Luca
Thank you for the tip about Au79, we took a trip across town to check it out this afternoon. Amazing set up, definitely one to note for a regular visit. They also offer great food.
Not sure if you have checked out The Reformatory Caffeine Lab range coffee, they are based in Sydney but Focus in Balwyn have a good range on offer. Might be worth exploring.
Sam and I are both using Quest roasters so always keen to learn and compare notes

Hi Luca,
Thanks for posting, please don't stop. I travel to Melbourne every month and always seek out places offering premium pour over or filter brews. The espresso offerings tend to be highly acidic with a citric tang at many places, so I stick to the filter roasts.
Sometimes I buy the roasted coffee to try at home. Many times I get the hay/grapefruit flavours you describe, and am disappointed as the descriptions sounded so good, but didn't deliver.
These days I prefer to source specialty green beans and roast them myself. I do a lot of experimentation from filter roasts to espresso roasts, and usually find my sweet spot by trial and error. High grapefruit acidity is not a favourite, but then neither are the excessive chocolate and roast flavours.
Currently I have a 90pt Ethiopian Yirgacheffe and a 91pt Burundi that I am roasting. Last year the Burundi (then a 90pt) was a ripper, so am expecting great things from this one.
Keep up the commentary!
Regards
Lw.

Beanz wrote: Not sure if you have checked out The Reformatory Caffeine Lab range coffee, they are based in Sydney but Focus in Balwyn have a good range on offer. Might be worth exploring.

Thanks for the tip! Will have to check them out in a few weeks. Thanks for the tip! I have seen their webpage and they look like they have good stuff.

Beanz wrote: Sam and I are both using Quest roasters so always keen to learn and compare notes

I'll have to get my Quest fixed up. Glad to hear there are some others using it in Australia. I haven't roasted on it in a while, but I was pretty easily able to take roasts from it to blind cuppings and have people unanimously agree they were the best before the reveal, so I think the Quest is pretty high up in the bang for the buck factor!

Lwowiak wrote:These days I prefer to source specialty green beans and roast them myself. I do a lot of experimentation from filter roasts to espresso roasts, and usually find my sweet spot by trial and error.

Good on you! That's really the only way to do it.

Lwowiak wrote:Many times I get the hay/grapefruit flavours you describe, and am disappointed as the descriptions sounded so good, but didn't deliver

I bought my fourth bag of Kahete from Au79, which is pretty much a record for me - I swap things around pretty frequently and seldom buy the same thing twice. They have now swapped it into a black bag, I guess to present it as more premium. And good on them - the green certainly seems to be very high quality. However, this bag was under-developed and grapefruity. The blackcurrant and plum were pretty much absent. I experimented a bit with dramatically changing my extraction profile and I found that a slightly lower brew temperature with almost no preinfusion and starting with a very high brew pressure, declining pretty much linearly, helped to mute some of the grapefruit and develop a bit of body but without dumbign down flavour clarity much. Still, it wasn't a patch on the earlier bags. Probably around 84 points on a fairly objective scale, but I'd penalise it down to 82, personally.

I've drunk my way through a few of the very good washed geishas that I have seen around Melbourne these years ... well, the ones that have been relatively affordable anyway, so I'll get some reviews up on these in a little while: