"Welcome to Five Senses Coffee"

I’m going to interrupt my sequence of stories to insert a different (yet relevant) story. Over the last few articles I’ve endeavoured to share a bit of 5 Senses’ journey as a business and how we are bridging the gap between the growers of coffee and the consumer.

This week our journey has taken us up into the mountains of Bali in the Kintamani region. Those who’ve been following what we’ve been up to over the last couple of years will know that we have been trying to identify a grower group in Bali that 5 Senses can support and ultimately work with in the long term. Our hope is that as a result of our involvement and willingness to pay a better price, the grower group will have a real incentive to improve their quality.

A quick background … Last year a group of us (Jen Murray from the WA Barista Academy, others from Melbourne and I) visited the Kintamani region to get a feel for the growing communities and to see what they had to offer in terms of potential in the cup. We visited seven grower groups, watched the processing and cupped lots of coffee! We came away pretty excited. The only problem was that the coffee that we wanted to buy was already spoken for — it had been sold to a buyer from Denpasar. As it turned out, our visit was timed a little too late in the year to be able to buy coffee — this had to be left for another trip.

... And this journey we’re on now is that “other trip”. Our objective is to identify a grower and to work with that grower and communicate exactly what result we are chasing in the cup.

We arrived in Ubud on Sunday night. The assembled party consisted of Jay, Shaughan (and partner Maree), Mikey and myself from 5 Senses; Nolan and partner Shari from Liar Liar; Mark (and family) and Bridget from Brother Baba Budan.

Our plan was simple — gather samples from some of the growers that we had encountered during the last trip, roast the samples, cup the samples, choose a coffee (and by default a grower group) and then spend the rest of the time with the growers, picking cherries and processing them.

So far, everything has gone to plan.

We spent Monday in the bus, bumping along the thin winding mountain roads from Ubud up to Kintamani. Our first job was to rendezvous with Uliana, who works for the local coffee exporting company which buys the coffee from the growers. Uliana was hosting a contingent of people including Ted Lingle and a couple of others from the recently formed Indonesian Specialty Coffee Association (of which we are now a member). Uliana was to give us her recommendation about which growers to shortlist and then organise her assistant to accompany us to the farms to collect the samples.

This we did and eventually headed back to the hotel at the end of a very long day, samples in hand and pretty tired — too tired to roast the samples as intended, so it was dinner and an early night instead.

On Tuesday, Jay, Mikey, Nolan and Bridget left the Ubud contingent nice and early so that they wouldn’t be late for a day of cupping in Sanur. The cupping was run by guru Ted Lingle and represented an amazing opportunity to learn more about coffee from one of the world’s legendary coffee experts. The rest of the crew, that is, Shaughan, Mark and I were left to roast the coffee. All those home roasters out there may be interested to know that we banged out ten samples of very consistent coffee (12-13 minute roasts) with our heat gun, bowl and wooden spoon. It was nice to know that Mark and I hadn’t lost our touch, being ex-home roasters, and it was also fun to see Shaughan with snozzle in bowl throwing in his opinion about the progression of the roast. Go Shaughany!

By early afternoon we’d finished the roasting, had bagged and tagged the samples and were ready for the ‘cup off’. This was planned for 5.00pm, immediately following the cupping training session. Ted Lingle was keen to participate and we were keen to hear his opinion.

We poured three cups of each sample. We cupped blind and tried to use our market (mostly espresso-based drinkers) as a reference point. The coffees were pretty amazing! You normally get a couple of stand-out coffees in a line up but in this line up there were only a couple of disappointments. Ted rated most of the coffees above 7.5, which was an incredible endorsement of the grower’s product and further reinforced our belief that we were onto a good thing.

Ted’s reference point is the US market (mostly filter coffee drinkers) so in the post cupping discussions we acknowledged that his preference would be for the cleaner, brighter coffees, while our preference was always going to be for the coffees that exhibit greater body and flavour intensity with more subtle elements of brightness. There was general consensus, however, about the top few samples and, when pressed, we agreed on two sample coffees, one for espresso and the other for its brightness and complexity and how it would render as a single origin.

Interestingly, there have been two grower groups which have consistently caught our attention over both the last few days and during last year’s trip. These two ‘Subak Abians’ (cooperatives comprised of small-holder farms which are ruled democratically by a communally written set of rules.) appear very switched on and enthusiastic about producing better coffees, with one of the farmers even attending Ted’s cupping class (unfortunately last-minute family matters prevented the other farmer attending).

It came as no surprise, then, that the samples we selected were identified as coming from those two Subak Abians! We couldn’t be happier.

Our intention now is to return to these Subak Abians and talk with them about further enhancing quality. We will do a pick with them to show them the quality of cherries we want and then stay with them into the evening to participate in the processing.

I will try to get more photos up on the website over the next couple of days to give you a better idea of what we are doing and (if possible) include some bio on the growers themselves.