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Jenny Jenny

Jenny has just got back from the North West Coffee Fest in Seattle where she hung out in the Synesso booth and also spent time sussing out the coffee culture in general.

She even had a crack at the Millrock Latte Art competition.

Jen’s heading down to LA soon to catch up with Deaton from Intelligensia and hopefully get a gig behind their machine. No doubt we’ll hear about it and you’ll have a chance to read about it in her blog.

Baby Renegade

It’s here!

It arrived yesterday afternoon. It isn’t plugged in so I can’t rave about how it transforms a humble green bean into a thing of beauty – but given its pedigree, we’re expecting amazing results. I’m not 100% sure, but I think that this little sample roaster is the only sample roaster in the world that can profile roast 500g of coffee.

It’s brilliant because it gives us the opportunity to roast samples through a roast cycle that mimics what the larger roasting machines are doing. Now that totally rocks!

I’ll post our thoughts on the first roasts as soon as we have it commissioned. We’re pretty excited.

Liar Liar

I’m always interested to see how much enthusiastic gossip is generated at the smallest mention of a potential sale of a cafe. Liar Liar is a brilliant cafe owned and operated by a team of three (Nolan, Nathan and Diamond) who I’m sure would also be bemused by the amount of chatter around the “sale”.

Nothing should be considered sold until the deal is settled, money safely in bank and the vendors are on the plane to the Bahamas for a well deserved rest.

Let’s see where Nolan, Nathan and Diamond are hanging in a couple of weeks.

If you can’t wait to find out – ask them directly – rather than paying too much attention to the rumour mill. I’m sure they’d give you an honest straight up answer – if they thought it was any of your business

Kongo Coffee will get even better

There are days when you get so much return on the investment of effort. Yesterday was one of those days.

The specialty coffee movement has gained so much momentum over the last couple of years. The Australian consumer has started to demand coffee of much higher quality through supply chains that have a high level social consciousness. As a craft roaster in Australia, we have been looking at ways that we can access better coffees while at the same time input practically into the lives of the people we are buying from. We feel that we have an opportunity here in the Pacific to work with growers to achieve this end. This visit to Kongo Coffee has gone a very long way to helping us get this result.

In terms of quality, I’m convinced that the biggest gains in cup quality can be made at the point of harvesting. Just like we did in Bali, I spoke at length with Jerry about spread of ripeness of the cherries being picked. Just like we did in Bali, we sat down with a bag of cherries and sorted through them and picked out a sample of cherries that represented the type of cherries we believe they now need to pick to stay ahead of the pack of “also ran” coffee.

One of the most important keys to our success here will be having the farmers on board and understanding exactly what harvesting habits they need to change. Jerry has engaged two full time guys to help with this process. Elimbari coffee only comes from a few selected family groups. Jerry will be calling meetings with all these growers over the next few weeks and start the process of re-educating them about escalation of quality he is expecting from them. It isn’t going to be easy – trees are scattered across mountains and valleys and separated by rivers and forests. I headed up to the foot of the Mt Elimbari to meet with Mark – one of the Elimbari farmers. It was great because many of his family were around and I was able to meet them. Mark’s village also happens to be Jerry’s Grandma’s “ass place”.

Once coffee is ripe, it’s harvested, pulped, washed and then sundried. It then goes into the mill to get the parchment removed – resulting in piles and piles of green beans. But the effort to get better quality doesn’t stop here. Green beans range vastly in size and there is always an assortment of defected beans in the mix. The number of defects in a Lot of green beans affects the coffees grading and its classification. At 5 Senses we’ve adopted the SCAA specialty coffee grading system. One of my jobs this trip was to go through this grading system with Jerry and leave them with the resources to help them understand the system and to have a better idea of how good the quality of the coffee needs to be to be able to be classified as true Specialty Coffee. We spent a good length of time on classification and on cupping in their Kongo Coffee quality lab.

Kongo Coffee also roasts coffee for the local market. Helen works pretty hard on getting the colour right but I was able to give them some of the information about roasting time and ramp rates. It’s a great little roastery. Jerry is talking about sending some of his people over to us for some roasting training.

Kongo Coffee is an incredible place to be. Jerry has assembled a team with incredible experience and skill. It is no coincidence that the coffee that hails from the base of this mountain and passes though Jerry’s infrastructure is so good.

TEAM KONGO COFFEE LIMITED

From Left to Right

Front row:

Tekepo Kumuno – Assistant Project Officer, five years with Kongo Coffee Limited.

Kilson Liripu – Elimbari Specialty Coffee Project Officer, 18 years Post Harvest experience with CIC.

David Rumba Rumba – Operations Manager, 14 years CIC experience in Quality Control & Management.

Jerry Kapka – Managing Director, 20 years in coffee buying, processing, exporting.

Back Row:

Philip Bai – Driver & Trained Elimbari Specialty Coffee Producer.

Ricky Laki – Quality Control Manager, 10 years with CIC & Kongo Coffee Limited.

Me

TEAM PARTNERSHIP

A look at Kongo Coffee

My frustrations with actually getting to Papua New Guinea have all but melted away. I’m back in Goroka after spending an amazingly productive time with Jerry and his team at Kongo Coffee. Yesterday was brilliant – nothing can beat a good old face to face get together.

