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Last night Dr Morse in Abbotsford held host to around 80 Melburnians spectating the inaugural Batchy Beatdown. With the event organised by Plug Nickel, 12 competitors representing various cafes plied their trade to take out the title. In the end Ben Bicknell of Five Senses coffee was the man whose batch coffee was deemed to be of the highest quality. After a quick vote from the crowd, Elizabeth Hatty of Hash Specialty Coffee was the People's Choice award winner, whilst our personal favourite batch was a Kenyan Peaberry made by James of Sensory Lab. Among the official judges was 2015 World...

Melbourne is often billed as Australia's coffee capital city, due to the laneways and streets crawling with excellent cafes. One of those cafes happens to be Coffee Supreme, a company which originated in NZ in 1993. Since 2001, they've been roasting and serving Melburnians amazing coffee and may just have had an influence in the development of specialty coffee in the city. To get an insight into their operation, we popped in to Supreme in Abbotsford to meet Ash and Jo, retail manager and general manager respectively. We chatted all about their experiences with coffee, the industry in general, and why...

Below is part of a review written by the Editorial team at www.theeverythingonline.com. For the full article, click here. Coffee is something of a religion in Melbourne. There are thousands of cafes dotted around every suburban hub and city laneway, and all of them take the perfect cup of coffee seriously. We’ve even claimed to have the best coffee in the world. When we travel, one of the first things we do is hunt for a good café. When we get home, the first thing we do is complain about the quality of the coffee we had. Coffee snobbery amongst...

At the beginning of each morning, a barista will "dial in" coffee to an espresso machine. This involves a bit of guess work: coffee doesn't taste the same day to day, or even over the course of the day for that matter. Dialling in comprises of fiddling with the size of ground coffee, the amount of ground coffee, and tamping pressure to name a few. An optimum balance is found that extracts the best possible flavours of the coffee, just in time for the line of snoozy customers after their caffeine fix.  Now that everything is up and running, and...

Written by Zaza Fetriza Mita, Yani and Yuli, women coffee farmers from Java. Credit: Erica Knecht  For coffee lovers world-wide, the word "Java" is synonymous with coffee. The Indonesian island was also the inspiration for the Fairtrade movement, and yet, the certification program has yet to reach its coffee growers. But that is about to change. Java Mountain Coffee is an indigenous social enterprise seeking to disrupt a 300 year-old coffee supply chain model established by men for men, under Dutch colonial rule. The old model has only delivered inequality to farmers - women and men - the depletion of...