Stay alert ... Coffee World museum is a rich attraction at The Coffee Works in Mareebad.Credit: Graham Simmons
This museum would not be out of place in Paris or Vienna. Its walls resonate with the ambience and aromas of 500 years of coffee-making history. The venue is Coffee World, an extraordinary coffee museum housed in The Coffee Works in Mareeba, Far North Queensland.
When Ian Bersten, the founding maestro of Belaroma Coffee, started collecting the items on show in Coffee World, he was driven by a unique passion – the aim of amassing the world's finest collection of antique coffee and tea-making machinery and other equipment.
He spared neither time nor expense, visiting the leading patent offices of Europe to track down the world's first espresso-maker, the first plunger, the first filter and the first vaculator. These, and more than 2000 other items, are at Coffee World.
The Mareeba region grows more than 80 per cent of Australia's coffee crop so it is fitting that a coffee museum should be set up here.
Rob and Annie Webber had been pioneer coffee growers in the region since the 1980s and had already put together a collection of coffee memorabilia so, when the Bersten collection came on the market, it took some delicate negotiations to ensure that its priceless treasures remained within Australia and found a home at Mareeba.
And priceless is the word to describe this collection. It doesn't take a visitor long to realise this, with displays illustrating the beginnings of the coffee trade in Ethiopia and Yemen in about AD800.
Subsequent displays cover the whole history of coffee- and tea-making, with recorded commentaries by Bersten accompanying a large number of the items on display.
About 1600, coffee reached Europe, where it rapidly replaced beer as the staple drink. The Coffee World collection documents a range of coffee- and tea-making equipment, mainly from this period onwards.
Bersten, now 74, says the early inventors were "clawing in the air for a machine to make coffee, without knowing exactly how to make a good cup".
The range of coffee-roasting, grinding and brewing equipment at Coffee World staggers the imagination. Take, for example, the 1930s Slovakian Kava grinder, with one chamber for coffee and the other for grain malt.
The first French press, or plunger, was invented about 1852, with the first espresso-makers appearing in 1878 – but it wasn't until as late as 1961 that the first espresso machine with an electric pump came on to the market.
As if that's not enough, the admission price to Coffee World includes unlimited tastings of no fewer than 21 Australian, international and blended coffees, four local plantation teas, coffee liqueur and chocolates – and free readmission. The wonderful courtyard cafe, with its corrugated-iron walls and slab timber tables, enlivened by the heady beat of African and Middle Eastern music, sets just the right ambience.
Who said coffee isn't addictive?
TRIP NOTES
WHERE
Mareeba is 70 kilometres west of Cairns. See queenslandholidays.com.au.
THE MUSEUM
The Coffee Works, incorporating Coffee World, is at 136 Mason Street, Mareeba. Phone (07) 4092 4101, see coffeeworks.com.au.
The admission price of $19 includes museum admission with audio guide and a $5 gift voucher.
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