Coming of age: Two Before Ten turns 18

Every 18-year-old has an origin story. Ours starts in a small city store called Enter café – two mates, a coffee machine, and a lot more optimism than experience.

Like any newborn, it needed feeding, watching, and a bit of luck. Six months in one half of the founding duo got shipped overseas for work, and the other kept the doors open. Sometimes growing up starts with someone having to figure things out alone for a while.

Before too much time had passed, a familiar face pulled up a chair behind the counter, the first of many who’d end up part of the family. You don’t choose your people, not really.

Then came the wild decision every teenager makes at some point, the one the adults think is a bad idea. Two Before Ten took on the Aranda Shops, a building that had stood empty for 15 years and had once been voted the second ugliest in Canberra. Growing up means ignoring the sensible advice and finding out what you’re capable of. And this time, there were more hands on deck than ever, with more mates finding their way in over the years that followed – one with an eye for how a space should feel the moment you walk into it, an IT nerd, a hatted chef, a rabble of baristas who took the coffee more seriously than they took themselves, and one who turned up with a ute full of tools and never really left. Each one added something that’s still part of Twobie today, even if most people walking in wouldn’t know their names.

It turned out the Aranda project was capable of quite a lot, it grew into a wine bar, a studio, a farm, a whole small neighbourhood of its own. We’ve kept a few pieces of furniture from that very first café, still doing their job around the group – proof that you can grow up without throwing away everything that made you who you are.

Now eighteen years on, we’re still figuring it out. Old enough to have a history worth telling, young enough to still be working out exactly who we’re going to be. Two Before Ten started as mates and a coffee machine in a small city café. It’s grown into a Canberra institution, and along the way it’s watched a lot of people grow up right alongside it. Not bad, for something that started with the idea of a perfect day = two coffees before 10am.

A thank you to the people who made all eighteen year’s worth it – the customers who wandered in once and the ones who’ve never really left, the suppliers, landlords and the staff who’ve turned up and shown up, again and again, whatever the day threw at them. You’re not just part of the story. You are the story.