From Our Farm to Your Cup: The Story Behind a Bag of Jaques Coffee

Most people don't think much about what happens before coffee reaches them. It appears on a shelf, in a bag, with a name on the front — and beyond that, the story is invisible. With Jaques Coffee, the story is one we're proud to tell, because it's entirely ours.

We're a family operation in Mareeba, Far North Queensland. We grow the coffee, process it, roast it, and send it out. No middleman farms. No imported green beans dressed up in Australian packaging. What's in our bags was grown in the soils of the Atherton Tablelands, by the same family that put their name on the front.

Growing Coffee in Queensland

Coffee is a tree crop, which means decisions made years ago are determining what we're harvesting today. Our Arabica trees take several years to reach full production, and they continue bearing fruit for decades if cared for properly. That long timeline shapes how we think about the farm — not in seasons, but in generations.

The Atherton Tablelands experience a pronounced wet season from roughly November to April, followed by a dry season that concentrates the sugars in the ripening coffee cherry. Altitude — we're farming at 400 to 700 metres above sea level — means cooler nights that slow the development of the cherry and give more time for complex flavour compounds to develop. This combination of tropical moisture and highland cool is genuinely unusual in Australian agriculture, and it produces fruit with more character than lowland-grown alternatives.

Harvesting by Hand

Coffee cherries don't ripen all at once. Even on a single branch, some will be at perfect maturity while others are still weeks away.  We pick selectively — going through the trees with the harvester multiple times over the harvest period to take only ripe cherries.

It takes longer. It costs more.  Unripe cherries produce astringency and under-developed flavour; overripe ones contribute fermented or off notes. Selective harvesting and the uniform ripening of our coffee from dry season stressing to create even flowing and ripening of the beans is one of the most important quality decisions in our production process.

Processing: From Cherry to Green Bean

Inside each coffee cherry are two seeds — what we eventually roast and call coffee beans. Getting from the cherry to a dried, stable green bean requires processing, and the method matters for flavour.

We use a washed process for most of our production, which involves removing the fruit skin and pulp from the bean before drying. This produces a cleaner, brighter cup profile with clearer expression of the bean's natural character — which is what you want when you're working with single-origin Arabica from a specific place.

After processing, the beans are dried to a stable moisture content of around 10–12%, which allows them to be stored and roasted without spoiling.

Roasting in Mareeba

Green coffee is shelf-stable for months or even years if stored correctly. The transformation into something you'd actually want to drink happens in the roaster. We roast on-site in Mareeba, which means that by the time our coffee reaches you, it hasn't left Queensland. It was grown here, processed here, and roasted here.

Our roasting approach is calibrated to the specific characteristics of our beans. We know our Arabica — its natural sweetness, its moisture content at harvest, the way it develops through the roast — because we've grown it ourselves and roasted it season after season. That familiarity produces more consistent results than you'd get roasting unfamiliar imported origins.

We produce two roast profiles: our Medium Roast, which preserves more of the bean's natural origin character, and our Espresso Roast, developed specifically for espresso extraction and milk-based coffee.

Straight to You

Once roasted and packaged, our coffee goes directly to customers around Australia. There's no national distributor, no import terminal, no extended time in a warehouse. The supply chain is as short as it can be for Australian-grown coffee: from our roaster to your door.

That matters for freshness, which matters for flavour. But it also matters because it means you're dealing directly with the people who grew it — a family in Mareeba who've put their name, their soil, and their work into every bag.

Explore our full range at jaquescoffee.com.au.