversation.

Not out loud. Not in any meeting or performance review. A conversation I had with myself, usually while working on something technically impressive, about who the work was actually for and how close I could get to the answer.

The conversation did not have urgency. It was not a crisis. It was more like a low-frequency sound that you stop noticing until the room goes quiet.

The Room Went Quiet

I was working remotely on the Dalmatian coast. The Adriatic in front of me. On my screen: a powertrain for a car built in a few hundred units for buyers who could already afford anything.

A grid failure took out much of Dalmatia and into Bosnia. The screens went dark.

In that silence the question became specific for the first time.

What am I actually building here?

I want to be careful about what I mean by that question. I was not questioning the quality of the engineering. I was not questioning whether the car should exist. I was not dismissing the value of the work.

I was doing something simpler. I was counting the number of people the work actually reached and noticing that the number had been getting smaller as my career got larger.

The most sophisticated system I had ever touched was destined for fewer buyers than a single apartment building holds residents.

That is not a moral judgment. It is an observation. And once I had made it clearly, I could not unmake it.

Thailand Did Not Start It

During gardening leave before joining Munich Electrification, I went to Thailand for Muay Thai training. On Surin Beach in Phuket I saw a converted Suzuki Samurai running a coffee bar. Two people. No organizational structure visible anywhere. Just a truck, a product, and a place worth going to.

I stood there longer than I should have.

The coffee was good. That was not why I stayed. I stayed because the whole picture was exactly what the decade-long conversation had been circling without ever landing on. No intermediary. No organizational distance. The thing being made and the person receiving it, without anything in between.

I took out my phone and texted Vanessa.

I want to do this. Our version. In Croatia.

People read that text as the beginning. It was not. It was the moment ten years of the same low-frequency question finally had a specific shape to pour itself into.

What Looks Like Impulse

The question I have been asked most often since leaving is some version of: what went wrong?

Nothing went wrong. That is the honest answer and I understand why it is unsatisfying.

What actually happened is that I spent ten years building exactly the skills that this project requires. Powertrain engineering teaches you tolerances and failure modes. Project management across 120 people teaches you what breaks between the plan and the execution. Running a multi-country procurement operation teaches you supply chain in ways that a business school case study does not.

None of that transfers directly to running a mobile espresso bar on a Croatian island. All of it transfers completely.

The Samurai will have limestone dust on everything in Dalmatian summer. The espresso machine has to perform without a stable power supply. The water filtration has to work off-grid. These are engineering problems. I have spent a decade learning to solve engineering problems under real conditions.

What looks like impulse from the outside is a decade of preparation that finally found its application.

We Are Building It Now

Cafe on the Roast is not a coffee brand. It is not a lifestyle project. It is not a reaction to anything.

It is the most direct answer I could find to a question I had been asking for ten years: what do you build when you want to be close to the thing you are making and close to the people it is made for?

A Suzuki Samurai on Pag Island, Croatia. A La Marzocco Linea Mini R. Single-origin beans from roasters we actually believe in. A location that makes the drive worth it.

Launching 2027. Follow the road.

The car cost several million euros. We built it for people who already owned everything. And somewhere on the Dalmatian coast, when the grid went down and the screens went dark, I sat in front of the Adriatic and asked a question I could not put back:

What am I actually building here?

That question ended a career I was proud of. It also gave me something I could not have found any other way.

The Machine Before the Question

I did not start as someone who liked coffee. I started as a kid in Graz who took mopeds apart in garages and refused to ask for help until the thing worked again.

That stubbornness went through Formula Student racing at TU Graz, a year as a paramedic in the Austrian Alps at nineteen, and eventually into the automotive industry. AVL, where I ran powertrain testing including a MotoGP project. Valeo Siemens, where I was technical project manager for the Mercedes and AMG EVA2 electric platform. Then Rimac Technology, Zagreb, 2022.

The brief at Rimac was clear: lead powertrain development for a scalable platform feeding the successor to the Bugatti Chiron. The car that became the Bugatti Tourbillon.

The program was called AXL_SC1. Three products derived from it. My team at peak: 120 engineers spanning procurement, manufacturing, industrialization, quality, and logistics across multiple countries. The customer was Bugatti.

We delivered. The Tourbillon exists. The BR1 powertrain inside it exists because of the work my team built from 2022, and continues to develop today.

On any objective measure: peak of a career.

A Blackout in Šibenik

I was working remotely. Dalmatian coast. The Adriatic in front of me, and on my screen: a powertrain for a car produced in a few hundred units, destined for buyers who could already afford anything.

The power went out.

