Could Australia become a coffee-growing nation?

SBS Australia

23-05-2025

The coffee's steaming hot at the Happy Frog café in Coffs Harbour in northern NSW. This cup is one of six billion consumed nationwide each year, according to Agrifutures Australia. Unlike most, this one is made with locally grown beans. The cafe's owner is Kim Towner: 'That's been a real passion of mine since I first went into the cafe business, was to buy as close to home as I could. And it's just a win-win all round for everybody, I think. It's beautiful coffee. We get to know the people that have grown it. And that has been probably my biggest, favouritest thing. But of course it's got the low food miles, so it's good for the environment. I know its story.' Australia grows less than half a percent of all the coffee we drink. Producing more sounds a great idea, but is it worth the effort? At Southern Cross University in Lismore, Professor Tobias Kretzschmar is finding out by trialling new trees. 'So we're part of a larger project with the World Coffee Research. They're interested in trialling 20 to 30 coffee varieties all around the globe. So we piggybacked on that global project to be able to trial those varieties in Australia. And our aim for Australia is to find new varieties that are better suited for this environment and better suited for the mechanized conditions of coffee farming in Australia.' Most Australian coffee grows in Queensland or northern New South Wales where farmers face climate challenges. 'They put their money on a variety that's much too vigorous for this environment. So we're looking at something that's semi-dwarf, easy to be machine harvested. So the next stage would be to take the two to three varieties that we're thinking will out-compete the current varieties and trial them at scale.' Globally, coffee exports spiked recently after a run of falls and prices remained volatile due to trade tensions and fears of economic slowdown. Paul Joules is a research analyst with Rabobank. 'In April we did see Arabica prices ease slightly but nonetheless on a year-on-year basis we're still around 100% higher.' And that means ever-rising prices at the coffee shop. So could Australia ever compete with Brazil or Colombia? Professor Tobias Kretzschmar again: 'We're covering around half a percent of what the Australian consumer is drinking at the moment. If we can double that, that'd be fantastic. If we can triple or quadruple that, we'd be punching above our weight.' It's also about finding a coffee style with broad appeal. For clues, scientists have turned to a unique taste wheel which helps analyse the makeup of a particular taste. Dr Ben Liu is behind the taste wheel. 'First we actually have this coffee tasting by different professionals. They work in the coffee industry for decades. And then we actually collect a different type of data from them and from description from them. And then we summarise them with also some of the score for the taste and the flavour of the coffee. And then we bring the exact same sample they taste back to our lab and do carry out analysis. And so we can associate the data from the chemistry also to the taste and the smell of the coffee.' The taste wheel doesn't just identify the flavour of the coffee, but its character as well and uses words as diverse as 'yoghurty', 'apple like' and even dirty. ' So this coffee character wheel basically helps the panel members to actually get an idea of what they think, what could be used to describe the taste, the flavour, or a different mouthfeel they actually feel. But saying that there are some bad words there because there are also some bad taste coffee there. Unfortunately, during our coffee research, (we not just taste the best coffee, we also taste bad coffee as well.' But Dr Liu says Australian grown coffee does have some common characteristics: 'We collect 100 single-origin coffee around Australian farmers. And when we run this tasting panel, the words that keep coming out for Australian coffee are they are sweet and they are fruity and they are nutty and roasty. So that's the thing that's coming up the most for Australian coffee.' For Kim Towner, the decision to use locally grown coffee was simple. 'All of these things you hear different blends and different stories about the coffee. But I just thought it tasted good. And it's super fresh. We know that everybody is getting paid fairly for it. We know that it hasn't had to travel across the ocean and up and down highways to get here. It's just over the hill. You can't get much closer than that. And I think that's important with everything. As much as possible, if we can source from our local area and just use as much of that as we can, we're going to make a big difference to how we look after the planet.'