"Welcome to Five Senses Coffee"

We are excited to introduce the Baratza grinders to Australia. In terms of home use options, they easily tick all the boxes. They are compact and easy to use, have conical burrs, and most of all, combine build quality with affordability.

We recognise that not all home users are willing or able to fork over $600+ for a grinder, and the challenge until now, has always been to find cheaper options that don’t compromise quality. With three options available from just $141.90, freshly ground coffee at home is no longer a massive investment and is something that home users at every skill level should consider. Not to mention, they are a great gift idea for Christmas!

Baratza Maestro ($141.90)

If you make plunger or filter coffee at home this is the grinder for you. Lots of home users have been making plunger coffee for years but have never experienced of a freshly ground dose of coffee. A gassy layer called the “bloom” is present in your plunger when you grind your coffee just before use. The flavour is richer, smoother and fresher, and you don’t need to be an expert to taste the difference. Once you try it, you won’t know how you’ve gone so long without it. The Baratza Maestro is also perfect as a secondary grinder for the serious home barista who wants to explore filter options. Clever drippers, syphons, cold press, pour-overs are all perfectly suited for this grinder. Instead of purging your espresso grinder and throwing out the grind setting, the Maestro is a low cost secondary grinder option. Bonus: if you want take your coffee on away trips with you, the Baratza Maestro is light and portable.

Baratza Maestro Plus ($163.90)

All the same features as the Maestro with a couple of added bells and whistles. It’s double the weight of the Maestro which gives it a more solid feel. It also has a timer instead of an on/off switch as well as a pulse button on the front. The timer is great if you want to roughly record and repeat a particular dose, while the pulse switch gives a quick ‘touch of the button’ option.

Baratza Virtuoso ($273.90)

Still significantly cheaper than other home-use espresso options, the Virtuoso is really best suited to those wanting a range of options from filter to espresso at home. It’s a heavier, solid build makes it the sturdiest option and it can either dose directly into your portafilter or into a static-free ground coffee bin. The Virtuoso’s burrs are the same size as both the Maestro and Maestro Plus, yet are of a commercial grade with 40+ adjustment options. Again, this model has the timer and pulse button options.

You might be asking yourself why is grinding at home so important? If you already know the answer, great! Feel free to skip to the end of this article and order your new grinder. However if you’d like a bit more information as to why grinding on demand is so essential to great coffee, we’ve pulled the most common grinding questions from a previous article on our website:

How important is grinding?

It’s critical. Grinding your coffee days (or possibly even weeks) before you use it is going to accelerate the staling process of your coffee in a big way. The first thing you’ll notice is that the grinds lose their fragrance, as does your brewed coffee. The resulting brew is often referred to as ‘flat’. As the natural oils in coffee oxidise, the flavour of the brew changes considerably, from pleasant to unpleasant — it can even become offensive and rancid.

Why does this happen?

The whole bean is like a fortress. It does a pretty good job of protecting the volatile compounds that positively affect the aroma and flavours of coffee for a short while. Like many organic products, exposure to oxygen and moisture can accelerate coffee’s ageing process. Grinding whole beans into small particles exponentially increases the surface area of the coffee, destroying the ‘fortress’, and oxidation begins almost immediately. Although you can’t actually see any visible change to your roasted coffee as it stales, the favourable flavour and aromatic components will have begun to evaporate.

What if I don’t have an espresso machine?

Grinding fresh is the single most important step in preparing coffee at home. This has a huge, undeniable impact on any brew method, from stove top to plunger, filter and espresso.

Moral of the story

Why pay for quality that has already evaporated into thin air? Specialty coffee is special because everyone involved in producing it cares. From the farmer who picks only the ripest cherries, to the roasters at Five Senses, who select and labour over each roast until they feel confident that we are offering you coffee at its best, we are passionate about your coffee.

We have spent many years cultivating close relationships with the people who grow our beans, and we’ve come to understand how much attention to detail and work it takes to create the kind of quality that we, and you, have come to expect. The farmers we buy from are continually striving for excellence and when they hand over their meticulously prepared crop, we feel that it’s our job to honour their labour by providing their coffee at its absolute best!

We are such strong believers in freshly ground coffee that we guarantee that if you’ve enjoyed our pre-ground coffee previously, and you make the switch to freshly ground, you’ll absolutely, 100% guaranteed, notice the difference.

So, if you have an espresso machine at home and you are interested in one of the Baratza models, your best and only suitable option is the Virtuoso.

On the other hand, if a shiny new espresso machine is not in the budget, you can still get superior quality coffee at home. The Clever Coffee Dripper was without a doubt the product of 2010. It opened the eyes of our espresso-focused, sunburnt land. The reason it revolutionises is because it solves the under/over extraction issues of other slow brew methods. They’re simple, ridiculously cheap, virtually unbreakable, and commercially viable, since you don’t need to sit and nurse them through a brew.

Combined with a Baratza grinder, you could easily be producing commercial quality coffee at home. Better yet, opt for a Filter Brewing Package and walk away with not only a Baratza grinder and a Clever Coffee Dripper, but also an electronic Breville scale, filter papers and 250g of Filter Roast coffee. More is merrier this holiday season!