Tattooed Sailor Coffee Roasters: The Cairns Roastery on Newell Street

Most people in Cairns have been drinking Tattooed Sailor for years without ever knowing the name. It turns up in the cup at Caffiend on Grafton Street and at Guyala, and it gets posted around the country in kilo bags, but the roastery itself sits in a shed on Newell Street in Bungalow, in the light-industrial belt behind the showgrounds, where nobody goes looking for coffee. That is the point of this piece. There is a working coffee roastery in Cairns, roughly ten minutes from the Esplanade, and the same company runs the cafe at the front of it.

Where it is, and why you have not found it

The address is 176 Newell Street, Bungalow, Queensland 4870. Bungalow is the suburb immediately south west of the city centre, past the railway and the showgrounds, and it is where Cairns keeps its panel beaters, its tyre places and its wholesalers. Driving in, you are looking for a roller door and a sign rather than a shopfront. There is no strip of cafes either side of it and no reason to wander past, which is why a business that has been roasting since 2015 is still a local secret to a lot of the people drinking it.

If you are staying in the city, it is a short drive or a reasonable ride. It is not a walk from the Esplanade, and it is not on the way to anything else a visitor is likely to be doing, so treat it as a deliberate trip rather than a detour.

One address, two names

This confuses people, including us until we checked the register, so here is the plain version. The Tattooed Sailor Coffee Roasters and Newell Street Cafe are not two businesses. They are two registered business names held by the same company, Caffeinated Jacks Pty Ltd, at the same address. The Tattooed Sailor name was registered in August 2015 and Newell Street Cafe in January 2017, both to that one entity, which you can look up yourself on the Australian Business Register under ABN 97 607 177 006.

The company belongs to Cairns roaster Oliver James, who also has Caffiend, Guyala, Riverstone Bakery and the Cairns Coffee School under the same roof, so to speak. So when you see the roastery listed one place and the cafe listed another, they are describing the same building. Search results, map pins and delivery apps all handle this badly, and it is the single most common reason people end up at the wrong idea of what is there.

What they roast

Six named blends, plus single origins that rotate. These are the prices on their own online shop as at 15 September 2026, in Australian dollars, and coffee pricing moves, so treat them as a guide rather than a promise.

• White Label, a mild roast drawing on Brazil, Ethiopia, India and Australia, which they describe as milk chocolate with a gentle dried fruit sweetness. $19 for 250g, $57 a kilo.
• Smooth Sailing, medium dark, from India, Colombia and Guatemala, roasted almonds and soft caramel. $19 for 250g, $57 a kilo.
• Ice Breaker, their boldest and heaviest, built on traditional Italian roasting. $19 for 250g, $57 a kilo.
• Fruit Merchant, the seasonal espresso blend, $21 for 250g and $62 a kilo.
• Sky High, medium roast, $62 a kilo.
• Decaf, Colombian, decaffeinated by the Swiss Water process. $21 for 250g, $62 a kilo.

Single origins are sold in tiers rather than by name, as espresso or filter, at $20 for the standard, $22 for silver and $24 for gold. Whatever you buy, they will grind it to order, and the list of grinds is longer than most: home espresso, V-filter, stovetop, Aeropress, plunger, Chemex and Eversys.

Sky High, the blend with Mareeba in it

If you want one bag that actually tastes of where you have been, this is the one. Sky High is, in their own words, nearly 70 per cent local beans from Skybury Farms at Mareeba, backed with citrus and acidity from Guatemala and brown sugar sweetness from Colombia. Mareeba is about an hour up the range from Cairns and it is the centre of Australia’s small commercial coffee-growing industry, so a blend that is mostly Tablelands-grown is a genuinely regional thing to carry home, not a souvenir tin with a picture of a reef on it.

Fruit Merchant is the other one worth asking about. It is seasonal, so the components change through the year, but the shape of it is a washed Ethiopian, often from Yirgacheffe, a naturally processed Ethiopian, and a Central American. They rate it as cold drip and filter as much as espresso, which is the right call in a Cairns November.

Buying beans, in person or posted

Retail bags come in 250g and one kilogram. The online shop runs at tscr.au, takes the usual cards plus Apple Pay and Google Pay, dispatches within 72 hours of payment clearing and sends by Australia Post, to street addresses and PO boxes. They also sell wholesale, which is how the coffee ends up in cafes around town.

One thing to know before you type the address in. There are two Tattooed Sailor websites still live. The current one is tscr.au. The older tattooedsailor.com.au is years out of date, still advertises products that no longer exist and lists hours that do not match anything else, so ignore what it tells you.

