BeanScene Magazine

Green Cauldron plantation, along with Southern Cross University and the University of Queensland, are leading a breakthrough study that will be the first to take a scientific approach to improving the Australian coffee industry.

The three bodies have set up a Coffee Research Program, with an initial $2.5 Million commitment over five years. In engaging with academic professionals, Green Cauldron is looking to not only improve their own coffee, but to define specific Australian tastes and growing practices to help promote the industry.

“It’s through a desire to do things differently that we’re seeking advice from university fellowships,” says Richard Kelly of Green Cauldron Coffee. “Initially we were just looking to set up our own research, but it made sense to set something up with the universities.”

In taking a scientific look at Australia’s coffee beans, Richard notes that this is likely the most significant study since coffee was re-introduced to Australia as a viable crop in the 1980s. The overriding objectives of the study are to examine the effects of genetic, agronomic, processing, post-harvest and roasting factors on the quality of sub-tropical coffee.

In this regard, the study is following the lead of the wine industry in identifying the chemical factors that account for certain tastes. Dr. Heather Smyth, a flavour chemist who works with the Centre for Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Queensland, will take what she learned from her work with wine and apply the same principles to coffee.

In her PhD, she helped link the chemical component of flavour compounds to the sensory experience of drinking wine.

“This is fundamentally what we’re going to do with coffee,” explains Heather. “We’re going to look at what consumers want and why they pay more for premium coffee. We’ll look at the range of flavours and explore if people like a coffee that’s more vanilla-like or more toasty. And then, we’ll look to understand the chemicals causing those sensory experiences.”

To begin the task, Heather will work with a consumer scientist to understand how consumers think, feel and behave when it comes to drinking coffee. This work will also involve exploring the sensory experience involved in drinking coffee. They’ll run a qualitative study on what consumers want via various focus groups and taste sessions, and confirm those results with a large quantitative study involving thousands of coffee-drinking participants.

“We want to understand what the consumer wants. Is it the package, how do they feel when they drink coffee, what to they think, what are the emotional attributes?” Heather says. “We’re then looking to understand their taste preferences in drinking coffee and tie that to the flavours and chemical compounds.”

Understanding consumer behaviour is an important first step, Heather explains. The industry needs to understanding what the consumer wants and will pay before diversifying its coffee flavour range and marketing new products. Flavour is a critical part of the coffee-drinking experience, however, it has to be right flavour together with the right price, package format, marketing message, and so on.

Once the consumer-preferred flavours of coffee are understood, a different approach will be taken to narrow down the flavour compounds. She says there could be as few as two to three key compounds that drive the sensory experience, or as many as say, 16. 

To identify the individual flavour compounds they’ll use a GCMS-Olfactometer, essentially a sniffing machine, to smell those flavours that are essential to those coffees preferred by consumers and identify the chemical compounds.

“Once we can identify the most important flavour compounds, we can then target those for measurement,” Heather says. “Coffee is a lot like wine and chocolate. It is very complex. The flavours come not only from the genetics of the beans, but from the growing conditions, geographical origin and processing techniques in roasting and ageing that create the flavours.”

Heather notes that coffee can have around 500 flavour compounds, of which 50 to 60 play an important role, and 10 play a very important role. This is a huge number of compounds to play with, compared to something more simple like a strawberry that only has 20 to 30 flavour compounds.

Once those flavour compounds have been identified, Richard and the team at Green Cauldron are keen to put the findings into practice in the growing environment of Northern New South Wales. Green Cauldron has already started analysing Australia’s unique growing conditions in commissioning David Peasley from Peasley Horticultural Services to write a manual on growing coffee in Australia’s sub-tropics. While at time of writing the manual was still in the draft stages, Richard is optimistic that this will serve as the first Australian-focused best practices guide.

The Coffee Research Program is a natural next step for Green Cauldron in developing the country’s coffee growing industry. Green Cauldron’s ultimate goal would be to tie in the flavour preferences that Heather and her team identify, with research into Australia’s growing climate and processing techniques to come up with a distinctive Australian variety.

“Eventually it’s our goal, but it’s probably at least 10 years away,” Richard says. “We’d like to breed a plant that best suits our growing conditions and has a unique flavour profile, something really distinct to our region.”
While there’s still a lot of work before this takes place, to help along the way Southern Cross University has set up a research advisory committee called CoffRAC that will meet up to four times a year. The committee membership includes key researchers from the Centre for Phytochemistry and Pharmacology (CPP) and the Centre for Plant Conservation Genetics (CPCG).

CPP specialises in the study of natural products and has TGA and APVMA accredited laboratories for the analysis of plant extracts. With its fully equipped laboratories, its team can undertake research into many facets of plants, foods and biomarkers. CPP has expertise in linking subjective measures of food quality to objective measures of food quality and this will be applied to coffee by identifying metabolites that are associated with desirable quality attributes.

CPCG has already had some experience in linking plant genes to food quality, having found the gene which gives basmati and jasmine rice their distinctive aroma and other rice varieties their soft texture when cooked. CPCG has also analysed the grape berry genome and linked gene expression patterns in grape berries to flavonoids, compounds which are important determinants of wine flavour, colour and quality. By building on this experience and expertise, CPCG will be able to contribute to understanding the link between coffee plant genetics and the flavor and aroma of the coffee as drunk it from the cup. With the combined expertise of SCU’s chemists and geneticists, the group hopes to develop new cultivars that have the desired coffee attributes and develop objective tools to measure these desirable quality attributes.

Green Cauldron currently has an estimated 60,000 productive coffee trees, with another 20,000 coming online within the next five years. The group owns and operates around 33 hectares in the hinterland of Byron Bay, with leasing and management rights underway for a further 12 hectares of mature coffee. The company is predominantly export driven and supplies a unique Green Cauldron coffee house concept that is being rolled out across the United Kingdom.

“Armed with a team of Australian baristas and serving coffee grown and nurtured on our very own plantation, it truly is an exciting time in the world of Australian coffee,” says Richard.