Aside from the Barista and their capabilities, the difference in producing the best cup of coffee is in the blending and roasting, which take years to master. The coffee blender must intimately know the characteristics of each batch of beans that go into the blend and how the different beans react with each other. The body, sweetness, tang, strength, and dryness of the coffee, when it is drunk, can vary dramatically between different batches of the same blend.

Subsequently each bean type is individually roasted to reach its optimum in flavour and aroma. Our blends are then created using the family recipes that have evolved over the years, and each batch is taste tested for quality. The blends will only arrive to you once they have been approved, which for our main blend is done only by our tasting panel consisting of up to three Genovese family members.

The Genovese Super Brazil blend combines the best of these characteristics to make an espresso coffee that resembles the Italian Style of the early 1950s. It is a marriage of traditional Italian blending techniques with the ever-demanding Australian Palate.

To evolve with the changes that have taken place in the coffee industry in recent years, our Specialty Coffee Division was born. Although we proudly stand behind our flagship blend Super Brazil, we realise that there are many different taste preferences and styles of coffee becoming available, and we are happy to satisfy the needs of our customers to experiment with and offer these alternative coffees and brewing methods. So in the one place you can get both a traditional Italian styled espresso, and a light roasted geisha served through syphon!

Our roasting facility combines state of the art equipment with our traditional hands on roasting and blending techniques. We have a long standing relationship with Brambati in Italy, who we have worked with to create our fully customized plant which enables us to have complete control over the process, ensuring the quality and consistency that we are known for. Just this year we have added a brand new 240kg roasting machine with intelligent profiling software that is allowing us to be even more efficient, and conserve energy which is very important to us. The previous 120kg machine is still in operation for when smaller batches are required, and our little 5kg customised S.T.A machine for specialty coffee micro roasting is now located at a café called Hawthorn Common.

The system incorporates mechanical green coffee cleaning and then loading into silos with virtually no manual labour, ensuring the health and safety of our roasting staff. Then the green coffee is transported into the roaster as a single origin, as we prefer to “post-blend” so we can create unique profiles for each individual coffee to bring out their true potential, then blend them afterwards. After being transported into the next set of silos, the roasted coffee is given a few days of rest which allows the gasses that evolve during the roasting process to escape.

Globally, specialty coffee is generally defined as “A crafted quality coffee-based beverage, which is judged to have a unique quality, a distinct taste and personality different from and superior to the common coffee beverages offered. The beverage is based on beans that have been grown in an accurately defined area, and which meet the highest standards for green coffee and for its roasting, storage and brewing.” Also, to be deemed as specialty grade a coffee should receive a score of 80 and above on the 100 point scale used to rate green coffee.

By that definition, our flagship blend Super Brazil could for the most part be considered as specialty coffee, but in Australia the term has further evolved to include other distinctions such as being roasted a touch on the lighter side to highlight origin flavours as opposed to more the caramelised flavours found with more roast development. A further requirement for specialty coffee has become a complete transparency and traceabilty of details like the origin, harvest time, processing method, roast date etc. So with these developments in the coffee industry, our specialty coffee division was born not as an alternative to Super Brazil, but as an addition to our range, so that cafes we work with can offer their customers the option of the different styles of coffee that are increasing in popularity with coffee drinkers.

For this purpose we source specialty green coffees through a range of means such as direct from the farmers themselves, via specialty coffee focused suppliers like Melbourne Coffee Merchants, SILO, Latorre and Dutch, MTC, Ninety Plus, the Cup of Excellence program and more. These coffees are purchased in small quantities, ensuring freshness, seasonality and variety. We roast these specialty coffees in small batches, predominately on a customised 5kg roaster that is located in one of our cafes called Hawthorn Common. Our specialty coffees are roasted to order, packaged by hand and delivered in a timely manner, in many cases by the roaster himself, Ben Toovey. Ben is the head of our specialty coffee division, and he oversees the sampling, selection, roasting, packaging and delivery of all specialty coffee products. Thus our specialty coffee division acts as a micro-roasting arm of our main coffee roasting facility, catering to those who wish to experiment with some of the more contemporary styles of coffee offerings and preparation methods.

Another function of the specialty coffee division is quality control, research and development. We test and implement things like VST precision filter baskets, Extract Mojo refractometer and TDS meter, and other “coffee geek” tools and toys. We can also source and help you set up alternative brewing methods in your café such as pour over, syphon, cold drip, chemex, aeropress, trifecta etc.