Kongo Coffee is a company that owns a few small plots of coffee trees, runs a wet mill, a hulling plant, an export arm, a coffee transportation company and a roastery.

I’m full of praise for Kongo Coffee. It is an excellent example of a business that has grown despite the odds (really bad communications infrastructure, bad roads etc). It has grown because it is a business by the people, for the people. Jerry understands how important he has become to the local community and, in many ways, has become more important to the local people in providing services than the inept government administration.

He’s been able to do this by finding a market for coffee that he and his people grow. He knows the coffee is good, he knows he can help his people make it better.

He pays a premium over the standard factory door price being offered by other coffee buyers – on the proviso that they make an effort to meet and maintain a standard. This coffee is called “Elimbari” coffee.

Jerry supervises the post harvest and production really closely. He has employed both an Elimbari Project Officer and an Elimbari Post Harvest Support Officer. He has his own pulping/wet mill and drying racks to get the best possible results in the cup. Interestingly, fermentation times are much longer up here in Chuave (up to 40 hours). At 1,735m above sea level it gets pretty cold, which means that the active bacteria that breaks down the mucilage on the parchment only starts to become active after about 16 hours.

Once washed, the Elimbari coffee is rack dried.

Jerry stores all the Elimbari parchment coffee and Elimbari green separately to all the other coffee that comes that will, after processing, be sold as Nambayufa A, X and Y Grades.

The same dry mill is used to process all the coffees. This mill is in the middle of a massive expansion program so that Kongo doesn’t have to shut down production to do a major clean every time they want to change from milling Nambayufa to Elimbari. I love the mill. They even use the parchment to fuel the burners that create the hot air that they use to bring all the parchment coffee down to 11% moisture content before they hull.

Once the parchment coffee is dried and hulled, the beans are hand sorted by what feels like a cast of thousands.

More updates to come.

Mud men and blackouts

My flight to Port Moresby and then onto Goroka was reasonably uneventful. Jerry experienced some delays on the way in from Simbu so wasn’t at the airport when I arrived. This is not to say I didn’t have a warm welcome. The famous mud men had made their way onto the tarmac by the time we’d taxied up to the arrivals shed and provided us all with a bit of light entertainment while we waited for our bags to be offloaded. Jerry wasn’t that far behind. By the time I’d checked in the Bird he’d arrived with his offsider David – we had a drink, dinner and quite a few laughs as we reminisced about old times.

I’m off to visit some of the growers today and will end up staying Mt Wilhelm Hotel in Kundiawa. I’m going to do a bit of roasting training with Jerry’s guys and also teach them how to use the espresso machine that they have just purchased. It’s going to be really interesting – many photos to come.

I’ve got to be thankful. The Bird of Paradise Hotel has had enough experience in PNG to know that back up generators are an essential part of their infrastructure – last night it had a real work out.

Sometimes things just feel too hard

I’m on my way to Papua New Guinea. It’s my second attempt in the last couple of weeks. Last Friday I flew out of Perth on the midnight horror only to arrive late into Sydney and as a consequence missed my connection through to Port Moresby. I wasn’t that fussed, it was Saturday morning and I knew if i turned around I’d be home for Fathers Day – so I hopped back on the first plane back to Perth and arrived home early Saturday afternoon.

I’ve probably down played the drama’s when I hit Sydney – those who have travelled will know the feeling when a tight connection is made even tighter by delays. It’s a sprint off the plane to catch the transfer between domestic and international. Then it’s a sprint to the check in counter only to find it’s vacated. Then it’s a sprint to the ticketing counter who hop on to phone to the rep who’s standing at the gate … and it goes on. In the end, knowing that you’ve missed the flight after having done everything in your power to get on is a relief in itself.

Well, it’s eight days later. I’m making another attempt to get into PNG. I’ve had the itinerary tweaked to give me the best possible chance of getting there incident free. Today I fly to Brisbane and tomorrow into Port Moresby and then into Goroka.

It feels wierd heading back to the old stomping ground. It almost feels like a bit of a pilgrimage to the hallowed turf of my coffee birthplace.

I’m really excited about getting back on the ground and catching up with old friends. I know so much more about coffee now than I did nine years ago and because of this I know I’ll see things through completely new eyes.

Update on the Balinese Coffee

I had contact just last week from Uliana. It looks like we’ll be getting about 60 bags from Subak Abian KW and about 30 bags from Subak Abian UM. We were also lucky enough to be sent a few pre-shipment samples which was brilliant. The coffee, despite it’s youthfulness was unbelieveable. Both Subaks retained the magic characteristics that were evident when we were making our selection in Bali. October is still the ETA for the coffee’s arrival.

We’re finally in

I’ve arrived in Melbourne and rocked up to our fully functioning roastery. Feels good. The guys here are all pretty amped – Mikey appears to be growing in confidence and has nailed some great batches. Rich is planning to get our emissions under control within the next few weeks. Brad is here with me helping with the operational side of things.

Here are a few pics to give you an idea of what things look like – it’s early days at the moment – things will look even more settled in a month or so.