"Welcome to Five Senses Coffee"

When you are an accountant and you tell someone that you work for a coffee roaster, you’re usually greeted with the same joke every time. “Oh, so you’re a BEAN counter”. Ha Ha. Not funny. Trust me, when you hear this joke for the 5,000th time, it’s incredibly unfunny.

The great thing about working at Five Senses is that you truly are more than just a bean counter. Every employee, from receptionist to delivery driver, or even accountant, is encouraged to immerse themselves in the world of coffee. And so it was that earlier this year I was given the amazing opportunity to travel to Bali, so that I could visit some of the coffee farms that we buy direct from, to see how they work.

Now, this was a big deal for me. Firstly, because I really had only a basic understanding of the whole coffee process. I had heard phrases such as ‘parchment coffee’ and ‘wet mill’, but now I was going to see these things in action. Good stuff. Secondly, this was Bali!!! Friendly people, cheap massages, and Bintang. It doesn’t get any better than that.

It was a great trip, with eight of us spending the week based out of Ubud. We visited local cafés, training staff in the art of coffee making, and then we spent some time up in Kintamani at a number of farms that we have a direct relationship with.

The days at Kintamani were fantastic. The farmers were so welcoming. Just wandering around you could see the daily routine of coffee being pulped, being laid out to dry on raised screen beds that were placed all along the street, and people sorting beans and removing defects by hand.

We also headed out into the fields and picked some coffee cherries ourselves. One of the key things we have developed in our relationship this year is the separation of cultivars, to develop a greater understanding of the various coffees from the region. I headed off with a group of eight young people. I was picking a cultivar called Usda, named after the US Department of Agriculture, which introduced this cultivar to Indonesia from Ethiopia.

It took me quite a while to work out the difference between the cultivars. The different trees grow side by side, and on first glance they look just the same. But after studying them for a while, you can see the differences in the shape of the cherries and the features of the leaves.

Any normal person would pick up the differences pretty quickly, but it took me a bit longer than normal. For about 20 minutes I kept on pointing to plants and saying “Usda?? Usda??”. After a while, the locals just laughed every time I asked; they thought it was hilarious that I still couldn’t tell the difference. It seems like even in Kintamani, accountants aren’t taken too seriously!

Our relationship with these farmers has been growing over the last few years and in a few weeks we will be receiving this year’s crop, direct to our Rockingham roastery. We are very excited that we will be receiving this coffee in separate cultivar lots; it will be great to have this coffee available to our customers to incorporate into their blends.

We have already cupped pre-shipment samples and the coffee tastes amazing. Some people around here think the S795 cultivar is the best, but for me, I think the Usda just shines. I might be biased, but I think it’s got something to do with how well it was picked!