Five Senses' Blog
In and Around 5 Senses
The SynessoMac Mark II is born
What was 18 months in the making is finally complete and stands proud on my kitchen bench — the SynessoMac Mark II.
My home set-up including the SynessoMac Mark II
It’s been about two years since Richard finished and installed the original SynessoMac at his home and after a few months or constant pestering, late night sms’s and post-it notes on his fridge, he finally agreed to go around the block again and create a Mark II of his original creation.
Once I got the nod, I raced my machine into the service department ready for its conversion. Richard assured me it would only take about eight weeks 
… ok, maybe it got dragged out just a little a bit, but I guess a few slightly more important projects like green bean lifting machines, roasted bean mixing trays and a 90kg Giesen roaster install were a little more important to bump my little machine further down the priority list.
Alrighty, enough about those other projects … a mere 18 months in the womb and the SynessoMac Mark II was born. It’s almost identical to the original with a few small differences: blue PID (at my request), a custom-made double walled cooltouch steam wand (thanks Synesso, you guys rock!) and the pump was mounted externally under the bench (making the internal area much easier to work around).
It came home just before Christmas, which was gold!!! … seens as it was holidays. I’ve been experimenting with different coffees, different temps and even dosing levels, which has been a lot of fun. I’ve been looking for something that’s chocolaty and super sweet. I really don’t know whether it’s possible to beat our Colombian Monserrate at 96°C, which is what I’ve been tasting for a few days now. I started at 92°C and one thing that I’ve definitely found is the shots get sweeter as I drive up the temp. Next up is to try some of our blends.
For all the technical details of Richards original project, check it out here: http://blog.fivesenses.com.au/category/project-x/
And just for the record … the wait was totally worth it.
Close up of the Synesso grouphead
Day 4 of Q Graders course is about to wrap up
This year there were five people from Five Senses represented. Here are their experiences of the past four days, wrapped up in four adjectives…
Adam: happiness, joy, excitement, nervous
Brydon: nerve-racking, informative, frustrating, validating
Ron: fun, exciting, tiring, summertime!
Ian: exhausting, tiring, fatigued, awesome
Jacob: intensive, educational, relational, challenging
Megan: informative, exhaustive, relationship-building, nostalgic
Watch this space for a post course wrap-up. It is sure to be, exciting, fun, informative, nostalgic…….
Cuppers in action
Could this be Australia's next Q-Grader?
The ABA Makeover is Complete
After only three days, Fintan Magee has finished his mural on the Australian Barista Academy wall in Victoria. Although a few rain delays prevented the portafilter idea from eventuating the new artwork has still given the west side wall a whole new look. Check out how the some of the balloons are actually part of a coffee branch! On the box heads there are stencils of coffee syphons and group handles, which are visible to Melbourne trains all day, every day. Next time you’re in West Melbourne, drop in a have a look. It’s an appealing image with fun, subtle coffee images woven in.
Thanks Fintan Magee!
The final artwork on the Australian Barista Academy wall by Fintan Magee
The eagle has landed!
Some exciting things have been happening at the Five Senses’ roastery in Victoria. Lots of new gadgets and toys have been arriving, and we’re particularly thrilled about our new Giesen 90kg roaster. After (im)patiently refreshing the tracking page for the shipping container every 15 minutes while it was en route, the roaster arrived just after 3.30pm yesterday. There was lots of jumping around with excitement and many high fives were exchanged. Then we hit the hard truth …
There were 5.7 tonnes of roaster, and only 4 guys to move it!
Well, everyone got their hands dirty and helped carry all the equipment into our newly expanded roasting room, before taking a moment to sit back and admire the gorgeous fire engine red roaster. We got email from the roaster boys at Five Senses in WA, urging us to keep the photos coming, as I am sure they could feel the excitement too.
Then Richard Muhl could not contain himself any longer — the bubble wrap came off, the tools came out and the assembly began.
All the staff are extremely happy and relieved that this amazing work of art has finally arrived at the roastery. There will be exciting times ahead for Five Senses, and I know the roasters cannot wait to jump on the machine and start playing around with all the amazing variables and controls that this roaster offers. A win for coffee lovers everywhere!
For now let me leave you with a photo, but we will be regularly updating our progress, so keep an eye on this page.
The Giesen roaster
Adventures of an amateur tea wallah!
I’ve always had a fascination with chai tea ever since I made my first steaming, aromatic cup many years ago. It may have had something to do with the cute kiwi girl with a taste for jazz and a strawberry birthmark on her cheek who was in charge of the tea preparation! Anyway, I digress. Back to tea!
