the cafe at the front of the plantation is the perfect setting for a morning / afternoon coffee. the outdoor balcony opens out to a relaxed, lush green garden with seating area to enjoy your morning cuppa over a book or magazine.
the cafe also holds a gallery showing off some pretty impressive paintings, artworks, photos and souvenir displays.
having spent 10-15 mins browsing around the cafe and taking photos, i asked about the plantation and whether i could take a short tour around the grounds. to my surprise, i was told that the plantation wasn't actually open to the public. the lady explained to me that it was more a working plantation rather than one to hold tours. sensing my genuine interest in coffee and the disappointment written on my face, she told me to wait a few moments.
in walks big kees, the owner of the plantation and she pulls him aside to ask him if he had the time to take me for an unofficial tour of the plantation and kees was more than happy to show me around his office. i must say that the private tour was nothing short of astounding. his enthusiasm, hearing him talk about his plantation, about his trees, the cherries, the beans, how they are harvested and his deep, deep love for coffee was awe-inspiring.
he told me that they had actually picked all the cherries recently and that most of the trees were relatively bare but to have a poke around as there were still many to be found.
after wandering in and out of the trees for several minutes, kees off-handedly mentions his pet python (apparently as thick as my arm!) lurks around the plantation. good lord! lucky i didn't know that before poking my head around! he's a harmless sucker says kees.
we wander further around the plantation while he's giving me a run-down of the different types of coffee beans and their origins, how they grow their trees and the seasons and conditions in which they thrive in. we stop by a tree and kees helps me locate a red coffee cherry, something i'd never seen before. he tells me to pluck the sucker and eat it but to spit the pip out so i gladly oblige. the cherry has a very lovely full sweetness to it - i was expecting it to be bitter.
we round the last corner of the plantation and he is explains to me the importance of australian coffee. he explains how our own home-grown industry is quite widely unknown and hardly mentioned when talking coffee. people are always buying from indonesia, brazil, columbia etc and how he's trying to do his best to bring awareness to our own local industry. so kees, this blog here is my little part in trying to spread the word.
kees also goes on to mention that the plantation and quality of the beans grown locally are just as good as brazilian, indonesian and other african and asian countries. although we don't have the rich volcanic soil used to produce rich, high quality coffee trees and beans, kees uses his own method to reproduce this by periodically fertilising his trees with ash. thus producing richer soil and in turn producing higher quality coffee beans.
the last stop, kees takes us into his shed to show us the machinery that he uses to roast these beans and i come face to face with 'the ghost of les hawker'. he lets me in on a little in-joke and a little bit of history on how this came to be. the short of it, kees and les were buddies but also rivals in the past, and as it turns out toward the later years, kees purchased this workhorse roaster from les. not soon after, les sadly passes away. kees names the roaster 'the ghost of les hawker'.
now last but not least, there was a very special guest to be found back behind the counter in the cafe. none other than legendary mr paul jackson :)
still in awe of the tour i was just given, i sat down and had a cup of black magic coffee (worlds highest caffeinated coffee) and a pumpkin and spinach roll. and that was not all, kees swung back around before he left to go home and dropped me a little gift - a bag of green beans for me to roast for myself at home. thanks kees. you're a deadset legend!
i have to say that this was an experience of a life-time and i am ever so grateful. thanks to the friendliest of staff in the cafe and to mr kees for being so accommodating and giving me such a generous tour of his plantation. i won't forget this - big big props to australian coffee!
one morning, i rock on over for my usual 10-10.30am coffee break and i bump into fellow coffee-nerd roly. so we give each other a nod and he's like 'yeh trust to see you here' and i'm thinking the same thing. so we're waiting for our coffee orders and having a quick chat about coffee and a few other things (ok i'm lying - it was all about coffee) and then roly asks me a rather serious question 'so what do you drink?'. i tell him my usual boring latte + 1, so he suggests the following to me...