Beanscene February 2019

FEBRUARY 2019

A World-Class Coffee Magazine

The right to play Stepping out with confidence and courage

Cafe Imports’ Ever Meister asks the big questions

No death to coffee Backing technology with science and passion

Uganda’s unlimited potential

61 ISSN 1449-2547

9 771449 254002

02

MEL

SYD

@baristablendaus

HOW SWEET IS YOUR CUSTOMER? LET THEM DECIDE. The only thing Almond Breeze Barista Blend isn’t sweet on is sugar. So when it comes to a healthy, great tasting barista-quality, dairy-free alternative in their coffee, your customers will think you’re sweet for recommending Barista Blend.

Brand

Average Sugar Quantity per 250ml

Almond Breeze Barista Blend Alternative Dairy Co Barista MilkLAB Almond Vita Soy Cafe for Barista Almond Pure Harvest

0.6g 3.6g 4.3g 3.6g 6.0g

6x more sugar than BARISTA BLEND 7x more sugar than BARISTA BLEND 6x more sugar than BARISTA BLEND 10x more sugar than BARISTA BLEND

THE BARISTA BENCHMARK FOR COFFEE

THE LOW SUGAR CHOICE

FEBRUARY 2019

20 66

45

contents UPFRONT

12 NEWS 17 STUFF ON THE SCENE

The latest must-have products

INDUSTRY PROFILES

20

KNOWLEDGE LEADER

Cafe Imports Managing

Editor Ever Meister on producer privacy

24

CELEBRITY CHEF

Alastair McLeod talks coffee appreciation and the value of compliments

36

WIN-WIN

Ordermentum creates an

ordering platform to connect the entire food service industry

41

GABRIEL'S GIFT

Gabriel Oliveira of Bom Jesus

farm in Brazil on why specialty coffee goes beyond cup quality

48

CAFETTO BARISTA PROFILE

Scottie Callaghan opens a new

specialty café in Hong Kong with customer service at the core

50

A LOW-SUGAR FUTURE

Almond Breeze Barista Blend:

great taste without the calories

54

PEOPLE POWER

Amelia Franklin on how BeanLedger uses Blockchain to improve traceability 6

beanscenemag.com.au

56 GREEN BEAN FEATURE

Green bean importers share their goals and responsibilities at origin

FEATURE NEWS

45 NO DEATH TO COFFEE

What can you do before coffee takes its final curtain call?

66 ORIGIN

CofiCom’s John Russell Storey explores Uganda's unlimited potential

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS

29

RANCILIO'S NEW ERA

Rancilio Specialty RS1 launches in the Australian market with a focus on temperature profiling

33

THE FINER DETAILS

Anfim and Espresso Company

Australia are set to take grinding technology to the next level

52

MYTH BECOMES REALITY

Victoria Arduino on how the

Mythos 2 reaches a new level of performance

70

TECH TALK

Service Sphere

on how to select the best automated coffee machine for the office

SKILL BASE

72 ESPRESSO YOURSELF

Shinsaku Fukayama presents one last challenge

74 TRAINING TACTICS

Suntory Coffee’s Kyle Rutten on

how to set professional goals

76

R&D LAB

hemical and sensory effects C of brew water temperatures on espresso extraction

CAFÉ SCENE

60 CAFÉ SCENE

Around Australia

69 FLAVOUR FASCINATION

Zest Specialty Coffee dissects roasting variables

79 ASTCA

Shaping Australia's agricultural future – part III

80 ASCA

Offering more than just trophies

81

NZSCA

New Zealand’s coffee champions

on triumph over adversity

82 E-SCENE

Fans of the magazine

R A I S I N G TH E E SPRE SSO BAR Mel bour ne. Sydney. Brisbane

vershoot o c e n e c S n Bea PUBLISHER Christine Clancy christine.clancy@primecreative.com.au MANAGING EDITOR Sarah Baker sarah.baker@primecreative.com.au JOURNALIST Ethan Miller ethan.miller@primecreative.com.au ART DIRECTOR Michelle Weston DESIGN Blake Storey, Kerry Pert, Madeline McCarty

Rancilio Group S.p.A 18 Progress Street, Mornington, Victoria, 3931 0439 649 917 www.ranciliospecialty.com

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Camilo Molina camilo.molina@primecreative.com.au

Welcome to the first edition of BeanScene for 2019. The industry is abuzz early in the year with many events, international guests and new product launches surrounding the Melbourne International Coffee Expo. One such product making its Australian debut is the Rancilio Specialty RS1, Rancilio’s ode to the specialty market.

BeanScene Editor Sarah Baker says what better way to start the new year than to feature a new machine on the February cover?

“The RS1 was the perfect choice. There's been a lot of industry talk about this machine since its international debut at Host Milan in 2017. I remember seeing it and thinking what a breakthrough machine this would be for Rancilio into the specialty market, and now it's time for Australia to test-drive it for itself,” Sarah says. “It's an impressive unit that's been designed by baristas, for baristas.”

To photograph the RS1, the BeanScene team, including resident photographer Blake Storey, visited Specialist Espresso in West Melbourne where Owner George Alam was storing one of the first RS1s to touch down in Australia. There, the RS1 was put to the test producing perfect shot after shot on a hot Melbourne day in Rancilio's own patented snow white cups.

Rancilio Area Manager – Australasia Paul O’Brien accompanied the photoshoot with a full demonstration of the machine's capabilities.

“The most exciting feature of the RS1 is Rancilio’s patentadvanced temperature profiling technology,” Paul says.

“Temperature profiling unlocks limitless flavour potential.

From a roaster’s perspective, they can discover so many avenues of flavour by simply adjusting temperature to profile higher or lower, flat or gradient, on the digital touchscreen display above each group head.” See more page 29.

In the week of the photoshoot, Dr. Monika Fekete of the Coffee Science Lab also undertook an experiment of the Rancilio Specialty RS1 at Criteria Coffee to test how five different temperature settings affected the extraction of one espresso blend (see page 76).

“We're excited to see black and The right to pla y white results that will give the industry confidence that the Rancilio RS1 is a machine at the absolute cutting edge,” Paul says.

“Rancilio has earned the right to gain customers’ confidence and we feel we have a right to play in this field. We have something different here.”

FEBRUARY 2019

A World- Class Coffee Magazi ne

Stepping out with

confidence and courag e

Cafe Imports’ Ever Meister asks the big questions

No death to coffee

Backing technology with science and passion

Uganda’s unlimited

37 ISSN 1449-2547

02

9 771449 254002

8

beanscenemag.com.au

potential

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Brad Buchanan brad.buchanan@primecreative.com.au PUBLICATION COORDINATOR Michelle Weston michelle.weston@primecreative.com.au CLIENT SUCCESS TEAM LEADER Janine Clements janine.clements@primecreative.com.au PHOTOGRAPHY Blake Storey, Specialty Coffee Association, Jeff Hann, Imstillhungry.net CONTRIBUTORS Shinsaku Fukayama, John Russell Storey, Maurizio Marcocci, Dr. Monika Fekete, Emma McDougall, Kieran Westlake, David Peasley, Aryan Aqajani, Kyle Rutten HEAD OFFICE Prime Creative Pty Ltd 11-15 Buckhurst Street South Melbourne VIC 3205 p: 03 9690 8766 f: 03 9682 0044 enquiries@primecreative.com.au www.beanscenemagazine.com.au SUBSCRIPTIONS Gordon Watson 03 9690 8766 subscriptions@primecreative.com.au BeanScene magazine is available by subscription from the publisher. The rights of refusal are reserved by the publisher.

ARTICLES All articles submitted for publication become the property of the publisher. The Editor reserves the right to adjust any article to conform with the magazine format.

COPYRIGHT

BeanScene magazine is owned by Prime Creative Media and published by Christine Clancy. All material in BeanScene magazine is copyright and no part may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means (graphic, electronic or mechanical including information and retrieval systems) without written permission of the publisher. The Editor welcomes contributions but reserves the right to accept or reject any material.

While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of information Prime Creative Media will not accept responsibility for errors or omissions or for any consequences arising from reliance on information published. The opinions expressed in BeanScene magazine are not necessarily the opinions of, or endorsed by, the publisher unless otherwise stated.

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CONTRIBUTORS In each issue of BeanScene we profile a few of our talented contributors.

Dr. Monika Fekete is a chemical scientist with a passion for coffee. She is the founder of Coffee Science Lab, Australia’s first independent scientific coffee consultancy. She has collaborated with innovative coffee companies, roasters, and competition baristas, helping them underpin coffee research and development projects with solid scientific principles. Monika regularly hosts workshops around putting coffee science to practice. She also works for the Department of Food and Agriculture Innovation at Monash University.

Kieran Westlake is the current President, past Treasurer and past Vice-President of the Australian Specialty Coffee Association (ASCA), Australia’s peak industry body dedicated to promoting and growing the specialty coffee industry. In his new appointment, Kieran is excited to create opportunities and pathways for ASCA members.

He is also a member of the Specialty Coffee Association, a certified food service professional, and Head of Channel Strategy for hospitality equipment funder Silver Chef.

Shinsaku Fukayama placed fourth in the 2018 World Latte Art Championship in Brazil. He is the 2018 Australian Specialty Coffee Association (ASCA) Australian Latte Art Champion, 2018 ASCA Southern Region Latte Art Champion, and 2016 Coffee Fest Latte Art Champion. Shin is a barista at St. Ali in South Melbourne. He started working in the coffee industry four and a half years ago. He is a former professional snowboarder and worked as a chef in Japan for 10 years.

Aryan Aqajani is a roaster and Q-grader at Zest Specialty Coffee. Aryan’s coffee journey started as a home barista. He gradually left his main profession of photography and got a job as a barista in cafés around Melbourne. His specialty coffee career started when he began working for one of Australia’s top specialty roasters.

Competing in the Australian Brewers Cup Championship and completing the Q-Grading course has enhanced Aryan’s coffee knowledge even further.

Maurizio Marcocci lived in Milan and attended the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, where he completed a Masters of Economics and International Relations. He has distinct qualifications from Italy as a Certified Coffee Taster with an Espresso Specialist Certificate.

Now as the Managing Director of Service Sphere, Maurizio has grown the business to become an industry leader in the sales and service of coffee equipment in just 10 years.

A word from the Editor

ASK THE BIG QUESTIONS

T

he summer break is full of festivities and fun, and if you’re lucky, there’s some downtime attached. It’s a time to wake up late without an alarm, not move from the couch, take regular naps, and read a good book as one hour rolls into the next.

Downtime often comes with questions about the year ahead, and what it means for you personally and professionally.

For Cafe Imports Managing Editor Ever Meister, her head is already buzzing with a list of questions about the unknown. Questions she’s curious about but doesn’t necessarily have the answers to. “How do we get consumers excited about specialty coffee? Why do we expose the personal details of coffee producers for marketing material? Why do roasters talk about having partnerships with farmers when many are oneway relationships?”

Ever is passionate about asking the questions no-one else is, and that’s what she plans to do when she tours nationally in Toby’s Estate’s Knowledge Talks series in March and April 2019 (see page 20).

Coffee machine manufacturer Rancilio has also asked the question: ‘How can we unlock limitless flavour potential?’ It’s answer, lies in the development of its new specialty machine RS1, which features temperature profiling – simply adjusting temperature to profile higher or lower, flat or gradient.

While technology has changed, brewing methods have developed, and new methods of delivering coffee consistency have been achieved.

However, Rancilio says no one has fundamentally changed the way coffee is extracted, until now. Thanks to the Australian debut of its RS1 machine, Rancilio is excited about having evidence to suggest that extracting at a certain brew temperature can achieve a measurable result (see page 29).

The list of questions continues, and so does our search for answers: How do we achieve consistent grinding to cope with Australia’s insane work volume? How can we secure the future supply of coffee? The answers to these, you might just find in the first edition of BeanScene for the year.

While the industry does its part to solve these questions and develop new ones, I hope your year is as successful as my holiday mission to read an entire newspaper cover to cover with a delicious coffee – uninterrupted.

SARAH BAKER Follow us on Twitter @BeanSceneEd ‘Like’ us on Facebook @BeanSceneCoffeeMag Follow us on Instagram @beanscenemag

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NEWS

CAFETTO OPENS NEW ADELAIDE DISTRIBUTION CENTRE On 23 November, Australia-based cleaning company Cafetto opened a new distribution centre in Adelaide, near the company’s Brompton factory and head office.

Cafetto Managing Director Christopher Short says the location of the new distribution centre on Wood Ave is key to it being able to operate efficiently.

“Being just a few hundred metres away from the factory and office means [communications with the] factory are swift and operational staff can go between the two sites with ease,” Christopher says.

Christopher launched Cafetto in 2003 after seeing a gap in the market for cleaning and sanitation products for coffee machines. Fifteen years later, Cafetto now distributes to more than 60 countries, with a head office in Adelaide and sales offices in Malaysia and the Netherlands.

Prior to launching the distribution centre, Christopher says Cafetto implemented several strategies to accommodate the company’s growth.

“One of the major issues any business faces as it grows is outgrowing its existing facilities,” Christopher says.

“Over the past 10 years we’ve been able to make some modifications to our Coglin Street site to accommodate the growth. We also tried outsourcing our warehousing which gave us more space for manufacturing but ultimately, we knew that to provide the best service to our customers, we need full control over every aspect of the process. That meant bringing our warehousing back in-house.”

Since Cafetto’s founding, Chris says the world has become a much smaller place, and global business is the way forward.

“We’re now really becoming a global business, shipping pallets and containers of products all over the world. To do this, you need on-the-ground expertise of how international business operates,” Chris says.

He adds that customer centricity is still the most important thing to Cafetto wherever they are in the world.

“My business has been built on finding the best and most efficient solutions for our customers and you can’t lose sight of that. It’s what we instil in our team and why our customers continue our business relationship.”

For more information, visit

www.cafetto.com

Julie and Christopher Short of Cafetto with Honorable David Pisoni, Member for Industry and Skills at the official opening of the Adelaide distribution centre.

SPECIALTY COFFEE ASSOCIATION APPOINTS YANNIS APOSTOLOPOULOS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Yannis Apostolopoulos is the Specialty Coffee Association’s new Executive Director.

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The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) has appointed Yannis Apostolopoulos as its new Executive Director, following the announcement that Ric Rhinehart is stepping down from the position.

Yannis has served as the SCA’s Deputy Executive Director since the Specialty Coffee Associations of America and Europe (SCAE) merged in 2017. Prior to this, Yannis was a member of the SCAE, and established the Barista and Roaster Guilds of Europe.

Ric stepped down to focus his attention on the SCA’s Coffee Price Crisis Response Initiative, which aims to understand and address the price crisis affecting coffee farmers and threatening the supply chain.

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NEWS

AUSTRALIAN INTERNATIONAL COFFEE AWARDS OPENS ENTRIES

Judging for the AICA will take place from 20 to 22 March 2019 at Melbourne Showgrounds.

The Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria (RASV) is inviting coffee roasters from around the world to enter the 2019 Australian International Coffee Awards.

The awards, now in their seventh year, celebrate and promote excellence in coffee roasting in Australia and internationally.

“The Australian International Coffee Awards provide the opportunity for coffee roasters to be recognised for their quality brews. There is so much that goes on before the beans make it to the café and this process is often overlooked when we grab a coffee from our local cafés,” RASV CEO Paul Guerra says.

Participants in the Australian International Coffee Awards can benchmark their products against

industry standards, receive feedback from independent industry experts, market their trophy-winning coffee, and promote their products through associated events.

William Angliss Institute Coffee Academy Teacher Coordinator Melissa Caia will oversee the 2019 judging panel.

With judging to take place from 20 to 22 March 2019 at Melbourne Showgrounds, and winners to be announced by the end of March, RASV encourages coffee roasters to get their entries in early to be part of the competition.

Entries for the competition close 22 February 2019.

For more information, visit www.rasv.com.au/coffee

XTRACTED ESPRESSO SOLUTIONS ANNOUNCES IMPORTING PARTNERSHIP WITH SYNESSO Equipment importer Xtracted Espresso Solutions has announced the formation of a direct importing partnership with Seattle-based espresso machine manufacturer Synesso.

This is the first time in 12 years that Synesso has opened its distribution channels in Australia. As the only independent importer and distributor of Synesso in Australia, Xtracted Espresso Solutions says it looks forward to having the machines available to a broader range of coffee roasters.

“As the need for specialty coffee equipment grows, so too does the need for roasters to offer their customers a point of difference,” Xtracted Espresso Solutions Director Dean Slade says.

“We think that Synesso has a good opportunity to gain market share now that it is available through an independent supply chain.”

Xtracted Espresso Solutions will add the latest Synesso models,

the S200 and S300, to its catalogue, as well as the Synesso MVP and MVP Hydra.

The Synesso range is available from Xtracted Espresso Solution’s

Melbourne and Brisbane based showrooms.

For more information, visit

www.xtracted.com.au

Emma and Dean Slade of Xtracted Espresso Solutions are excited to begin their new partnership with Synesso.

WOMEN IN COFFEE AWARD NOMINATIONS NOW OPEN The Australian Specialty Coffee Association (ASCA) in collaboration with the Genovese family are seeking nominations for the Eleonora Genovese Australian Coffee Woman of the Year, and Rising Star Awards.

The Awards recognise the many contributions Eleonora Genovese made to the Australian coffee community. Eleonora displayed many qualities that women in the coffee industry should aspire towards,

such as drive, leadership, and passion to unite the local and international coffee communities.

Eleonora lost her brave battle with cancer on 19 September 2015.

Eligible candidates for the Eleonora Genovese Australian Coffee Woman of the Year Award must demonstrate a career of 10 years or more in the coffee industry, be actively involved in the coffee community, be a mentor in their line of work, and

demonstrate commitment to growing and supporting the Australian coffee scene.

A Rising Star Award will also be presented to an up-and-coming industry female who has made a great impression in their field of work, regardless of their length of time in the industry.

For more information, visit www.australianspecialtycoffee.com.au/ women-in-coffee-award beanscenemag.com.au

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STUFF ON THE SCENE

Stuff on the scene KUVINGS CS600 Kuvings Australia CS600 Chef Commercial Cold Press Juicer is the first to offer the hospitality industry a whole fruit cold press juicer that can provide on-demand cold press juicing with ease and confidence.

The Kuvings CS600 features a large feeding chute with 88-millimetre flip gate for faster and easier juice extraction, and easy cleaning with a smart juice cap and rotating cleaning brush to prevent dripping.

The CS600 includes the world’s strongest brushless motor – a powerful 200 watts, providing 24-hour continuous juicing, minimum friction and 40-decibel noise-reduction design. It’s low-speed 50-revolutionsper-minute motor is able to process very fibrous fruits and vegetables. It also includes a stainless steel gearbox, safety-lock system and three-way ventilation channel to keep cool.

Use the CS600 to press and squeeze juice, which can stay fresh for up to three days when bottled.

For more information, visit www.kuvings.com.au

LORING S7 NIGHTHAWK The new Loring S7 Nighthawk brings the fuel efficiency, environmental sustainability, and consistency of Loring’s patented single-burner coffee roaster, and offers it in a much smaller 1.4 to seven-kilogram roast capacity.

The compact S7 Nighthawk, at two square metres, gives roast masters operating in smaller spaces or with smaller batch sizes the control and efficiency previously only available on larger Loring roasters.

An intuitive touchscreen interface and automation software standard to every Loring delivers consistent results, roast after roast, so profiles are accurately repeatable across batch sizes and even from one size roaster to another. Loring’s high-efficiency design saves up to 80 per cent on fuel costs compared to conventional roasters, and requires less time and energy for maintenance. The S7 Nighthawk packs all the efficiency and power of a Loring into its smallest roaster yet, and is available now to roasters worldwide.

For more information, visit www.loring.com

BOB BAD OLD BLOKE For all the blokes who need a good coffee to get going, love going fishing, or enjoy spending their spare time cycling, surfing or the outdoors comes a great new range of t-shirts for blokes and their favourite past time and personality traits.

Bob Bad Old Bloke is your dad, your partner, your brother, a mate, and any bloke that enjoys his happy place. The t-shirts are designed and printed in Australia on quality soft cotton in dark and light grey and feature a range of designs that blokes will relate to.

Part proceeds with every sale is donated to men’s mental health initiatives.

RRP is $48 including delivery.

For more information, visit www.bobbadoldbloke.com.au

beanscenemag.com.au

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STUFF ON THE SCENE

IBERITAL VISION Iberital, a Barcelona-based espresso machine manufacturer, launches Vision in the Australian market, an ambitious product of the company’s pursuit to define the next generation of coffee machines: efficient, eco-friendly, and connected equipment.

Behind its state-of-the-art, synthetic, rational, and Brutalist-influenced design, Vision hides outstanding technical features. Among the most remarkable, the Vision’s multi-boiler system has separate boilers for steam, each group head, and an additional independent water system. The machine comes with a provided tablet that includes a modern and intuitive app, which enables the barista to accurately control temperature, amount of water used in every delivery, and to manage all technical settings.

This innovative espresso machine winner of five international design awards, is available in three different finishes, and in one-, two-, and three-group heads.

