Sarah Baker

Beanscene April 2018 covershoot

Go behind the scenes at the 2018 Melbourne International Coffee Expo before the doors opened to crowds on day 1 of the event, and conduct a latte cupping with Zest Specialty Coffee Roasters. Check it out!
Read More

Advanced calibration: the different stages of espresso extraction

Fast forward in time, and through the development of tools and technology, we swapped our sensory approach to espresso production for a scientific recipe of numbers, scales, refractometers, and pressure. These tools have helped baristas achieve quality control and simplified our lives by providing useful facts and numbers to work with. But imagine for a second we lost all of this technology. Could you still produce great tasting coffee?
Read More

Intermezzo Café

Using Grinders Coffee Roasters and the Rancilio Classe 9 coffee machine, Intermezzo Café serves customers Grinders’ Organic medium roast, single origins, and decaf beans. 
Read More

The big freeze: why there’s no longer a barrier to coffee freshness

Freezing roasted coffee is gaining momentum and putting a stop to stale beans once and for all. Ona Coffee explains why age is no barrier to coffee freshness. Imagine going into a café in five years time and asking the barista for a look at the vintage menu of coffees on offer: a 2013 Panama Geisha, Sasa Sestic’s 2015 World Barista Championship (WBC) winning carbonic maceration-processed coffee, or perhaps the number one Brazil Cup of Excellence coffee from 2018 is more to your liking.  By traditional standards, consuming such coffee years later would prove stale and lifeless in the cup, but what if they were frozen? It’s a concept Ona Coffee is exploring in order to preserve and extended coffee’s shelf life, and by all accounts, it’s got potential.  George Howell saw that early on. He started freezing green coffee in 2001 to help preserve freshness and flavour, and at Re;Co 2017 he presented a series of vintage harvests from 2012 and 2013 to demonstrate how freezing coffee could preserve its integrity, telling the audience “by all standards, these coffees should have been dead and buried”. But they weren’t. They were very much alive.
Read More