exhilarating beverage realise the amount of labour and care involved before the crop is taken off and preserved from deterioration and decay?  A few berries that may have become mildewed during the slow, tedious and anxious process of drying in the sun, may violate the delicate flavour and aroma which the grower has been at pains to secure and fix.  In coffee it is as with many other features of rural life in Australia.  The men who undertake the production are for the most part those who have gained their knowledge by personal experience on the spot.  Reading and the advice of experts who have graduated in countries where climatic conditions are diverse and where the labour is cheap, yet skilled by reason of generation after generation of occupation in it, do not complete necessary knowledge.  Problems have to be faced that have no theoretical nor official solution, and blunders paid for, until by the process of the elimination of mistakes the right way is discovered.  Losses mount up until either patience and means are exhausted, or success crowns the application of intelligent enterprise.  Then, when the coffee planter, self-taught, in each and all of the departments of culture and preparation, glories in the assurance of his capabilities to offer to the world an article of indubitable character, he discovers that the vulgar world, for the most part, prefers its coffee duly adulterated; indeed has become so warped and perverted in perception that the pure and undefiled article is looked upon with suspicion and distaste.  Its flavour and aroma are quite foreign to the ordinary coffee drinker.  The contaminated beverage is regarded as pure, and the genuine article is soundly condemned as an imposition, and the seller of it is liable to be accused of fraud.  It is in a similar position to the good grape brandy which Victorians produce, and which drinkers of some imported stuff (described as one part cognac and three parts silent spirit) fail to recognise as real brandy.  If coffee is not muddy and thick and does not possess a mawkish twang of liquorice, it is suspected.  The delicate aromatic flavour, the fragrant odour, the genial and stimulant effects are now almost unknown, except in limited circles.  North Queensland is capable of growing far more than sufficient coffee for the Commonwealth, but coffee is not a popular Australian beverage, and as it entirely loses its specific balsam and identity under the manipulation of manufacturers, it cannot get the chance of becoming popular.  Australian wines, Australian spirits and Australian coffee might well be the popular beverages of Australians.  But preference is given to foreign importations, of the genuineness of some of which there are strong grounds for suspicion; or in the case of coffee its elements are so disguised by adulteration that a revolution in public taste must take place before it can possibly find general favour.