Tabla de contenidos para April 2020 en BeanScene

Three years ago, War on Waste brought the Australian community’s attention to the billions of single-use coffee cups that end up in landfill. Since then, many people, businesses, and the wider industry have looked at how the reduce their footprint. One Australian business that is looking hard at its own sustainability is Ona Coffee. In February, the Canberran roaster announced #giveupthecup, a campaign to remove single-use disposables from its supply chain and encourage other businesses to do the same. This inspired BeanScene to feature a reusable cup on its cover for the first time. To host the photoshoot with resident photographer Blake Storey, Ona Coffee recommended we visit one of its Melbourne accounts, Calēre Coffee. For the winning shot, we chose to go with a forebearer of the reusable revolution,…

The aroma of Malaysian spices wafting through the door of Diana Chan’s house is tantalising. She’s knee-deep in preparations for her dinner party with Australian culinary icons and MasterChef family members including Matt Preston, Anna Polyviou, and Khan Ong. Her kitchen bench is laden with traditional Malaysian dishes in the works, such beef rendang, a hong bak, black pepper crayfish, sambal prawn, tempeh goreng, and cucumber salad. There’s just a few hours left until her guests arrive, but Diana’s not the least bit worried. She experienced pressure far greater when she appeared on the 2017 season of MasterChef Australia and defeated Ben Ungermann by one point in the grand finale. “I’m used to cooking under pressure. Preparation is key,” she says. “MasterChef was an experience of a lifetime. It feels…

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 role, Kieran is excited to create opportunities and pathways for ASCA members. He is also a member of the Specialty Coffee Association and a certified food service professional. Babin Gurung is the Suntory Coffee New South Wales Barista Trainer. With a Masters degree in accounting from the University of Southern Queensland, the only numbers Babin crunches these days are extraction and dose times. He came to Australia from Nepal 11 years ago to study, fell in love with coffee, and hasn’t looked back. Babin has worked at many different cafés in Sydney, and now enjoys sharing his…

The 2020 Melbourne International Coffee Expo (MICE) has moved its dates to 3 to 6 November to ensure the health and safety of attendees, exhibitors, competitors, judges, volunteers, and staff. The 2020 World Barista Championship and World Brewers Cup will both still take place at MICE. “Following the recent announcement from Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and the measures that will be taken by the state government to mitigate the risk of Covid-19, we have made the decision to reschedule MICE2020,” Show Director Lauren Winterbottom says. “We want to ensure that we’re delivering the best possible event experience for all attendees, exhibitors and competitors. We also take the safety of all our attendees, exhibitors, competitors, judges, volunteers, and staff very seriously.” The decision to postpone MICE was made ahead of bans…

ÜBERMILK Übermilk marks a new standard in consistency. At the touch of a button, Übermilk delivers consistent micro foam milk at the ideal temperature. This product streamlines barista workflow, reduces café training time, and decreases milk waste. It further allows baristas to concentrate on perfecting espresso shots and latte art, while allowing them to better engage with customers. Barista Group exclusively distributes Übermilk in Australia and New Zealand. For more information, contact Barista Group on info@baristagroup.com.au or visit www.baristagroup.com.au LACIMBALI M23UP The LaCimbali M23UP – the latest release by LaCimbali – has just hit Australian shores, and is set to be in high demand throughout 2020. LaCimbali has released the M23UP as an upgraded model to its M27. Key features include a reliable and high-performance thermal system, barista lights for…

Astoria Core 200: A minimalist machine with a contemporary design that blends tradition and technology. Astoria Storm 4000: A competition-grade machine designed to grant the barista total control of manual dispensing of mono-origin coffee and to memorise brewing curves. Mazzer Robur S: Electronic grinder with conical grinding blades and slow speed rotation designed for high coffee consumption. Mazzer Kony S: On-demand grinding with electronic dose adjustment. Designed for medium coffee consumption. Mazzer Major V: Features Internet of Things technology and Grind Flow Control system to increase the barista’s control over each cup. Mazzer ZM: Designed for specialty coffee, grind adjustments can be made electronically within units of microns, so the grind setting is understandable, accurate, and repeatable.…

