2019 Melbourne International Coffee Expo

MICE is now in its rightful location at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre at Southbank – dong a run-through before the World Barista and Brewers Cup Championships happen at MICE 2020. From our perspective, staying in South Melbourne, we were a short walk away among good cafes & roasteries, interesting Asian places to eat, a bit of coffee history – and the South Melbourne Market a stone’s throw away. What more would a pair of foodies and coffee lovers want for a week?

Being Queenslanders we headed straight to the Aremde stand as we are especially proud of Geoff Michelmore for putting our hometown of Brisbane on the coffee map with the amazing Nexus One. That’s the espresso machine you can look through! And Alex Milosevic from Extraction Artisan Coffee, one of our favourite cafes has the first in the world!

Lots of locals were there to support them. I’m sorry if I missed you, but here are some of our fellow Queenslanders …

There were other new espresso machines too. Having recently secured a distributorship for Synesso, Emma and Dean Slade from Xtracted had the S300. The new Slayer is boldly touted as a machine to rival the top-end specialty market. The sleek Astoria Storm promises more options for programming, the La Marzocco KB90 more efficiency and ergonomics and the San Remo Verona RS more consistency. Rancilio announced the RS1, the first in its specialty range and Iberital showcased its multi-award-winning Vision. The machine with the intriguing name, the Decent Espresso Machine had its state-of-the-art insides on show – with demonstrations by Luca Costanza, a lawyer, come coffee lover. We’d met Luca in 2011 at World of Coffee in Maastricht as Australia’s Cup Tasters champion and it was good to see his love of coffee lives on through his career in law.

Automation seems to be the new word on everyone’s lips – something you’d never hear uttered in the specialty space a few years ago. For a while now, the Puqpress has been bringing automation to tamping and the Juggler eliminating the need to fetch milk from the fridge with its under-bench milk bladders. Now there’s Milkit, a benchtop milk dispenser with its own refrigeration unit and i-milk where you dispense the milk and clean the jug on the same unit. Ubermilk and Perfect Moose foam milk without a barista involved. Automation is surely happening.

Milk. Milk. And more milk was at MICE 2019. Oat from Oatley and Minor Figures seem to be the ‘new kids on the block’ – with cow, soy, almond and macadamia sporting new formulas and branding in their bid to maintain market share and Riverina Fresh diversifying by co-creating the Milkit milk dispensing machine.

There were lots of disposable cups from those made of paper, bamboo and bagasse (a by-product of sugarcane) – to reusable ones made of glass and silicone. I was particularly impressed with Huskee, a new style of reusable cup made from coffee husks. Feeling a bit like hard plastic it’s a cup you takeaway from a café. You can put it in the dishwasher and it’s designed to leave at a cafe if you like and pick up a clean one when you come back or at the next cafe.

And who was there? Here are some of our coffee friends from far and wide – here in Australia and overseas..

And here are more – with a few Queenslanders among them for good measure!

One of the main reasons for MICE is to host the ASCA Australian Coffee Championships – to find Australia’s best baristas to send on to the World Coffee Championships, this year to be held in Boston and Berlin later on in the year.

Our Queensland competitors at MICE 2019 were …

Tilly Sproule (Tim Adams Specialty Coffee), Matt Philben (Di Bella Coffee), Joshua Robertson (Seven Miles Coffee) and Callum Jubb (Black Star Coffee) in the Barista Championship, with Tilly the only one making it through to the finals – for the 5^th year in a row.
Alex Borg (Veneziano Coffee) in the Brewers Cup
Kyujong Han (Cup & Wells) in the Latte Art
Callum Jubb (Black Star Coffee) in the Cup Tasters Championship. Congratulations Callum for representing us in two categories.

After two days of rigorous competition and judging in heats and semi-finals, our Australian champions for 2019 are …

Australian Barista Champion – Matt Lewin (Ona Coffee)
Australian Latte Art Champion – Jibbi Little (JibbiJug)
Australian Cup Tasters Champion – MJ Kim (Shamble Coffee Brewers)
Australian Brewers Cup Champion – Yanina Ferreyra (Ona Coffee).

What a day for Ona Coffee it was with two champions. And everyone was so excited to see Jibbi finally take out the Latte Art Championship having competed and made it to the finals for many years.

The Genovese Women in Coffee Awards this year went to Gina di Brita for Woman of the Year and Tilly Sproule for Rising Star. These awards are organised by ASCA in honour of Eleonora Genovese who lost her life to cancer at a young age a few years ago. Congratulations to you both for keeping the spirit of Eleonora in our memories.