EXPERT ON COFFEE

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28894, 14 May 1959, Page 17

EXPERT ON COFFEE

Forty-Six Years’ Experience A coffee expert of 46 years’ experience, but whose family history in the coffee trade goes back 200 years, Mr J. M. Tass, came to New Zealand from Burma though he was born and brought up in Moscow. He has been in New Zealand for 11 years, but began his own business in Auckland three years ago.

Mr Tass said yesterday that he was the first to begin cultivating coffee in Burma and the plantation was now a famous one in the Far East for its Toungoo coffee. He left Moscow in 1919 after the revolution and eventually settled in Burma. He found coffee growing in a wild state and so he considered it could be cultivated. He lived in Burma until 1949, but made frequent trips abroad to study research work in agriculture, specialising in coffee growing. He studied at the World Research Coffee Institution in Guatemala and still receives the various formulae it evolves. At a conference in England he was acclaimed an expert in coffee. Mr Tass designed a machine for handling coffee and obtained its various parts from different countries. He said he was now turning out a finished product that was untouched by hand after the beans were received and, for the first time, he was putting bulk coffee in vacuum packs. Coffey was his whole interest.