Not just locally. A grid failure took out much of Dalmatia and into Bosnia. The screens went dark. The machine sounds stopped.

In that silence, a question formed without warning:

What am I actually building here? An expensive toy for people who already have everything.

I want to be precise about what that question was and what it was not. The engineering was extraordinary. The team was world-class. I am proud of the Tourbillon program without reservation. But the question was not about quality. It was about proximity.

A decade of increasing technical complexity. Increasing organizational scale. And a shrinking number of people actually served by the work. The most sophisticated vehicle I had ever touched was destined for fewer buyers than a single apartment building holds residents.

The question would not leave.

Thailand Changed the Variables

In 2025, during gardening leave from Rimac before joining Munich Electrification, I went to Thailand for Muay Thai training. Fourteen years of the sport, trained to instructor level at Master Toddy's Academy. A return to the source. I found something I had not planned to find.

Surin Beach, Phuket. A coffee truck. A Suzuki Samurai, converted. Two women running it with the ease of people who genuinely love what they are doing. Cold brew, espresso, coffee that had no business being this good in a vehicle this old and this perfectly placed.

I stood there longer than expected.

The coffee was good. But what stopped me was not the coffee. It was the whole picture. The vehicle. The location. The directness of it. Two people, a truck, a product, and a place worth going to. No organization chart. No stakeholder matrix. No intermediary between the thing being made and the person receiving it.

I took out my phone and texted Vanessa.

"I want to do this. Our version. In Croatia."

Why Croatia. Why the Samurai.

Neither was a deliberate choice. Both were the only logical conclusions.

Vanessa and I built our lives in Zagreb during the Rimac years. Croatia became home the way a place becomes home when you choose it actively, not by default. Pag Island was already part of the geography we knew: limestone karst landscape, salt flats, the Bura wind off the mountains, the Adriatic in every direction. Roads that deserve something interesting being driven on them.

The audience we are building for already comes here. The 25-to-44-year-old who has worked through the specialty coffee scene in Vienna, Amsterdam, Munich, and Berlin, then drives through one of the most visually extraordinary coastlines in Europe and finds the same options available at any service station. The gap is not accidental. Nobody has solved the logistics of bringing serious equipment to serious locations.

The Suzuki Samurai solves it. It is a compact 4x4 designed for real terrain, not the soft-road styling of modern crossovers. Small, capable, honest, aged into the kind of cool that only comes from a thing being exactly what it is. A La Marzocco espresso machine inside a Samurai is not a design statement. It is the precise answer to a logistics problem: maximum refinement inside maximum raw capability.

That contrast is not for effect. It is the thing itself.

What Most People Get Wrong

People hear "project manager quits Bugatti to open a coffee bar" and read impulsiveness. A burnout call. Someone who snapped.

The opposite is true.

Everything that made the Bugatti program possible applies here. A decade of understanding how to engineer something correctly: the tolerances, the failure modes, the gap between what should work in theory and what actually works under real conditions. Those instincts transfer directly to building a mobile espresso setup that runs reliably in a Dalmatian summer with limestone dust on everything.

And the decade of telling the same story to Vanessa and friends, refining the same idea across cities and career phases, is exactly what a product development cycle looks like. Thailand was not the starting gun. It was the moment ten years of iteration found the right form.

What looks like impulse from the outside is usually preparation that did not announce itself.

The Practical Takeaway

Purpose does not come from the complexity of what you build. It comes from proximity to the person it serves.

I built a powertrain for a car that a few hundred people in the world will own. The engineering was harder than almost anything I have done. The satisfaction of delivering it was real. But the feeling I am after is simpler.

Hand someone a coffee. Watch their face change.

Cafe on the Roast is the intersection of a decade of engineering instinct and everything my parents modeled at a dinner table in Graz: a physiotherapist who understood the body as a system under load, and a leadership coach who understood the mind the same way. Both of them spent careers helping people reach something they could not reach alone. I absorbed that without knowing it.

We are in it now. Finding the right Samurai. Building the setup. Developing the coffee program. Documenting the entire process as the brand itself.

The Samurai won't be parked on a city high street. It will be perched somewhere on Pag Island with white stone and blue water and the Bura coming through, brewing something worth the drive.

That is the why. That has always been the why. Launching 2027.

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Markus Reinprecht, Co-founder of Cafe on the Roast. Building a mobile specialty coffee bar in a Suzuki Samurai on Pag Island, Croatia, with Vanessa Reinprecht.

Stop following the recipe. Start understanding the system.