For more information, visit www.iberital.com/en

GLORIA JEAN’S COLD BREW SOFT SERVE Gloria Jean’s has been brewing, hot and cold, since ‘79. The big secret in specialty coffee is that Gloria Jean’s buys from the same farms as the best independent cafés in Australia. It just tweaked its roast profiles and is now winning awards. If cold brew is pretty much everything that is good in the world, Jean’s delightful Nicaragua single origin Cold Brew Soft Serve is out of this world. Caffienated, brewed for 12 hours, fresh and so creamy. Feelings of euphoria and invincibility are likely to follow.

For more information visit www.gloriajeanscoffees.com

JIMMY SCALES Jimmy scales by Hiroia are the latest innovation in scales for espresso bars and brew bars. There are four modes for espresso and pour-over with the AutoTare and AutoStart Timer functions.

Jimmy scales feature a detachable magnetic Bluetooth display, which can be left connected or placed at eye level on an espresso machine for best viewing position.

Jimmy has a training app for brewing that can be customised by the user to learn correct pouring speed. The scales can be operated from iOS and Android via Bluetooth functionality, and allows users to accurately measure flow rates in realtime.

Jimmy scales automatically record the historical data of all espresso shots and pourovers for reviewing at the end of the day. They allow for a more precise reading with sensitivity and responsiveness are measured up to 0.1 grams.

Fully charged, Jimmy scales will operate for up to 10 hours, providing a full day of service. The scale are also water-resistant so there’s no need to panic over any spillages or the environment.

For more information, visit www.espressocompany.com.au

BARISTA MATS Barista Mats are a simple and effective way to reduce standing worker fatigue. Co-creators Lachlan Mckenzie and Nick Rio launched Barista Mats at the 2017 Melbourne International Coffee Expo. Since then, hundreds of the mats have been sold throughout Australia and now New Zealand. This includes food and beverage operations such as cafés, mobile coffee carts, roasters, green bean suppliers, technicians, canteens, and restaurants. Barista Mats provide cushioning to the feet and helps reduce the risk of equipment breakages and injuries from slips and falls.

Barista Mats are made to order in Australia. They are lightweight, easy to roll up, clean and shake, durable, and heavy duty. Australian distributors include Artisti Coffee, Bombora Coffee and Water Supplies, Barista Technology, and Wild Timor Coffee.

For more information, visit www.baristamats.com.au

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OXO POP CONTAINERS OXO POP is a storage solution filled with endless possibilities for café owners looking to organise their kitchens and pantries. With 14 sizes, eight innovative accessories, an updated, modern look, and a new dishwasher-safe construction, OXO POP containers offer endless pop-abilities to organise a café or restaurant.

OXO POP has a signature pop-up button, no-fail airtight seal, and modular stack ability. It looks great in any space and can be customised to create the perfect storage solution.

Three new slim and three new mini-size containers make POP even more versatile. The new POP containers stack perfectly with existing POP containers, and are easy to disassemble for cleaning. They are now dishwasher safe.

POP accessories include half-a-cup scoop, a coffee scoop, dusting scoop, rice scoop, leveler, brown sugar keeper, and date dial.

For more information, visit www.kitchenhomewares.com.au

LOCALE NO143 SEASONAL BLEND With notes of caramel, dark chocolate, and hazelnut, the No143 Seasonal Blend from Locale is full-bodied with mild acidity and a beautifully balanced finish. Ideal as an espresso or through milk, No143 is the bigger, more voluptuous counterpart to Locale’s original No141 Seasonal Blend.

No141 is lighter in body, with clean acidity, lingering sweetness, and a creamy mouthfeel.

Featuring notes of chocolate, raisin, and almond, this blend currently comprises highgrown Brazilian, Colombian, and Ugandan coffees (blends rotate seasonally).

Locale also offers a Fair-Trade Organic Blend (No142), which is pleasantly smooth and delicate, with notes of milk chocolate, stone fruit, and nougat. All three blends are available nationwide in 250 grams and one-kilogram packs along with Locale’s range of single origin coffees.

For more information, visit www.localeespresso.com.au

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KNOWLEDGE LEADER

Meister’s message Cafe Imports Managing Editor Ever Meister is a natural storyteller with a curious mind. She is passionate about asking the questions nobody considers when it comes to producer privacy and marketing.

A

typical specialty coffee shop experience involves receiving an espresso or filter coffee with an information card. Its purpose is to spark a customer’s curiosity and gain further appreciation for the coffee they’re drinking.

The card or subsequent bag of roasted coffee often contains details such as the farm and producer’s name, the names of their children, how many people they employ, the harvest schedule, farm altitude, farm size, and volume of bags per harvest. But nowhere does it say the name of the person who roasted the coffee, their hobbies, and the names of their children.

“If that information about ourselves was exposed, we would probably feel like it’s an invasion of privacy,” says Cafe Imports’ Managing Editor Ever Meister, or Meister as she is better known.

“I think there’s a lot of producers who buy into what we want, but we have to think more critically about the way we approach information and share it. Where along the supply chain did the farmer sign their life away for roasters to use their personal details as marketing material?

“The majority of importers and roasters don’t use a disclosure form when they take photos to ask permission for their use. We shouldn’t be thinking ‘we’re going to take your photo and put it on a bag to help sell your coffee, that’s an honour’. It’s not unless they agree to it.”

After seeing the evolution of the coffee industry for the past 18 years, Meister is most concerned that producers are still not empowered to reject or withhold information. They see big cheques handed over for their coffee, and emails sent requesting information about themselves in exchange. It may be how business is done, but it doesn’t sit right with Meister.

“Many businesses, and I’m also guilty of this, continue to use the word ‘partnership’ when describing their collaboration with a farmer, but many are one-way relationships. I give you money

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and you give me information, but I don’t give you any in return. The baseline equaliser of what we could do, is share the same information about my company,” Meister says.

“There’s never any communication about what we’re gathering information for, or why we may or may not need it. We need to be more considerate especially considering the way farmers have been disenfranchised from the supply chain, and together as an industry, question how we can all move the needle in a way that makes more sense than is ethical, and to be honest, a little less colonial.

“I know it’s done in a well intentioned way and after a while we will learn to ask the right the questions. But I don’t know we are at the moment.”

These are just some of the considerations Meister raises with herself on a daily basis, and some of the thoughtprovoking questions she will present to audiences when she tours Australia for Toby’s Estate’s first Knowledge Talks series in March and April 2019.

Meister says her presentation will be a “soul search” to these kinds of questions she’s been thinking about, but doesn’t necessarily have the answer to.

“I really want to step back and put into context what certain information means and how necessary it is to have and share, and how we can ask the right questions that really forms a partnership between the folks who are doing the work at the farm level and the export and the mill level,” Meister says. “In my Knowledge Talks presentation I also hope to take a philosophical approach to what traceability means, how we can be critical about it, and how we can do more good frankly as an industry with that kind of power and influence.”

Meister stresses the purpose of the talk is not to lecture, but to ask the questions no-one else is.

“If I get up in front of an audience in Perth and they start throwing tomatoes I’ll

understand, but I do think it’s important that we stop making assumptions that more information is better and conducive to selling more coffee. We need to start acknowledging that farmers have ownership of their information, and that we should be asking them if it’s OK to share it together,” she says.

On the other side of the fence, Meister says there’s a fine line between acknowledging what customers really want and still bridging the knowledge gap between them and coffee professionals.

“We assume coffee drinkers want to know about the coffee they’re drinking and the person who grew it, but have we ever really asked them what information they actually want? The average roaster I think – and this is true in the States – puts a bunch of words on a bag because it makes them feel confident. But fundamentally, what the consumer looks for is what the coffee tastes like and how much it costs,” Meister says.

“The challenge, however, is how to get consumers excited about specialty coffee.”

Born and raised in New Jersey, United States, Meister studied journalism at Northeastern University, and like so many others in the coffee industry, fell into her coffee career. Her first job was working as a barista in a Boston coffee shop in 2000.

Meister then moved to New York City to work at Joe Coffee Company in 2004, which was one of the first known specialty coffee companies in the state.

“Joe’s was famous for doing latte art.

It was like the Magnolia Bakery of coffee shops,” Meister says. “Coffee in New York in the early 2000s was like a Seinfeld episode. There was the place that tells you ‘no, we don’t do sugar, no we don’t do soy’, there’s the place that has the Clover coffee machine, and the place that did the $10 pour over coffee.”

Meister stayed at Joe’s for several years before moving to Counter Culture Coffee in wholesale accounts out of its Manhattan office for six years. In her last years at the company, Meister focused on research

COFFEE COVERED Ever Meister studied journalism at Northeastern University and developed a passion for storytelling and human connection. She worked as a journalist at Time Out NY. She’s also contributed work for The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Saveur. com, and authored New York City Coffee: A Caffeinated History in 2017.

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KNOWLEDGE LEADER

Image: Specialty Coffee Association

and coffee education and building a company curriculum. She now works for Cafe Imports as its Managing Editor, a role that allows her to combine her skills for storytelling by writing and managing the company’s written content across its digital, print, and social channels.

“I started in 2015 on the sales team but it turns out I’m better at talking people out of buying coffee rather than selling it to them,” Meister says.

“I quickly realised when I moved into my role at Cafe Imports that it’s basically my job to discern what information is appropriate for us to share with our customers about the coffee that we’re buying.”

More than ever, working in green coffee, Meister feels her skills in research are a helpful asset in an area of the supply chain where people are hungry for information.

“I can use my journalism training and ethics and apply it to an industry that’s totally different,” she says. “We’re in a time where everyone wants to know everything about the coffee we buy, the food we eat, the clothes we wear. We want to know details because we feel it gives us some sort of protection to know that we’re doing the right thing ethically.

“The interesting thing for me is how many times I’ve raised questions with myself about what traceability really means. How do we sell coffee appropriately and really bring consumers along with us on this investment that we’re making in the supply chain?”

Meister says it’s thanks to the passionate managers and co-workers from her early years at Joe’s, and the roasters she worked with at Barrington Coffee

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Company in Massachusetts, that drew her attention to “relationship coffee”, or what would have been considered direct trade in the early 90s.

She adds that people such as Peter Giuliano at Counter Culture, Kim Ionescu of the Specialty Coffee Association, and former colleague and 2012 US Barista Champion Katie Carguilo were inspiring and hugely influential in challenging her thinking and ideology.

“It’s funny to think that companies like Counter Culture were at the forefront of promoting traceability until I came along and questioned their motives. Now I’m doing the same to Cafe Imports, a company that celebrated 25 years in 2018, one of the companies that’s helped make traceability accessible. I’m sure it’s been a big culture shock to have someone like me come in and challenge the status quo,” she says.

For this reason Meister is trying hard to be more critical of the standards the company sets in place when it comes to farmer information and privacy. Who knows, one day it may become mandatory for farmers to sign contracts in order to share personal and business details, but for now, Meister just wants to prod the idea that things we think are acceptable are not always so.

“It’s really important to separate impact from intent and really look at the long-term effects that our behaviour and our questions and our marketing tactics have on people who have been historically oppressed or marginalised,” she says.

“People who buy from them should be evaluating the ways that they do that business, especially when we intend to do good.”

When it comes to the influence

Australians have had on New York’s coffee scene, however, Meister say their intent has always been good despite their continual battle to explain what a flat white is.

“Australians have had such a wonderful influence of NY with the likes of Toby’s Estate flagship and roastery in Brooklyn, Little Collins in New York, and Milk Bar in Brooklyn changing the way a lot of us thought about what service meant and what you could achieve, especially what people can do in really small spaces,” she says.

“I’m always amazed at how you could do a full menu with two induction burners and make toasties. It opened people’s minds to what was possible, but also, why weren’t we doing this? It elevates coffee if you can elevate the experience and that really has been a huge asset to NY.” Meister looks forward to embracing the source of Australia’s coffee influence on her Toby’s Estate Knowledge Talks tour, and meeting those who share the passion she exudes.

“The thing I love the most about coffee, which has been true since the first day I started as a barista, is that it’s something that almost everyone has in common and it’s completely personal. It’s something we share universally and something that’s also really individual,” she says.

“Coffee is a thing we use as a way of expressing our own personalities and our culture, our history. It’s not essential but it’s very essential to a certain extent.”

See Meister on Toby’s Estate’s Knowledge Talks tour from 27 March to 2 April.

For more information, visit

www.tobysestate.com.au

Ever Meister presented at Re:Co 2018 on The Evolution of Innovation: How new ideas will shape specialty coffee’s future.

ALASTAIR’S IRISH GIG The much-loved chef and TV personality was born in Belfast, Ireland and classically trained in Europe. He has worked at Michelin-starred restaurants including Roscoff in Belfast, and Da Giovanni in Torino, other prestigious venues including La Fregate in Collioure, and The Ubiquitous Chip in Glasgow.

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CELEBRITY CHEF

Alastair’s Aussie ambitions Alastair McLeod is an Irishman with an Australian appreciation for quality coffee. He talks to BeanScene about European kitchens, his indigenous roots, and why six coffees a day is an acceptable quota.

By Sarah Baker

A

lastair McLeod still boasts a strong Irish accent after calling Brisbane home for the past 22 years, but in that time he’s adopted a love for all things quintessentially Australian: Vegemite toast, mangos, and coffee.

“I can still see my mummy and daddy in Belfast drinking instant coffee. My dad worked in cafes in Ireland and in restaurants throughout school, but Belfast wasn’t a discerning coffee culture growing up. It was in its formative years. They were serving instant coffee in the cafes,” Alastair says.

“Coming to Australia I could immediately see a difference and the sophistication of its coffee culture. There’s definitely no-one else more discerning about coffee than the Aussies. The fact that a publication called BeanScene can exist is a reflection of that.”

Alastair learned to make coffee long before he decided to start drink it. Back in Northern Ireland in the 80s, people consumed numerous cups of tea, with the kettle on more than it was off. It wasn’t until Alastair moved to Scotland when he was 19 that a passionate Roman-Italian by the name of Leonello Francescangeli introduced him to the foreign concept of coffee.

“He had a big, bulky coffee machine, and his manager Angela was married to an Italian fellow who showed me how to use it. I learned how to grind to order, how to use the right amount of pressure, and adjust the grind depending on atmospheric conditions. I even used a little thermometer in the milk,” Alastair says. “I mimicked a lot of what Leonello drank. He would have a milky coffee in the morning, espresso as the day went on, then we would often have an espresso with a wee slurp of sambuca before the evening service.”

When working in France, Alastair says

the coffee menu was much like ordering wine: black and white. Simple. There was no choice. Bowls of milky coffee were served to the chefs during staff meals whereas in Torino, Italy, Alastair says the coffee experience was strong and stringent.

“I was mindful the coffee was different from place to place, café to café, but I drunk espresso exclusively in Italy so I understood the purity of it. I could identify if it was raw, chocolatey, or bitter, and how it was roasted,” he says.

In commercial kitchens, Alastair says there was little value or care in making coffee and a real lack of training. It was only when he arrived in Australia in 1997 and started work at Baguette under head chef Francis Domenech, a proud Catalan and father figure who made Alastair strong double shot flat whites each day, that he realised restaurant quality coffee could hold its value.

“I still remember the stats in my head: 70 per cent of people at the restaurant would order an entrée, 100 per cent had a main, 50 per cent had dessert, and 65 per cent had a coffee. Any restaurant owner would be happy to see that on your ledger,” he says. “Great coffee is about equal parts coffee quality and the talent of the person making it.”

Alastair likes to think he can pour a good espresso. He knows his way around around a Nuova Simonelli coffee machine, and at home, uses an Nespresso machine, enjoying anywhere from three to six coffees a day.

“I often think, do I need it to get through the day or do I just drink it because it’s delicious? I think it’s just because of its addictive nature and I want to enjoy them each so terribly,” Alastair says.

“That’s why it’s our responsibly to get the best out of it, just like I would try to get the best out of cooking a tomato or zucchini. There’s nothing worse than the

feeling of disappointment of drinking or eating something that’s [sub-par].”

After going back home to Belfast, Alastair says the city is now synonymous with having a contemporary, vibrant coffee and dining scene.

“There’s a sense that Belfast’s best days are still ahead of it, and considering its history you would hope so,” he says.

Alastair spent his 20s in Michelin-listed restaurants in Belfast and Torino and respected venues in France and Glasgow, but says he was always destined to call Australia home.

“I’m actually Australian,” Alastair says.

“My grandfather was indigenous. He was born on Erub Island on the eastern island group of Torres Strait. I was up there filming a few years ago. It wasn’t because of TV opportunities that the doors opened to go spear fishing for lobster, to see the pearl farmers on Friday Island, or cook a kup murri (cooking food underground) on Badu Island 150 miles from Papua New Guinea. It was because of my genealogy. It was because I was the son of a Guivarra, a strong name in Torres Strait Islands.”

Alastair’s mother was sent down to boarding school at Lourdes School in Brisbane, which just happens to be where Alastair’s two eldest girls also attended.

“Because there was family here it was the logical place to come and I’ve lived nowhere else. I visit Sydney and Melbourne but Brisbane is developing fast. I think when I arrived it had a bit of an identity crisis but now you can look at a menu here or style of service and know you’re in the subtropics. It’s a good place to be.”

Alastair only has to look outside his kitchen window to see his thriving collection of Australian produce: native Australian finger lime, lychees, mangoes, pomegranates, and macadamia.

“I can hear myself saying those words out loud and it sounds pretty exotic to me.

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CELEBRITY CHEF

Alastair’s roasted Hervey Bay scallops with Granny Smith apple, ginger and lemon.

Even an apple is exotic,” Alastair says.

“Despite its physical isolation, Australia is definitely a leader in coffee and the aspects of sustainability and provenance of origin, the source of ingredients. The whole conversation of food is maturing terrifically.”

Alastair’s Brisbane resume has also matured over the years. He worked as Executive Chef at the iconic Bretts Wharf as well as the much acclaimed Tank

Restaurant and Bar. He is a great example of someone who has turned his passion into a successful business. In front of the camera, Alastair’s natural passion and enthusiasm has captivated audiences as a presenter on Queensland Weekender, guest chef on Ready Steady Cook, and today films The Great Day Out, taking viewers to unlikely destinations and highlighting the wonders of local producers.

“I’m an absolute kid in a lolly shop on that show. I just love supporting local businesses and being that conduit to share their narrative and passion for what they do and why with a large number of people. They are people not driven by numeration but driven by doing what they do to the best of their ability,” he says.

“We talk about the world getting smaller but it’s still a big old world out there, and there’s so much to see. It’s existing to see young coffee roasters and young producers out there doing incredible things. We all have to pass the baton on at some stage, even for me as a chef, but seeing them in action, I think the future is in safe hands – young people with passion, with palates, who have travelled.

We’re in a good spot.”

Alastair’s 2019 diary is fast filling up.

Top of the list is his national tour of the Good Food and Wine Show, in addition to his other great accomplishment, running his own catering business, Al’FreshCo. “I don’t think most young cooks aspire to be a chef of a hospital, prison, cruise ship, or a catering business, but you can absolutely achieve expertise at any level.

I’ve never enjoyed my cooking more because I’m doing it in people’s homes and businesses, and I’m closer to the feedback. “[American writer] Mark Twain says you could live on compliments. I don’t know for how long, but you know your place in the universe after you’ve served your food and people say ‘thank you’. It propels me extraordinarily,” Alastair says.

“The wonderful thing about cooking is that it’s a job where you don’t need to wait for a quarterly report, the circulation numbers, or food costs.”

Alastair is proud of the career he’s accomplished and plans to continue to share the lessons his parents and many chef mentors have instilled in him.

“Everything should be done to the best of your ability,” he says. “The job I do to the best of my ability is hospitality: being hospitable and making people happy with my craft.”

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TECHNOLOGY PROFILE

A new era Rancilio Specialty RS1 is making waves in the Australian market with its focus on temperature profiling, stability, and achieving the one percenters.

R

ancilio knows a thing or two about making coffee machines – it’s been doing so from a factory outside of Milan since 1927. Within that time, the world introduced colour television, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Australia went through 23 Prime Ministers, and consumers discovered their addiction to iPhones. The coffee industry has equally evolved, but what hasn’t, according to Rancilio, is the process of coffee extraction.

“Technology has changed, brewing methods have developed, and new methods of delivering coffee consistency have been achieved, but no-one’s fundamentally changed the way coffee is extracted,” says Paul O’Brien, Rancilio Area Manager – Australasia.

Rancilio, identified for its reliability, has produced hundreds of models over the past 90 years, but only in 2017 did it release its first coffee machine dedicated for the specialty coffee market.

The Rancilio Specialty RS1 is Rancilio’s ode to the specialty market, a machine that’s been produced by baristas, for baristas. The company worked with a dedicated team of industry experts from around the world, including several World Barista Champions and industry experts to understand their needs from a high performance machine in the specialty market.

It’s been a five-year gap between machine releases for Rancilio, but as Paul explains, it’s for a good reason.