With the pending introduction of our new tea range (watch this space for more details) we found our self with some high quality black tea “surplus to needs” and I immediately put it aside as a base tea for some Chai. Literally translated chai just means tea but the word Chai in Australia typically means a spiced tea.
After a little bit of google homework I felt sufficiently equipped to get cracking.
First stop was the iconic Kakulas Bros store in Northbridge to load up with some spices. If you’ve never been into Kakulas, it’s an amazing experience with a staggering array of “loose” products priced by the kilo. They manage to cover a broad array of ingredients for many different ethnic cuisines with an increasing range of organic products. True to its Greek heritage its strictly “cash only”, love it!!
Loaded up with star anise, cinnamon, cardamom pods, black pepper, clove and fennel seeds I headed home to start some experimenting. In the past I’ve often weighted my judgement of Chai too highly on the visible spices, the big chunky pieces that are easy to see. I now realise that the visible spices are largely for show and unless you’re doing a traditional slow brewed Chai, the typical percolation times in a cafe of around four minutes are too fast to actually extract any flavours from whole spices. So a nice mix of ground spice for “go” and whole spice “for show” is the formula I settled on.
Whilst grinding and blending I was constantly reminded of the incredible power smell has to evoke the memories of a certain place or time. Smelling the sweet, spiciness of the cloves I was immediately reminded of Rosella Chutney and cheese and chutney sandwiches after school. Smelling the cardamom reminded me of an old sweet potato and cardamom ice cream recipe (better than it sounds, trust me!) that was popular what seems like a lifetime ago.
And the most powerful of all was tasting the final result after hours of blending and adjusting … I swear I could hear some jazz playing softly in the background!!!
Shaughan's amateur tea making
The G90 is almost ready
I’ve just spent a few days at Giesen Coffee Roasters in Ulft, a lovely little Netherlands town situated near the Germany border, to check in on how our fully re-built and refurbished Probat G90 is progressing. Giesen’s Marc Weber and his team of engineers have be working hard on our roaster for some months and the results are spectacular.
The process started with Marc finding the required roaster, which in our case was a 1947 Probat G90, with its cast iron drum in excellent condition. The condition of everything else is largely unimportant as whatever is not thrown away and replaced can be fully restored to new condition with relative ease. The drum was fully striped down to its most basic components and everything went on the receiving end of a sandblaster. Once the dust settles all of the parts are painted and then reassembled with new bearings and seals. All of the existing electric motors are tossed in the bin and replaced with new three phase units. The old Burners and Gas train are also discarded and a new six row array with 96 ceramic burners, three solenoid valves, a pilot burner and regulator fitted. The cooling tray received the same treatment with most of its components requiring complete replacement due to damage and wear. A new Cyclone was manufactured out of 4mm thick steel, which Marc jokingly told me would easily put up with a chaff fire … and if one were to start, just let it burn. I think he was joking…
Our now fully rebuilt and re-furbished roaster stands side by side with a customised Giesen Roaster Control System. The touch screen interface gives us access to the stored recipes that we use to operate the roaster. Once recorded and fine tuned, the recipes allow us to precisely control the power level of the burners, the airflow velocity through the roaster and the drum rotational speed throughout the entire roast duration.
At this stage it looks like the G90 will arrive in Melbourne in eight to ten weeks (sometime in early August).
Hmmm … I guess I better start thinking about how to I’m going to install it.
Richard and Marc Weber from Geisen stand in front of our new 90kg Geisen roaster for the Victorian roastery
The bare roaster
Our roaster in it's original state, prior to the rebuild/re-furbish
Classic Bali
I met the farmers from Bedugul very briefly last year and they offered me possibly the most motley, defect ridden coffee sample I’ve ever seen! The actual township of Bedugul straddles two lakes and is very scenic in the brief periods it’s not totally enshrouded in cloud! We set off from Ubud to revisit the farmers on a brief respite from the persistent rain. We met them at a tiny, ramshackle roadside warung. The old lady who runs it would have been a beauty in her day. I could imagine her topless in one of the old black and white photos you see from the 40’s and 50’s. Her husband is around 90 and maybe showing some signs of dementia but is happy and full of energy. He speaks fluent Japanese from the occupation of Bali during Second World War. She is his 5th wife. After years of hard work he can’t relax and digs holes just to keep him himself busy.
A squad of scooters arrived to pick us up from the warung and ferry us into the Subak (co-op) headquarters. The track is narrow and incredibly hilly and it was an exhilarating ride in. The farmers were waiting for us in the hut and we sat around and chatted for an hour or so, the whole group chiming in as we tried to get a feel for what they need. Bali is a very democratic society, with lots of consultation on any decisions affecting the community. Whilst there is a designated leader who is treated with lots of respect, everyone is free to offer their opinion. The farmers are way behind our groups in Kintamani but are very keen to try to work with us and get things on track. This will be a long term project and we will start by building a nursery for them on the June harvest trip so we can get the right varietal (S795) planted from day one. There is around 30 hectares of land available to plant out in coffee which would be a huge undertaking but very exciting. I’m also curious about having cloves as the intercropped shade tree and whether that will have any impact on a flavour. Possibly a slightly romantic notion!