Where else in Cairns you are drinking it

Caffiend, at 72 Grafton Street, is the one most visitors find first, the laneway cafe with the art on the walls that we send people to on a wet morning in Cairns. It pours Tattooed Sailor, and it is owned by the same person. Guyala does too. So if you have had a good flat white in this city and could not place the beans, there is a fair chance they were roasted on Newell Street.

They are not the only roaster here, and we would not pretend otherwise. ABC News reported in August 2025 that eight roasters operate in Cairns. White Whale roasts at Portsmith, Sipping Duck at Stratford, Cruze at Manoora, Ransom at Manunda, and Coffee NQ roasts at Portsmith and sells retail as Blackbird. For a city of this size that is a real scene, and most visitors never see any of it because they never leave the Esplanade.

Coffee grown an hour up the range

Here is the thing that makes Cairns unusual, and it is the reason a roastery in a Bungalow shed is worth writing about at all. Almost no Australian city has commercial coffee farms within an hour of it. This one does. The Mareeba and Atherton Tablelands district is where most of Australia’s coffee is grown, and the roaster behind Tattooed Sailor put it to the ABC in August 2025 like this: “we have farms right at our doorstep, 40 minutes to an hour away.”

That proximity is the story, not medals. If you want to see the growing end of it, Coffee Works at Mareeba is the long-running visitor operation up there, and it is a proper day trip rather than a coffee run. Newell Street is the town end of the same industry: green beans in, brown beans out, an hour down the range from where some of them were picked.

Before you go

We are not going to print opening hours for this one, and we want to be straight about why. Between their two websites and their own online store there are four different sets of hours published, ranging from a 5:45am start to a nine-to-five. The only thing all four agree on is that they are closed on Sunday. Ring 0420 901 414 or check their Instagram before you drive out, because a wasted trip to an industrial estate is a miserable way to start a morning.

The same goes for the food. There is a cafe operating at the front, and the description they give is coffee, fresh juice, cakes and gourmet toasties, but there is no current menu published anywhere we could verify and no prices we would be willing to put in print. Go for the coffee and the beans. Treat anything to eat as a bonus.

One more note on claims, since it is the kind of thing we check. You will see it said that Tattooed Sailor was named one of the best coffee roasters in Queensland. That comes from a coffee blog’s roundup article published in 2022. It is a nice mention and we would take it too, but it is an editorial list, not an award from a judging body, and we could not find Tattooed Sailor in any Golden Bean or specialty association result from the last five years. The only Cairns roaster we could verify with a real competition result is Ransom at Manunda, which took bronze in three categories at Golden Bean Australasia in 2024.

The verdict

Go if you care where your coffee comes from, or if you want to take something home from Far North Queensland that is not a fridge magnet. Buy the Sky High, because a bag that is nearly three quarters Mareeba-grown is a souvenir with an actual place attached to it. Do not go expecting a laneway cafe with a queue out the door, because it is a roastery on an industrial street and it behaves like one.

If you want the cafe experience instead, go to Caffiend in the city, which is the same coffee in a room built for sitting in. And if you are working out where to eat more generally, our guide to where to eat in Cairns covers breakfast through to the expensive end.

FAQs

Are Tattooed Sailor Coffee Roasters and Newell Street Cafe the same place?
Yes. Both are registered business names of Caffeinated Jacks Pty Ltd, ABN 97 607 177 006, and both trade from 176 Newell Street, Bungalow. It is one address with two names on it, which is why search results treat them as separate venues.

What are the opening hours?
We are not publishing them, because their own published sources give four conflicting versions. All four agree they are closed on Sunday. Ring 0420 901 414 or check their Instagram before you go.

Can you buy beans there?
Yes, in 250g and one kilogram bags, ground to order if you want. Blends run $19 to $21 for 250g and $57 to $62 a kilo, and single origins are $20 to $24 for 250g, as at September 2026. They also ship Australia-wide by Australia Post from tscr.au.

Which blend has local Queensland coffee in it?
Sky High. The roaster says it is nearly 70 per cent beans from Skybury Farms at Mareeba, with Guatemalan and Colombian components making up the rest.

Where else can I drink Tattooed Sailor coffee in Cairns?
Caffiend at 72 Grafton Street and Guyala both pour it, and both are owned by the same person who owns the roastery. It is also sold wholesale to other venues.

Is coffee really grown near Cairns?
Yes. The Mareeba and Atherton Tablelands district, about an hour up the range, is the centre of Australia’s commercial coffee growing. It is a small industry by world standards, but it is real, and some of it ends up in bags roasted in Cairns.

Header photo: ours, Tattooed Sailor Coffee Roasters, Bungalow, December 2020. Prices and business details checked at the operator’s own sources and the Australian Business Register on 15 September 2026.

Nobody paid us to write this and we have no commercial relationship with the business. They shouted us a coffee when we visited, and that is the extent of it. The photographs are our own.