We’re pretty lucky here in Melbourne when it comes to water quality. Conveniently, our tap water sits neatly in the middle of the recommended specs for brewing coffee, leaving most cafe operators the rudimentary task of whacking on a water filter and off they go. Not quite the case for cities like London or Copenhagen where the water is problematically hard. Until now, having great water in Melbourne has deemed ‘designing’ water through reverse osmosis units and other means superfluous. Yet this blessing has also cursed us with a pretty shaky understanding of the importance of water when brewing coffee. In recent years, an international troupe of coffee people have inspired a worldwide ‘water-awakening’, calling our attention to the thoroughly...

Since July last year we’ve been running a series of events, each of which is intended to shine some light onto a misunderstood or under-appreciated aspect of the coffee industry.

In my early days as a barista, there was one really important book. It was big, orange and was released in 2001 by La Marzocco. It was a troubleshooting guide for the Linea espresso machine. For those of us with a burgeoning interest in making better coffee, the two hundred or so pages within its luminous orange covers contained a great deal of the information that we were hungry for — detailed, illustrated advice crucial to keeping the equipment we relied upon operating at it’s peak. The book was a field guide for the foundations of making great espresso (as we understood it then). It was an important book, and aggressively sought after by enthusiastic baristas. Perhaps it was more...

  Each week we produce large volumes of both spent coffee grinds and chaff — a papery byproduct of the roasting process. While each of us took home as much as our compost bins could handle, we no choice but to dispose of the rest with our normal rubbish collection. And then we received an email from Ninna and Kaitlin of Reground. Reground is a sustainability-driven startup working to divert coffee waste from landfill. Their young business operates a simple but valuable service, placing bins for the collection of used coffee grinds into cafes across Melbourne. Once a week Reground picks up the full bin, drops off a fresh bin, and distributes the collected grinds to end users for composting...