“We take pride in what we deliver to the market. Some might say that we’re a bit late to the party with a specialty machine, but it is a new era for us,” Paul says. “We wanted something that would challenge and progress the market, not just follow it. When you’re a company that’s already respected for its performance, reliability, and qualitydriven approach, you can be guaranteed that any of our new machines will carry this same integrity.”

The Australian release of the RS1 signifies a new approach to serving the local market, with the brand seeking new partnerships and opportunities

to collaborate with partners that share similar values and passion for to progress the industry.

“We are a passionate company and we want to work with people who celebrate our values of performance, passion, and partnership,” Paul says.

Rancilio has embraced its dedication to performance even more so with its commitment to scientific research. In what Paul says is a completely “new world” approach compared to 20 years ago, the company has now employed a full-time research chemist to head up the

Rancilio Lab in Milan. Carles Gonzalez, Head of Coffee Competence at Rancilio, is devoted to exploring the possibilities and applications of temperature profiling and its benefit to the market. He will also assess how different coffee cultivars and processing methods perform at different set temperatures on the RS1.

“We are listening to science and using data to enhance our technology more than ever before,” Paul says. “It seems the entire industry is focused on science and innovation. Roasters are becoming more sophisticated and that curiosity extends

The Rancilio Specialty RS1has been produced by baristas, for baristas.

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TECHNOLOGY PROFILE

Rancilio says temperature profiling on the RS1will unlock limitless flavour potential for roasters, baristas, and café owners.

“RANCILIO HAS EARNED THE RIGHT TO GAIN CUSTOMERS’ CONFIDENCE AND WE FEEL WE HAVE A RIGHT TO PLAY IN THIS FIELD. SPECIALTY IS ONE PIECE OF THE MARKET, BUT WE HAVE A MACHINE AT THE ABSOLUTE CUTTING EDGE.” through to the baristas, and we want to grow alongside them.”

That growth is evident in Rancilio’s RS1, which has been carefully tailored to suit three key demographic groups of the coffee industry: roasters, baristas, and café owners.

The standout of the RS1 is Rancilio’s patent-advanced temperature profiling technology.

“Temperature profiling unlocks limitless flavour potential. From a roaster’s perspective, they can discover so many avenues of flavour by simply adjusting temperature to profile higher or lower, flat or gradient, on the digital touchscreen display above each group head,” Paul says.

In December 2018, Rancilio, with the direction of Dr Monika Fekete of the Australian Coffee Science Lab, performed a series of tests on the RS1 to measure the impact of different brew water

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temperatures. They tested its correlation to pH, caffeine strength, acidity, total dissolved solids, brew ratios, and sensory aspects such as aroma, crema, and colour (see results page 76).

“If you speak to passionate industry members, they talk about the pursuit of flavour. There’s no right or wrong answer on how to best extract flavour. There’s so much subjectivity in flavour. But what if we had black and white results to say that at a particular temperature you could achieve measurable results, such as more body in the cup, more bitterness, etc?”

Paul says. “Of course results will vary depending on particular origins of coffee and varietals, but temperature control is digital. It’s measurable and we are confident we can make it consistent thanks to the RS1’s temperature profiling feature.”

Rancilio says it deliberately doesn’t want to tell people what temperature will be best for their coffee – that’s part of the

journey and the user’s engagement with RS1. What it does believe, however, is that the flavours a roaster can achieve from one bag of beans will be limited only by their imagination, and that’s the exciting part.

Paul says asking ‘what temperature is best for my coffee’ is like asking ‘what’s the best type of wine to drink?’ However, it’s Rancilio’s duty to educate others how to operate the RS1 and its temperature profiling feature, and support users as they embark on a flavour journey themselves.

Once users find the ‘sweet spot’ that best suits a particular coffee, they can lock that temperature in. Or, they can program each group head individually to extract at different temperatures to best suit different blends or single origins on the menu.

“Stability is a massive consideration of the RS1. Roasters work so hard to perfect a roast and baristas put so much care into each cup, so we want to guarantee that when they find the best temperature for their coffee, they can categorically produce a stable shot of coffee, day after day after day,” Paul says.

What gives the RS1 this level of stability is Rancilio’s cutting edge brewing technology, thanks to patented software and group head design. Rancilio uses a mixer system fed by a heat exchanger to fill each individual group head boiler.

Mechanically, it is quite a straight forward system, however the magic lies in the algorithm Rancilio has developed in its software to ensure maximum accuracy in its temperature profiling.

Stability and reliability is achieved thanks to the use of a mixture of materials, each optimised for the role in each component.

This includes stainless steel construction for the RS1 group heads and copper for the steam boiler. Copper will expand and contract with heat, while stainlesssteel provides thermal stability. To this day, after 90 years, each of Rancilio’s copper boilers are still hand rolled and tested at Rancilio’s Milan factory in Parabiago.

Just as Rancilio’s engineers uphold artisan traditions, baristas also have the ability to control each coffee thanks to Rancilio’s thorough consideration of their every movement.

Take the touchscreen display, for instance.

Rather than have the barista push the purge button, lock the portafilter into the group head, and take their hand off to activate the extraction button, Rancilio has considered each button placement. Three wide buttons are easily accessed with a tiny stretch of the thumb: the left button for a single shot, middle to purge, and right for a double shot.

When it’s a button that’s activated 800 times a day, Paul says baristas will rejoice with no need to move their hand from the group handle to run the machine.

“It’s nice to have temperature profiling but accessibility is also what’s unique about the RS1. Think about how much we use our smartphones. We’re connected with our fingers. It’s intuitive. So why would we want to do anything less to activate an extraction?”

Paul says. “At the touch of a finger you can immediately change the temperature and

Rancilio’s brewing technology ensure stability and consistency of shots in the RS1.

activate the shot.”

The design criteria of the RS1 was to make the barista’s workflow as fluid as possible.

Such considerations include a lower profile machine to improve customer connectivity, a higher drip tray to accommodate space for scales beneath the machine, and even two USB ports to connect and charge an iPhone and scales. Group handles are also balanced and feature a flat base for baristas to tamp by leaning against a bench ledge naturally.

“It’s all about the one percenters,” Paul says. “When baristas are pulling 800 coffee shots a day, every little detail counts.”

The steam taps at each end of the machine are also placed to easily activate one of two pressure settings. For example, one setting actives steam pressure at 100 per cent for standard milk pitchers, the other at 40 per cent, best suited to small, 200-millilitre milk jugs. This is ideal for cafés making soy or other plant-based milk orders. Baristas can easily go back to the touchscreen to activate a different steam setting at any point to suit the order.

Cleaning is also reimagined. How many baristas can relate to being asked by a customer for a coffee, only to lose their business by saying, ‘sorry we’ve started cleaning the machine’? With the RS1, that sentence is a thing of the past. Users can activate the machine to clean each group altogether or allocate individual groups for cleaning and leave one group open in case of last-minute orders.

“All these things may seem trivial but they’re the things that will make a barista’s life easier,” Paul says.

Finally for the café owner, it’s Rancilio’s 90-plus years of expertise that is important to consider when making that all-important decision of which machine manufacturer to support.

“The killer punch for the RS1 is the value it can deliver, which is much more than the purchase price. For the café owner, they need to consider life costs of the machine, which can be five years or more. With Rancilio’s reputation for quality and reliability, think about the savings from reduced downtime when so many machines require maximum upkeep,” Paul says.

“Rancilio has earned the right to gain customers’ confidence and we feel we have a right to play in this field. Specialty is one piece of the market, but we have a machine at the absolute cutting edge. We are an innovative company and we need to put up our hand and claim a change. We have something different here, and we encourage others to challenge us so we can continue to progress this industry.

“We’re excited the RS1 is here, and we’re ready to play in this space.”

For more information, visit

www.ranciliospecialty.com

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TECHNOLOGY PROFILE

The finer details Anfim and Espresso Company Australia are committed to taking coffee grinding technology to the next level, with science and passion backing its progress.

W

hen Hemro Group Head of Product Development and Design Daniel Hofstetter held an Anfim grinder workshop in Australia in November 2018, the reactions from the crowd were divided. There were nods of heads from those who understood the mathematical explanation of volume-based particle size distribution (PSD), blank stares at the word “sphericity”, and fascinated expressions from those who couldn’t believe how much product information was willingly shared.

“Anyone’s mind blown?” Daniel asked the crowd, pointing to a relating cartoon on the power point slide. “Trust me, the more you look into coffee the less you understand.”

It’s impressive for a company to go well beyond the realm of manufacturing and dig deep into the science behind its production in order to make something satisfying for its users, but “that’s what it takes to be at the forefront of grinder technology”, Daniel says. “We leave no stone unturned.

“As manufacturers, we are constantly in touch with our customers. There is an automatic duty for us to educate them, and talk the same language so together we can make something better that the whole industry can benefit from.”

Anfim has been manufacturing grinders from its Milan factory for almost 60 years.

Within that time, the Italian manufacturer has developed the Caimano series, Special Performance (SP) II, Scody II, Practica, and Solida professional grinders, to name a few, helped two baristas win the World Barista Championship by using an Anfim grinder, and is currently the official World Latte Art Championship grinder sponsor. All the while, the brand has continued its dedication to engineering and manufacturing of espresso grinders for demanding baristas the world over.

To this day, Anfim’s grinders are still hand built, with the factory producing

15,000-plus grinders per annum with an impressive record of minimal customer complaints and warranty issues, demonstrating its commitment to high quality manufacturing across its production line.

It’s for this reason that Australian importers Espresso Company Australia (ECA) has had a 15-year relationship with the grinder manufacturer, and is excited to facilitate the next level of grinding technology together.

“Operating in the Australian market, which is recognised internationally at the forefront in preparation of espresso, we feel safe partnering up with a manufacturer who has 50-plus years of coffee grinder manufacturing history, let alone the DNA pool of personalities and skillsets who make up Anfim and Hemro today,” ECA’s Salvatore Savarino says. “These guys are not only capable but willing, which is how we hope we are viewed by our customers.”

Grinding technology has undergone many changes in the past 10 years, with the introduction of models that grind on demand and by weight, but the one thing consumers continue to demand from their grinder, Salvatore says, is a machine to cater to high volume demand.

“We put our espresso equipment under hideous work loads in the mornings, and still want it to perform at the same parameters outside these periods, with minimal intervention,” he says.

As such, Anfim’s SPII Special Performance grinder is designed with Australia’s “insane work volume” in mind.

It comes with step-less grind adjustment to enable the barista to make incremental changes to the precise setting they need to produce the flavours developed during the roasting process, user-friendly software with a precise timer, and is adjustable by one 10th of a second to ensure consistent and exact dosing for constant pour time.

Customised titanium-coated 75-millimetre burrs operate at a low 650 revolutions per minute (rpm) and offers

Anfim’s SPII features fans, low-spinning burrs and motor to burr chamber design to manage generated heat.

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TECHNOLOGY PROFILE

Hemro Group’s Daniel Hofstetter with Charles Stephens of Espresso Company Australia at Anfim’s grinder workshop in Melbourne.

a minimal degree of wear for longevity.

That’s paired with a powerful dual fan system to stabilise the internal temperature, and reduce heat emission.

Salvatore says Anfim has always been a flat burr manufacturer and has stood by this choice since it conceptualised the SPII in 2011 using the basis of its existing Super Caimano model (now the Scody II) but with a lowered rpm, more aggressive burrs to increase grind output, and improved ventilation performance. “[We spent] the next few years showing our customers that a flat burr grinder could cope within a high volume café,” Salvatore says.

The use of flat burrs lends itself towards narrow, predictable, and consistent particle size distribution (PSD), which allows the barista to push extraction higher and for the roaster to roast lighter and still reach a pleasant espresso when extracted well.

PSD for espresso, however, remains one of the industry’s greatest grey areas, a topic first thrust into the spotlight when St Ali barista Matt Perger addressed the importance of PSD in his 2013 WBC routine, forcing the grinder manufacturing industry to “step up and smarten up”.

“Although we are aware of the benefits of a relatively narrow particle size distribution, it is interesting to reveal results for an espresso grinder like the SPII, which is renowned for balance and higher extraction,” Salvatore says.

“When breaking down particle size distribution results and looking at what would be considered as ‘fine coffee particles’ [less than 100 micrometres in size], this would account for around 22 to 25 per cent of volume in a nominated dose, but contributes 75 per cent of the surface area just ripe and ready for extracting. This stated, it should be considered quality over quantity in relation to fines, good sphericity

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[of particles in a more spherical shape], predictability and minimal dust for better extractions.”

When a roasted coffee bean is shattered in the grinding process and one gram of espresso grounds is distributed, there can be anywhere from 600 to 1.2 million particles, which Anfim has determined thanks to the use of high-speed cameras, 3D imagery and high beam microscopes.

This enhanced image is empowering the grinder manufacturer to develop new disc geometry and paint the picture of what impacts particle size distribution, including heat and its impact on extraction consistency and taste.

Anfim’s SP-II special performance grinder.

“Heat remains one of those problem areas. It’s generated from the motor, the grind chamber, and grinding discs, the breaking of beans, and friction between ground coffee particles. That’s why baristas frequently need to adjust their grind size,” Daniel says, not to mention Australia’s long summers and insane output, an unfavourable match.

Heat-induced changes result in faster running shots, a drift towards coarser particles, and all in all, a worse in-cup quality. It was revealed in research on bean temperature effects that freezing coffee pregrind can result in a 31 per cent decrease of mean particle size. Briefly put: tastier, more efficient extractions.

“Why else would all the baristas be walking around with freezers at the WBC over the past two years? This is how important and how detrimental heat can be,” Daniel says.

“But how sweet would it be if a grinder was so stable that from the moment you walked into the café in the morning to the end of the day you hardly had to touch the grinder? That’s when things get interesting.

It’s exciting that through the mechanics and technology Anfim applies to its machines, it can not only change the quality output of shots, but change operational business outputs.”

For this reason, Anfim has worked hard to manage the generated heat as much as possible with the use of fans, low-spinning burrs and the motor to burr chamber design, as featured in the SPII. “If we can manage the heat, we can make a machine more consistent and be the robust device baristas want – one that’s easy to use, sturdy, and easy to maintain,” Daniel says.

In September 2018, Hemro Group invited a group of opinion leaders to Switzerland for a summit on the future direction of the coffee industry, and the role of grinder technology within it. Participants talked about the continued talk of grinder consistency, and even shared their concern about the industry’s global price crisis along the value chain.

“There’s an obvious impact from the global price crisis,” Daniel says. “If there’s no more coffee, people can’t buy it, and they certainly won’t be buying equipment, so it’s something we can’t ignore. It makes sense that we continue to make affordable products that can be used at origin and help support farmers so that the result is better quality coffee down the chain. One little initiative has the power to change so much.”

Daniel has always been intrigued by science and its ability to problem solve. He completed a Masters degree in food science in Zurich, and stumbled into coffee when

he did his thesis on coffee roasting. He was working as a professional triathlon athlete at the time, and discovered coffee to be his favourite training companion.

After his sporting career ended, Daniel worked with Kraft Foods in a commercial sales and marketing role, and Franke coffee systems as Global Product Manager where he stayed for two years before joining the Hemro Group, first as a sales director and now as Head of Product Management and Innovation.

“The fact I could bring my science knowledge and apply it to the coffee industry has been an incredible opportunity. I’m excited and motivated to bring new ideas, and bring grinder technology to next level,” Daniel says. “Today’s coffee industry is buzzing with information but it’s my duty to put the science I know to use in a meaningful way, and shake the industry up a little. There hasn’t been a lot of news in the knowledge of grinding coffee, but there’s good movement and momentum from players in the coffee industry. We need to ask ourselves, ‘is there a better way to extract coffee, just like there’s different ways to extract flavour from food and in fragrances?’ We don’t have the answer to that yet, but it’s something we need to consider.”

In the past year the Swiss-based Hemro Group has been busy reaching its goal of making efficient grinders and great-tasting coffee. It launched the first wave of new-generation grinder models, has been conducting research with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, and plans to develop a suit of new products in 2019.

The Hemro Lab is also researching influences of PSD by volume and surface, which is where Salvatore says “extraction happens”, in addition to research on chemistry and the effects burr rpm has on PSD, sphericity, and aspect ratios. Salvatore anticipates the future of grinder technology will begin with Anfim’s human machine interface and how it supports barista workflow, which it says is progressing well.

“What excites us is the research that is happening with the cutting of burrs, or at this time burr geometry research to better understand the impact of burr design and materials on grind particles, and the subsequent impact on the espresso extraction,” Salvatore says. “Anfim has taken to de-engineer good and bad results in the cup from the effect of the grinding process by pinpointing what had changed to influence the results in the cup.”

Daniel says his adventures in coffee science will keep him busy for many years to come, but looks forward to investing in people and relationships of those who, like Anfim, simply want to invest in a grinder that simply does what it’s meant to do: grind coffee beans consistently and efficiently throughout the work day.

“In reality, we don’t want to grind, we want to taste, and Anfim is committed to that purpose,” Daniel says. “The future is unpredictable, but we’re confident we’re on the right track.”

For more information, visit www.espressocompany.com.au

Anfim’s SPII grinder on full display at Collective Roasting Solutions’ pop up café in Saint Peters, New South Wales.

INDUSTRY PROFILE

Win-win with Ordermentum Ordermentum’s founders Adam Theobald and Andrew Low talk to BeanScene about their motivations behind creating an ordering platform that connects the entire food service industry in one place.

O

rdermentum, the brainchild of Adam Theobold, Founder of Beat the Q (now known as Hey You), and former Toby’s Estate Managing Director Andrew Low, is helping Australia’s food and beverage industry trade smarter. The B2B web-based ordering and payments platform streamlines a café’s ordering process, saving time and money for both the retailer and the supplier.

When Adam kept hearing from café owners about a need for a platform that took the pain out of ordering and payments, he jumped at the chance to develop the solution.

“There were multiple pain points around ordering for café owners, which led to the idea of building this platform,”

36

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“ORDERMENTUM’S FOCUS ON WIN-WIN SCENARIOS FOR BOTH ROASTERS AND CAFÉS IS GOOD FOR THE FOOD AND BEVERAGE INDUSTRY AS A WHOLE.” Adam says. “I was talking to venues about Beat the Q and they would say to me: ‘It’s great my customers get to use this technology, but who is making my life better?’

“They hated getting phone calls from their suppliers in the middle of service, and opening draws full of invoices they couldn’t manage or collate. They complained about cash on delivery payments when every week they were

getting less and less money in their till because of tap-and-go becoming more prominent.”

As the former Managing Director of Toby’s Estate Coffee, Andrew Low has first-hand experience collecting orders and payments from cafés, and the challenges and frustrations it creates.

“At Toby’s Estate I was really proud of my customer service team who called stores for orders. It was very

confronting when I actually interviewed my customers who all said the team are fantastic but they didn’t have time to answer the phone. Plus, I was only one of 10 suppliers they use,” Andrew says.

“It became very clear that we needed to connect all of the key suppliers for each retailer in one app. They could then do everything in one place but never compromise the relationship with my brand and my customers.”

Ordermentum makes it easy for cafés to order and pay their suppliers on their mobile when it suits them. Cafés are provided with order history, digital invoices, favourite lists, and standing orders, making the ordering process as efficient as possible.

The app also provides cafés with a digital catalogue of every available product from their supplier, allowing them to browse and select the products they want to purchase. Daily reminders ensure venues are ordering before cutoff times on the right days of the week so that they don’t miss out.

“Suppliers no longer have to call their customers in the middle of service or receive a one-way text which is prone to errors of re-keying and pricing mistakes. We really improve that entire transaction,” Andrew says.

STAYING IN THE BLACK

A key issue that the food and beverage industry currently faces, that Andrew says Ordermentum can also help solve, is liquidity, or the ability to manage cashflow.

Adam Theobold and Andrew Low founded Ordermentum to help roasters and venues make money and save time.

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INDUSTRY PROFILE

“FROM THE VERY START OF THE BUSINESS, WE HAVE AIMED TO CREATE A GREAT EXPERIENCE FOR RETAILERS THAT ALSO MAKES THE LIFE OF OUR SUPPLIERS BETTER. SERVING BOTH STAKEHOLDERS IS IMPORTANT, AND THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY IS BETTER FOR IT.” “For the roaster, they have a big debtor’s balance. It’s a very cash-hungry industry as you buy your green beans months in advance, then you’ve got to roast and sell them. After that, you wait a week or two to get paid,” Andrew says.

He adds cafés could suffer setbacks to their own cashflow, such as rainy days, that impact how soon they can pay suppliers.

“Today, we enable automated payments on credit card or direct debit, but our ultimate payment vision sees us bringing working capital solutions to the market in some capacity to ensure people always have the money to pay their bills on time and don’t face that anxiety of being short for a week,” Adam says.

“To improve invoice management even further, we have just released a feature which allows cafés to sync invoices to their accounting systems.

There are a number of things we’ll be doing for cafés over the next six to 12 months, which the team is currently working on. We’ve established a retail team dedicated solely to improving the

lives of small business owners in this space and we’re really excited about what that’s going to bring.”

