Coffee Culture – St. Ali Laneway Party & Latte Art Comp

St Ali
12-18 Yarra Place, South Melbourne
(03) 9686 2990

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Sun-Tues 7am-5pm
Wed-Sat 7am-11pm

Coffee Culture in Melbourne is massive. Coffee  is an obsession to many, with coffee aficionados chasing every latest cafe to pop up in Melbourne. It’s a cult following that ensures that any cafe which produces an excellent coffee will not have an empty seat.  As Alex posted earlier, Three Bags Full had only been open a couple of weeks before we made it down and it was already packed out, and had been since day one. I think at one point they were even running out of beans. A cafe, specialising in coffee, running out of beans? Like, what the fuck?!

Alex, whom I fondly refer to as monosodium (much to his disgust) and I spent the first glorious weekend of February 2010, reveling in the the amazing coffee culture that exists in our truly wonderful city. It was a celebration of coffee, held in the tiny laneway that houses St Ali.

St Ali is one of the pioneers in bringing this new wave of trendy cafe/roasters which have been popping up all throughout Melbourne in the past few years. It is housed in Yarra Place and has been there for years but on February 6, 2010, the laneway was rechristened with a bang with graffiti artists painting all along its sides.

The colourful laneway was pumping, with DJs and a BBQ and even a bike race.

White rabbit was on tap

this one's my favourite

We followed this up with a latte art competition in the Sunday evening, with some of the best baristas in Melbourne pitting Slayer against Synesso (or at least their milk wands as all shots were put through the Slayer) producing some excellent pours, judged by the Australian latte art champion, Will Priestly.

what a great tshirt

Rosetta vs. Rosetta with hearts. Not bad for two random ad hoc pours.

the winner, the enigmatic Henry.

National Latte Art Champ Will Priestly schools us on how it's done.

A swan... and a massive tulip poured into a demitasse (machiatto cup), count those leaves! Nice one Will!

I thought I knew coffee, but Alex, assures me that I do not. Whatever. I love my coffee, but Alex knows his coffee. So I’ll let him have that. Coffee is his forte, booze is mine 😉 So, rather than offend MS by how little I know, I’ll just post some pics that we took of the weekend. Interestingly, our weekend devoted to coffee involved very little coffee drinking 🙂

Alex: it’s all a journey of discovery for all of us, there’s so much to learn about coffee. I’m just a n00b like everyone else.

But also check out this great post  this great post from Alvin with a photo documentary of the graffiti festival.