Billycart Coffee is changing the coffee game one conversation at a time

These re-purposed caravans offer us the cafe experience in miniature, a smaller offering of treats, a shorter menu of coffees, a quicker conversation with your morning barista.

You might have even noticed that all the furniture is smaller too.

If you're lucky you could find yourself on a milk crate set at a tiny round table in a carpark. Like the design of the caravan itself, measured to function in a squeeze, it's all about practicality. Saving space and saving time.

In Marks Point, right in front of their airport, there is a coffee caravan that throws all of these customs out of the window.

Barista and owner Billy Aitkens might still have a random arrangement of carparked chairs and tables but he has created a coffee experience that is somehow larger, rather than smaller, than the real thing.

It's practical but it's also unusual and unexpected.

To begin with, he pours a coffee that is rarely made available in Newcastle. In a city famous for its exotic varieties of beans and origins, the Michelangelo blend from Maestros, roasted in Sydney under the Danes label, is a gold-medal winning combination that has the locals lined up every morning.

Describing a dark coffee roast as tasting chocolatey can seem repetitive and slightly cliched these days. It is a flavour note that almost always results from a bean harvested from a wide array of growing regions and then roasted for a specified length of time.

But every now and again you sip on a coffee that genuinely tastes as though a Malteser has melted its way through it. Your coffee is sweet, it's rounded and its flavour lingers long after you've paid for it.

Billy Cart serves up an espresso that thoroughly deserves the malty chocolate description. And its flavours are not the only thing that lingers around this unlikely coffee spot.

Complementing the hard-to-find coffee blend from the cart is an equally distinctive attitude to serving it, a philosophy that every customer encounters and then benefits from.

The customers linger because barista Billy wants to share and engage in a conversation with them. If you're thinking that every coffee, everywhere, is automatically served like this, with an accompaniment of good conversation, then think again.

On the morning I arrive I find myself waiting not because the barista is slow on the pour but because he is taking his time and listening to a customer.

Like all airports, big or small, the atmosphere reverberates with expectation.

Timing is everything. A new experience awaits.

Yet Billy Aitkens won't rush his way into taking the next order. I linger while his customers wave him hello and goodbye. He jokes, he tells stories, he wins hearts.

Behind him a team of skydivers are about to throw themselves out of a plane. Down on the ground, but still elevated in his own special way, Billy is happy to keep throwing the customs out of his window.