Steve’s Coffee Cart still going strong

You may just miss Steve’s Coffee Cart if you’re driving by the little industrial part of town on Auckland St. Located in the car park at Blenheim’s Think Water, Steve’s humble caravan is without glitz or glam.

But Steve Fanthom will be the first one to tell you that he’s not a barista.

‘‘They didn’t even have a fancy name for it when I started doing this,’’ Steve laughs. ‘‘That’s all we are is ‘coffee makers’. Just because you make coffee doesn’t make you barista. You have to get that fancy certificate on the wall, and do the five-year training. But now that YouTube’s out there, everyone is a barista!

‘‘You see a guy in training and they still try and sell you the coffee for $5. When I was in training we didn’t dare sell the coffee we made. In the early days, you had to pay to learn coffee. We had to bring our own beans, our own milk, and do it in your smokos. Because we were gaining valuable knowledge from someone else.’’

The 55-year-old first saw coffee being made when he was living in Brisbane in the late 1980s, and when he returned to New Zealand in the early 1990s he saw the coffee landscape slowly shifting away from instant coffee to espresso.

‘‘And I saw it take off over there [in Brisbane]. Then in New Zealand I saw that it was slowly creeping its way down from up north. I thought, well if we get in quick, and we did, we will be one of the early ones.’’

But while Steve has been making coffee for years at various ‘coffee houses’, Steve’s Coffee Cart – perhaps the oldest – has been running for more than 10 years, and in his time being a ‘coffee maker’ Steve has seen the game change. Steve is now seeing a rise in food trucks and coffee carts, and he has some advice from years running his own.

‘‘It’s like kiwifruit and the wine industry, you see someone doing OK at it, and people think, ‘We’ll have a go too!’ But right now, because of the competition,

continues his mission to visit every food truck in Marlborough. This week he catches up with Steve Fanthom of Steve’s Coffee Cart.

if you are not right onto it the day you start, three weeks from now you’ll disappear ... you wanna be good, and your set up wants to be really good.

‘‘Years ago you could practice and charge, but you can’t do that nowadays.’’

Steve says the secret to good steamed milk is using high protein milk – not trim – and using the freshest milk.

‘‘Cleanliness and freshness is the magic ingredient,’’ Steve says. ‘‘I get my milk fresh every day… and clean my cart top to bottom before and after trading. I think I’ve thrown away a bottle and a half of green milk in the last 10 years.’’

And even Steve’s water is triple filtered.You could even say he’s obsessed by clean water.

‘‘We went to Think Water and they recommended what we’d need to do. So it’s super, super clean water. You know, we always say, ‘We use protection so you don’t have to’, he laughs.

Steve has been developing his bean blend for many years, and says that he has finally settled on one he’s happy with.

‘‘Our blend has a bite at the beginning, a bite at the end [and] a lot of chocolate nutty flavours in the middle. That’s the Indian at the end, and the Columbian in the middle. We spent three or four years on getting our blend right. We’ve developed a bean blend that matches the pressure of the machine, and the skills of the barista. So everything that comes out is exactly the same.’’

Through an exploration of flavour Steve says he was amazed to discover that the countries that contributed to his blend have a similarity.

‘‘All the countries we use are on the same part of the equator, but different parts of the world. And that’s interesting too, eh?’’

DAVID JAMES Steve Fanthom says fresh milk (not trim) and filtered water are just as important as a decent coffee blend.