"Coffee is addictive! Coffee is evil! Coffee is bad for you!" These are some of the sentences we've all heard throughout our lives. They have been going around since the very first discovery of coffee back in 500AD when a young goatherd names Kaldi watched his goats bouncing around after eating these strange cherries from a bush. THE FIRST GOLD RUSH (OF SORTS) Upon returning to the village with the cherries, the elders immediately proclaimed them as the fruit of the Devil and threw them in the fire. When they cooked in the flames, the other villagers were drawn out of their homes by the aroma ..read more

  Why is the Airscape Coffee Canister necessary for any home barista? Coffee is one of the most sensitive and volatile products; its literally allergic to everything: Light, Oxygen, Heat, Cold, Moisture, and Time.  Keeping coffee fresh enough to retain all those gorgeous oils is one of the most difficult things. Depending on where you are in the world it can make it even more difficult. Here in sunny (and humid) Brisbane, coffee degasses much more quickly than in the cooler states of Australia like Sydney and Melbourne. The humidity is a killer too and even though the coffee bags ha ..read more

  At the core of every single home espresso machine, no matter how complicated, is a very basic and very familiar baseline of components. These components, no matter how different they may seem, can be cleaned with these BASIC and UNIVERSAL CLEANING TECHNIQUES. If you follow these simple steps that anyone can do on ANY espresso machine you will GREATLY improve your coffee’s flavour and extend the lifespan of your machine.   So let's break these steps down to EVERY COFFEE, EVERY DAY, EVERY WEEK and EVERY MONTH.    NUMBER 1: PURGING - EVERY SHOT Before and after you ru ..read more

Filter, or Pour over Coffee, is regarded as one of the purest tasting coffees you can make. Held to high esteem by the coffee elite, filter coffee is the pinnacle of flavour, texture and cleanness. For such a prestigious method, there is a lot that goes into preparing this liquid gold, and with various contraptions on the market it can get overwhelming to start off with.  Even the TYPE OF FILTER matters when it comes to getting the best out of your brew. So check out which filter style works best for your brew below! The most common type of filter on the market is the humble paper filt ..read more

Australians are known for their coffee. Unlike South America or Africa, Australia doesn't grow beans worthy of the world stage. Sure we grow some pretty good beans but realistically we just aren't there as a producing country. Our baristas on the other hand are world class.  Here are some stats! Nearly 19 Million Australians drink coffee (that is 75% of the entire population) and of those, 28% have three or more cups of coffee daily! In Sydney 2016, it was estimated that over 920 cafes and coffee shops in the area sold around 100 million cups of coffee in one year, which produced 3,000 t ..read more

  TACKLING THE WAR ON WASTE Written by Liam Burge   Coffee is one of the largest waste producers on the planet. Every year roughly 20 BILLION kgs of the waste off the coffee cherries and is left to sit in landfill, that then creates roughly 16.6 million tonnes of Co2 emissions (0.2% of global emissions). Around 80% the whole plant is stripped off and thrown away, leaving the remaining 20% (the seed/coffee bean) being the only part consumed.  So how can we combat the level of waste? This is the question I Am Grounded aims to solve, and is taking inspiration from one of the oldes ..read more

Currently in Australia there are: 6700 “Coffee Businesses" operating 792 Coffee Bean Distributors and just around 40 000 baristas currently employed Australia is girt by high quality, delicious coffee and no matter where you look you will be bombarded with yet another ARTISAN COFFEE ROASTERY trying to sell their product.  How do you tell which ones are good or not?  I wish it was simple, even as someone who knows what they are doing. It can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack trying to pick between which coffee seems to have the best reviews, which bags lo ..read more

Given the title by Winston Churchill back in the 1908, Uganda is a hidden gem of coffee production nestled in the heart of Africa. Landlocked between its neighbours South Sudan (to the North), Kenya (to the east), Tanzania and Rwanda (to the south), and The democratic Republic of The Congo to (the west), Uganda is mostly unknown for its coffee internationally. However in recent years it is fast becoming a powerhouse of the world's coffee production.  In the southern regions of Uganda sits Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa and the second largest freshwater lake in the world! The c ..read more

Puck prep is all over the internet these days, with just about every home batista having a tool kit of various gadgets that claim to revolutionise the coffee game. What the videos tend to have in common is that no matter how much fiddling and fussing over the perfectly distributed coffee grinds, the extraction is still relatively rubbish.  There is merit to what they are attempting.  Puck preparation is a new train of thought chasing perfectly distributed grinds inside of your basket. What this means is when water and pressure is added to your portafilter, the water is disperse ..read more

Coffee prices ARE rising and they aren't going to stop at the predicted $7 a coffee. Most of the public's immediate reaction has been to batten down the hatches like it's the end of the world, or to confront cafe owners about the level of extortion that seems to be going on.  What if I told you that it’s not the cafe owners choice? What if I told you that the price hike is not just good for farmers around the world, that it is also in the grand scheme of things good for you?  Coffee has been marketed to us ONE WAY for roughly 60 years, and that has been cheap fuel to boost you up i ..read more