It often takes people many years to master a discipline. For Shinsaku “Shin” Fukayama, it took less than five years to go from drinking his first coffee to performing on the 2018 World Latte Art Championship stage. “I had my first coffee when I was 29 years old. I didn’t drink coffee when I lived in Japan and had never made one before either. My father bought a small coffee machine and made me a cappuccino,” Shin says. “I asked my father, ‘what is a cappuccino?’ and he showed me a YouTube video of latte art, how to make basic patterns. I thought it was really cool and wanted to learn more. “First, I googled ‘which country has the best coffee in the world?’ and I found Australia. Next, I googled…

A few years ago, the words “filter coffee” would conjure thoughts of bitter, black, and American sludge served from a pot that had been sitting on the diner, café, work, or kitchen counter for several hours. But times have changed. The quality Australian cafés are serving has become very high and many are embracing filter brewing and its ability to bring out the best of coffee using only the basics: water and beans. Now, bulk or batch brewing equipment is making this possible in larger doses. Our friends at Veneziano Coffee Roasters see this firsthand. One of its flagship cafés in Richmond uses batch brew to serve a variety of micro-lot single origin coffees every day. “It is a great way to serve a lot of coffee quickly, the flavour…

Consistency is a constant topic in our conversations, mainly because there is very little margin of error when working with a product such as coffee. In recent years, we have seen a boom in automation in coffee making to help us achieve just that. In the February edition of BeanScene magazine, we talked about how automatic tampers such as PuqPress is becoming part of standard café setup. This time, let’s explore how we can best utilise newfound technologies at different stages of the production line to help run a more efficient café. STAGE ONE The first stage of our coffee production line is preparing shots. The two main variables to this are dose and extraction time. A slight change in one or both variables can dramatically alter the flavour profile of your coffee (refer to my…

Shortly after Titchener published his conclusions about the four basic tastes, German psychologist D P Hanig developed the tongue map by asking volunteers where they could taste sweet, sour, salty, and bitter sensations. The resulting original illustrations (see Figure 3) were intended to show the perceived intensity of the tastes: the taste can be felt wherever there is a dot, and the closer the dots, the more intense the taste. This has been misinterpreted later to mean that sweet is only tasted at the front, bitter at the back and sour on the sides of the tongue. More current research shows that Hanig concluded correctly that bitter (and also umami, which he didn’t know about at the time) are perceived more intensely at the back of the tongue. There is…

It’s been a while since the last Tamper Tantrum, so Ozone Coffee Roasters thought ‘why not kick one off again?’, this time in New Zealand. The main instigators, Natalie Clausen and Steph Noble from Ozone Coffee Roasters, hatched a plan to make a work trip for their Director of Coffee, Stephen Leighton, into an event for the wider coffee community. Steph says they were really keen to facilitate an event that involved more than just their own team talking with Stephen. Thus, Tamper Tantrum New Zealand came to be at Ozone’s Grey Lynn eatery and roastery. From there, the speaker list grew to include World Barista Champion 2017 and Hasbean Coffee Genral Manager Dale Harris, Director of Raw Material Richard Corney, Mojo New Stores and International Development Project Manager Kim Boyd,…

It’s been an interesting month. On a casual Saturday morning I headed to my local supermarket to find aisle four under surveillance by a security guard ready to pounce on overindulging toilet paper hoarders. “Just one packet per family please,” he yelled. Don’t get me started on the empty flour, sanitiser, and paracetamol shelves, or the couple fighting over the last packet of pasta. Coronavirus anxiety had well and truly kicked in. Chef Darren Purchase managed to find the lighter side of the situation, unveiling his white and dark chocolate Loo Roll cakes for $10 each while stocks last. Then came the US media, which suggested the Covid-19 outbreak could mean the end of KeepCups with the sustainability movement “possibly forced” to take two steps back as companies make plans…

Paul Bassett is the only person alive who can boast having a World Barista Championship (WBC) title, television series, and Asian coffee chain to his name. “If you told me as a child, ‘you’re going to have 100 stores named after you in Korea’, there’s no way I’d have believed you,” Paul says. His interest in hospitality and flavour was embedded in him from a young age. Paul grew up living above his parent’s French contemporary restaurant in New South Wales, where he would often help out after school. “Having all the taste and tactile – the sensory awareness – of a kitchen around me as a kid, in those formative years, was highly influential,” Paul says. “My father was also an amazing chef. He had a strong influence on my character. We’re…