Every espresso guide starts the same way. 18 grams in. 36 out. 25 seconds. Taste it. Adjust. What they don't tell you is why those numbers exist, or what to do when they fail. And they will fail, because your beans are not their beans, your water is not their water, and your machine is not sitting in the same controlled environment as theirs.

This is not another recipe. This is the system behind every recipe. Two levers. One variable. And the willingness to taste your mistakes.

What Is Actually Happening in Your Cup

Water is a solvent. It does not care about your recipe. It pulls compounds out of your ground coffee in the same order, every single time: sour first, sweet second, bitter last.

Dial-in is the act of stopping that extraction at the right moment, when you have enough sweet to balance the sour and enough bitter to add depth without dominating. The recipe is just someone else's guess at where that moment lives. Your job is to find it yourself.

The Two Levers

You have two tools. That's all you need.

Grind size controls how fast the water moves through the puck. Finer grind means more surface area, slower flow, longer contact time. The shot takes longer at the same ratio and pulls more from the bitter end of the spectrum. Coarser grind means faster flow, shorter contact time, and the shot skews toward the sour end.

Ratio controls how much liquid comes out. If your shot tastes sour, let it run longer. You are adding more of the sweet and bitter compounds that follow the sour ones. If it tastes bitter, cut it shorter. Stop before the bitter tail overwhelms everything else.

Grind size gets you in the right neighborhood. Ratio fine-tunes the rest. That order matters. Most people try to fix everything with grind adjustments alone and end up overcorrecting in circles.

The Salami Shot: How to Train Your Palate

This is the most useful thing you can do before you touch a single grinder setting.

Pull a shot and split it into thirds. Three small glasses. Taste each separately.

The first third will be sour. The second, more balanced. The third, bitter. If you have never done this before, the difference will be dramatic: darker colors in the early pour, lighter at the end, flavors that feel like completely different coffees.

Do this once and you will never have to guess which direction your shot is leaning again. You will know. The sour-sweet-bitter sequence becomes a physical reference point, not an abstract concept.

The Variable Nobody Mentions: Solubility

Here is where recipes fall apart entirely.

Not all beans extract equally. Some dissolve fast. Some resist. The factors that determine this have nothing to do with your technique, and everything to do with what is in the bag.

Roast level is the biggest factor. Dark roast has been in the roaster longer. It has been broken down more, and it extracts easily. Extract it too much and you get tar. Pull a tighter ratio, go slightly coarser. Light roast is the opposite: less broken down, more resistant. You need a finer grind, a longer ratio, and sometimes more temperature to pull everything worth pulling out of it.

Processing method is the second lever you don't control but need to understand. Washed coffees have the fruit removed early. They tend to be dense, less soluble. They need more extraction. Natural processed coffees are dried with the fruit on, which leaves the bean less dense and more soluble. Fermented and anaerobic coffees push solubility even higher. Decaf is in its own category: the processing strips so much structure from the bean that it extracts quickly and tends to flow fast. Go finer to slow it down, but tighten the ratio to compensate.

Altitude plays a role too. High-altitude coffees grow slower, become denser, and resist extraction more. You need to push harder to get everything out.

Before you touch a grinder setting on a new bag, read the label. Washed Colombian from 2,000 meters? You are going to work for this one. Low-altitude natural Brazilian? It will come easy. That is not a guess. That is information you can act on before pulling the first shot.

Puck Prep: The Unglamorous Truth

If you have two identical shots, same bean, same grind, same ratio, and one tastes right and one tastes wrong, the problem is almost certainly the puck.

Channeling is what happens when water finds the path of least resistance through your grounds. Instead of flowing evenly through the entire puck, it blasts a channel through the least dense section, over-extracting that section while under-extracting everything else. The result is a shot that is simultaneously sour and bitter, which should not be possible, but is.

Fix it with even distribution before you tamp. The goal is a flat, uniform bed of grounds before the tamper touches it. Whatever tool or technique gets you there consistently is the right one. Tamp straight down, not at an angle. The amount of force matters less than the straightness. Once the grounds are compressed, additional force does not compress them further.

What This Means When You Are Somewhere Remote

A recipe assumes everything is constant: machine, grinder, water hardness, ambient temperature, bean age. In a controlled environment, those assumptions mostly hold.

On a limestone ridge with wind coming off the sea, none of them hold.

Ambient temperature affects extraction rate. Water from a remote source may behave differently than tap at home. Beans that spent a day in a warm vehicle extract differently from beans pulled straight from a cool storage. The machine needs to be fully saturated and temperature-stable before the first real shot. And the landscape does not wait for you to troubleshoot.