We concluded the meeting after making some plans and prepared to leave. It started to rain as the scooters ferried us back to the main road. My friend Iwa had to jump off the back of the scooter and run up the steepest hill as the bike he was on didn’t have the power to pull 2 people up the steep incline. He had one hand trying to keep his pants up and the other holding a large palm leaf over his head as an improvised umbrella. Hilarious! By the time we got back to the main road it was pouring and we sheltered under the eaves of the warung. A couple with a small baby all on one scooter pulled up to shelter from the rain. It was quickly decided the wife and baby should come with us and we would drop them in Singaraja. It was so natural and happened with almost no communication. Classic Bali! The baby was pretty upset and the mother pulled out a swollen breast (the world’s best packaging solution, right there!) and began to feed him. He settled down to feed but kept one big brown eye on me the whole time. I started by stroking his finger and hand and after a while he curled his little fingers around mine and squeezed my hand. After lots of cajoling and playing he eventually reached out to me and jumped over and we played for the rest of the journey as he bounced on my lap. We dropped them at their place in Singaraja and continued on our journey.
The weather turned bad quickly and we drove home in heavy rain. It started to clear as we got closer to Ubud and I hung my head out the window like an inquisitive puppy and filled my lungs and heart with Bali as it whizzed past. Can’t wait for June!
Coffee is a Way of Life
On meeting Sunalini Menon, the founder of Coffeelab in India and a tireless champion of Indian coffees it’s impossible not to be impressed by her intellect and broad coffee knowledge. My friend and colleague Jenny Murray recently sent me this quote from Sunalini’s Wikipedia listing. Inspirational, beautiful, evocative, it’s got it all. Should be compulsory reading for anyone in the specialty coffee industry.
Sunalini has this to say on coffee “Coffee is a Way of Life … not just life, but a life which is aromatic, meaningful, rewarding, and passionate. Aromatic with its unique flavour and taste, meaningful as you connect and make friends for life across the world, rewarding when the farmer is not only able to upgrade the quality of his produce but is able to market the same successfully, and passionate when the “coffee aroma therapy” not only rejuvenates you, but also rekindles life for farmers and consumers across the globe. Every day I wake up and look at coffee, to find something beautiful. It certainly is all about expecting the unexpected.
Sunalini Menonm, the founder of Coffeelab
Day 4 and Going Strong
The vibe is slowly starting to relax as the test results start to trickle in and are overwhelmingly positive. So far everyone has completed three olfactory tests, one sensory skills test, four triangulations, five cuppings (Brazil, Indo, Centrals, East Africans and Colombians), one general knowledge exam and a green grading exercise. The rest of today has them doing organic acid identification, roasted coffee analysis and the last olfactory exam.
The biggest challenge has been staying focused and not succumbing to sensory dumbification, maybe I just made that word up, but that’s what it feels like by the end of the day. Knowing everyone here, including a couple of usually rowdy folk, I’m AMAZED at how quiet it’s been during the tests, HYPER focused is the best way to describe it, everyone is taking this very seriously, as they should. It feels like this week is about continually challenging and re-calibrating your pre-conceptions of what a good / great / amazing coffee really is. As an industry, it’s near impossible to not get caught up in our own little bubble and slowly create our own set of standards. Things like gradually changing roast depth over time, pulling different shots, favouring one flavour profile, dismissing one origin completely etc etc. This is one of those rare opportunities we find ourselves all in the same room, tasting the same coffees and calibrating ideas, this is ALWAYS a learning experience. The goal of having one common language as professionals (Craig mentioned this on Day 1) is an invaluable tool in my opinion.
Bears Fighting Unicorns
In our online ordering system, we have a fairly standard feature where our customers are able to put in any special requests that they have for the order. More often than not, this is a simple request to the delivery company saying things like “Please put behind the gate” or “Please leave the order behind the planter” or similar. Occasionally, however, we get something a little more complex.
One customer, perhaps spurred on by a trend occurring with online pizza ordering in the US, decided to test the artistic skills of our Operations department the other day. They put “Please draw a picture on the packaging of a Unicorn fighting a bear 
”. Not one to shirk a challenge, Emma took out her sharpie and drew a masterpiece.
A Bear fighting a Unicorn
Close-up
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