Launceston’s growing coffee culture, for many, seems to resemble the well-cultivated and wildly popular coffee scene in the sprawling metropolis of Melbourne.
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Coffee is something that Melbourne particularly loves to claim as its own.
The multitude of trendy coffee shops that litter its suburbs, from up-and-coming Footscray to more established hubs such as Fitzroy and Northcote, are a point of pride for the Victorian natives.
While George Street can’t exactly be compared to Brunswick Street yet, Launceston well-and-truly punches above its weight when it comes to quality and quantity of good coffee shops.
Not only are there coffee shops aplenty, but many of them are serving up delightful cups of coffee using fantastic quality beans.
The burgeoning coffee culture in Launceston is palpable to an outsider, and is surely confirmed by the ever-expanding list of quality competitors joining the fray.
If you ask some of the better establishments where they source their beans from, you’ll invariably receive the same answer time-and-again – Ritual Coffee.
Ritual’s roaster, and self-described coffee-nerd, Stuart Grant remembers when things were very different in Launceston.
“A lot of people tasted our coffee early on and said 'where did this come from? I didn't know coffee could taste like this'”, he said.
“You still get a lot of crossover - there's cafes that are still using nasty, old, stale beans roasted who know’s how long ago.
“Then a local roaster comes on the scene that has gone to a lot effort into the sourcing the beans from different regions around the world, and roasted that week just down the road.
“The flavour difference is massive.”
The Invermay roaster has been operating for seven years, and supplies beans to many of the very best coffee shops around Tasmania.
The moment you walk into their roastery, you are hit by a wall of beautiful aromas – the pungent and addictive smells of freshly roasted coffee beans of the very highest ilk.
Their roastery is still a relatively small operation in national terms, however they now lay claim to one of the largest coffee roaster machines in Tasmania.
Their finely-tuned set up and relaxed vibe certainly belies the industrial surrounds that Launceston’s pre-eminent coffee roaster operate in.
Mr Grant believes that the increasing popularity of locally roasted coffee is a part of an overarching movement toward people buying and consuming locally produced goods.
“It’s something you see not just in coffee and food, but in all kinds of things. People like that local connection,” he said.
“Being a local company, we have the benefit of delivering it five minutes from where we roast it.
“We can deliver it to cafes nice and fresh, and they can use it right away.
“It's a local movement of a product that's not at all local. But I think there's something that's appealing to people as well - it's an exotic product, but you get the benefit of it being roasted locally.”
This contradiction of the craft-coffee movement is one that is often left unnoticed by many coffee drinkers.
Green beans are harvested in South American farms and shipped more than 10,000 kilometres away to roasters, before being served with smashed avocado in quaint little coffee shops all across the country.
It starts to feel even less like a local, grassroots movement when you consider that coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world after oil.
Big business indeed.
This contradiction is only further exacerbated when potential ethical pitfalls, such as worker exploitation and slave labour, get thrown into the mix.
While many may point to the Fairtrade certification as an example of superior ethical standards, many in the industry believe that this system does very little to improve actual working conditions in the international coffee trade.
These problems that accompany the locally roasted coffee movement, however, are not lost on the team at Ritual.
“The big problem is that the world market price [of coffee] has been below cost of production for decades,” he explained.
“This means that there is no way for a Colombian coffee farmer to make money whatsoever if they are being paid what the market says they should be paid.
“That’s an inherently unfair system.
“We looked seriously into the Fairtrade brand, and for us it didn't really go far enough.
“[Fairtrade] are trying to make an unfair system a little bit fairer. What we've found that works better is just getting rid of the unfair system.”
Mr Grant explained that they go to great lengths to ensure that all of their imported beans are sourced from the most ethically viable farms.
“We're working with larger suppliers who are getting a better deal for farmers,” he said.
“The farmers are firstly educated on how to make better quality coffee. That's the number one thing for us - we want really good quality coffee.
“Our supplier is incentivising making really good coffee for growers. They're saying 'here's some free education on better practices, here's interest-free loans to buy fertilisers or to pay pickers better wages'.
“We work with them to ensure that the quality of the coffee, and the health of the farm is working better. Every coffee that goes into the co-operative is roasted then tasted to assess the flavour.
“If their coffee is 85 points or higher on a tasting scale, they get paid one and a half times the market rate.
“If the rating of their coffee goes higher, they'll be paid double the market price, and so-on.”
The moral of the story is that it’s worth paying a little more for a final product that is ethically sound, and has a far better taste.
As the popularity of locally roasted coffee increases, and Launceston’s insatiable appetite for new coffee-shops continues, there are bound to be more local roasters following in the footsteps of Ritual and other local roasters.
Provenance Coffee, for example, is another Launceston roaster that shares Ritual’s space, with the two working together closely on some of their projects.
A strengthening of this sense of collaboration and community will surely go a long way toward the development of a unique craft-culture that redefines the city.
Who knows, maybe it won’t be too long until Launceston knocks Melbourne off its perch as the coffee capital of Australia.