SUPPLIERS WIN TOO

For roasters, the platform provides features such as roast tallies for the day, pick-up slips, delivery slips, and driver manifests to help the products get delivered. When invoices are due, Ordermentum collects payments via credit card or direct debit and settles cleared funds into the supplier’s bank account with a reconciliation summary marking off each transaction.

Not just satisfied with streamlining transactions, Ordermentum provides a coffee industry first with its insights dashboards. It highlights changes in consumer behaviour, sales performance, and profitability in real time.

“Ordermentum lets suppliers know about unique and specific changes in their customers’ behaviour in real time. This has proved to be a game changer for suppliers and has helped them focus on which customers purchase less weekly, and are at risk of

leaving,” Andrew says.

In fact, Adam says the feedback Ordermentum regularly receives from its suppliers is that the app has provided them with a better platform to launch new products and reach new customers.

“We’ve worked hard to create a digital catalogue that the retailer actually likes to use. It does a great job of showing products, and retailers tell us they are finding products they didn’t know existed. The best part is venues are now buying more than they used to over the phone, so we are helping to grow sales,” he says.

Andrew and Adam believe Ordermentum’s focus on win-win scenarios for both roasters and cafés is good for the food and beverage industry as a whole.

“From the very start of the business, we have aimed to create a great experience for retailers that also makes the life of our suppliers better. Serving both stakeholders is important, and the entire industry is better for it,” Adam says.

Andrew and Adam recognise that the food service industry is hard enough without having to worry about paperwork, administration, and cashflow. As such, they have made it Ordermentum’s purpose to help businesses make money and save time.

“Our driving purpose is to improve and celebrate the lives of every person who creates and shares the food and drinks we love,” Andrew says.

For more information, visit www.ordermentum.com

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INDUSTRY PROFILE

Gabriel’s gift Brazilian coffee producer Gabriel Oliveira of Bom Jesus farm talks to BeanScene about his family’s strong environmental commitment and why specialty coffee goes beyond cup quality.

E

very producer thinks their farm is special, but in Gabriel Oliveira’s opinion, owning Bom Jesus is a matter of luck and merit.

Located at Alta Mogiana biome in Brazil, Bom Jesus is a picture perfect postcard of lush terrain, symmetrical rows of coffee trees, and natural vegetation.

As a child, Gabriel recalls playing among the drying coffee on his grandparent’s farm. He grew up with first-hand appreciation that coffee production was arduous, detailed, and extremely passionate work, but it was work that fascinated him.

“Our family always let its successors choose their own path, their own career, but coffee has always brought our family together,” Gabriel says.

Gabriel chose coffee as his profession, and so have his children, making them the family’s seventh generation of coffee producers.

Named after the small chapel located on the farm, Gabriel’s parents Gabriel Senior and Flavia took over ownership of Bom Jesus from Gabriel Senior’s parents in 1971. Along with the farm’s agronomist, Gabriel’s brother Lucas, and mentorship from Odilon Americano Rodrigues Alves, Gabriel has watched the evolution of Alta Mogiana biome’s coffee production.

“The industry and especially international buyers are demanding for high quality coffee and at Bom Jesus we have been able to exceed this demand,” Gabriel says. “Until the early 2000s, we were exporting mainly commercial grade coffee, but when the specialty boom started, we realised we had been selling specialty as commercial.”

The current state of Brazil’s specialty coffee production is small, but for a continent-sized country producing countless flavour profiles, Gabriel says there’s still a lot to be learned, such as how much quality coffee can aggregate

the price of specialty and create a better coffee drinking experience.

“I know several producers, our friends, who when making their own coffee still put sugar in [it]. This is cultural,” Gabriel says. “We need to break these paradigms to move forward.

People need to knowledge, know that coffee does not need to be so strong, over roasted, milk-based, and [contain] sugar. Only when the majority of the population decides to enjoy a good coffee can we say that we are at the highest quality peak.”

But specialty coffee isn’t only about quality. Gabriel says it’s about the type of relationship producers share with roasters and distributing partners.

Gabriel says his four-year partnership with Australian coffee importers Minas Hill Coffee is one such relationship that represents more than just a coffee connection.

“There is a mutual trust between the two companies and Marcelo Brussi

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INDUSTRY PROFILE

“UNTIL THE EARLY 2000S, WE WERE EXPORTING MAINLY COMMERCIAL GRADE COFFEE, BUT WHEN THE SPECIALTY BOOM STARTED, WE REALISED WE HAD BEEN SELLING SPECIALTY AS COMMERCIAL.” [Minas Hill General Manager] is today a personal friend. We speak almost every night via Skype and I believe this is important to develop respect and trust, and to celebrate our achievements,” Gabriel says.

Every year, Minas Hill brings a group of roasters from Australia to Brazil. It spends a week visiting the Bom Jesus farm, giving guests a first-hand look at how its coffees are processed.

“At night we catch up around the bonfire, telling spooky stories from our folk tradition,” Gabriel says.

Minas Hill has been so influential and supportive of Gabriel’s specialty coffee production, it’s helped the Brazilian

producer develop three coffees it sends to Australia’s mature market with flavour profiles it knows Australian roasters and consumers will love.

The first is a natural processed Mundo Novo cultivar with a high level of sweetness and mandarin acidity.

“Marcelo helped us to get this flavour and nowadays is the top of our range.

We have also developed a low-acidity coffee from another farm we own, Sao Lucas, in order to fulfil a demand for a good full-bodied, caramel flavour blend,” Gabriel says.

The other is a specialty grade blend from coffees on both farms, called Labareda Regional. Gabriel describes

this blend as “clean and super sweet”.

The key now, he says, is maintaining consistency and price, and translating its importance to customers.

Bom Jesus currently plants 21 coffee varietals, with the highest proportion being Catuai, Bourbon, and Mundo Novo, and is constantly researching new cultivars and production methods.

The farm produces naturals and pulped-natural coffees and is methodical about its drying methods. It uses a de-pulping machine for natural coffees and a patio to dry most of the coffees.

Gabriel says patios are said to be obsolete but this natural energy from the sun is an effective method to dry his coffees. Bom Jesus also has a number of raised-beds for micro-lots and tanks for controlled fermentation. For ultimate control, Gabriel separates coffee lots in different wooden hulls so customers like Minas Hill always get the coffee they are buying without any confusion.

“We test each coffee individually before and after storing them, aiming for fully traceability and quality control.

After the coffee is dried, we cup them again and what meets customers’ standard, we bag them and ship them to their countries,” Gabriel says.

Minas Hill General Manager Marcelo Brussi supports Bom Jesus’ annual Gima event to support 1000 local children in Alta Mogiana.

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Bom Jesus Owner Gabriel Oliveira and Minas Hill’s Marcelo Brussi.

The aim is to produce coffees with a balance between sweetness, body, and acidity, but it is Bom Jesus coffee’s distinct caramel flavour that’s become internationally recognised thanks to the coffee’s high sugar content.

Bom Jesus produces 20,000 60-kilogram bags on average in harvest from April to September. In 1986, when Gabriel’s father and mother took the management control over his grandparent’s property, their first crop yield was just 1000 bags. Production has been through several ups and downs, but now yield has expanded rapidly despite the farm’s consistent battle with excessive rain and drought.

Gabriel believes Bom Jesus’s current high-yield harvest is due to the farm’s rich preserved forest which attracts lots of Brazilian-wolves, ant eaters, armadillos and birds, such as toucans and hawks. By law, the farm is obliged to preserve 20 per cent of the land, but it’s now close to 40 per cent.

“This is one of the reasons we rarely see insects attack and rusty leaves. Maybe this is the secret for our high-quality,” Gabriel says.

The other reason is because of Bom Jesus’s “excellent terroir”, microclimate, “ideal altitude”, and propitious soil containing high sand and clay content for specialty coffee production. Being located close to the port of Santos is also an advantage, as is the farm’s proximity to five springs and a medium-sized river.

Bom Jesus’s high quality production was recognised when it won the Best Coffee from Alta Mogiana. Gabriel says this award is just as difficult as winning the prestigious Cup of Excellence due to the number of contestants and the quality it delivers.

To continue that quality demands a balance between production, environment and social issues. Bom Jesus is Utz and Rainforest Alliance certified, and with the support of Minas Hill Coffee, established Gima, an environmental and social project that has become an annual success to support 1000 local children. Each year Bom Jesus invites grade five children from five schools in towns in Alta Mogiana to perform and share their understanding of civic issues, the environment, and respect. At the end of the day, Bom Jesus donates push bikes, school supplies, and footballs to the children, many of whom have parents that work at the Bom Jesus farm.

To further support the next generation of coffee professionals, Gabriel helped establish Alta Mogiana Specialty Coffees, a non-profit association to preserve the culture of specialty coffees, and develop new methods of production, processing, and brewing.

Farming is a constant commitment to quality. With this mantra affirmed at Bom Jesus, Gabriel is confident the future is bright for the country’s specialty coffee production.

“Coffee is part of my family’s life. Coffee is evolving, dynamic, and challenging,” Gabriel says.

“The best coffee is the one produced at [our] farm. Fresh and delicious, exactly the same quality we are delivering to Australia.”

For more information, visit www.minashill.com.au

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FEATURE NEWS

No death to coffee Amid predictions of a 180-million-bag coffee shortfall by 2050, BeanScene asks: what are you doing to make a change before coffee takes its final curtain call?

I

magine the day coffee shops around the country place a ‘closed indefinitely’ sign on their shop door. Imagine the end of the World Barista Championship when there’s no longer any quality coffee to showcase, or replacing your morning coffee with a green smoothie.

The idea of a world without coffee is incomprehensible to many, but possible, with studies already predicting that by 2050 demand will double while suitable land for coffee production will be half of what it is today.

With no investment, 2040 will mark the fall of production, as well as an inevitable rise in retail prices that will halt

or reverse the year-on-year consumption growth the industry has enjoyed.

Rather than watching the situation demise, there is something we can do, contrary to thinking that the greater issues of climate change and disease threatening the industry are “too big and complex” to be our problem, when they are.

Everyone can play a role in helping secure the industry’s future by eliminating the knowledge and technology gap that exists for producers. World Coffee Research (WCR), a non-profit research institute conducting cutting-edge scientific research, is encouraging roasters and green bean importers to join its Checkoff Program and donate a small amount per

pound or kilo of green beans purchased towards WCR’s continued research efforts.

“There’s a lot of great people in the industry doing great sustainability work, but you have to evaluate that and ask yourself: ‘How much of that includes research and development?’ Roasters and cafés are confronted with so many different charities and organisations to support, but WCR is taking a leap of faith with some of its projects in the hope that there will be funds to cover them,” says Greg Meenahan, Partnership Director of WCR. “Coffee R&D isn’t a sustainability project with a beginning, middle, and

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FEATURE NEWS

an end. It doesn’t go away. It’s a new capacity the industry has decided it needs in order to ensure the economic and environmental sustainability of producers and the foundation of the entire coffee value chain.�

The importance of agricultural research was one of the core topics of discussion when Sydney-based roaster Single O presented its No Death to Coffee industry talk in October 2018. “We recognise that the future of coffee is in all of our hands, and
are calling on Australian roasters and importers to do their part to fund the critical research and development needed for coffee and farmers alike by signing up to the WCR Checkoff Program,� says Single O Director of Coffee, Wendy De Jong, an original founding member of WCR. Single O, like many other coffee companies around the world, are contributing to the Checkoff Program by paying a few cents per kilo of green beans roasted every quarter directly to WCR. “I think the international coffee community is quite aware and concerned with the challenges facing coffee producers, but the funding and expertise needed to tackle these issues is outside the scope of just one company. I’d like to see Australia do its part and step in with the other international coffee companies donating to the WCR Checkoff Program.

We are a few years behind,� Wendy says. “We believe sustainability in coffee needs a multifaceted approach, and plant science is something that has been long overlooked in coffee compared to other global supply crops.�

Coffee is said to be one of the most under-researched and under-innovated crops in the world. Compared to coffee’s 52 varieties, watermelon has 675, wine has more than 1000, and avocado has 129. “There is so much innovation in coffee brewing equipment, for example, trying to squeeze levels of perceived quality at the extraction level, and much of it seems to

be just bells and whistles. I think the real measurable advances in quality in coffee in the next few years will be plant based, thanks to WCR and the coffee community supporting this vital work,� Wendy says.

In 2018, Single O became the first roaster to import a full container of futurefriendly coffees to Australia. The three new climate-resilient coffees included Centroamericano, Marsellesa, and Starmaya, which WCR describes as “a glimpse into a much brighter future for the coffee plantâ€?. These coffees were featured as single origins and in three blends across Single O’s cafĂŠs and wholesale family.

Southern Cross University (SCU) is also contributing to the development of climateresilient coffee by participating in WCR’s International Multilocation Variety Trial, an effort to facilitate the global exchange of the world’s best coffee varieties.

The trial has brought 35 of the world’s best Arabica varieties to 23 countries for rigorous testing and evaluation to see how the plants perform in different climates.

The successful varieties and findings from the trial will be shared with coffee producers and farmers around the world.

To date, Graham King and his team at SCU, are working with almost 1000 plants and testing 20 different coffee varieties.

Already, some of the first climateresilient coffee trees have been planted in Australian soil at the Tropical Fruit Research Station in Alstonville, northern New South Wales.

WCR’s Greg Meenahan says this kind of research and development is vital to securing coffee’s future. “If nothing is done, more than half of the world’s suitable coffee land will be pushed into unsuitability due to climate change. Without research and development, the coffee sector will need up to 180 million more bags of coffee in 2050 than we are likely to have,� he says.

Research is a long-term commitment.

With many projects spanning anywhere from five to 10 years in length, Greg

says it’s important for the industry to understand that without adequate funding, research will stumble. “Today, no matter how earnestly the coffee industry is trying to save coffee, they can’t do it with the toolkit they have,�

Greg says. “If you don’t have enough agronomists and have to put off taking care of the plants or measurements, you could end up coming back to a test plot filled with weeds and plantlets that didn’t survive, which compromises the accuracy of the science. The industry needs an automatic, steady, and fair way to contribute to this pre-competitive effort, and doing this with transparency is vital.�

In order for WCR to continue its devotion to the livelihoods of producers, and create a toolbox of coffee varieties with dependable performance, disease resistance, and high yields, funding needs to be economically sustainable. It also needs to be profitable for producers and attractive to the next generation. “You’ve got people getting rid of plastic straws at one end, and at the other, you’ve got organisations helping farmers to keep their rivers safe by installing bioswales to filter the wastewater produced by a wet mill,� Greg says. “Both of those efforts are super important, but neither strategy deals with the economic sustainability of producers. If coffee farming isn’t profitable in a region, it will stop being grown there. You don’t need a crystal ball to predict that. Once those supply chains wither and die, they often don’t come back. We see that now in El Salvador.�

That’s why Meenahan says WCR’s “penny per pound� idea provides an element of fairness, where a contribution to WCR is based fundamentally on the volume of coffee the supporting company is using. They pay into it at the same rate they’re taking advantage of it. A contribution can be anywhere from half a cent up to 10 cents or 20 cents per pound or kilogram of green coffee purchased

Find the Right Machine for You

from participating suppliers to help fund future innovation in coffee agriculture.

This includes WCR’s five-year Global Coffee Monitoring Program, estimated to cost about US$18 million, which will produce unprecedented data on how to improve farm profitability for the industry. “[Through the Checkoff Program] an entrepreneurial roaster working out of their garage in the Netherlands doing 2000 pounds per year who wants to contribute to WCR can step up to the plate and contribute five to 10 cents per pound,” Greg says.

“You can’t have one roaster contributing US$5000 a year and another of equal size contributing US$50,000 a year. The market needs to benchmark the donation. We each have to make an appropriate gift for our association based on volume.”

The program works through participating suppliers, who keep track of coffee sales to roasters, adding however many pennies per pound/kilo the roaster has indicated to the green supplier. The contribution is included as a cost of doing business on the roaster’s invoice, similar to docking costs, brokerage fees, or warehousing costs. The supplier then collects funds and disperses them to WCR four times a year. Software program Eximware, a cloud-based commodity management business, even integrates the Checkoff functionality into its system automatically.

To date, 44 importers have pledged to embed the Checkoff Program into their administration system.

About 70 roasters have signed up as well, including Single O in Australia, and one of the largest global contributors, Dunkin’. It announced a five-year agreement that will see a percentage of sales from every pound of its Original Blend coffee beans sold to franchisees go towards WCR. Campos Coffee CEO and Founder Will Young says WCR’s Checkoff Program

Support of World Coffee Research’s Checkoff Program will help secure the fiveyear Global Coffee Monitoring Program.

is the next necessary step for the industry.

“This is so important and it affects all of us in specialty coffee,” Will says.

“So much so, that I see a need for the Australian Specialty Coffee Association (ASCA) to take the lead on driving the fundraising and communicating the message. Having a neutral, collective body as the conduit between WCR and the specialty coffee community will help attract all roasters/baristas and café operators to the cause.”

Like many roasters, Campos Coffee already commits to many long-term social projects to help protect the future of specialty coffee. In Kenya, it invests in heavily subsidising the cost of manure to its coffee farmers to ensure coffee plants gain the necessary organic matter to reverse entropy and rebuild a significant area of soil over the next couple of decades. While this is where the majority of Campos Coffee’s investments are going, Will says he would “jump” at the

Comparative Guide to Office Coffee Machines

opportunity if ASCA, Australia’s leading industry body, were to invest in the WCR Checkoff Program through fundraising initiatives.

“It would unite our community around a cause that is so vital to the future of specialty coffee that we need to tackle it as one,” Will says. “I think we need a call to the whole industry. Only one or two roasters investing in big change is not enough.”

WCR agrees. With more companies signing up to the Checkoff Program, WCR urges roasters and importers to question how they can make a difference.

All it takes is a small donation for a big investment, because as WCR quite rightly puts it, if we lose producers and the supply of coffee, “we lose the game, and the future of the industry”.

For more information, visit

www.worldcoffeeresearch.org/ donate/checkoff

Visit servicesphere.com.au

1300 730 680

CAFETTO BARISTA PROFILE

All in the fine print After making a name for himself at home, Scottie Callaghan has brought the Australian café model to Hong Kong, where he has discovered a need for customer service in an emerging specialty coffee scene.

By Ethan Miller

W

hile working in Hong Kong for a Chinese start-up named Holly Brown, Australian coffee professional Scottie Callaghan noticed a lack of cafés in the area offering the personalised service he was familiar with.

“There was a gap in the market where there was no café offering an Australian espresso bar experience: a friendly barista, ready and prepared to make you a good cup of coffee and do so efficiently, and remember your name – all the little customer service things that are expected in Australia,” Scottie tells BeanScene.

“If you go to the same café in Australia every day for five days you’d expect them to start remembering your order, and for the most part that doesn’t happen in Hong Kong.”

Scottie believing there was room for an Australian style café in Hong Kong’s SoHo district, and in 2014, left Holly Brown to open Fineprint, a specialty coffee shop/ winebar.

Another Australian element Scottie has implemented at Fineprint is the use of Cafetto products. Scottie chose the cleaning agent due to its familiarity and reliability.

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“It’s a product I know, and it’s a good product. I don’t think I would use any other cleaning agent. Pretty much every café and roastery I’ve ever worked at always used [Managing Director Chris Short’s] products,’ he says.

Much like the personalised service Scottie receives from Cafetto, Fineprint’s friendly service has helped it establish a group of regular customers Scottie likens to the characters of the 90s sitcom Cheers.

“It’s a café with a little community of loyal regulars who know our staff and each other,” he says. “It’s quite usual for some of our regulars to turn up on a Saturday morning at 8am and still be there at 10am, because they keep running into their friends, and sit down to have another coffee and a chat.”

While Australian expats make up a large part of the customer base, Scottie sees customers from a spectrum of backgrounds frequent the café.

“About half of our customers are Australian, and we also have regulars who are from many different countries, Ireland, America, Britain, Israel, Canada, Russia, New Zealand, and South Africa to name a few,” Scottie says. “Only about 10 per cent of our business would be Hong Kong locals, though the number is growing.”

Scottie attributes the growing number of local customers to making the café accessible to Hong Kong’s non-English speaking community.

“They learn that we’ve got good staff who speak fluent Cantonese, so they know they have someone they can speak to, and I’ve learnt a lot of Cantonese too,” he says.

At night, Fineprint shifts its focus from specialty coffee to a carefully cultivated selection of wine. Scottie, who had no experience in the liquor industry before opening Fineprint, says the basic tenents of the wine business are the same as coffee.

“People like a quality product served by people who are friendly and attentive. It’s just good customer service.

Customers like to go somewhere where they are confident the employees know what they’re doing and talking about,” he says.

The main difference Scottie has discovered between the two fields is the level of organisation required.

“The more difficult side of running a bar is the portion control, stock, costs, and inventory management,” he says. “If you own a specialty coffee shop, like a little espresso bar in Australia, you need

milk, beans, and some basic tools. With a bar you have an inventory management list and stock is substantially higher.”

Scottie’s long history with coffee began more than 25 years ago when he began working as a barista for The Coffee Club in Hornsby, New South Wales. After bouncing around a few other cafés in Sydney, he settled at Toby’s Estate Coffee in Woolloomooloo in the early 2000s.

“Back in the day, Toby’s Estate was one of the only, and one of the better, specialty coffee roastery/café boutiques,” Scottie says.

“That’s where I started to learn to roast from Dean Morgan, a roaster there at the time. I would come in on my days off to sit and watch him roast, and then pick his brains.”

In 2006, while working at Danes Gourmet Coffee, Scottie was offered the opportunity to compete in the World Latte Art Championship in Berne, Switzerland with one month’s notice.

“We hadn’t run an Australian Latte Art Championship before, and at the time, a national association body could nominate someone to compete,” Scottie says. “I quit my job – my boss was very kind to let me resign effective immediately – so I could practice for the four weeks before going to Switzerland.”

Scottie went on to win the championship, one of many titles he would go on to claim. After returning to Australia, Scottie began working at Dean Morgan’s roastery, Morgan’s Coffee, which he represented when he won the Australian Specialty Coffee Association Australian Barista Championship in 2007.

In 2010, Scottie again won the Australian Barista Championship, and travelled to London where he placed third in the World Barista Championship.

Scottie believes that coffee competitions have since grown to better reflect the work baristas actually do in cafés. “[Coffee Championships are] a totally different competition in so many ways.

A lot of the old rules used to restrict baristas and what they wanted to do,” he says.

“The way that changed was baristas competing in championships and doing things differently, challenging the competition and the status quo. Some of those baristas actually went on to win too.”

Though no longer interested in competing himself, Scottie would love to see his employees follow in his footsteps.

“One of my baristas wants to compete, so I’d like to make that happen,” he says.

Scottie says attending coffee

competitions in Hong Kong has shown him the growth of the city’s specialty coffee community, with more than 100 people in attendance.

“When I first moved here in 2013, there was maybe two or three specialty coffee places. Now there must be at least 30, and most of them make really good coffee,” Scottie says.

Although the coffee culture is growing and Hong Kong has a large population, Scottie says it’s still difficult for new businesses to enter the market.

“Quite a few new coffee shops in the area just open and close,” he says.

“The main reason is that the people who drink specialty coffee in Hong Kong are expats. The other people who drink specialty coffee are the wealthier Chinese people, who have travelled and experienced Western-style café culture.

There’s probably another five million people in Hong Kong who who only eat western style food or drink on very rare occasions.”

Despite the tough market, Fineprint’s success allowed Scottie to open a second

venue in Hong Kong’s Tai Hang district in December 2018.

“The second one is going well, though it’s only just open,” Scottie says. “We’ve got a good team there, most of the operation is okay, and sales so far have been better than we had initially hoped in the early stages.”

Scottie attributes this success to his and his business partner James Wilson’s attention to detail, which influenced the name of Fineprint.

“I’d created brands in the past, thinking of names, logos, and designs, and came to the conclusion that you can agonise over it for too long. You can just choose a name and the real challenge is turning it into a brand,” Scottie says.

“James said he always liked the name Fineprint. The name itself sounds nice, and it indicates that we’re passionate about the details. Who and what we are is in the fine print.”

For more information about Cafetto, its support of industry members, and latest product range, visit www.cafetto.com

With Fineprint, Scottie Callaghan brings an Australian café experience to Hong Kong.

“THERE WAS A GAP IN THE MARKET WHERE THERE WAS NO CAFÉ OFFERING AN AUSTRALIAN ESPRESSO BAR EXPERIENCE: A FRIENDLY BARISTA, READY AND PREPARED TO MAKE YOU A GOOD CUP OF COFFEE AND DO SO EFFICIENTLY, AND REMEMBER YOUR NAME.” beanscenemag.com.au

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INDUSTRY PROFILE

A low-sugar future Almond Breeze Barista Blend provides cafés with a great tasting and high performing low-sugar dairy alternative that ensures consumers can control how many calories go into their cup.

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he “low-sugar” movement is gaining momentum in Australia. Schools, hospitals, and sporting venues in several states are banning the sale of sugar-rich soft drinks and junk food in their canteens and cafeterias.

Numerous organisations including the World Health Organization and Australian Medical Association have called for a tax on sugary drinks, similar to those imposed on tobacco and alcohol.

With consumers becoming more aware of what they eat and how it affects their health, almond milk producer Almond Breeze says it is more important than ever that suppliers provide cafés with low-sugar alternatives to cater to this growing market.

A Nielsen and The George Institute study released in April 2018 revealed that nearly three in 10 Australians are “very concerned” about sugar consumption.

The study found that health education and the wider availability of healthy alternatives are leading Australians to buy more products with reduced fat and sugar content.

Almond Breeze Country Manager Australia and New Zealand Michael McNulty says it’s the responsibility of the manufacturer to provide healthy alternatives.

“The whole marketplace is talking about sugar and low-sugar products.

The challenge for producers is to create products that are low in sugar but also satisfy the same criteria in terms of taste

Almond Breeze provides a low-sugar dairy alternative that allows consumers to better monitor their sugar intake.

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and quality that consumers have had for the past decade,” Michael says.

“We are very keen to promote low sugar as a practice, but also advise the marketplace that we have products that are of a high quality, despite their low sugar content. Other café almond milks use five to 10 times more sugar than Almond Breeze Barista Blend.”

Sugar is used in most dairy alternatives as a shortcut to allow the products to stretch and froth in a similar manner to dairy milk.

Almond Breeze Barista Blend only contains 0.2 grams of sugar per 100 millilitres. Michael says maintaining a low sugar content meant utilising Almond Breeze’s years of expertise and knowledge of almond milk to satisfy the

needs of baristas with a performance level equivalent to cow’s milk.

“It’s a combination of taste and functionality. Our product doesn’t split when heated and has great taste and texture, which is why it’s the choice of baristas and café owners,” he says.

Almond Breeze utilises almonds from its parent company Blue Diamond’s almond farms in California, where Michael says more than 80 per cent of the world’s almonds are sourced.

“Through Blue Diamond, we have the benefit of being in the almond business for more than 100 years,” he says. “We believe we’re sourcing the best almonds with the highest level of knowledge and generational education, which is why we’re able to produce such a high-quality product without the addition of sugar.”

Michael says that while the Almond Breeze Barista Blend has been low in sugar since it was released to the market in 2011, the company has been forced to reiterate its product credentials to café owners and their staff due to a high level of miscommunication in the marketplace.

“We were amazed that there was so much misinformation out in the marketplace about sugar,” Michael says.

“We’ve been astonished by how much the café network wants to adopt and spread that message.”

A comment Michael frequently hears from baristas is that they feel responsible for making sure customers are aware of what is going into their drinks.

As such, in 2018, Almond Breeze Barista Blend conducted a research survey into Australian baristas and their thoughts on the industry. The study, published on BaristasforBaristas.com, found that 60 to 70 per cent of baristas see themselves as trusted by the customer and more than 80 per cent see themselves as knowledgeable, and capable of real influence over the consumer.

“The barista is second only to perhaps the hairdresser in terms of short-term engagement but a high level of informal trust in their relationship with their customer,” Michael says.

“It’s very important that we don’t mislead the consumer, even unintentionally, about their sugar intake, particularly in a café scenario when the consumer doesn’t get to see the nutritional information on the side of a pack.”

He adds that Almond Breeze Barista Blend’s low sugar content means that coffee drinkers can control how much sugar they have in their coffee.

Almond Breeze Barista Blend only contains 0.2 grams of sugar per 100 millilitres.

“WE ARE VERY KEEN TO PROMOTE LOW SUGAR AS A PRACTICE, BUT ALSO ADVISE THE MARKETPLACE THAT WE HAVE PRODUCTS THAT ARE OF A HIGH QUALITY, DESPITE THEIR LOW SUGAR CONTENT.” “When people go into a café to buy their coffee, there’s an expectation that they should be able to decide how many calories they would like to allocate, or how much sugar they want to intake,” Michael says. “When you have a low sugar base, you have the ability to add more sugar at your discretion, which is more suitable for everybody.”

Cafés can use Almond Breeze Barista Blend in their smoothies as well as their coffee. Michael says this means that they can better monitor the sugar content of fruit-rich beverages.

Despite the lower sugar levels, Almond Breeze found that during blind tasting panels, non-dairy drinkers preferred Barista Blend’s taste. Michael attributes this to the quality of Almond Breeze’s milk, the minimal effect sugar has on almond milk’s taste profile, and Barista Blend’s prominence in the marketplace.

“When you’re the first to market, people look at that taste and texture profile as being the norm,” Michael says.

Almond Breeze Barista Blend will

look to spread its low sugar message with one-on-one education throughout the whole supply chain.

“We aim to highlight that protein and almond milks do contain sugar, and if you want a low-sugar option, Barista Blend is the best choice that you could make.”

Michael says Almond Breeze’s aim is to provide the consumer with the best tasting product to provide a healthy and active lifestyle, and that is exemplified by its commitment to providing low-sugar alternatives in cafés.

“It’s not just in non-dairy alternatives, which are quite healthy to begin with, that the low-sugar movement is gaining momentum, but the food and drinks industry as a whole. Low-sugar options are becoming the way forward in all categories,” Michael says.

“Consumers are looking for a healthier alternative, and an almond milk with less sugar definitely fits that bill.”

For more information, visit www.almondbreeze.com.au/barista beanscenemag.com.au

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TECHNOLOGY PROFILE

Myth becomes reality Victoria Arduino’s Mythos 2, available in Australia through Espresso Mechanics, represents the next generation in coffee grinding.

W

hen Victoria Arduino’s Mythos One grinder first arrived in Australia in 2014, baristas were drawn to the machine’s Clima Pro technology, and its other features to improve dosage and espresso extraction.

But Victoria Arduino felt it could do better, and after years of development, launched the Mythos 2 grinder in 2018.

Michele Mastrocola, Senior Sales Area Manager Asia-Pacific at Victoria Arduino, says the company entered the development of the Mythos 2 with the intention to build on what the Mythos One was capable of.

“With Victoria Arduino Mythos 2, we wanted to reach a new level of performance,” he says. “We started from our experience with the Mythos One, and took in inputs and feedback from baristas around the world.”

Baristas told Victoria Arduino that they wanted greater control over their grinders’ speed, and achieve a more accurate dose than had ever been possible. The company took these comments on board while developing the Mythos 2’s three models: fixed speed, variable speed, and Gravimetric.

All three are available in Australia through equipment importer Espresso Mechanics.

“The Gravimetric is the Rolls Royce of these models,” Espresso Mechanics Business Development Manager Matthew Galea says. “It precisely measures the ground coffee, and instead of working by time, it grinds by weight.

This guarantees you have a precise grind size.”

Matthew says this eliminates one of the many variables in coffee grinding, and ensures a consistent product.

“If you increase the grind size on a grinder that operates by time, the larger particle size means you will get more coffee in your group handle. If you

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The Mythos 2 uses Gravimetric technology to grind coffee by weight rather than time.

TECHNOLOGY PROFILE

Michele Mastrocola and Colin Harmon attended the Mythos 2 Australian launch at Veneziano Coffee Richmond.

adjust for a smaller grind size without altering your grind time, you will get less,” Matthew says.

“It doesn’t matter what grind size you adjust your grinder, the scales will always measure the quantity of ground coffee needed. If you ask for 22 grams of coffee, regardless of grind size, you will get 22 grams.”

The gravimetric sensor immediately turns on when the portafilter is placed into the holder. During the grinding phase, the touchscreen shows the amount of coffee in grams, and progress of the grind.

Another signature feature of the Mythos 2 is its variable speed motor.

Victoria Arduino says this allows for consistency of speed from the very beginning. The Mythos 2’s grind speed can be adjusted from 600 to 1200 revolutions per minute.

“The Victoria Arduino variable speed motor allows the barista — through rapidly adjustable programming from the touch display — to choose the most suitable setting for the coffee being used,” Victoria Arduino’s Michele Mastrocola says.

“Being able to vary the burr revolution speed allows the barista to perfect the texture of the grounds according to specifications for each variety of coffee, thus enhancing its aroma.”

Also contributing to the Mythos 2’s high hourly production is a larger set of burrs, which, at 82.5 millimetres in diameter, are approximately 10 millimetres larger than on the Mythos One. “[This provides] a faster service, which does not compromise the quality

of coffee,” Michele says. “The special helix, located upstream the grinder, ensures constant coffee pressure inside the grinding chamber, providing the optimum texture.”

An inverter-equipped motor stops the burrs locking, ensuring the grinder maintains a consistent performance, and a redesigned clump crusher is used to regulate the air flow from the burr set.

The clump crusher also removes static cling from the ground particles, ensuring an even spread in the portafilter. It is also easily removable to facilitate cleaning.

“The dose is dropped into the centre of the portafilter with less than a gram of grounds retained between doses, reducing the need to purge between doses and waste beans,” Michele says.

Another feature of the Mythos One Victoria Arduino has updated for its new model is its signature Clima Pro technology. This system allows baristas to choose a wide range of temperature with higher stability. Baristas can set the grinder at temperatures ranging from 30 to 60°C, with Victoria Arduino identifying 40 to 50°C as the ideal range.

“If a coffee grinder gets too hot it can affect the flavour and deteriorate the quality of the dose. This can be especially likely in on-demand grinderdosers that tend to be used in highvolume operations,” Michele says.

“The Victoria Arduino Clima Pro 2.0 technology ensures a consistent temperature in the grinding chamber and can also lower the temperature if needed.”

The Mythos 2 was officially launched in Australia at Veneziano Coffee Richmond on 23 October 2018 at an

event Michele and Colin attended.

Colin recalled the reaction Australians had to the release of Victoria Arduino’s preceding model in 2014.

“When we launched Mythos One in Australia, everyone was very polite but a little dismissive,” Colin says.

“But people started to take a chance on a grinder that was a little different and Victoria Arduino and the grinder started to make names for themselves.

When I came back to Australia in 2016, there was a Mythos One in every café.”

Colin told the audience the Mythos 2 represents the future of coffee grinding, and he struggles to think of something further that will have a dramatic impact on how coffee is grinded.

“I feel it’s what we’ve been working towards for the past 10 years, and it’s something that feels very satisfying,” he says.

“I am terrified and excited to see the Mythos 2 put on coffee bars across Australia.”

For more information, visit

www.espressomechanics.com.au

beanscenemag.com.au

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INDUSTRY PROFILE

People power BeanLedger is using Blockchain to improve traceability throughout the coffee industry, and People of Coffee is leading the charge to support it.

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hen Amelia Franklin entered the coffee industry in 2006, she did so because she viewed it as an opportunity to make a living while making a positive contribution.

She operated as Amelia Franklin Coffee Roaster for 12 years, and in 2018, began the company’s transition to People of Coffee in Bellingen, New South Wales, to better reflect its community values.

“The roaster is a social business, and always has been, with profits going into projects local or globally. It’s about everyone in coffee and having my name on it doesn’t represent that,” Amelia says.

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This transition is not just in name.

People of Coffee uses a corporate structure popular among Australian notfor-profit organisations.

“Changing the company’s structure is representative of our goals and mission to make a big impact on how we do business. There’re better ways of pushing on those boundaries of social business and social enterprise,” Amelia says.

Proceeds from People of Coffee roasting operations are largely used to fund BeanLedger, a blockchaindistributed ledger solution Amelia helped establish that provides traceability throughout the global supply chain.

Blockchain technology links batches of transactions, called blocks, and stores

multiple copies of these blocks on a decentralised network of independent computers. This removes the need for a third party to make transactions, prevents one single entity from controlling the ledger, and ensures traceability.

“The industry needs a relationship between the nursery, farmer, importer, and roaster. BeanLedger provides that for a minimal fee, like 0.0007 per cent of the transaction, which is pulled into projects around research and development of coffee,” Amelia says.

“That fee is so small it’s not going to hit anyone’s bottom line, and for it, people receive a more traceable system.”

To assist in the management and development of the platform, Amelia

has partnered with Griffith University in Queensland to ensure its good governance. Griffith University’s Dr. Timothy Cadman, whose key fields of research include environmental policy and administration, advises BeanLedger on ethics, governance, and sustainability.

Members of the coffee supply chain are able to sign up as ambassadors of BeanLedger, allowing them to have a say in how the platform is run.

“Every single person using BeanLedger can become a decision maker. It can be anything you want it to be,” Amelia says. “If you participate in BeanLedger, you effectively own it.”

BeanLedger was developed with the assistance and consent of farmers, ensuring the system is accessible and beneficial. BeanLedger Technical Advisor Christophe Demangeot travelled to Papua New Guinea to speak directly with farmers about if and how they would use the platform.

“The farmers have a dialogue with us. We don’t want to just go in and tell them how to farm or that they have to use our platform. We get the consent of the farmer and communicate with them in a respectful manner to learn what they want to get out of BeanLedger,” Amelia says.

BeanLedger is a blockchain-distributed ledger solution that provides traceability throughout the global supply chain.

One way BeanLedger is helping producers directly is by allowing roasters to send out a Tip the Farmer QR code. This code provides retailers and customers with the ability send money directly to the farmers that produced the coffee, or a project to help support them.

“Roasters can flag a project within the BeanLedger ecosystem that they want to encourage donations towards. These are not limited to research and development, and can address other issues, or go towards a certain region,” Amelia says.

“We can track and trace all the money spent on that project right down to where and for what it was used, as well as the financial outcomes. This includes what the results of the project were, and what the return on investment was – financially and in terms of social and environmental sustainability.”

Amelia says that although the Tip the Farmer program is useful and easily understood by consumers, BeanLedger’s real focus is on raising money for research into genetic coffee varietals.

In recent years, the project that BeanLedger has directed most of its attention to is variety verification at the seedstock level. Amelia says that World Coffee Research (WCR) first brought this issue to her attention in 2014.

“When the nursery sells the farmer the seedstock, 50 per cent of the time they’re selling the farmer the wrong seeds. Now we have this global problem where farmers think they’re planting a rust-resistant varietal, or one that’s really good for the growing conditions, when they’re not,” Amelia says.

“They do their best with no information, and it’s really just trial and error. Most of the time, [farmers have] planted the wrong coffee, which leads to crop failure becoming more prominent.”

BeanLedger supports WCR Verified, a certification program designed to provide independent, science-based quality control and assurance at the start of the coffee supply chain.

Amelia says verification is not the only problem the coffee industry faces beginning at the seed level.

Coffee’s small number of varietals compared to other crops has made the crop vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

“When you don’t have a diverse set of varietals in a crop, you get this problem we’re having now where six out of the seven genomes that prevent disease in coffee have collapsed in the last 10 years,” she says. “We have one genome left protecting the entire coffee supply chain, and WCR believes it will collapse in four to 10 years.”

Amelia compares coffee crops to the potato industry. Potatoes have more than 3000 individual varietals, whereas WCR says only 52 varietals are registered.

“This screams volumes about the lack of coffee breeding that has been done.

Coffee is the orphan crop of the world.

It is the most underfunded, neglected, and under-researched crop,” she says.

“The potato industry has a small fee per transaction which ensures there is research and development done into the crop. They’re developing rigorous and strong varietals, which will protect potatoes through climate change. Coffee needs a system like this.”

Amelia says that to preserve the future of the coffee industry, all members of the supply chain need to invest in coffee research, and contribute to a more traceable supply chain.

“We don’t even know what we’re planting in the ground, and we don’t have any diversity in our seed stock.

It is primarily because we are dealing with farmers in developing countries who have traditionally been neglected,” she says.

For more information, visit www.peopleofcoffee.org or www.BeanLedger.org.

beanscenemag.com.au

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GREEN BEAN FEATURE

On the ground Cofi-Com reveals some of its plans for 2019, which include offering roasters the opportunity to meet and connect with their origin teams.

O

ver more than 30 years importing coffee to Australia from around the world, Cofi-Com has developed strong ties with its Volcafe sister companies that operate in most growing origins.

These relationships give Cofi-Com an in-depth knowledge of the requirements and capabilities of farmers in these areas.

It is this on-the-ground presence that gives the trader the ability to provide a range of coffees, from commercial blends to high-end speciality, to its roasting customers.

“We have teams of field officers in each country which assist farmers with agricultural management. This ranges from tree management to dealing with climate change,” says John Russell Storey, Marketing Manager Trade at Cofi-Com. “These are people who aren’t sitting around in offices, they’re out in the field and have tremendous amounts of knowledge, expertise, and rapport with farmers.”

This year, Cofi-Com intends to bring some of its origin teams to Australia to speak about their role in the supply chain at its Huntingwood warehouse in New South Wales.

“We’ll be inviting our customers along to celebrate Cofi-Com’s commitment to sustainability at origin, and show everyone our Huntingwood operations,” John says. “For our roaster customers, it will be a chance to chat to folks who are actually in the field and hear what is happening in origin.”

He says many Australian roasters may not be aware of the work these origin teams are doing at the coal face. Among the many challenges being tackled is ageing coffee trees that are impacting farmers’ yields.

“There’s an awful lot of work going on in terms of management of trees in origin. A lot of these trees are getting very old and we are introducing a

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Cofi-Com has sister companies in origin countries which assist farmers with farm and tree maintenance.

program for stumping them down until they are about 30 or 40 centimetres high,” John says.

“The regrowth that comes back is managed carefully in terms of plant nutrition and what to prune.

Unfortunately, this process means the farmers normally miss a season, so it has to be done very carefully and with the farmer’s total cooperation.”

Not all the work being done by these groups is practical. It includes the theoretical as well.

“It varies in every origin, but really it’s about giving advice and support, and offering different ideas to farmers,” John says. “In Uganda, for instance, the idea is to get farmers to think of themselves as small businesses, so they’re not just growing the odd coffee tree here or there, they’re actually running a small business that provides ongoing revenue for them.”

Other topics John hopes to highlight at the event include traceability and sustainability.

“These aren’t new concepts to Cofi-Com,” he says. “Roasters want to know where, how, and who their coffee is grown by. We can track back almost all our coffees to who grew them and where.”

Cofi-Com has a rigorous documentation process as well as other internal systems at origin to ensure the coffee is trackable.

“The way we operate, if there is something from one particular farm that is really good, we can isolate it and highlight that particular farm or estate,” John says.

He believes this focus on quality and added value is what will define 2019 for the coffee industry, on the roaster and farmer ends of the chain.

“What we’re seeing is an increased awareness at origin that quality counts, which translates into us encouraging farmers at all times to provide red cherries at the time it is picked,” he says.

“The added value will come with farms and mills looking at different processes like honey and full flavoured naturals.

We’re seeing exceptional naturals coming out of Costa Rica, Papua New Guinea, Uganda, and Tanzania.

“The café sector is incredibly competitive and roasters are looking for coffees that are good value, and deliver on taste. The demand for $20-plus a kilo coffee is slowing down,” he says. “As a roaster said last year, he buys good value coffees and his job was to turn them into something special.

“The positive thing is there’s no lack of people drinking coffee, especially as a younger generation comes into the market. We’ll continue to source great coffees. Quality isn’t a trend — it’s what we do.”

For more information, visit

www.coficom.com.au

GREEN BEAN FEATURE

More than a label Fairtrade is helping Papua New Guinea farmers improve the quality of their coffee through training and sharing expertise.

T

o Will Valverde, Fairtrade is not just about certification. It is a comprehensive system that helps coffee-producing communities build their knowledge, skills, and production capacity.

“The consumer will buy a product because they want to help the farmers.

But at the same time, they want to have a good quality product they can buy all the time,” Will says.

“As part of our commitment to the industry, we are working closely with producer organisations to ensure that they can bring the best quality green beans possible to their buyer.”

In his role as a Producer Support and Relations Officer for Fairtrade Australia and New Zealand, Will works with coffee growing cooperatives in Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and the Solomon Islands.

“We’ve been working with producer organisations to implement best practices in farming and processing,” he says.

“We’re supporting to help them improve their consistency.”

Will says that when PNG became independent from Australia in 1975, most of the country’s coffee plantations were divided among smallholders.

These farmers, who may have had some experience picking coffee, were self-taught in terms of coffee processing.

“Coffee was like their ATM. When they needed money, they would just sell the coffee. Quality wasn’t part of their mindset,” Will says. “We’ve been trying to help them to see coffee as a good way to improve the living conditions of their families and their community by treating coffee like their profession.”

Fairtrade assists these farmers by providing them the equipment and resources needed to enhance the quality of the products and operations, as well as the training to use them.

“Our training courses are really practical. We go into the [farms] and select

the best cherries, showing the farmers how to detect unwanted or unripe beans,” Will says.

During the training process, the farmers and Fairtrade then process the coffee beans together using the cooperative’s preferred method.

“We continue to the drying beds, showing the farmers how best to dry the coffee and explaining the importance of achieving consistency,” Will says.

Fairtrade’s training programs have included introductory Q Grading classes so farmers can taste good coffee as well as identify it. The Coffee Quality Institute’s Q Grader assessment trains and certifies coffee professionals on correct methods of coffee cupping and tasting, helping farmers better anticipate the needs and preferences of roasters.

“In our recent PNG training, a Q Grader came and shared his experience with the cooperatives, using the same Specialty Coffee Association tools and equipment as anyone else,” Will says.

Farmers were also given the opportunity to roast coffee and learn about different profiles.

“We are in the process of implementing a roasting laboratory at each of the producer organisations, so they can improve their own quality.

They’ll be able to identify primary defects, separate those loads, and make sure the coffee they are selling to an exporter is in optimal condition,” Will says.

“The course last year was an introductory one that we hope to continue and complement with processing training in April or May 2019.”

Will says coffee roasters can contribute to the growing quality of coffee from countries such as PNG by sharing with consumers the hard work farmers have put into producing their coffee.

“Coffee roasters are definitely an agent of change. Farmers are doing their best to produce high-quality coffee, and the roaster has the ability to tell this story, and bring the consumer into the picture of the

producer,” Will says.

“The Fairtrade certification also brings validation to the roaster that the coffee they are selling has been produced in a fair way, and the farmers are the heart of that transaction.”

With the support of the Australian and New Zealand governments, Fairtrade operates programs that enable farmers in PNG and throughout the region to improve their quality of life.

“We will continue to work with these groups in four key areas,” Will says.

“Quality, in terms of improvement and productivity, crosscutting issues such as the environment and gender, business development and the administrative aspects of the industry, and establishing an investment fund where producer organisations, traders, roasters can add value to a particular project and make it bigger.

“PNG remains an attractive origin to the Australian market, and quality is an area where we are really making a significant positive impact.”

For more information, visit www.fairtrade.com.au

Will Valverde and Fairtrade work directly with PNG farmers to improve the quality of their coffee.

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GREEN BEAN FEATURE

Raising the reputation Project Origin is introducing carbonic maceration processing to farms in countries not known for their high scoring-coffees.

Project Origin is working with farms to employ carbonic maceration, improving their coffee quality, and livelihood in the process.

W

hen Sasa Sestic first introduced carbonic maceration (CM) to the global coffee community on the 2015 World Barista Championship (WBC) stage, the industry saw the value the new processing method could offer in terms of taste and coffee quality.

CM sees farmers ferment coffee in a controlled setting, allowing them to bring out complex flavours and ensure greater consistency.

What may not have been as apparent to spectators in the WBC arena, and what Sasa’s green bean trader Project Origin is focused on, is how CM can be beneficial to farmers and their communities.

“The idea of Project Origin was to not only be a green bean sourcing company, but also give back to these communities and create partnerships,” Project Origin Media and Marketing Manager Jordan Montgomery says.

“Our CM experiments are creating controlled environments which enable producers to take hold of how their coffee is developed and increase the potential of what they can do with it.

They get to create a better product and

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earn more money from it.”

The organisation has established CM experiments in half-a-dozen farms in producing countries. Recently, Project Origin has been working at one of its farms, Finca El Arbol in Nicaragua, to improve not only the coffee of the farm but also coffee across the country as a whole.

“Not every single farmer who has a good scoring coffee will earn the right kind of money,” Jordan says. “Something that might score 85 from Nicaragua will earn a third of what the same scoring coffee from another country might earn.”

The CM experiments at Finca El Arbol have focused on Catimor varietals, which Jordan says people tend to dismiss. He adds that the farm’s altitude is 1300 metres, which would usually mean a faster cherry ripening time, and a less complex or unique flavour profile in the coffee.

“So, we’ve got a coffee that is great for disease-resistance and production, but wouldn’t normally be considered to be high scoring,” Jordan says. “With these experiments, some of them are now scoring 91 or 92 points when a year or two earlier it was more 81 or 82.”

“Taking varietals well known for unique and exotic flavours and intensifying them

is one thing, but taking more mainstream and easily grown varietals and applying these processes to them is potentially more beneficial to a wider number of producers.”

Perhaps the most notable of these experiments is the work Project Origin has done with ZB Washing Station in Masina Village, Ethiopia. CM coffees produced at this farm were used in the 2018 WBC by sixth-placed John Gordon of New Zealand and winner Agnieszka Rojewska of Poland.

Project Origin General Manager Habib Maarbani says the success of these coffees led to higher prices being paid to ZB. “The creation of these coffees meant uniforms were purchased for workers who do sorting at the station, and [it] also funded a water well for the community in Masina Village to be constructed in 2019,” he says. “[It also provided] plenty of exposure for this station and the coffees it is capable of producing, not just the CMs but their standard lots as well.”

Project Origin is now looking to bring this level of success to Kenya, where it has begun CM experiments at the Thagieni washing station in Nyeri. Jordan says Project Origin is impressed by the possibilities Kenyan coffee has to offer.

“Kenya’s kind of what Ethiopia has been in the past, but hasn’t been as prolific.

Some really good coffee comes from there but it also has a bit of a reputation for producing inconsistent coffee.” he says.

Jordan says that while producing higher quality coffee is a benefit of the CM experiments, the end goal is to ensure the welfare of the farmers.

“Coffee is going to become a limited resource in the future with climate change,” he says. “The livelihood and lives of these people is being threatened, so we’re enabling them to create better products.

Sustaining their livelihoods is of vital importance to us.”

For more information, visit

www.projectorigin.com.au

GREEN BEAN FEATURE

Our farmers, our heroes Minas Hill Coffee works closely with three Brazilian farming partners to enrich their lives and the communities they serve.

M

inas Hill Coffee Founder Marcelo Brussi says his admiration for coffee farmers comes from his relationship with his grandfather, Francisco Brussi, who grew up working on coffee farms.

Francisco’s parents migrated from Italy to Brazil to work in coffee farms before he was born. After his father left the family when Francisco was 10, he, his mother and brother, moved to Sao Paulo. When Francisco was an adult, the State Department of Agriculture hired him to monitor coffee exports, due to his knowledge as a coffee picker and worker.

“I used to sit in his lap when I was a child to listen to his stories about the life at coffee farms. Stories about animals, the wildlife, the shipments to the port of Santos by steam trains. All of that created a world of fantasy in my mind. I have the highest respect for everyone involved in agriculture, especially at coffee farms,” Marcelo says.

Minas Hill values the opportunity to contribute to the Brazilian coffee industry, and that each of its three main farming partners distribute their money throughout local communities in various ways.

“Every one of them has at least one social or environmental project in place in Brazil, and supporting them is crucial for the quality of the coffee and wellbeing of the workers,” he says.

Ismael Andrade of Sao Silvestre, Capim Branco and Paraiso farms in the Cerrado region is a long-time philanthropist of his local hospital, Santa Casa de Misericordia in Carmo do Paranaiba.

“People who visit the [Santa Casa de Misericordia in Carmo do Paranaiba] will see a framed photo of Ismael from when he was 18 and began assisting the hospital,” Marcelo says.

Roasters who purchase Ismael’s coffee

from Minas Hill can donate to the hospital anywhere from five cents to $1 on top of every kilogram they buy.

Pedro Gabarra of Santo Antonio and Pinhal farms in Campo das Vertentes runs five different social projects at his farms.

One of these projects is Wings, which rescues and recovers injured and captured birds in the area.

“In Brazil, hunting and keeping animals in captivity is illegal, but people still capture local birds and fauna and keep them in cages. Animal rescuers take these birds to Pedro’s farms where they are looked after until they can be released,” Marcelo says.

“Or, if anyone finds injured eagles, hawks, or toucans in the forests, fields, or roads, they can bring the bird to Pedro’s farm, where they have the capacity to look after it until the bird is able to fly again.”

Marcelo declares that the project that captures the most interest from Australians is GIMA (Intercity Games for the Environment) from Flavia and Gabriel Oliveira of Bom Jesus farm in Alta Mogiana.

GIMA aims to promote social and

environmental responsibility and to create environmental awareness from early generations. Almost 1000 children attended its latest edition.

Fifth grade children from the local area take part in a day of events where they perform plays and non-competitive games. At the end of the day, they are given push bikes to help them go to school because there is no public transport in rural areas like Bom Jesus.

Marcelo says this project has a special place in his heart, as his grandfather was born in the Alta Mogiana region.

“The project works with the future of coffee. We need to take care of the next coffee generation. Roasters want quality and sustainability, and this is exactly what Minas Hill Coffee offers them,” he says.

“There is no coffee without people, and that does not just apply to the owner of the land, the farmer. Everyone – the workers, children, and community – is equally important. That’s why we focus on specialty grade coffee — not only quality but what goes on beyond the coffee.”

For more information, visit

www.minashill.com.au Bom Jesus’ GIMA project educates local children on social and environmental responsibility.

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CAFÉ SCENE BYRON FRESH 7 Jonson St, Byron Bay New South Wales 2481 Open Monday to Sunday 7:30 am to 11pm (02) 6685 7810 In 2004, hospitality veteran Markus Hofer took over Byron Fresh, a café located just 50 metres from the beach in Byron Bay. Byron Fresh first appeared on Markus’s radar while scouting locations for a previous employer.

“I earmarked this café as being in the best possible location in Byron Bay from a hospitality perspective,” he says.

“It’s in the established end of town, has good [street] exposure – facing northeast and northwest, good parking and visibility.

“After I left [my job], they gave me a call and told it was up for sale, so I snapped it up.”

Markus chose Campos Coffee as his roasting partner, a relationship he formed while operating his previous café in Sydney.

“Initially, [Byron] Fresh had a different coffee supplier, but I felt that Campos’s quality and brand following was something that would be useful up here,” he says.

“From what I’ve experienced in my lifetime of hospitality, [Campos Coffee CEO Will Young and Queensland

Byron Fresh employs a French pastry chef to bake exclusive items in-house.

Director John Ronchi] are the kind of partners you want to have.”

Byron Fresh uses Campos Coffee’s Superior Blend for its espresso, and rotates single origins as they become available. Campos has supplied the café with equipment including a La Marzocco espresso machine, grinder, and automatic tampers.

Byron Fresh serves handmade pastries, made in-house to keep them fresh and exclusive.

“Our bakery is fairly unique and pretty special because it is all done by our own French pastry chef,” Markus says.

Byron Fresh’s menu ranges from fresh burgers to health-oriented items such as

the quinoa and zucchini hotcakes.

“We go out of our way to buy as local and organic as we can,” he says. “We certainly try to stay true to what our name suggests.”

Markus says to stay relevant, cafés and baristas must be constantly adapting, staying on top of trends, and improving.

“One of the reasons I like Campos is the ongoing barista training they provide to us,” he says.

“This Friday we arranged for six of our baristas to travel to Brisbane to spend the day with Campos. We do that every three months or so to sharpen their skills and knowledge and make sure we produce a product that Campos is all about.”

Byron Fresh renovates its interior every year, ensuring the café stays up-to-date.

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THE GOOD FOOD COLLECTIVE 123 Maling Rd, Canterbury, Victoria 3126 Open Monday to Wednesday 6am to 4pm, Thursday to Saturday 6am to 8:30pm, Sunday 8am to 3pm 0432 060 599 Chris Henry and his business partners Nev Juric and Ross Wilson each had 20 to 30 years of experience working in the hospitality industry as chefs before opening The Good Food Collective. It is through Ross’s prior café experience that the men became acquainted with the café’s roaster Mocopan Coffee.

“It’s a very easy company to deal with,” Chris says. “Mocopan provides a fresh product, roasted regularly, and great customer service.”

Chris and his partners tasted several blends before choosing to use Mocopan’s Roast ’54. The blend is based on a Sumatran Mandheling from Indonesia, with other origins including Papua New Guinea, Colombia, and Ethiopia. Mocopan describes the coffee as enriched with a deep tone of dark chocolate and dried nuts, with hints of earthy and cedar spice.

Chris says The Good Food Collective was born from his and his partners’ desire to work for themselves.

“We were pretty tired of working for other people,” he says. “We’ve all worked in the industry for a very long time, so having [the café] be our own is very rewarding.”

Chris, Nev, and Ross chose to open a café over a restaurant, preferring the fast turnover and flexibility a café offers.

“It’s slightly less hours then if we’d opened a restaurant where you have to do lunch and dinner,” Chris says. “We all worked as breakfast chefs for a long period of time, so it kind of felt like the right choice to open a café.”

Chris says the ability to constantly change the menu was another drawcard, especially with their previous kitchen experience.

The Good Food Collective makes all of its food and drinks onsite, something Chris says is unique along Maling Road.

“A lack of fresh produce and housemade food was something we noticed when we first visited the area,” he says.

“Everything is made onsite at our café, which is becoming a bit of a rarity nowadays.”

A fixture on The Good Food Collective’s menu is the avocado and hummus, which the café makes using avocados it grows itself when available.

“We have a three-storey-high avocado

The Good Food Collective appeals to a wide demographic, with a focus on families.

tree in our backyard. It is a real talking point among visitors at the café,” Chris says. “A lot of people will go sit underneath it, then realise that it is an avocado tree.”

Customers also enjoy the café’s family friendly atmosphere. As such, Chris is seeing a shift in the café’s demographic, with more young families moving to the Canterbury area.

“I’d say 65 per cent of our clientele are families, with parents between 35 and 45 and a few children,” he says. “The rest of our customers are largely middle aged or older. We’re catering for all types of people, and a lot of the older demographic enjoy that we still make everything [in house].

“We have a lovely, loyal, regular clientele who appreciate what we do, so that’s been really rewarding for us.”

CAFÉ SCENE THE BLOOM ROOM 2/190 Birkdale Rd, Birkdale, Queensland, 4159 Open Monday to Sunday 7am to 2pm (07) 3822 9336 The idea behind The Bloom Room’s flowery aesthetic blossomed from Co-owners Giorgina Venzin and Chris Hollingsworth sitting down with a piece of paper, a pen, and a bit of inspiration from Pinterest and European café design.

“Everywhere you look there’s flowers,” Chris says. “We covered the ceiling with wisterias and set up a floral wall.

“We’d noticed at a few pop-up cafés that flower walls were popular for Instagram shots. Social media is so powerful when it comes to marketing these days. We thought, ‘why not create a flower wall where people can come in, get great food, great coffee, and get that photo?’”

Chris fitted out the café himself. He and Giorgina drew inspiration from cafés and restaurants such as the Dalloway Terrace in London, which incorporates foliage into its design.

“We went with a different style to what we normally do. Usually our cafés are Asian inspired, but we wanted to go with something a bit more European,” Chris says. “We took ideas from here and there and made them our own.”

The Bloom Room serves Veneziano Coffee, and Chris appreciates the service and onsite training as much as the beans. “[Veneziano’s] training facilities stand out to us as well above the rest. They’re constantly taking our baristas, levelling them up, and running the courses for us,” he says.

The café runs Veneziano’s Forza blend for its milk-based drinks and Bella blend for black coffee.

Chris calls Forza a robust dark blend that’s good for an early morning kick, while

The Bloom Room serves traditional European and British dishes including its sticky date waffles.

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The Bloom Room incorporates flowers and foliage into its design.

Bella’s lighter, fruitier notes makes black coffee accessible to the wider community.

The Bloom Room prepares its two blends with a two-group La Marzocco espresso machine.

“We were pretty limited for space when designing the café so I had to sacrifice that third group head for a second grinder so we could run two blends,” Chris says.

The Bloom Room’s menu takes inspiration from traditional European and British dishes, highlighting bangers and mash, bubble and squeak, and sticky date waffles among others.

The Bloom Room opened in August 2018 to a positive response from the local community.

“A lot of people asked ‘why Birkdale?’”

Chris says. “We feel that the outer suburbs need something like this. Both Giorgina and I are from around here, so we wanted to create a little café that is different to the norm.”

Chris says the highlight of opening The Bloom Room is seeing peoples’ excited reactions when they walk in and see the decorated space, and engaging with them about coffee.

“I love serving great coffee to passionate people,” Chris says. “You can’t beat serving great coffee and great food to people. It’s such a rewarding feeling.”

PEOPLES LUKES LANE 1 Lukes Ln, Te Aro, Wellington, New Zealand Open Monday to Friday 7am to 5pm, Saturday 8am to 3pm +64 4 389 6777 After spending 12 years based in Newtown, just out of Wellington City, roaster Peoples Coffee has opened its second flagship café in the heart of Wellington’s CBD. “We really wanted to take what was so beautiful about [the Newtown café], an inclusive space serving great coffee with a simple complementary menu, and transplant it into the city,” Peoples Coffee Marketing Manager Jesse Finn says. “[Newtown started as] a little hole in the wall and over the years the space has really grown. Now it’s this fantastic café that attracts a real cross section of the community. This time, we can take everything that we’ve learnt and really hit the ground running with the new space.”

The BioGro Organic and B Corpcertified Peoples Coffee was founded in 2004 when sole owner Matt Lamason finished studying and chose to go travelling rather than go down a career path in politics.

“He went to Ethiopia and was really

ROMA BAR 9/11 Cavenagh St, Darwin, Northern Territory, 0800 Open Monday to Friday 7am to 3pm, Saturday 8am to 2pm, Sunday 8am to 1pm (08) 8981 6729 For more than four decades, Roma Bar has been a fixture of the Darwin CBD,

Phoebe’s family has owned and operated Roma Bar since 1989.

inspired by the people he met. One man in particular was Don Wilfredo, the namesake of our house blend,” Jesse says.

“He came back to Wellington and felt like he could do better by the farmers and communities he met.

“Our brand has always been tied to the people, those who work here at the roastery and the farmers and communities we source our coffee from.”

Peoples Coffee sources its fair trade, organic beans from a range of farms and cooperatives in Ethiopia, Uganda, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, and Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“Our head roaster René MaCaulay has been with us for 12 years now and he usually visits origin at least once a year.

He’s just returned from his most recent trip to Ethiopia,” Jesse says.

The Wellington store serves its Don Wilfredo blend, with a seasonal blend available too. On the bar sits a La Marzocco Linea PB three group espresso machine.

Peoples Coffee has a range of single origins on offer, which can be prepared via Fetco or Kalita pour over.

Jesse says the café has been well received by the community, particularly its coffee, fitout, and minimalist menu.

He attributes much of the quality of the

and since 1989, the café has been owned

by Phoebe Breyer-Menke’s parents.

In 2012, Phoebe bought out half of Roma Bar and now operates the café with her mother.

“What makes Roma Bar so special is that it’s been around for so long. Our core customer base are Darwin locals, and people who are interested in the history of the city,” Phoebe says.

“We’re right in the Darwin CBD, close to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the courts. We’ve always been known to have politicians sitting next to journalists, and our day to day regulars include judges having their breakfast before they go into work, and then coming back for lunch.”

Roma Bar serves Seven Miles coffee, distributed in the Northern Territory through Absolute Coffee, and has a great relationship with the company.

“About five years ago, we wanted to change the direction of our coffee and pull it up a bit higher,” Phoebe says.

“Seven Miles was coming into Darwin and it brought its Belaroma blend to us. They thought that was something that would really suit our brand, and it really did.”

Phoebe says the rich chocolatey flavour of the darker roast really suits the locals’ taste palates.

“In Darwin, we like that Italian-style

Peoples Lukes Lane is the second flagship venue of Peoples Coffee.

coffee to René. “[He] is an incredible roaster,” Jesse says. “The coffee coming out of these cafés is delicious and incredibly consistent. You can go in and always be sure you’re going to get a beautiful cup.”

Jesse, who was also responsible for hiring for the new flagship, believes the café’s team has successfully created a community space at the café.

“I really love a café where you can go in and feel at home. I see these staff, these great and awesome people, creating that atmosphere,” he says. “That is exactly what we hoped for.”

coffee, so Belaroma worked well for our customers,” she says. “We did taste tests with our regulars before deciding to move to Seven Miles, and it’s been really good.

We get lots of compliments on the coffee.”

Roma Bar serves an all-day breakfast menu with lunch specials changing day to day.

“We keep the menu quite simple but effective, because we find that our regulars like that, and it means they can eat there twice a day,” Phoebe says.

“We also offer really interesting specials based on what local produce is available. When it’s mango season, everything on the menu seems to have mango.”

A staple on Roma Bar’s menu is the Indian Breakfast, which consists of dahl served with yoghurt, and house-made roti and lime pickle.

“We’ve had the Indian Breakfast on the menu for around 25 years. It’s an interesting meal, and it’s very popular, which is why it has been on the menu for so long,” she says.

To Phoebe, the best aspect of operating a café in Darwin is the community feeling she shares with her regulars.

“I feel like it’s not just me serving customers, I’m serving my friends and family of Darwin,” she says. “Each of our regulars almost own a part of the café.”

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CAFÉ SCENE

Open by Duotone is David Yeo’s second venue, following the launch of his first café, Duotone, three years earlier.

OPEN BY DUOTONE 6/45 Francis St, Northbridge, Western Australia 6003 Open seven days 8am to 3pm, and Tuesday to Saturday 5pm until late (08) 9227 6961 David Yeo moved from Melbourne to Perth six years ago, with the intention of contributing to the same community atmosphere and appreciation for specialty coffee he found in Melbourne.

David’s ambitions became a reality with the unveiling of his new café, Open by Duotone, in June 2018.

Open by Duotone is David’s second venue, following the launch of his first café, Duotone, three years earlier. David says Open by Duotone does not have the same space limitations as his first café’s CBD location.

“Duotone is very popular with the locals, but it’s more of a small takeaway venue and we were only able to offer a few brunch items,” David says.

“A lot of our customers wanted us to open on weekends but [Duotone] is not really in a location that is suitable for that.”

Open by Duotone is located in Northbridge, an area David compares to Fitzroy in Melbourne.

“There’s quite a few nightclubs around here as well as nice restaurants

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and pubs,” David says. “I wanted a venue that we could open until late, and this area is one with a lot of night-time crowds.

“It made it possible to open a café/ bar that serves specialty coffee during the day and espresso martinis at night.”

Open by Duotone serves Zest Specialty Coffee’s African Mailman as its house blend.

“It’s a phenomenal coffee, one of my favourites,” David says. “It’s a perfect balance of flavours and acidity, good for

Open by Duotone boasts a courtyard where its owner hopes to host functions and events.

espresso or with milk.”

The coffee, sourced 80 per cent from El Salvador and 20 per cent from Ethiopia, has tasting notes of chocolate pudding, plum jam, maple syrup, cream, and berries.

The café rotates single origins from guest roasters on Fetco batch brew. At night, Open by Duotone uses these cooled coffees as the base for negroni cocktails.

“I want to make creative drinks.

Not only do we serve classic beverages, we’ve used trial and error to make things that are new,” David says.

Other cocktails David has created include an espresso-based white Russian, and an espresso martini made with soju, a Korean spirit.

Open by Duotone serves a Korean/ Japanese inspired menu alongside its coffee and cocktails. David says the Omurice, Japanese-style smoked chicken and fried rice topped with an omelette and mushroom demiglace, and the Korean short rib are customer favourites.

“We marinate the Korean short rib in a soy-based galbi sauce made with our own ingredients. After that, we slow braze them and finish with a charcoal,” he says.

“The Korean short rib is my mum’s recipe. It’s a traditional meal we’d eat to celebrate new years or thanksgiving.”

David hopes Open by Duotone can become a meeting place for Perth specialty coffee industry.

“We have a big courtyard, with an 80 to 90-person capacity,” he says. “I really want to utilise the space for more events and to collaborate with other cafés, restaurants, and brands to come here, and socialise and connect while trying good food and coffee.”

GREEN COFFEE PARTNER TO AUSTRALIAN ROASTERS SINCE 1987

UGANDA NEW SEASON

MOUNT ELGON GIBUZALE From a sustainable coffee scheme operated by our sister company in Uganda, Kyagalanyi Coffee, involving over 400 small family farms.

Farmers are supported by Kyagalanyi’s 37 field operatives who provide practical advice on improved farm management, including plant rejuvenation, use of organic/non organic fertilisers, pest/ disease control, climate change adaption and erosion control.

All Gibuzale coffee is grown between 1150 – 2200 metres and handpicked.

This is a true speciality coffee that’s juicy, has lovely balanced acidity along with red apple, caramel, black tea and dried figs.

Packed in roaster friendly 30kg bags.

More details on coficom.com.au

CONTACT 02 9809 6266 dariusz@coficom.com.au / john@coficom.com.au coficom.com.au

FEBRUARY 2019

A World-Class Coffee Magazine

The right to play Stepping out with confidence and courage

Cafe Imports’ Ever Meister asks the big questions

No death to coffee Backing technology with science and passion

Uganda’s unlimited potential

37 ISSN 1449-2547

02

9 771449 254002

DAIRY & DAIRY ALTERNATIVES PROMO FEATURE

APRIL/19

OUR BRAND PROMISES We offer you the best exposure to decision makers We provide the best platform to showcase your product We will be the best external marketing partner you’ll ever have

The Australian dairy and dairy alternative industry is a competative market. To help make the right purchasing decision for your business, BeanScene’s April 2019 edition will look at the industry’s top players dedicated to producing quality dairy and dairy alternative products.

Australia’s coffee drinking marketplace has a dominant milk-based culture, and aligning with the best milk brand is cruicial to selling a quality milk-based coffee product.

A range of dairy alternative products goes hand in hand. More than ever café customers are demanding choice, which can be the key difference between retaining new customers and attracting new ones.

Tell our readership of café owners and roasters about your unique and latest product range.

BOOKING DEADLINE: 22 MARCH 2019 Book now: Camilo Molina | 0481 736 890 camilo.molina@primecreative.com.au

FLAVOUR FASCINATION

Aryan Aqajani is a roaster and Q-Grader at Zest Specialty Coffee.

Riding the curve Zest Specialty Coffee’s Aryan Aqajani dissects roasting variables and explains why the time spent between roasts is as crucial as monitoring temperature throughout the roasting process.

F

or a barista, finding out all the things that can massively influence the end flavour of coffee, such as origin, processing, and brewing, is game changing. As a coffee roaster, I’ve had a similar moment.

Although we know coffee flavour is developed further during the roasting process, we’re not seeing enough transparent discussions about roasting in the coffee community, not the way we do about brewing and equipment.

I’ve been lucky to roast on many different machines throughout my roasting career. While the small but intricate differences (machine to machine, roast to roast, bean to bean) can be a frustrating learning curve when you have production deadlines to meet, consistency and mastering the variables becomes the holy grail that drives you, and curiosity takes over.

The variables are almost greater when roasting than they are in brewing.

Similar to espresso machines, roasting machines have their differences. We have drum, fluid-bed, centrifugal, tangential, and hot air roasters, and interestingly, not all drum roasters are equal. They are built with different materials, with various heat application. Beyond the machine, there are so many other variables affecting flavour outcome.

The density and water activity in the bean, as well as the processing of the green coffee, has great effect

on roasting. We closely monitor the duration of the drying phase (when coffee turns from green to yellow), the duration of Maillard phase (when coffee turns from yellow to brown until the first crack), and the development time (from first crack to when the roast is finished). When aiming for complete consistency we also analyse the rate of rise, which is how fast the bean temperature changes over a specific time.

Temperature is key. By considering batch size, total roast time, and bean density, we choose different charging temperatures. And depending on the roast degree, a certain end temperature.

One thing I’ve always kept a close eye on is what we call temperature probes, which monitor the bean temperature inside the drum, the inlet temperature (the air coming to the drum), and the exhaust temperature (the air going out of the roaster).

Nowadays, specialty roasters are using logging software to keep track of these temperatures, which allow us to “profile” coffee beans, and taste and tweak to get the best out of them, time after time.

Keeping track of the temperatures, how they change, and the time it takes is integral. I am able to go back to these profiles to try and replicate the flavour profile as closely as possible each time, which means I learn even more about the variables and go even deeper into flavour appreciation.

During my production roasting shifts, I even discovered that the time between roast batches, when the coffee is cooling, can massively influence the thermal energy of the roaster. Depending on the batch size and how efficient the fan is, the cooling process can take few minutes, and this consequently affects the flavour of the coffee with each roast. This discovery has now changed the way I roast.

It became clearer to me, after several times analysing the roast profiles, that perhaps this time spent between roasts is as crucial to monitor as any other variables throughout the roasting process.

This became more obvious as I started to scrutinise my roasts. I found that usually the roasted batch with longer waiting time tasted more flat and dull, and lacked vibrancy, while the batch with a shorter gap between roasts was more lively.

Since then, I’ve attached a small timer next to the cooling tray to monitor the time spent for cooling the coffee, and also the gap between roasting batches. Comparing these times next to the roasting qualities, over a period of time, has helped me get a step closer to more consistent roasts.

With every new discovery we’re better able to control that consistency, and in turn, impress more coffee drinkers with the complex flavour from around the globe.

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TECH TALK

Maurizio Marcocci is the Director of Service Sphere.

Top office solutions No barista? No worries. Service Sphere’s Maurizio Marcocci shares the best automated machines that combine convenience and quality without leaving the office.

E

veryone deserves good coffee.

However, for many office workers, access to professional equipment and skilled baristas is restricted. Some choose to make their own morning coffee at home and try not to spill it on the peak-hour train. Others enjoy revert to drive-through options, while some commit to getting up 15 minutes earlier just to detour to their regular café in order to start the day right.

But this option is costly, and often time consuming. Then comes the afternoon slump with little to no extra time to exit the building or convince the boss that taking a 15-minute coffee break won’t turn into half an hour.

While many offices try to address their employee coffee needs with instant options, vending machines, and lines of pods stacked up on the kitchen bench, quality can still be an issue, especially if no-one knows the finer points of coffee making. This is where automation becomes invaluable to an office’s coffee requirements, and thankfully we’re in an era where it doesn’t just mean convenience, but quality and consistent production too.

If your office isn’t lucky enough to have its own on site barista, don’t fret. I’m going to share with you my top-rated automated machines that I truly believe offer the same skills as any good café can.

The Eversys Cameo c’2 features Eversys’e’Barista system, which does all the steps a barista would take to make coffee.

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EVERSYS

The Swiss manufacturer is respected worldwide for its super automated machines, but if I was to choose just one model from the Eversys range, I can’t look past the Cameo c’2, its most advanced espresso machine to date.

This machine bridges the gap between traditional and super-automatic technology with its unique design, functionality, and exceptional coffee quality.

The Eversys Cameo features the most advanced Eversys technology, including a new touchscreen interface, designed for intuitive navigation, ease of use, and simple temperature control. Its sophisticated electronic milk texturing system allows operators to create the perfect milk foam and texture for a comprehensive menu of bespoke milk- based drinks.

With Eversys’ e’Barista system, all the steps a barista would take to make coffee are programmed into the machine.

Stopping just short of placing a barista in the unit, Eversys has dissected all of the key movements and functions associated to the making of espresso-based beverages, and assimilated them into an intelligent electronic interface.

Beans are ground with Eversysdesigned ceramic blades driven by a powerful yet quiet motor. The motor’s heat is channelled away from the coffee beans via a set of fans to maintain their quality, and an electronic tamper guarantees consistent quality in the 24-gram brewing chamber.

Dedicated coffee boilers, separate from the water/steam boiler, provide productivity and temperature stability, essential parts of in-cup quality. A reverse extraction brewing system optimises

also remotely communicate with the S30, making it quick and easy to upgrade software, adjust recipes, and personalise interface images.

An automatic washing system manages daily wash cycles, ensuring the machine is well maintained despite having various operators throughout the day. The system cleans deeply and efficiently, ensuring maximum hygiene at the touch of a button.

LARHEA

La Cimbali’s latest model, the S30 features two stainless steel boilers.

powder efficiency as the espresso is produced.

All products are pre-programmed to be dispensed in a consistent and efficient manner, placing seamless productivity and quality at the forefront of the customer experience.

Eversys’ Push telemetry system also gives operators the ability to modify machine parametres remotely, driving down maintenance costs and minimising downtime. When maintenance is required, however, the Eversys range with modular format means trained personnel can simply exchange modules to expedite repairs Simple.

DECISION TIME?

LA CIMBALI

The latest model from Italy’s La Cimbali, the S30, emphasises customisation and usability, with its touchscreen display allowing operators to customise a wide variety of beverages. Users can even add new images to display beverage options with a USB stick, providing a whole new level of customisation and branding for any business.

The S30 is equipped with two boilers, made from stainless steel with external insulation. The first generates steam and hot water, while the second is dedicated to the preparation of coffee-based beverages.

The coffee boiler performs better and allows for more consistency in the delivery of different drinks. The patented Smart Boiler system optimises the performance of hot water and steam, maintaining

With its LaRhea Business Line, the Rheavendors Group aims to set a new standard for tabletop coffee machines.

The range boasts heightened performance and a sleek new design that fits into even the most elegant settings.

The Business Line consists of four models to cater to a range of requirements in terms of space and output. The BL eC is a slim, compact model perfect for tight spaces. The BL Grande VHO provides extra capacity and options for its users’ beverages. It features an external transparent bean hopper, acting like an open invitation to enjoy fresh-ground coffee.

All models are equipped with a Variflex brewer, which adapts to the quantity of ground coffee required for the drink selection to make an optimal dose.

A unique feature of LaRhea is its ability to produce instant coffee, speeding up the process when workers are really on the go.

Offices can choose between black or white side panel options for a machine that best aesthetically matches the workplace.

LaRhea’s optional Tm-on service system enables service partners to immediately check any malfunction or error message via telemetry. Since the machines are connected online and around the clock, service partners can promptly provide a new set up or modify dosing values without having to appear onsite.

LaRhea’s Grande VHO is a slim, compact model, suitable for tight office spaces.

production during office rush hours.

The machine includes a double hopper for coffee, holding 1.0 to 1.2 kilograms each, and incorporates a soluble hot chocolate system for those employees who like variety.

Thanks to La Cimbali’s integrated bi-directional Wi-Fi system, users can

So what’s it going to be? Gone are the days of workplaces offering employees jars of instant dried granules and hot water.

Our cities have become discerning coffee hotspots in their own right, and that level of quality is appreciated right down the production chain from the cafés to its customers. Employees are seeking our quality options, and so are their clients.

It’s time we bring quality coffee to the office level, and contrary to what past office machinery has looked like, there is now a dedicated and affordable line of machines with new technology that workplaces should consider. It’s an investment in the happiness of your staff members and their tastebuds.

For more information, visit servicesphere.com.au

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ESPRESSO YOURSELF

Shinsaku Fukayama is the 2018 ASCA Australian Latte Art Champion.

Dragonfly Shinsaku Fukayama presents his final BeanScene column and sets one last challenge with a flying, fancy favourite.

W

here has the year gone? I know we say that at the end of each year but 2018 really was a blur of events and achievements for me.

It all started a year ago at the Melbourne International Coffee Expo when I was crowned the 2018 ASCA Australian Latte Art Champion.

And just like that, it’s time to say goodbye to the crown and pass the baton onto the next worthy artist who, like me, gets to experience all the wonderful opportunities and challenges that comes with winning a national title. My years of hard work certainly paid off. I started writing my first BeanScene column as an Australian champion, and I leave you as the fourth best latte artist in the world – well, only for a few more months.

It’s been a pleasure to take you though some of my favourite latte art designs, many of which I created for the nationals and world championships, and set you a challenge each issue. I was

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amazed to see how many people attempted my patterns and sent me images of your replicated art.

It just goes to show the impact one person can have. I’m still happy if all you’ve learnt is new latte art terminology or a handholding technique. Now it’s time to put all the skills you’ve gained and look for your own inspiration – from experiences or images – and put it to practice in the cup. You can only try.

In the meantime, I’m going to show you my Dragonfly design.

This pattern isn’t just about the insect but creating a picture, which is what I love doing most – setting a scene and making it as realistic as I can. The trick to this pattern is all about the angle you pour, and holding the cup in your fingertips because it’s one of my most challenging yet – we’re going to do it in one continuous pouring action. Don’t forget, practice makes perfect. If you don’t succeed, try and try again – I did for years, and look at where it’s got me.

Goodbye and good luck.

1.

Start with your handle at 12 o’clock. Build your base and pour a three-leaf rosetta with long S wiggle movements down the right hand side of the cup. Pull up through the pattern.

3.

Rotate the cup clockwise so that the handle is now facing six o’clock. Aim your pour at two o’clock and pour a sixleaf rosetta down the cup. Pull through.

5.

Pour another C shape or reverse C shape to connect the two shapes. It’s important to make sure they’re circular.

Pull up through the centre.

7.

Add the dragonfly head by pouring one dot of milk where the wings meet. Then make the body of the dragonfly with a single drag of your pour behind the head.

2.

With you hand in the same position, pour a seven-leaf rosetta down the left hand side of the cup. Pull up through the design.

4.

In the same position, around five o’clock, pour a small C shape or drag your pour in a half moon shape. This will create the dragonfly’s wing.

6.

Underneath the first big rosetta you poured, drag your pour from the left of the right of the cup. Add a branch by pouring a short, straight drag down the cup on the right hand side of the branch.

8.

To enhance the picture, add a dot of milk between the branches. I like to think of these as coffee cherries on the tree. Finally, pour a large dot for the sun. Turn the handle back to 12 o’clock, and there you have it.

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TRAINING TACTICS

Kyle Rutten is the National Training Manager of Suntory Coffee Australia.

New year, new you Kyle Rutten talks career development and how to put your 2019 professional goals in place for a year of growth and accomplishment.

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ew Year’s celebrations have well and truly finished and some of you may have already drafted resolutions to keep your personal and professional goals on track for the year ahead. The start of a new year presents no better time than to evaluate your career, so ask yourself: what do you want?

Where do you want to be by the end of 2019? What would be your ideal job?

What do you want? Create an end-of-year goal and work towards achieving it with a monthly action plan.

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Even if you’re dead-set in love with your current position, what skills or qualities do you want to develop? Whatever your goals are, you can get there if you start identifying them.

“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” It’s a simple statement used in financial planning and stress management, but I believe it holds merit when it comes to goal setting. So let’s look at how to tackle an elephant together.

Step one: Create a big goal, one that’s exciting and will help drive you forward throughout the year. This is the “elephant”. But remember, everyone’s elephants will be different sizes. I’d recommend putting down a thing or things that will have an impact on your own life but also that of your team, company, or group that you work in.

This will improve the chances of those around you supporting it. Don’t make your “elephant” too big. The grander the

goal, the more likely it is you’ll find an excuse why it can’t or won’t be done.

