If you're a roaster, you've probably felt it. It's getting harder and harder to find great quality coffee at volumes and prices that still make sense. One origin that's often been overlooked in the search is Honduras. For years, it's been treated as a conventional origin, even though there are producers quietly growing exceptional coffees that never make it into the specialty conversation.
The Honduran Coffee Alliance is a social enterprise with a simple mission. Connect those producers and buyers in a fair, sustainable and commercially viable way. They work with organized producer groups across regions like El Paraiso, La Paz, Olanchito and Comayagua, helping them evaluate quality, tell their farm stories and move coffees that belong on specialty menus, not buried in anonymous blends. What that looks like for roasters is previously untepped lots that hit your flavor and quality targets, a minimum of just four bags to get started, transparency reports so everyone can see where every cent of the purchase goes, and turning that first buy into a long term trade relationship, not just a one-off.
If the idea of forming a long term relationship with producers in Honduras is of interest to you, reach out to the Honduran Coffee Alliance so that they can work to find you a fit for your 2026 menu. Samples are going to be ready soon. You'll find Sean Warner's WhatsApp and email in the show notes. Send him a message and tell him you heard about the Honduran Coffee Alliance here and start exploring what these overlooked Honduran coffees could do for your menu today.
Check the show notes for links. Welcome to The Daily Coffee Pro by Mapper Forward Friends. I'm your host, Leah Zafar, and this is episode one of a brand new five-part series with Bec Zentfeld from Zentfeld Coffee Farms. I am ashamed to say this is the first coffee producer from Australia that we've ever had on the podcast.
Bec, welcome to the podcast for the first time. Thank you, Leah. After nine years, is that right? I know, after nine years for the first time to have, but in fairness, you know, it's not that well known that it took us seven years to get a coffee producer from Hawaii on the podcast, and they're a wee bit bigger than, only a wee bit bigger than Australia.
But somewhat more well-known, as you suggest. Right, so please, folks, forgive me for it taking me this long, but Bec, we're really happy to have you here. The theme that we are talking about this week is Australian-grown coffee, and I would hazard a guess that most people have no idea that coffee is grown in Australia. So you are here to help us in this series understand all the Australian-grown coffee situation.
And in this episode, we're going to talk about where has Australian coffee come from over the last 40 years. So I guess I want to start with, like, you're not a newcomer to the Australian coffee growing vibe. You have been there for quite some time. So would you mind introducing yourself and telling people about your farm?
Yes, indeed. So I'm actually, if I could be the second gen, I married John and June Zentfeld's son, John, and we moved back from Melbourne in 1993, back to the family farm, which is in Yuribah, the hills behind Byron Bay, literally 10 minutes behind Byron Bay, which most people have heard of where that lovely seaside spot is, almost in the middle of the east coast of Australia, to south of Brisbane and the Gold Coast. So back in 1993, when I started my roastery, I came back to the family farm, so I could start the roastery. But really, I should take the story back five years before that.
John's parents had this beautiful property here, 50 acres, 18 hectares, and they were actually growing avocados for a few years. But like most of us who've gotten into farming in Australia in the last few decades, we're really the tree changes. You know, they weren't generational farmers. That might differ quite a bit from other coffee producing lands.
So they'd made their money doing other things in Melbourne, having a successful business, and they'd retired to the beachfront nearby. And then were bored within about three years in their late 40s. So then they bought this lovely property, but thought they really should be planting something. What can we, this is beautiful soil, and we'll keep circling back to that lovely soil.
So June and John actually went to the local Department of Ag and said, looked at what other crops were available, macadamias, avocados, some other fruits, and went, oh, well, actually, we've been doing five years on coffee research and let us tell you about that, that that could be something you're interested in. So they became the first, yeah, they became the first farm in New South Wales to properly grow coffee on scale. There was really only one other person put in, you know, I think half an acre, and they jumped in and did, well, accessed the seed and decided to plant a good 40 acres of Arabica coffee. So I can tell you quite a bit about how that came about.
Yes. Yeah, so how long has coffee been grown in Australia then? About 40 years? Yes.
So just prior to June and John deciding in New South Wales to be that first New South Wales growers, there were, I think it was only two or three in far North Queensland. So we go all the way up to Queensland where Cairns is, and then the tablelands behind Cairns, higher altitude, flatter, hotter, more tropical climate up there. And there was good two founding families, one named founding family, Jack's family, and then McLaughlin family joined in. So the early years, that was back in the mid 80s.
So my parents started in 87 and it was the mid 80s, early 80s, that's far North Queensland, where really the first to grow coffee in this area. But that's in the last 40 years. What I haven't told you is way back when, in the 1880s till about the 1920s, Australia had a little successful coffee growing industry. And the Department of Agriculture has records, both in New South Wales and Southeast Queensland.
