"Welcome to Five Senses Coffee"

We added a new dimension to our annual harvest trip to Bali this year by doing some barista training in our base town of Ubud. A speculative email to the good people at Casa Luna got the process started. With a posse of Australia’s best baristas in the group, I thought it would be great to do some training between our trips out to Kintamani to work with the growers. It kills me that so many origin countries don’t use their own coffee, and import stale product from far off Mediterranean countries.

Our first trip was just a reconnaissance mission to check out the state of the equipment and see what we were up against. I wasn’t expecting a state-of-the-art set up, but was a little surprised to see a pool pump hooked up beneath the machine to provide pressure. The old clanker managed to get to a peak of about three bar (usually about nine) and the grind was set very coarse to compensate. Not a very promising start!

We delved a little deeper and stripped the grinder down a little which revealed a Jurassic era deposit of coffee gunk that was worthy of some photos.

There were four venues in total with some antiquated, but workable, equipment and we split the teams up to cover a bit more ground. We soon found that though the gear was a bit challenging, it was more than compensated for by the awesome students. They were incredibly interested and had a natural feel for coffee making. We didn’t dumb it down at all, and got them grinding to order and hand tamping very quickly.

Armed with some Reg Barber tampers and Scottie Callaghan dosing tools, we soon had them pulling nice shots. We had to convince them that the half frozen milk wasn’t making the job any easier and, after a bit of searching, we found some fully liquid milk and, quite quickly, uncovered some latent latte art gurus ready to strut their stuff!

We managed to do multiple sessions at all the venues over the five days we were in Ubud and made some incredible progress with the staff. We are hoping to bring the most promising barista over to Perth for some more intensive work, and then have that person become the head coffee person for the Casa Luna group.

If you’re in Bali, drop in to Casa Luna for coffee and let us know how our favourite pupils are going!