Country Life: Brewing up a taste for NZ grown coffee

A pioneering Northland coffee farm is hoping to introduce visitors to a slower ritual of coffee drinking and tasting this summer.

Ikarus Coffee growers Rob Schluter and Marie-Elodie Proust are preparing a tasting experience where visitors can learn and understand their coffee's provenance and characteristics.

"I've learned an incredible amount about coffee ... an appreciation for what goes into it. It's very labour intensive, influenced by nature," he told Country Life.

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Ikarus Coffee is well-known among New Zealand coffee experts like Haobo Tong, otherwise known as Hubs, who has arrived at the farm perched on the Pekarau Hills for a "cupping" session.

He and three other coffee industry specialists have made the four-hour journey from Auckland to taste and smell brews from what is said to be the farthest coffee farm from the coffee belt, the area around the Equator where most of the world's coffee is grown.

"New Zealand has seen a huge growth in specialty coffee and coffee that's not espresso, filter coffee, brewed coffee, for example, and people are more and more looking into what they're consuming, where they're coming from, and how does that impact their experience with coffee," Tong said.

The sound of loud slurps soon ring out above the heavy rain falling on the verandah roof as the aficionados suck up coffee from their spoons.

"This is a very universal way of identifying coffee," Tong said.

"What is it capable of? How good can it be or how bad can it be?

"It is used widely in the coffee industry from farmers to roasters to cafes, people in a bar brewing coffee. It gives you a sense of, you know, where the coffee is sitting at in terms of its taste and flavour, and then by utilising your knowledge and your experience in the brewing process, you can amplify some of the good flavours and try to minimise the not-so-good flavours."

Expert appreciation aside, Schluter and Proust hope to introduce a less slurpy experience in the summer for visitors to the farm where coffee is not only grown but fermented, dried and roasted.

It's a "fluke" that he came to be successfully producing coffee here at all, Schluter said.

In 2014 he planted Arabica var. Laurina, a dwarf mutant plant originating in Reunion, an island in the Indian Ocean.

He got the plant from New Caledonia where it had been cultivated since the 1800s.

"To go to a coffee festival, to have the opportunity to meet some farmers, and to have received the seed that I asked for [...] and then to have received that, not knowing how it would perform, to get it through customs, which was a fluke as well, I mean it could have been taken off me and dropped into the rubbish, just like that, because I declared it.

"For it to germinate [...] and then once it started to fruit a few years later, realising the potential of it and realising how well it was doing."

The couple estimates they have about 1200 plants in the ground now, and a good two tonnes of fruit harvested this last season.

The varietal's low caffeine cherries are a point of difference especially for Proust, a nutritionist by training.

"Coffee was literally poison for my nervous system and then I tried the coffee here and it was an absolute revelation."

She and Schluter treated Country Life to their ritual pour-over, seated among lush vegetation on a verandah above the farm, the beans slowly measured, ground and poured to bring out a range of flavours and aroma.

Proust, originally from France, values the mystique and ritual around coffee as well as the farm's potential.

"I just want to see those hills covered with coffee, but it's very difficult because it's very wind exposed and so of course it's challenging," Proust said.

"I know that we will lose a lot of seedlings and a lot of trees and we'll have to replant and we'll have to shelter more and work with the environment and learn from the environment as we go because we never know really how the trees are going to behave."

The couple plans to plant more trees and other varietals, as do other growers from Northland to the Bay of Plenty.

The industry in New Zealand is still nascent, with an estimated 9000 trees in the ground, a New Zealand Coffee Producers' Association, and government-funded coffee tree trials being set up around Northland.

"What's evolved here has been a big inspiration for a lot of people and now there is quite a movement of development and I like people to take their own initiative to explore, to make mistakes, to learn from those mistakes as I've done," Schluter said.

Learn more:

Find out more about Ikarus Coffee

Find out more about New Zealand grown coffee