Oliver James is a co-owner and founder of Caffiend and Tattooed Sailor Coffee Roasters in Cairns, Australia. He will be joining Project Origin at the Best of El Salvador Auction, 2017 as an Experienced Judge. We caught up with him to talk about coffee, his career and origin travels before he makes his trip to Central America.<\/strong><\/p>\n How long have you worked in coffee for? What do you do at Tattooed Sailor? What drew you to coffee and working with it? What is your favourite part of the industry? How did you get involved working with Project Origin? And how was it judging Sasa? Will the Best of El Salvador Auction be your first origin trip? Do you have a favourite coffee\/varietal\/coffee producing country? Is there anything in particular you will be looking for in El Salvador? Oliver James es copropietario y fundador de Caffiend y Tattooed Sailor Coffee Roasters en Cairns, Australia...<\/p>","protected":false},"author":4830,"featured_media":858,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\n<\/strong>Since I was 9 years old, so I guess that\u2019s about 21 years now! My dad had restaurant in Southern Highlands and when I\u2019d go down every third weekend to visit, I\u2019d stand on a milk crate so I was able to reach the coffee machine and make coffee. Of course, that was the late 80\u2019s and early 90\u2019s, so the style of coffee was big, frothy, \u2018snow dome’ cappuccinos. And I made a damn good one!<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Most of the roasting is done by my business partner, Ian. He\u2019s ex-navy and didn\u2019t actually join the team until a while down the track – he watched our progress at the cafe, Caffiend, and was doing his own roasting at home on a little home roaster\u2026eventually it just kind of happened! I do some roasting as well, but leave the bulk up to Ian. When we first started, we had a 5kg roaster Probat that I loved. It was a bit of an older model and wasn\u2019t as technologically advanced as the newer models\u2026but I know a bit about metal quality from my dad\u2019s blacksmithing days, and the metal quality on the Probate was amazing. With a few modern touches, it was perfect.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>When I was a kid working with my dad, we would drive to Sydney to buy coffee directly from an Italian family, who roasted themselves. They would roll up the garage door to the unit they roasted in and the smell of roasting coffee would waft out. I\u2019d sit in the car and wind down the window, loving the smell. I guess I\u2019ve always had coffee in my veins; I\u2019ve tried a few different jobs over the years, but I always seem to be drawn back to it. And for good reason, I love it!<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>I suppose it\u2019s that in the entire industry, from the farm to cafes, there is a sense of inclusiveness and sharing that you don\u2019t often see with other industries. There\u2019s a special attitude in specialty coffee\u2026actually, I had it recently in Cairns; we get a lot of tourists coming through, and just the other week we had a girl from the Czech Republic come in for a coffee. We talked for a minute about her shop back home and before you knew it, she was behind the machine with me, pulling shots! Coffee breeds this culture of sharing, pushing boundaries, broadening what we can learn and challenging what we know.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Well, Project Origin is of course founded by Sasa Sestic. I know Sasa through judging competitions and had known the team for a little while. While judging in Melbourne in 2015, I found myself thrown onto the finals panel for the National Barista Competition; I felt really unprepared and a little overwhelmed. Fortunately, all of the finalists came from cafes and roasters that I knew well and had drunk many times, so I was able to align myself with their style and understand the performances. Sasa competed and won and I guess it was there that we first formed a close relationship.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Well he won, so obviously he did well [laughs]. If I\u2019m honest, I actually scored him the lowest out of the four sensory judges! For that reason, after the competition he approached me and asked how he could improve. From there he kind of kept me updated, called me when he found the perfect ingredient for his signature drink and I was actually lucky enough to taste his coffees in Canberra before he went to the World Barista Championship in Seattle.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>I have actually already travelled to Ethiopia on an origin trip. I did this because I wanted to go to the origin of coffee to begin my origin journey, right back to where coffee originated. That was an amazing trip and I was lucky enough to be hosted and shown around by some people doing some really wonderful stuff over there. I have also been to coffee farms in the Australia Atherton tablelands; I really think that Australian coffee has a lot of potential and there\u2019s a lot of work we can do there. El Salvador will be my second overseas origin trip and I can\u2019t wait to see what we find there.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>It\u2019s hard to pick, but I\u2019d have to say that Ethiopia is probably my favourite coffee country (so far). Several years ago Nolan at Proud Mary in Melbourne roasted heaps of Ethiopian that blew me away. It could have been my palette at the time, or just the fact that I had never experienced something like that, but it still stands out in my mind as an amazing experience. Going to Ethiopia reinforced my love of the country, the people and the coffee. As a coffee destination, Ethiopia is still so unexplored and\u2026.raw.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>I like to travel without expectation – my travelling is really about building friendships and solidifying relationships. I think the Project Origin auctions are exactly about this, so I\u2019m very excited for the trip. Food is also a big part of my travel, so I\u2019m excited to see what is waiting there for me to try. I deliberately haven\u2019t done much research on the country, I tend not to. It makes it really rewarding,\u00a0 travelling without expectations or preconceived ideas. I usually start my coffee courses with a segment on expectations, namely how It\u2019s important for us and the ways in which we perceive and grade coffee is about expectation. I want to go to El Salvador and have my version of it.<\/p>\nOliver James will be attending the ‘Project Origin: Best of El Salvador’ auction between April 24 – 30, in coffee regions throughout El Salvador.<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"