Thursday 21 November 2013

Wednesday 8 May 2013

INDIA

I’m not ordinarily big on bright gold and purple trousers but when in Coorg, do as the Coorgs do. Nithya, my friend whose wedding I’m in India to celebrate trades coffee beans in Australia. His was a traditionally arranged marriage, but the wedding is in true Coorg style and I’m determined to look the part.

Continue reading this story here http://www.tobysestate.com.au/india/ 

BRUNSWICK

Opening a café in Melbourne was partly an excuse to go and mix it with mates down there, which is what coffee is about. If I wasn’t based in Sydney I’d live in Melbourne in a second. I love how it is street oriented. Bikes, cafés, hanging around - that’s just what you do. We couldn’t wait to get there.

A friend and I climbed in a VW van and did the run down in one day, and got straight into setting up the new café. We trekked around every market to find different bits and pieces to dress the shop. Corrugated iron walls, doors we made into tables, random artefacts. We brought the roaster in and got started. It was a warehouse, a school, a roastery and a café in one.

It was a good moment to be in Brunswick to watch Melbourne turn the coffee tide and see the rise of the local speciality roasters over imports from Italy.

The bean is on a journey, and we’re just tagging along for the ride. We hope this Brunswick blend transports you too.

For more Local Stories visit us here http://www.tobysestate.com.au/blog/

WOOLLOOMOOLOO

‘You really don’t know what you’re doing do you?’  The bloke had walked right into the part of the day I loved the most. Mum had taken her afternoon trip to the bank and I’d jumped on the forbidden coffee machine at last. The question was pitched in a thick Italian accent and wasn’t really a question. ‘Get a grinder’ he continued. ‘Take some control over the coffee you make.’ I’d just received my first bit of customer feedback.

I spent a year in Brazil absorbing everything anyone would teach me about coffee and trust me, everyone has a theory. I learned a lot, and much of what I learned was what not to do. That’s what coffee is about. Trial and error. Roast, taste, try again. The science will only take you so far because from tree to cup there are a thousand variables to defy your system. Taste is the only real measure of coffee. But I didn’t know all that yet.

Dad helped me buy a small roaster and I started roasting in Mum’s garage down in Woolloomooloo. I had a bed made of milk crates next that roaster, it was where I lived. On weekends we’d have coffee tastings, and once we knew what we were doing we rolled up the garage door and sold coffee into the laneway.

Two years after that we opened the first Toby’s Estate café down the road and I’d begun a journey that would take me to meet growers in every coffee growing region in the world. It all started in that Woolloomooloo lane, to which I dedicate this blend.

For more Local Stories visit us here http://www.tobysestate.com.au/blog/

PANAMA

1560 metres up, overlooking the pristine cooling rainforest punctuated by giant up-flung trees sits Finca Santa Teresa, the farm I’ve dreamed of having since I got into the coffee game. It’s great to be handed a bag of green beans, to roast them, grind them and so on. 

ETHIOPIA

The landscape is flat, the road is flat, the flatness stretches out forever and beyond. The only change in the landscape was colour, with brown moving to a light ochre, then opening up to a palette of red and green. The verdant hills are held up by the rich, red topsoil, all set off by a backdrop of impossibly blue sky.

YEMEN

Ghotul Akbar Nooruddin Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili is the man who first bought coffee to the western world, but the guy who picks us up from the airport gives his name as ‘Jack’ then takes us to the hotel without speaking.

Continue reading here http://www.tobysestate.com.au/yemen/