Our Coffee Story

We are passionate about producing the delicious house blend that is enjoyed by our customers and our team alike. Each origin within our house blend is important as it provides just the right flavour profile, strength, sweetness, acidity and nuiance to your espresso.  This is a story to detail each farm and how the coffee berry is cultivated to create the perfect character balance within our MELBA house blend.


Tanzania - Mbinga

Mbinga is the most Southern coffee producing area in Tanzania. The region produces 6-14,000 metric tonnes of arabica green beans a year. The varietal is Bourbon, Kent, Blue Mountain and Typica. The coffee is graded AA and is fully washed in processing. Featuring an aroma of chocolate biscuit, vanilla and stonefruit. In the cup you will experience a smooth body, and a good balance with the flavour profile of cocoa and green grapeskin with a crisp acidity on cooling.


Region: Mbinga, Tanzania

Varietal: Bourbon, Kent, Blue Mountain and Typica

Process Method: Fully washed

Aroma: Blackcurrant, spices and wine

Flavour: Chocolate, caramel and blackcurrant undertones with long roasted nuts and sweet lemon zest aftertaste

Body: Medium acidity and round body

Tasting Notes: Cocoa and green grapeskin


PNG

Commercial coffee production started in Papua New Guinea in the 1920s with seeds brought from Jamaica’s Blue Mountain, a Typica known as Jamaica Blue Mountain. At that time most of the coffee production came from 18 large plantations. Plantations still exist in PNG but it only accounts for 15% of the total production; most of the production now comes from small-holders who tend to their coffee gardens, as they call them locally. The small-holders are subsistence farmers (meaning they live off their land) and they also grow coffee–there are no coffee farmers per-se. Each garden might have anywhere from a couple to a couple hundred trees of coffee and parchment deliveries can range from 25 – 65 kg. Coffee is currently grown in 15 of the 19 provinces in the country, and half of the rural population have a direct connection with coffee production.


Varietal: Arusha, Bourbon, Mundo Nuevo, Catimor and Caturra

Grade: B

Process Method: Washed, sun and/or machine dried

Aroma: Roasted nuts, cocoa, dark spices and prunes.

Flavour: Caramel and roasted nuts with a long cocoa nibs aftertaste.

Body: Medium round body

Acidity: Citric acidity


Brazil – cerrado

Cerrado is an eco-region within the states of Goia's and Minas Gerais. Cerrado coffee is generally clean with a good body (creamy mouthfeel), low acidity, well-balanced, and often exhibiting a nutty and even slightly caramelly flavor when light-roasted, perhaps even malty, though more chocolaty if given a darker roast. Mechanical harvesting and mass processing are the normal with Cerrado coffee, providing large amounts of coffee which is exported from the country. The relatively flat topography of the Cerrado region makes it possible to utilize mechanical harvesting while also assuring some consistency of quality in choosing the optimal time to pick the coffee beans, which generally do not ripen all at once -different fruit ripen at different times over a period of one to four months.


Region: Cerrado

Altitude: 900-1200m ASL

Grade:  NY 2/3 FC  

Flavour: Roasted peanuts, caramel and chocolate

Body: Medium round body

Acidity: Light acidity

Aroma: Chocolate, nuts and nutmeg

Tasting notes: Chocolate, nuts and nutmeg