The world's most expensive coffee

A group of inner-city gardening enthusiasts believe they might just have stumbled across the recipe for the perfect cup of coffee. It goes something like this: take one lovingly nurtured coffee tree, add 12 volunteers and the generous services of an international coffee expert; enlist a helping paw or two from some greedy local possums, then carefully season with plenty of time and commitment. At the end of all that, you should have a cup of coffee to be proud of.

The coffee tree stands in a tiny Woolloomooloo community garden. There's really room for only one tree because the garden is about half the size of a basketball court. About 25 locals maintain tiny plots of beans, leafy greens, artichokes, eggplants and so on. There are also communal areas for herbs and other food plants such as the coffee tree - not that you'd really notice it, gardener Carlyn Chen says. "It's just one skinny little tree," she says. "It looks pretty weedy, actually."

But this year, the weedy little tree decided to show what it is capable of and grew some serious fruit.

The members of the community garden picked more than a kilogram of berries. They also discovered plenty of berries around the base of the tree that appeared already to have been stripped ready for drying.

"Possums like to eat fruit and the fruit around coffee beans is really sweet and creamy, so it seems they were eating the fruit and then spitting out the beans," Chen says. "They were doing some of the work for us, peeling the beans."

Next, the community gardeners enlisted the help of master roaster Toby Smith of Toby's Estate. Smith, who started his business in Woolloomooloo and still has a popular cafe in Cathedral Street, was happy to help turn the beans into a product ready for drinking.

After laboriously peeling the skin, or parchment, from each seed, Smith roasted them.

"I roasted them to a light medium so we could get as much acidity and as much of the natural flavour of the coffee as possible," he says. "It roasted beautifully and evenly."

In fact, Smith even managed to fool some of his colleagues into thinking the beans were the latest Colombian supremo roast rather than originating much closer to home. The end result was 300 grams of coffee beans, which were bagged and sent off to the gardeners down the street.

Later, Smith joined Chen and the others for a ceremonial cup of coffee in the garden, a moment they all savoured. "Having a coffee harvest in the middle of the city is a real triumph," Chen says. "Cities aren't known to have the most fertile soil and the cleanest air and you also have the risk of vandalism so we're pretty happy to have the whole process happen in the same suburb - from growing, to harvesting, to roasting and grinding and drinking it."

And the verdict from the expert? "It was very drinkable," Smith says. "Not at all bad for a coffee from sea level. It would have to be about the most expensive coffee in the world if we costed it out but it was worth the effort - great fun!"