Examples could be: get a promotion in your company, compete in a specific competition and place in the top three, or maybe just win the whole thing. Grow your individual sales or your team’s results by 25 per cent, or something as simple as finally being able to smash out that five-leaf rosetta latte art, or to decrease the amount of waste your café produces.

Step two: You need to put down some clear steps or actions to achieve your goal – that’s the bite sized pieces.

You might to do this by spending more time with the people you can learn from and grow with, or by taking a particular course or reading a specific book.

When I was younger I read Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins, and there was one line I will never forget.

“If you want to get better at something, spend time with somebody who is the best at it.” This caused me to find people who were great at latte art, such as Matt Lakajev and Jibbi Little, and people who were great at extraction and calibration, such as Trevor Hotten.

Step three: Prioritise your “bite-size-

D

pieced goals” into daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. If we use the five-leaf rosetta example, then a daily goal could be to practice at least 10 minutes every morning. Weekly could be watching videos of other latte artists doing that pour, sending videos, and getting feedback from a friend who you know can do it well. Then monthly could be locking in three hours of training with an expert friend to help you work on pouring that pattern.

Step four: It’s also important to be clear on things that you shouldn’t do or should do less in order to achieve your goals. For example, spend less time on emails each day, be more specific, block out a certain time in the day to do emails, and hold yourself accountable to sticking to that. Why not try responding to emails between 10:30am to 11am then again at 3:30 to 4pm instead of letting them distract you throughout the day? Devote the remaining time to your work and the extra time you’ve gained towards your goal.

HELPFUL TIPS: •A ccountability. Find someone to regularly ask you how you are tracking

eveloped in conjuction with the BeanScene magazine website, The Long & Short of It news EDM is dedicated to keeping the coffee industry abreast of the latest relevant news as it breaks, in addition to providing an electronic interface for the viewing of BeanScene magazine content. To keep up to date with fresh, informative and relevant content, register your details at www.beanscenemag.com.au

towards your goal. This could be a manager or boss, a friend or a partner.

•R eevaluate. Set a time to look at your plan and goal progression. Quarterly might be a good time to check up on yourself and the steps you’ve taken towards achieving your target. Like any good pilot who maps out their flight path, there may be adjustments made a long the way. This is OK. In fact, you may find you achieve your goal sooner than you thought.

•R ecord. Keep a journal, record, photos, or diary. Part of achieving anything is enjoying and remembering the journey.

I trust that if you are reading this that you have some level of desire to make a change or improvement this year. At the end of the day, it’s you who is responsible for what you will or won’t achieve, which will only be determined by your work ethic and passion. Hard work beats talent every time. Be intentional, be focused, and be honest in your approach. That way, no matter what obstacles may stand in your way, you will end the year closer, if not having achieved what you set out to do.

Good luck.

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75

R&D LAB

Dr. Monika Fekete is the Founder of Coffee Science Lab.

Turn up the heat Dr. Monika Fekete investigates the chemical and sensory effects of different brew water temperatures on espresso extraction.

Figure 1. Thermal image of espresso extraction.

D

o you feel like a refreshing cold brew in the summer heat? Or what about an iced latte? Whichever you prefer, there are a range of factors that contribute to their unique tastes, and the temperature they are prepared at is certainly a big one. While it’s easy to appreciate the difference between cold and hot brewed coffee, it takes careful investigation to dissect how fine-tuning brew water temperatures can affect physical and sensory outcomes.

Espresso coffee is commonly brewed between 90°C to 95°C. In a recent study, I looked at how five different temperature settings affected the extraction of one espresso blend. With the help of a very patient barista, 20 double espressos were prepared at each brew water temperature setting of 90°C, 92.5°C, and 95°C (lets call these flat profiles because the brew temperature is kept constant), as well as an upward (90°C to 95°C) and a downward (95°C to 90°C) gradient profile. The grinder was dialled in to yield close to 40 grams of liquid from a 19-gram dose in 27 to 32

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Figure 2. Results of physical measurements.

seconds. The temperature of the coffee grinds was recorded immediately. The double shot volumetric setting was used to ensure that equal amounts of water were added to each dose of ground coffee. We then took a range of measurements to assess extraction.

It was immediately clear that brew temperature had a strong effect on the shot weight. Have a look at the top graph in Figure 2, focusing on the flat profiles. As the brew water temperature increased, the shot weight decreased. Or in other words, increasing temperature decreased the flow rate through the puck, a finding supported

by previous work by researchers Petracco and Liverani. But why?

Lower flow rates can be caused by smaller particle sizes. Imagine water flowing through sand rather than pebbles.

However, in our case, particle size was unchanged. Another thing that can decreased flow rate is a higher pressure of gases trapped inside the porous material.

This makes sense: the pressure of carbon dioxide and volatile aromas inside the grinds increases with temperature, restricting the liquid flow. On top of this, swelling of the grind particles upon contact with moisture can also lower flow rates

Figure 3. Caffeine concentration in the early, middle, and late stages of an espresso shot. Insert shows the variability of total caffeine concentration.

(Hillel, 2004). This certainly happens in coffee, however, I haven’t found any studies on whether the particles swell more or less at different temperatures.

Now for the gradients. The downward gradient profile was close to the middle 92.5°C “flat” profile, as we would expect, since these have the same average brewing temperature. The upwards gradient profile, however, yielded significantly higher shot weights (42 +/- 0.5 grams).

This is surprising, but may have a simple explanation, at least in part: the temperature of the grinds.

In our experiment, the five profiles were used in randomised order and the upward gradient profile happened to be first, while the grinder was still warming up. The somewhat lower temperature of the grinds in the first group (45 +/- 1°C compared to 47.5 +/- 1°C later on), led to a slightly lower extraction temperature, resulting in an increased flow rate. That said, a 2.5°C difference in grind temperature is not quite enough to fully account for the outstandingly high shot weights measured for the upwards profile.

There’s room for more investigation, but we can conclude that a few degrees change in the temperature of the water and the grinds have a significant effect on how a shot turns out.

The second chart in Figure 2 shows that total dissolved solids (TDS) values roughly follow an opposite trend to shot weight: shots that stop a bit shorter are also more concentrated. Extraction yield is calculated taking both shot weight and TDS into account, therefore these values also principally reflect the effects of temperature on flow rate. We also tracked how the different temperature profiles affected caffeine content of each espresso.

The insert panel of Figure 3 shows the total amount of caffeine measured in

three randomly selected full shots from each set representing the five temperature profiles. These data correlate with the corresponding total extraction yields to some extent, however the variation between samples is too large to draw clear conclusions. The caffeine concentration of coffee beans is known to be highly variable within a blend, and even between individual beans, so this may be a confounding factor.

Due to the high solubility of caffeine, we expect that most of the available caffeine will be extracted early on in the shot. To test this, we also prepared a triplicate series of split shots, separating the first, second, and third ~13 grams of each espresso, then measured the caffeine concentration. Figure 3 clearly shows that 60 to 65 per cent of total caffeine is indeed extracted into the first third of the shot volume for all profiles,

followed by 20 to 30 per cent in the second split and 10 to 20 per cent in the last one. So, if you’re having a 25 to 30 gram ristretto rather than a 40-gram double shot, you’re consuming 15 per cent less caffeine on average.

Sensory outcomes were tested with the help of a seven-member panel, who blindtasted a total of 15 long black style coffees prepared using the five profiles in triplicate, in a randomised order. All judges tasted the same samples using cupping spoons.

As you can see in Figure 4, the flat 95°C profile scored the worst in general. The flat 92.5°C profile performed well in terms of sweetness and acidity but fell behind for balance, aftertaste and overall scores.

The flat 90°C profile achieved relatively high scores for balance and body, but it was not well regarded in terms of the other attributes.

The two gradient profiles achieved the highest overall scores. The downward profile showed high scores for body and acidity, but lower on sweetness and balance. The upward profile was the most well rounded with consistently high scores on most attributes, and was the overall favourite.

In conclusion, the largest impact of brew water temperature is its effect on flow rate. Higher brew temperatures lead to a slower flow rate, which, in consequence, results in a more concentrated beverage.

Both upwards and downwards gradient temperature profiles showed interesting modulations in the sensory experience.

I would like to thank Rancilio for providing the Rancilio Specialty RS1 espresso machine for this experiment (see more page 29), Craig Simon for the space at Criteria Coffee, along with expert advice, and the panel and baristas for volunteering their time to help with this experiment.

Great coffee is a team effort.

Figure 4. The gradient profiles performed best in the sensory tests.

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ASTCA

David Peasley is an Australian coffee agronomist and Australian Subtropical Coffee Association representative.

Shaping the future – part III ASTCA’s David Peasley on Australia’s search for a new coffee cultivar to make coffee growing a thriving agricultural industry of the future.

O

vercoming data free observations on Australia’s coffee production was a big hurdle in the early days.

Research in the subtropics during the 1980s and 1990s was challenged by such beliefs that coffee “must have shade to produce high quality” that “hand-picked coffee is better quality than machine harvested coffee”, or that “high altitude is required to grow the best quality coffee”.

Many of these observations were dispelled when a professional taste panel in Sydney in the early 1990s blind taste-tested samples of green beans from field trials in the Tweed Valley.

These taste tests soon showed that coffee quality was not simply a function of altitude, variety, or location, but a combination of all these including soil type, microclimate, and the coolness of the ripening period, which could be achieved at high altitude, high latitude, or under shade.

Having studied coffee growing and harvesting in Brazil, Hawaii, Sri Lanka, and Colombia together with our own observations in Australia, I was convinced that German author Berhard Rothfos had it right in 1985 when he said “quality does not depend on the coffee’s origin or method of preparation”.

“First class coffee is a product of care, experience and accuracy at every single stage of production.” Another quote I found summed it up nicely: “Altitude itself is less important than the interaction of altitude, latitude, aspect and slope, and their combined effect on temperature and light.”

The Australian Subtropical Coffee Association (ASTCA) recognised the importance of these factors affecting coffee quality and has focused its promotion on the “terroir” of the region.

The field trials in the 1980s and early 1990s resulted in the K7 cultivar being selected from a range of 19 Arabica varieties, mostly collected from the collection at Kamerunga Research Station with a local selection of Condong Range Bourbon included.

This was probably a local adaption of the original plantings in the 19th century. Through the Australian Coffee Industry R&D team, Queensland Department of Primary Industries researchers Ted Winston and James Drinnan greatly assisted the development of the NSW industry with their technical expertise and energy.

After more than five years of conducting trials in northern New South Wales, the K7 variety from Kenya showed the most potential. It had many attributes including rust resistance, suitability for machine harvesting, high productivity, and liquoring quality.

It is still the dominant variety in the subtropics today. However, the K7 has a weakness, which was only discovered in the mid 1990s. It has now proved to be too vigorous. Over the past decade, the need to prune the trees regularly to maintain productivity and suitability for machine harvesting has threatened the viability of coffee growing in this region.

Producers who simply grew coffee or had it processed off-farm to the green bean stage found it difficult to survive. Recognising this obstacle, the ASTCA began the search for a new

range of semi-dwarf varieties, which did not require regular pruning. It met with Southern Cross University (SCU) in 2014, and with financial support from the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, now Agrifutures, began the search to find a semi-dwarf variety with the attributes of K7.

The project funded my study tour of Colombia and Brazil in 2015 to investigate coffee breeding programs run by Cenicafe Research Centre in Colombia, and the Coffee IAC Research Centre in Brazil. Six varieties met the criteria for suitability for the subtropics in Australia, and access to these varieties is still being negotiated.

On another front, ASTCA and SCU have now agreed to become part of the World Coffee Research Variety Evaluation Program to introduce a wide range of varieties and evaluate their suitability for Australian conditions (see June 2018 edition of BeanScene).

So, after a rich early coffee producing history more than 130 years ago, its demise in the 1920s, and a resurgence in the 1990s, the Australian coffee industry in the subtropics is again at a crossroads. We know we can produce high quality coffee without the major pests and diseases, which affect coffee overseas, and the demand is there. There is no danger of over production as there is limited suitable land for machine harvesting and frostfree production.

All that is needed is a new variety suitable to our environment and machine harvesting to make coffee growing an attractive enterprise for new entrants.

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ASCA

Kieran Westlake is the President of the Australian Specialty Coffee Association.

Full focus

Competitions are one thing but association growth is another.

In 2019, ASCA is about offering more than just trophies.

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IMAGES: Jeff Hann

H

ot on the heels of the 2019 ASCA Australian Coffee Championships at MICE2019, ASCA is already looking ahead to the 2020 competition year.

This year, ASCA will be launching its competition season with one of the most highly anticipated national finals – the 2019 Australian Coffee in Good Spirits Championship (CIGS). We’ve always had a good record in this category, especially with Matt Perger of St. Ali winning the world title in 2014, so we were thrilled to see the competition’s return last year after a year off. It was incredible to see so much enthusiasm for this event, and the level of talent was proved with Ona Coffee’s Danny Wilson placing third in the World CIGS Championship in Brazil last November.

ASCA will be combining the national competition, to be held in the first half of 2019, with the successful Coffee Chain Challenge – an event that has seen Australia’s leading coffee chains compete head to head for the title of the best in the country. It is thrilling to see so many mainstream consumer brands embracing specialty coffee and an increasingly high level of care and detail they put into preparing their drinks.

With their help, we can educate even more consumers about specialty coffee.

But its not just competitions we have to look forward to this year.

ASCA is firmly committed to providing educational and up-skilling opportunities for our members.

Our talented judges have been invited to participate in a World Coffee Events accreditation workshop in Melbourne in March 2019. This will provide them with the opportunity to grow their professional skills and contribute to the global industry.

We’re also partnering with Genovese

Coffee once again to bring you the Eleonora Genovese Women in Coffee Award. With alumni including former Roasters Guild Head Lucy Ward and current Board Member Melissa Caia, this award recognises those who are simply outstanding in their field.

Nominations can be submitted yearround via the ASCA website, with finalists and winners for 2019 to be announced shortly.

In 2019, ASCA will be bringing even more value to its members. We’ve teamed up with Member Advantage to provide members with exclusive discounts, access to complimentary products and services and more. If you’re not yet a member, now’s the perfect time to sign up.

By the time this edition of BeanScene hits the shelves, we will be granted with new barista champions, leaving just a few months for our Brewers Cup

The Australian Coffee in Good Spirits Championship will return in the first half of 2019.

and Barista Champions to prepare for the world stage at the Specialty Coffee Association expo in Boston in April.

A big thank you to our generous judges, volunteers, and sponsors for helping bring the Australian Championships to life and supporting ASCA’s vision to grow the specialty coffee community and our barista talent.

In particular, thanks to Vitasoy for supporting the Australian Barista Championship, Parmalat Professional for supporting the Australian Latte Art Championship, Cup eXchange for supporting the Australian Cup Tasters Championship, and AMC for supporting the Australian Roasting Championship.

To sign up for our FREE newsletter delivered every month, visit www. australianspecialtycoffee.com.au

NZSCA

Emma McDougall is the Communications and Administration Co-ordinator of the NZSCA.

Triumph over adversity New Zealand’s coffee champions reflect on what they learnt at the World Coffee Championships held in Brazil in November.

E

ven with the countless preparation and practice hours required to compete at world level, not every competitor will win. With the financial and mental investment high, what happens when the competition doesn’t go to plan? Stepping onto the stage with the backing of sponsors, family, friends, employers, colleagues, and customers is daunting, even more so on the world stage.

With the right mindset, competitions can be richly rewarding, regardless of the result.

With intuitive skills and an impressive coaching ability, Masako Yamamoto coached and travelled with 2017 and 2018 New Zealand Latte Art Champion Leo Li to the World Championships in Brazil.

Masako says her background as a barista trainer gives her the invaluable skill to identify a student or staff’s strengths and weaknesses, and help bring them out.

“I think that any great coach has the ability to see the potential in a person and help develop their skills,” she says.

With Leo placing a credible seventh in the World Latte Art Championship (WLAC) in 2017, expectations were high.

“This year, we practised a lot more.

We also had a lot of help from some very experienced judges. I feel as though Leo’s routine was much better [in 2018]. His technique as a barista has grown, and the competition is moving much more towards needing to be a multi-skilled barista, much like the Barista Championships but with a focus obviously on latte art,” Masako says.

While there were some weaknesses in the performance known to the team, Masako says in hindsight they should have spent more time addressing them, and trying some different strategies.

“You never really know how it’s going to play out when you try a new strategy.

It’s always a risk, but you learn from it,” she says.

Leo remains optimistic, saying his ability all comes down to practice.

“Next time, I will spend time designing and practicing more difficult latte art patterns. Then practice, practice, and more practice,” he says.

Between competitions, Leo says the best thing he gained from his WLAC experience was improvement in his skills, particularly in controlling milk flow. He encourages aspiring competitors to stay composed on stage.

“Remain calm in the competition and believe in yourself,” Leo says.

Stuart Hargie represented NZ for a second time on the World Cup Tasters stage. He says many things needed to align on the day in order to become the champion. Unfortunately for Stuart, when it came time to compete, his competition cups were deemed unsuitable, so he had to change times and compete at the end of the day.

“I thought I was prepared and relaxed until my competition time came. You think, ‘this is what I do every day, just pick the different cup’, which is easy to say until you’re standing on the world competition stage. It’s a mental game as well as sensory,” Stu says.

“Learning more about controlling the mental game, and how to handle pressure situations, will benefit me in the future both personally and professionally.”

Stu’s tenacity to compete every year has netted mixed results. He swore he retired from the stage, though it wasn’t long before he suggested the possibility of a comeback.

“A few months down, I would love to take the challenge on again and see if I can beat the nerves and improve my performance,” he says.

Stu says spending time at the Belo Horizonte expo, International Coffee Week, was also an interesting experience, which was more producer-focused than on roasters and machinery. What he and Masako also admired was the opportunity to catch up with fellow industry members.

“One of the best things about travelling to the competitions and meeting people within the same profession from all over the world is that your perspective on the ‘world of coffee’ expands. I think it helps reinforce your own identity and where that fits, whether that’s as a company or as an individual,” she says.

Although there were no podium finishers on the day, our NZ champions have shown that by immersing themselves in the competition experience, they were able to find inspiration and motivation. We are very proud.

Thanks to our amazing sponsors who make the NZ national events happen in order to get our competitors to these international events.

Next up on the calendar is the NZ Cup Tasters Championship, which will be held in Auckland at Ozone, Grey Lynn on 3 May, followed by the Meadow Fresh NZ Latte Art Championship on 5 May at La Marzocco, Parnell. The winners will fly to Berlin in June, thanks to NZSCA’s generous sponsors.

For more information on the New Zealand Specialty Coffee Association, or to join, visit www.nzsca.org

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E-SCENE

Every edition we highlight BeanScene’s digital coffee community, hearing from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram followers.

For more information, visit www.beanscenemag.com.au ‘Like’ us on Facebook/BeanSceneCoffeeMag

HARRY KOLOTAS

When my wife and I decided to open our café, Cavalier Specialty Coffee, we wanted the service, coffee, and food experience to be above and beyond. For that, we needed to find a coffee bean that best represented Cavalier. After tasting many different types of coffee, Marvell Street Coffee Roasters’ tasting notes of malt, caramel, and chocolate best represented the perfect cup for us.

I don’t get to travel and coffee-hunt as much as I would like, but the best part about owning your place is how much research and tweaking you can do with your own coffee. I’m pretty happy to say that I start all of my mornings with Marvell Street and I don’t think that will change for a long time.

The industry has definitely grown with more people being open minded about their cup of coffee. Gone are the days of the dark roasted blends. Flavour is really at the forefront of coffee in Australia.

Image: Imstillhungry.net

ANITA NASERI

The first coffee I ordered when I came to Australia was a flat white from Koko Black. I’d heard that was the fancier version of a latte that Melburnians like to drink. I couldn’t really tell the difference at the time but it opened me up to all the possibilities the Melbourne café scene had to offer. Living in northern Melbourne and working in the east, there’s no shortage of great places to get your caffeine fix, with a couple standouts being Humble Rays in Carlton and Axil Coffee Roasters in Hawthorn. But my absolute favourite has to be Higher Ground in the CBD. I’d never been to a place with such a cool design that had food and coffee that complemented each other so nicely. I can’t wait to see where my coffee journey takes me next.

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BAHA JAMALI

Hi, my name is Baha. I am 32 years old and my favourite coffee is Campos.

I love it. I’ve tried a lot different roasted coffee but honestly, I have to say Campos is the best. I enjoy drinking cappuccinos – soy cappuccinos are my favourite, and my favourite coffee places to visit are in Alexandria and Newton in Sydney.

I am a driver at the moment but one day I would very much love to open a café.

Each morning I drink at least one coffee to get me ready for the day. A good coffee makes your day beautiful.

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WE WANT YOU!

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We’d love to see it. Email a 150-word bio about your love of coffee, your favourite coffee moment, and a little about yourself with a high-resolution image (1MB or greater) to BeanScene Editor Sarah Baker: sarah.baker@primecreative.com.au

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