So in our little zone around, you could say the hills just north of Brisbane and about a couple of hundred kilometres south of Brisbane, where we are. We've got little pockets of red, beautiful, rich volcanic soil, extinct volcanoes. Somewhat from your experience and understanding Hawaii, others tell me, yes, this is so much like Hawaii, but without any steep mountains. We really have the smaller core and the volcanoes.
So that rich red volcanic soil. Yeah, they bought in, they actually had a successful industry growing with Arabica coffee back in the time. And they won awards. They won awards in Europe.
Apparently there's records in the Department of Agriculture in both Queensland and Sydney, New South Wales, saying that they took green bean or roasted. I'm not sure about that. Whichever way they took the coffee to Europe, and it was tested and won awards against coffees from the major coffee growing lands at the time. So that gave us, my parents-in-law, particularly the impetus to say, Hey, the confidence that we should be able to grow good coffee again here.
The main reasons that industry fell apart in the 1920s was really the cost of production compared to so many other lands with, again, like today, mostly I'm going to say cheaper labour costs and where we are in Australia and the importation issues between the two world wars and then the invention of instant coffee. Unfortunately, Australians took to that. And with that cheaper price point compared to bringing, there was no equipment. Yeah.
The cost of labour, handpicking, that really was, you know, too hard to make a decent living back by the 1920s. So the industry kind of petered out until we drew it out again in the 80s. And folks, you might be wondering, how does Bec know all of this? It's not just because she is a coffee farmer, but Bec, tell everybody about your background in the association.
Well, today and the last, I think it's coming into nine years now, I am the president of the Australian Grown Coffee Association. So we have a good solid organisation for Australian coffee growers and roasters and a few researchers, a couple of processors as well. So you don't have to be a grower, but it's invariably, you know, it's about coffee growing and making sure we're growing our industry and growing quality coffee for the future. So we'll keep surfing around to that.
So I was certainly a volunteer position and I was an active member for many years and then eventually got the, you know, the tap on the shoulder going, okay, you know, you really need to be president. It's time. It's time. Because where I come from, why I became interested, to go back to the early 90s, my parents-in-law were growing the coffee for the first five years.
So we think about growers. Growers are growing coffee. We've got the right conditions. We've got this beautiful subtropical climate.
We're really quite cool and I'm sure we'll touch on this again, but particularly in our subtropical northern New South Wales, southeast Queensland, we're a naturally subtropical climate. We're not in the tropical zone. Like really every other coffee growing land is in the tropics, you know, the equatorial zone. Right.
And we're not, so we're that much further south. So what that gives us is, well, it gives us a longer ripening season. It gives us a cooler climate. Our ripening season for our coffee is 11 months in our zone from flower through to harvest.
That's quite long. I gather it's quite common to have, you know, eight or nine months. It's only something I've more recently understood meeting other coffee growers that the coffee value chain works. What if we were to start roasting our own coffee and building a local coffee consuming market?
And that's what's starting to happen at origins everywhere. And that's what you want for them. Amazing. Amazing.
That's exactly what we want. If they're not going to be valued by consuming countries, then they're like, I'm here in every capacity that I can to help get help them set up locally. Then that's a big part of this podcast. Well, a big part of the podcast is how do we help people get informed about how to expand their scope, right?
So, so it makes me so happy to see that that's what you're doing. And you don't want their coffees from the other origins as well to be valued in the cup in a fancy little cafe just in Melbourne or Dubai or London, but no, no, we want them to be valued in their own country. I totally hear you. Exactly.
Yes. Yes. So that wasn't being done in my zone either, but it was back in the nineties. So I guess I was an early adopter of that idea.
Make that happen. But, but are people roasting now on coffee farms in Australia? Not many of us. There is a handful.
So some growers are absolutely professional growers and it's what they do well and they process well and they haven't necessarily got to the, I guess, having other person in the family or employing someone, but it is changing. We've got, I'm going to say there's a, it might only be about eight or 10 of us at the most, but we're doing it well. So the bar has raised. Yeah.
There is a few of us who are doing that particularly well on the family farm. In fact, they're all family farm. As yet there, I believe there's actually no investment farms currently in Australia. Excellent.
But there's room for it. You know, I don't want to say no, but it's lovely to know that most of us are either the first generation or second generation coming through and doing that. The roasting and the valuating and considering, of course, online in Australia is a huge part of the business potential because, you know, we're such a diverse, well, such a large country. So sending by mail is quite a simple way to reach the customer base in Australia.
I want to qualify why I say excellent. We're in a coffee crisis, as I've mentioned before in this episode, and it is getting harder to grow coffee. And what we know is that the big corporates are, you know, throwing money at coffee farms and at research to try and shift that so that they can keep the price of coffee suppressed. Because if we get into a situation where it continues to get very hard to grow coffee, supply and demand fundamentals kick into the pricing structure.
