Whisky blender Carlie Dyer, vegan chocolatier Pana Barbounis, artist Daimon Downey and Lavazza’s coffee experts have learnt to read Australians’ changing tastes. In partnership with Lavazza, we ask what’s new (and what’s not), and how they applied this knowledge in developing the new Australian-inspired Mosaic range.
Ask any coffee-drinking Aussie about getting caffeinated overseas and most will say: it’s not as good as in Australia.
“Our coffee scene has its own biosphere here,” says Peter Dorkota, a coffee expert for Lavazza. “We do it a bit differently compared to the rest of the world.”
For Dorkota and Nick Ferrara, another of Lavazza’s coffee experts and trainers in Australia, it was a tough standard to work to as the two embarked on a mission to create a range of coffee blends designed specifically to suit contemporary Australian tastes.
“We love a soothing, gentle, hug-in-a-cup experience when we get our milk-based coffee drink, which is what most Australians drink,” Dorkota says.
After two years of development, including extensive blind tasting and taste profiling, the country’s sweet tooth became apparent. The Lavazza team found that notes of chocolate were a clear winner for coffee lovers between the ages of 25 and 45 who go to cafes multiple times a week. From there, they identified three distinct flavour strands that fit Aussies’ preferences.
The result is Mosaic, a new range of beans made specifically for the Australian palate and coffee culture.
“Coffee is a universal language,” Ferrara says, “and we don’t want to say that one is right one is wrong. So our idea was to have a product that’s brighter, which is Tidal, and another product on the bolder side, which is Retreat. And then something in between, which is Ochre.”
Each of those three blends represents a section of the Australian landscape: coasts in Tidal, deserts in Ochre and rainforests in Retreat. As for the flavour, Tidal boasts a fruity acidity with notes of green apple and plum; Ochre brings milk chocolate, macadamia and honeycomb; and Retreat offers dark chocolate and walnuts. All three are roasted the same way, so those flavour profiles are down to the different beans used in each blend.
The new range is permanent and exclusive not just to Australia, but to Australian cafés. Since local provenance is key to the Mosaic collection, Lavazza tapped three local artists and creatives to assist with this fine-tuning process.
Vegan chocolatier, and founder of Pana Organic, Pana Barbounis helped build the chocolate-y flavour profile that satisfies local preferences, while Starward Whisky blender Carlie Dyer shared observations from the whisky-blending process that could enhance the coffee blend profiles in Mosaic. Visual artist and former Sneaky Sound System frontman Daimon Downey, meanwhile, was commissioned to design the packaging, drawing clear connections to the range being inspired by Australian landscapes.
To celebrate the new range – and Australians’ evolving tastes – we ask the trio about the changing nature of their industries and their personal relationships with coffee.
Downey is a Sydney-based artist whose fun, punchy pieces decorate Byron Bay boutique Raes on Wategos and Sydney trattoria Matteo. For Lavazza’s new range, he created collage-based artwork – inspired by the art of mosaic – to convey the Australian backdrops evoked by the three distinct blends.
I have a baby now, so I have a routine. When I had the band [Sneaky Sound System], we could [make music] whenever. Now it’s more structured, which actually works out for me. I had a studio at home, but then the second kid came and I pretty much got booted out of the house. But there were too many distractions at home.
There’s a lot more agenda-based art, and a lot more voices that are now shouting loud. It’s a much deeper political platform now. That landscape has changed, for the better.
Trend-wise, you do what you know how to do for yourself, so you don’t really hunt down what’s hip and what’s not. [And] the borders are gone – Australians have infiltrated everywhere. And rightly so: we make beautiful things.
I was always a double-shot soy latte guy. That’s it [and still is]. I have a lot less than I did a decade ago [laughs]; I think that’s just a natural thing.
I don’t ritualise it [anymore], but it’s always there.
Dyer is a blender at Melbourne’s innovative Starward Whisky. There, she presides over hundreds of former wine and sherry barrels, mixing the whiskies aging inside and testing the results. For the Mosaic range, Dyer introduced Lavazza to blending processes that are transferrable to coffee production – like gas chromatography, a technique used to map a whisky’s molecular composition.
Each day can be different [but] it requires a lot of quality monitoring, from the start of the process to the end. Once the whisky is in the barrel, it’s just patience and monitoring the whisky until it’s ready to be bottled. But just before bottling, that’s when we pull out the whisky and assess each barrel and cask and see which product it will fit into. That’s blending in a nutshell. It also involves a bit of creativity for new product development –tastings and sensory things, which is fun.
A lot of distillers have popped up; in 2014 there would have only been a handful. Back then, it was a lot of small-format barrels and lots of oak: big, bold flavours. [Australian] whiskies have definitely matured and become more nuanced. What we can choose to blend and play with has allowed for more subtleties in consumer preferences and tastes, so it’s great that we can have more core products that cater to a lot of people’s tastes. We like to break boundaries and experiment and see what consumers are willing to try.
I used to just drink a flat white with cow’s milk. I was a pretty late coffee drinker. Now I strictly drink black coffee. My favourite is a pour-over – I like the mindful process and soft extraction of the aromas and flavours. I guess my taste has evolved to enjoy the subtleties and nuances of the flavour, instead of just trying to caffeinate myself.
I start work at 6am, so I have coffee in the morning. We have a really nice coffee machine at Starward; everybody loves coffee. I’m having long blacks during the week and a pour-over on the weekend. It’s a nice ritual.
Barbounis, who trained for a time with traditional chocolatiers in Belgium, has been handcrafting his forward-thinking range of vegan chocolate in Melbourne’s north for more than a decade. He worked with Lavazza to bring out the chocolate notes in its Mosaic blends, and collaborated on a vegan chocolate powder designed to complement the new range.
It was a lot harder [a decade ago], getting ingredients that performed the same way [as non-vegan ones]. But there are great alternative ingredients, like coconut-milk butter or coconut oil. You’re getting a lot more of the truer flavour [now]. It’s not as blended. You’re allowing the ingredients to speak for themselves. And I think people can see the difference between something that’s organic and grown the right way [and something that’s not].
I remember going to cafes 10 years ago – there weren’t many vegan options. Now there wouldn’t be a half-decent cafe that wouldn’t have a few vegan options on the menu. There’s obviously a demand for it, and [we’ve] seen that change in the market.
Being in Melbourne, we like to hold our coffee cups and walk around on a cold day. So it was probably soy lattes, moving into espressos. Now it’s just espresso: either a single or double shot. Cafes generally don’t get that as wrong, either. At home, a traditional Greek-style coffee might be the go-to.
I’ll generally have three to four espressos every day. And if you don’t want to see a cranky Pana, the first one has to be the best one.
I got to go to their offices and have six espressos in an hour, so I was in heaven [laughs].
This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Lavazza.