What works in variable conditions is not a recipe. It is the system: know your bean before you arrive, know which direction to pull, know what sour feels like and what bitter feels like on your palate, adjust one variable at a time, and trust that over the noise. The Samurai will not always be parked on flat ground. The machine will not always warm up in ideal conditions. But two levers and a trained palate work anywhere.

That is not a philosophy. That is just how you do not waste coffee in the field.

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Three years ago, Vanessa said coffee tastes like coffee.

Not as a criticism. As a statement of fact. Same dark liquid, same bitter finish, nothing to distinguish the office machine from anywhere else. She didn't care, and didn't think she should.

That was wrong. And now we're building a business on the other side of that mistake.

The Feeling Came Before the Plan

Markus was working in Croatia. Vanessa went along, and something happened to the evenings.

Not the work. The pace. The way a coffee could turn into two hours without anyone trying. People sitting at metal tables outside, no laptops, no agenda, just the conversation and the light going golden over the water.

There's a Croatian word, lagano, that roughly translates to: without force, without hurry. It doesn't map cleanly to English because English doesn't really have that concept. But sitting in Dalmatia with an espresso that hadn't cost anything except time, we started to understand it.

Coffee in Croatia isn't a task. It isn't fuel or a ritual or a productivity habit. It's a reason to stay.

At some point during those months the thought arrived: we want to bring this to other people. Not the coffee specifically. The feeling around it. That thought didn't come with a business plan attached. It was just a feeling we couldn't shake.

Why a Car? Why a Samurai?

The problem we're solving isn't "no coffee nearby."

It's "no good coffee where you actually want to be." On a beach that takes 40 minutes of rough road to reach. At the top of a climb that deserves better than a gas station vending machine. At a turnout with a view that shouldn't have bad coffee but always does.

That's the gap. And a café on a corner doesn't close it.

Markus found the concept in Thailand. Someone had already built a mobile café in a classic 4x4. He brought the idea back. We took it further.

The vehicle: a Suzuki Samurai. Small, capable, distinctive, with enough room for one serious machine if you think carefully about the build. The machine: a La Marzocco Linea Mini R. The person who once couldn't tell coffees apart now pulls shots every morning on one of the most serious home espresso setups on the market.

We Started from Zero. We Documented It.

No café experience. No espresso knowledge. No car.

The first five shots were embarrassing. Genuinely bad: sour, thin, wrong. We knew they were wrong before we'd learned enough to know why. That gap, between sensing something is off and being able to fix it, is where the real learning lives.

We also made a decision early on: document everything from step zero. Not when there's something worth showing. Before that.

Because the beginning is the honest part. If we're going to ask people to follow this journey, we're not going to start when things look polished.

What Changed in Three Years

The bad shots got better. Then good. Then dialed.

A strong preference for fruity, lighter-roasted beans emerged, not where most people start, and not where we expected to land. But we got there by drinking things we didn't like until we understood why, then chasing back toward what we actually wanted.

We tested cafés in every city we traveled through. Still do. Not as tourists. As people trying to understand what works, what doesn't, and why some places serve an espresso that makes you want to stay and some don't.

We made a downpayment on the Samurai. We don't have a delivery date. We don't know exactly what the finished build will look like. But the process has started, and it's not reversible in the good way. We're committed.

The Roles Happen to Make Sense

This is a shared project, and the split happened naturally, which is the best way for these things to happen.

Markus is the car person. He understands vehicles, has the mechanical instincts, and was the one who found the Samurai café model in Thailand, which tells you something about how he moves through the world.

Vanessa is the coffee person and the creative lead. She went from "all coffee tastes the same" to spending free time practicing latte art and getting deep into single-origin sourcing. The fact that she started with zero knowledge is part of the story, not something to edit out.

We met through kickboxing and still train together. This project is just the latest shared thing. Different medium, same dynamic.

What Most People Get Wrong About Building in Public

The common assumption is that you start documenting once you have something worth documenting. The product is built. The launch is imminent. The story is ready to be told.

What we found is the opposite: the most interesting part of any build is the beginning, when nothing is certain and everything is still being figured out. Showing up before you're ready is not a liability, it's the honest version of the story, and it's the part most people never see.

We didn't start @cafeontheroast because we had something to show. We started it because we didn't want to miss documenting the part where we didn't know what we were doing. That turns out to be the whole first chapter.

The Practical Takeaway

If you're building something: the messy beginning is not a phase to get through before the real story starts.

It is the story. And the people who follow you through it will be there when the car pulls up to the beach and the machine is running.

Don't wait.

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