"Welcome to Five Senses Coffee"

Last year’s World Barista Champion, Gwilym Davies, was in Australia recently, and Brad Nixon from our Melbourne roastery went to Queensland and NSW to attend Gwilym’s seminar. Here’s Brad’s diary of his travels…

We spent our first day in Brisbane with husband and wife team, Dean and Kathryn, at Chic Espresso. It was a great way to start the trip, running cuppings of some of the delicious backroom coffees and catching up with a café team that is doing a great job representing Five Senses in the new frontier of Queensland.

After meeting up with Miss Em Oak from Australian Independent Roasters, we collected Gwilym from Di Bella Coffee and set off for Mountain Top Coffee, which is just over the NSW border. The two hour trip gave us a rare opportunity to pick the brains of the (then) World Barista Champion, a dream come true for every coffee geek!

After getting lost for a little while, we finally ended up in Nimbin, which certainly lived up its reputation. No more than 30 seconds after stepping out of the car, we were offered a plethora of narcotics. Much to the dealers’ dismay, we declined! We arrived at the home of Andrew Ford to be greeted by the lovely Cassie, roaster and operations manager for the Zephyr imports that MTC is currently offering.

The next morning we woke up to the beautiful mountainous surrounds of MTC, and headed down to meet up with seven baristas from Sydney and the surrounding areas. We settled in for Gwilym’s seminar, which covered a range of different topics and techniques for espresso and filter based coffees. With Gwilym’s relaxed presenting style, the time passed quickly.

Farmers Russell and Trevor then showed the group around the farm. They ran through their harvesting methods and talked about the issues the farm faces growing coffee in Australia.

The processing at MTC is mostly based on the same methods used in Brazil, with equipment imported directly from Brazil. The coffees that we tasted had very similar characteristics to those of our Brazilian — Ipanema. MTC’s farm experiments with dry and semi dry processing, giving the coffee more of a wild, dark fruit characteristic in the cup.

It was a great first origin trip for me and I’m really looking forward to comparing notes on processing and farm conditions with the guys who went to Bali.