BeanScene Magazine

As the Australian specialty coffee scene advances, gone are (hopefully) the days where café owners decide on which coffee to stock based solely on price. Discerning customers and increasingly educated baristas know what they want and are prepared to put a lot of effort into finding beans that are right for them. The question arises, then, as to whether this client base is putting a similar amount of effort into choosing the milk that best suits the coffee they use?

Rob Stewart, Ducale Coffee’s Innovation and National Training Manager, doesn’t think so. From his experience, when it comes to milk, most cafés still start off with the question: “Who can give me the best price?” and move on from there.

So what would Rob have cafés do as an alternative? The answer is a milk tasting session and your coffee correspondent was lucky enough to sit in on one at Ducale’s warehouse, in the Melbourne suburb of Preston. 

Also on the panel were  Ducale staff members: Production Manager, Brett Lumley; Account Manager, Justin Murphy and General Manager, Henri Kalisse.

To start with, Rob gave us the rundown of what we were going over. We were blind tasting some of Australia’s market-leading milks. While we could see in front of us a line up of the empty containers, Rob had put all the contents in a series of identical bottles labelled A to F.

Prior to starting, Rob explained that we were to taste the milk in four different formats: first cold, then warm at 60 degrees Celsius, then as lattes with Ducale’s Origin and then with Ducale’s Monsoon. For each milk in each format, we would grade it from 5 to 10 based on aroma, flavour, body, sweetness and aftertaste.  

We start with cold tasting and this being my first milk tasting session, I ask Rob for a few tips. He tells me just to treat it like a wine – start with aroma, observe the colour, drink it in small sips and suck in some oxygen, then swirl it around your mouth to ensure it hits all your tastebuds. And, much like wine, we were all equipped with a spitting cup to avoid any coffee or dairy overload.

A big key here, Rob says, is for us all to try and stay silent about what we are tasting during the process. He says it’s too easy to find tastes that people talk about and while we’ll compare notes at the end, it is for us to come up with our own individual assessments not influenced by the others.

I was a little nervous writing down my marks and seeking some assurance, I ask Rob if there are any right or wrong answers. He smiles and assures me there aren’t. As I struggle to critique the flavour profile of five perfectly good milks, Rob is chatting about palette development and I learn that while there may be no wrong answers, there is certainly a key to developing your palette to ensure your answers are well informed.

“You’re really looking to taste the salt and the acids and seeing where they are on the tongue,” explains Rob, as he pulls out various diagrams showing the tasting points. He then brings out two shakers, one with citric acid and one with salt. He explains that to develop his palette, he sips water heavy with acid and then with salt, to find where those taste buds are on his tongue. He then gradually reduces the amount to force himself to really pick up the slightest taste of each. He does the same with oil to test out the body of a liquid.  He does this exercise every month to recalibrate his taste buds.

“A lot of this is just trusting what you’re tasting and putting a word to it,” Rob explains. “It’s just having the confidence to say, OK, I can test this caramel or whatever it is. When you start identifying the big ones, you can move on to the subtle ones, but for those you really have to dig deep.”

In tastings, he explains, you come across a lot of bad coffees, but it’s only in trying the bad ones that you can identify the good ones. “It’s like building up goal posts, you need to know both ends of the spectrum,” he says.

With this in mind, we move on to the warm milk and here I really start tasting a difference. The warming process seems to bring out some new aromas and flavours and we notice how some milk warms up better than others.

The next step was to finally pair up the coffee with milk. We start off by calibrating our taste buds with an espresso shot and Rob talks us through what flavours we should be looking for in Ducale’s Origin – prominent blueberry flavour followed by a dark chocolate aftertaste.

This was a vital part of seeing how the different brands of milk complement the coffee differently and we start noticing a strong difference between flavours. In between tasting, we eat apple slices to neutralise the palette, as the acidity cleanses the tongue without leaving too strong an aftertaste. Rob also recommends cheese, a good bitey cheddar, as a nice palette cleanser.

As I comment on the remarkable parallels to wine tasting, Rob tells me it’s no coincidence that tasting the two is a similar process. Much like wine, how the coffee flowers develop on the plant based on climate and surrounding environment has a significant influence on the final taste.

After we grade each milk paired up with each coffee blend, we move on to the final step, which is evaluating the micro foam on the lattes. This is a challenging part, because the foam does depend on the skills of the barista as much as it does on the milk, so Rob has to be careful to pull each milk in the same fashion. Here, with the results less subjective than the tasting component of the session, we have an open discussion on the quality of each milk’s microfoam.

Three hours later, the tasting round comes to an end and now is the time for the big reveal.

The overall results show clearly that the different milks react differently to different blends, an important point to remember for those café owners looking to make the most of their beans. Following the session, Rob notes that this exercise should serve not as a judge of which milk is universally better than others, but rather as an example of something café owners should be doing in looking beyond prices to choose which milk to go with.

“As much as we got something out of this, I think what we’re really doing is highlighting that a café should take a fair bit of consideration in choosing their milk.”

In his follow-up report which summed up our exercise, Rob writes: “The clear fact that a standard coffee is at least 80 per cent milk and only 20 per cent coffee means that we really need to understand a lot more about its effect on our coffee.”

Milk Price Wars

While the world talks about the high price of coffee, the low cost of milk has been making major headlines in Australia.

Dairy farmers around the country were in uproar when Coles supermarkets decided to lower their price of a litre of milk to $1 in January, which prompted rival Woolworths and smaller supermarket chains to do the same. Dairy industry representatives called on the ACCC to investigate how supermarket operators set prices for milk, saying the move was unsustainable and would ultimately hurt the dairy industry.

Australasian Specialty Coffee Association President, Bill Comely, says this is all bad news for coffee in the long term. Although most specialty cafés don’t stock the lower priced milks – with an understanding of the importance of good milk to creating the best coffee – the brands they do stock risk suffering in the long term as they will be unable to withstand competition from these major brands.

“If mums and dads continue to buy cheap milk, then branded milk sales will drop and this will lead to a reduction in selection and choice as the big guys will control more of the market,” says Bill. “If Coles and Woolworths are the only companies selling milk at the end of the day and they want to sell essentially ‘plastic’ milk, then those will be the only choices cafés will have.”