After Italian immigrants brought their love for espresso to Australia in the 1950s, coffee quickly became ingrained in Australian culture. According to World Atlas data collated in 2017, per capita, Australia ranks 42 in the world for coffee consumption. Despite not placing among the highest consumers, Australia has developed a reputation as being a global leader of specialty coffee and an influential trendsetter in the Asia-Pacific. One company that has contributed to the growth of Australia’s specialty coffee industry is Danes Specialty Coffee, which is this year celebrating its 25-year anniversary. Danes Managing Director Paul Jackson says modern trends gaining popularity are driving the coffee industry back towards traditional espresso bar concepts. “Coffee was meant to be short, black, and fast. That’s how Italians invented espresso, with the espresso bar…

When SoCo Roasters introduced itself to the coffee community at the 2019 Melbourne International Coffee Expo, its goal was to deliver great coffee. It did this with its Society Blend, a blend of Zambian and Colombian coffees, with distinctive dark chocolate and cherry favours. In the year since, SoCo Roasters has firmed its footing and is using its platform to introduce the best single origin coffees to cafés through its quarterly program. “After launching the SoCo brand in Melbourne in 2019, we now supply nationally and the single origin program complements our core Society Blend,” SoCo Roasters Marketing Manager Burcu De La Cruz says. “It allows the café to serve coffee in a different way, like brewed as filter, and offer a wider range. We always look for different unique tastes…

Ask any coffee roaster their main goal and almost all will tell you that it’s consistency. But developing a roast profile that’s replicable can be difficult, especially if you don’t know every possible detail of the bean pre-and post-roast. This usually means roasters will need several pieces of expensive equipment to capture everything from moisture and density of the green bean to its colour score and temperature after roasting. However, Barista Group General Manager Joe Chalhoub says this data analysis can all be done with one small machine, thanks to the Syncfo 4 in 1 Coffee Analyser. “The Syncfo is really the first product in the world that combines these four functions, providing precision analysis and measurements of moisture, density, temperature, and even colour,” Joe says. “If a roaster likes the way…

It’s hard to believe it’s been more than a year since Ross Quail called my name as the winner of the 2019 Australian Latte Art Championship. For my next pattern in BeanScene, I wanted to offer something creative, fanciful, and that reaches for the skies. The unicorn pattern features five rosettas, each relatively short and requiring a lot of fine control to pour correctly. It’s also important to nail certain elements like the symmetry of the wings and the subtle curve of the mane and neck. Dragging is the other key technique for this design. It may sound simple, but you want the legs and neck of the unicorn to curve as shown in the photos for maximum appeal. Drawing the neck, face, and horn in one movement will take…

Coffee is not only a feast for the senses, but one of the most complex beverages we consume, from a chemical point of view. Dissecting this multi-sensory experience in order to identify distinct flavours in your brew can be a difficult task, even if you have worked with coffee for many years. Understanding how the human body receives and processes chemical signals through smell and taste can be helpful towards getting a grip on those elusive flavours. First, what is “flavour”? Flavour is perceived through a combination of three main sensory pathways (see figure 1): • Basic tastes: Taste (gustatory) perceptions in the mouth caused by non-volatile chemicals in coffee or other foods. • Aromas: Smells are a mixture of volatile chemicals that we perceive through our olfactory system. We…

The Covid-19 pandemic is on course to be the most destructive economic issue since the Global Financial Crisis, due to its unprecedented nature and scale of the outbreak. This is especially true for individuals and families living week to week, as well as businesses that are reliant on face-to-face customer transactions, like cafés. As entrepreneurs and business owners, how do we protect our businesses and our people? The first step is to secure your family’s safety, then that of your livelihood: the business. Before taking action, we need to establish a vital mindset: communicate, communicate, and communicate. Unless we make our circumstances known, our network of suppliers, customers, and creditors cannot be expected to divine the pressures we may be facing. This isn’t weakness, it is an act of strength.…