Once upon a time: A Coffee Story through Food & Wine

Posted on 1 November, 2014

Attention all coffee, food and wine lovers (which I’m pretty sure is all of us)! If you are mid-love-affair with any of the aforementioned, you’ll want to know about what’s going at The Cupping Room next week. Imagine all your loves brought together and rolled into one, for a night of splendour, excitement and marvel. That’s right my friends—clear your calendar, because The Cupping Room has a dinner date for us to share — a coffee story through food and wine.

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Director and Founder of ONA Coffee and Project Origin, Sasa Sestic, has created the evening in the hopes of educating his guests about the processes involved in producing coffee. As a passionate pioneer of all things coffee related, Sasa enjoys educating our community about coffee and actively contributes to creating a knowledgeable and enthusiastic coffee drinking community here in Canberra. I caught up with Sasa to gain some insight into what’s in store for Canberra’s coffee lovers and those curious about the bean that brings pleasure to many.

“The idea of the night is to tell a story of coffee through [presenting] similarities between the production of wine [and the production of coffee]. We’ve found this is a more understood medium for those whom are not directly involved in the coffee industry,” Sasa explains.

A bit over a year ago Sasa travelled to Santa Barbara, Honduras to begin a special coffee farming project with award-winning farmer and owner of La Huerta Coffee, Jorge Lanza. Sasa leased a portion of the La Huerta coffee farm, which he since turned into an experimental lot. The pair explored and tested different methods of growing coffee and what environmental factors influence how coffee tastes.  The goal was to ‘try and make an exceptional coffee even better’ as Sasa puts it.

[pe2-image src=”http://lh4.ggpht.com/-zg3PdwsoSJo/VFQrHy8cxrI/AAAAAAAAKiA/QzGZVUisXAw/s144-c-o/la_huera_%252520%2525281%252529.jpg” href=”https://picasaweb.google.com/108454826374315674707/TheCuppingRoomAStoryOfCoffeeAndWine#6076529210164037298″ caption=”la_huera_ (1).jpg” type=”image” alt=”At the La Huerta coffee farm: Sasa, Jorge and some fellow farmers.” pe2_caption=”1″ pe2_img_align=”center” ]

After finishing with his experiments, Sasa returned home to Australia with a renewed enthusiasm towards coffee farming and decided to host an evening where he could share with our community what he learnt from his experimental experience. A Coffee Story through Food and Wine will consist of a four-course dinner accompanied by matching wines. With the food and wine predominantly the focus, the coffee aspect will be presented as a reference to tie the courses and elements together. Each course is based on a different aspect of coffee farming which, with the help of Clonakilla Wines’ Tim Kirk, Sasa will take guests on a journey through the process of farming good coffee.

The first course revolves around Soil and explains how phosphor levels in soil influence the acidity and texture of the coffee, which is also similar to wine. Sasa says that soil type and composition also play a huge role in determining the flavour and quality of a wine. For this portion you’ll get two small starters, and a wine to match each from Giant Steps Wines.

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The second course, dubbed The Plant, is all about, well, exactly that. Sasa and Jorge experimented with ‘selective picking’ of coffee cherries to find out which part of the tree produced the most ‘balanced, exciting and well-rounded’ product. They found that cherries in different parts of the tree did not taste the same or share similar characteristics. They then experimented with blending these beans together to combine different flavour components. Sasa draws similarities between wine and coffee by deconstructing and discussing their separate components including the comparison of coffee cherry plants and grape vines. Guest speaker and award-winning wine maker, Tim, will be talking about this in more detail while you munch on your second course, sipping on a Shiraz Viognier from Tim’s vineyard.

Fermentation follows on as course number three. Sasa explains that one of his goals during this part of experimentation was to ‘improve body and sweetness’.

“The idea was to bring a more prominent fruit flavour to the coffee,” he says. “[But to] still maintain the clarity and acidity we [achieved] during the soil experiment.”

If you have ever tried La Huerta coffee from one of the Project Origin vendors around town (Espresso Room is one of them), you may identify its cupping notes of peach, caramel, juicy red apple, panella and coke. This blend encompasses those ideas of sweetness, acidity and fruitiness Sasa aimed to produce with his original experiments in Honduras. The process of fermenting brings these cupping notes to the forefront and so Sasa played around with different methods of fermentation to reach the end product. By using wine as a comparison, Sasa hopes to demonstrate to guests ways in which fermentation affects the ‘flavour, balance, and structure’ of wine. You’ll also receive a choice of Pinor Noir’s from the By Farr Vineyard to accompany your, no doubt, delicious food (if you’ve eaten at The Cupping Room before, you’ll know exactly what I mean).

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Finally, no meal is complete without dessert—the fourth course (and my favourite part). Kick back, relax and enjoy the Fruits of your labour or rather, Sasa’s labour. This course will allow you to reflect and digest what you have learnt throughout the evening, and will hopefully leave you with a better knowledge and deeper appreciation for what’s involved in making your little old morning coffee. Don’t worry – there’s a wine matched for this course too—a fortified Pedro Ximenez from Turkey Flat Vineyards.
The wine selection

The venue for this event is particularly fitting. If you’re familiar with The Cupping Room, you might know they’re a concept café created specifically to explore every aspect of coffee and educate people in the process. Not surprisingly, the Cupping Room concept was thought about by Sasa and the team at ONA Coffee, who are immensely passionate about sharing their knowledge and love of coffee! It might even be said that Canberra’s new-found coffee culture can be partly attributed to ONA Coffee and Sasa’s undying efforts to instil these ideas of education, passion and innovation among our community.

The Cupping Room is also notorious for creating particularly beautiful and delicious food, and its recognition by Gourmet Traveller as one of ‘Australia’s Best Cafes’. You only have to take a look at the menu to see why! So if this has enticed you to book into for the Coffee Story through Food and Wine, then my job is done and you’ll surely be in for a treat!

The essentials

What: A Coffee Story through Food and Wine

When: 6.30pm, Saturday 8 November

Where: The Cupping Room, 1/13 University Avenue Canberra City

Book tickets: Tickets can be purchased through Facebook