Page 12 - foodservice magazine June 2019

12
Q&A
The Grounds’ coffee roasting operation already injects over a tonne of coffee beans per week into the local cafe industry. With the new facility in Everleigh, this number is expected to grow.
As for the customers, the new space will have more specials and educational experiences. And the fit out will certainly be different, though of course it will still have plenty of greenery.
Coffee in Australia was roasted very dark for decades, and lighter roasts and filter methods became wildly popular in recent years. But some venues now are going back to the robust, rich flavours of Italian espresso and looking for darker beans. What’s in demand at the Grounds?
Coffee certainly keeps evolving, however there is evolution, and then there are trends. It’s so important to keep learning and pushing. In terms of roasting, there have been incredible advances in technology and tonnes of resources now that simply weren’t around even a decade ago.
Many roasting machines have been the same design for nearly a century, but finally that’s changing. Cropster roasting software would be one example that has helped with constancy. At origin too many things have changed; new processing methods and agronomy have helped with yields, quality, and disease resistant varietals.
For us, the majority of
coffee we serve is milk-based, composing of an espresso blend. Our roasting style is greatly
inf luenced by this way of enjoying coffee, though we can apply different roasting styles, light or dark, to suit different coffee and brew methods.
Customers are becoming more interested about where the coffees are coming from too, the flavours, attributes and sources. We have also noticed the rise in single
origin and estate coffees served as both espressos and filters.
For the consumer, coffee is notoriously immune to inflation. Prices of food and alcohol rise
by noticeable percentages each year, but the price of a cup of coffee has barely gone up a dollar in the last 10. What strain does this place on Australia’s coffee industry? Has the growing price of coffee production surpassed that of the beverage itself?
I’m glad you asked. For a long time, people thought that
coffee in Australia (Sydney in particular) should be $3 to $3.50 and refused to pay more. The reality is that with inflation everything has gone up and
this puts roasters and cafes in a difficult position. The cost of production, land value, wages, utilities and so on have increased, and there is a squeeze to get the best coffee for cheap, the flow-on effect of which is that the cafe struggles and growers are getting the rough end.
I think if you want a quality coffee you have to be prepared to pay for it, just like anything else. Clean, fresh crop coffees cost money to produce. The meticulous care that goes into the picking, processing and sorting cost money.
As always, you get what you pay for. I’m not saying that you need to spend $10 on a cup of coffee, but when you see a $1 or $2 coffee, alarm bells should ring. If coffee beans are purchased for a price of less than $2USD per pound, not only is it going to be very average, but in most cases it’s below the cost of production. This means it’s unsustainable for the farmers all around
the world.