And so we, who is it for me to say we do or we don't want? But the moment that the corporates start to realise that they can grow coffee in Australia, they will start buying up all the agricultural land and growing coffee in Australia. And they'll try and figure out how to do that very cheaply. I would rather that that land was purchased by Australians and, you know, as an ageing population or whatever, I would just love to see people say, I want a piece out of the urban life and I'm gonna go and learn how to be a coffee farmer and spend the next couple of decades figuring that out rather than corporates doing it.
And that is what has been happening. That is that tree changer movement that was quite popular after a TV show in the mid-90s. And we really felt, we see change. See change, yeah.
See change and tree change. Exactly, similar. So that has been particularly evident in this area, the northern rivers of Tintilande, South East Queensland, people leaving out of Brisbane or out of Sydney and going to, you know, where they believe would be a lovely spot to live. Now with that, that's last, let's go back to what has happened in the 90s and the 2000s in particular.
We were doing quite well. We've got a growing, little growing industry. We got up to about, well, at least 15 growers because I was able to purchase from 15 growers as my little roastery grew. So more for my Zen Foods coffee roastery on my farm.
I always set it up to always buy from other growers as well. I wasn't going to be limited by just having the single estate of our own property. I could really see the value in how to grow with the growers. So it was lovely to see them growing.
Then the rise of farmer's markets became quite evident through the 90s and early 2000s, which was great to see. So they're popping up everywhere. So that started to become an outlet for some growers to be, okay, I can, as long as I don't have to roast and do that well, and I'm willing to commit to every Friday or Saturday farmer's market, which on top of being a farmer, you know, seven days a week, add that in. So that's a lovely little value-added market where they can meet the consumer.
That first round of that 10 years at least, our growers are starting to really connect with customers directly and get the best value added from them. And that's all before the online business really started to grow and that's really given a good outlet for many a grower since. But I wanted to circle back to why are we still so few growers? So what was happening in the 90s and 2000s, in terms of growing, we're growing particularly one main variety that was proven really successful.
An Arabica variety, not very excitingly named K7, which I believe was from a Kenyan rootstock and probably row number seven. That worked out that was the variety that was productive, tasted great, you know, it was doing well with the scoring at the time in the early 90s or late 80s even, and proven disease resistant. So we loved all that. So that's what we all plant.
We planted five varieties on our farm being early adopters, but that we sort of got it down to K7s being the most productive. Let's all use that. So you get to about 10 years old for the coffee trees and the dabbing things don't stop growing. So they're too vigorous.
So the K7 variety is not what we're after these days, or really any farmer would be after, is a semi-dwarf variety. So that you can either, if you want to handpick, which we don't. We definitely want the economies of scale and have a machine harvest, harvest it, which we own. So, or if you're handpicking, you don't need it more than six to eight feet, really.
You know, after about eight feet, you're starting to go, I can't get the harvester through and you're certainly not handpicking up there. So this is what we've dealt with for almost 40 years, is this, particularly this K7 variety suited to our cooler sort of tropical climate, wants to keep growing. So now the farms for 10 years are starting to lose production. The new growth on the, where the coffee grows, where the flowers are set, is on the latest branches.
You know, last, this year's, last year's current growth. And that's mostly at the top of a tree. We think of the shape of the coffee bush. The new branches are up the top and that's where they put out their little arms.
And that's where the flowers are going to form. And now we're starting to look like they're, you know, 10 feet and up from the 10-year-old, 10 years on age. So now we're starting to have to think about pruning more often and then we're losing production. So every time you prune, you might lose two years of not having the crop on that tree.
So you've got no income coming on while you're rejuvenating that tree, giving it a trim. So I'm sure we'll be able to touch on the good future now we've got access. Yes, coming on. But one of the other things that was happening through the 90s and the 2000s at the same time, was that our land pricing around here.
It's a beautiful spot to live. And one of the terms, I know that my friend Lisa, the secretary of the Australian Growing Coffee Association, she says, coffee trees want to grow where people want to live. We like the same conditions. We like rolling hills and subtropical cool winter, not particularly too hot a summer.
We like rainfall every two weeks for the garden and lovely vistas of these rolling hills. So unfortunately, the land pricing has become so expensive that when the farmers that are also aging, rather like our trees, a lot of our tree farmers came in it in their 50s. They were doing the pre-retirement phase, left the cities growing trees, 10 to 15 years later, they're getting closer to 70. Now the lands are worth, you know, every block of land, whether it's even five acres might be worth 2 million, then 5 million and now 10 million.
So really they, you know, they sell up their grown-up children are in the cities, not wanting to come back and be farmers. So land, coffee growing land, as it's been sold, has often been bought by Lifestylers, those who just really want to grow a big house, is how I put it. They don't want to grow trees. They just want to have a nice garden and lawn and grow a big house.
So unfortunately there has been a decline in the industry of growers from the 90s right through till more recent times. So interesting. It's the same thing that's happening at every coffee origin. And you know, it doesn't matter whether we're talking about in Colombia or Brazil or, or Hawaii or Australia, the same.
It's always fascinating to me that