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Friendly Competition Creates "Tazza d'Aldo" for One Night...

A weird sight faced after-hours customers of Enrico's Tazza d'Oro last night - "foreign" baristas bringing all sorts of accoutrement through the doors and setting up by their GB5 espresso machine.

Competition season is in full swing and once again the two shops from Pittsburgh that will be competing in next week's Mid-Atlantic Barista Competition got together for practice.  This time it was a full non-dress rehearsal involving the entire competition routine with music and speeches. 

The Aldo travel team (Sonja, Belle & John) and Tazza d'Oro's own Braden went through their routines in front of group of geeks and wrenches and baristas who did their best imitations of official SCAA technical and sensory judges (thanks Todd-Michael, Sean, Chris, Matt and Ward for the assists!). 

Everyone finished their routines within the 15-minute time.  There were a few spills and other mishaps, but everyone recovered to present great drinks.  All in all it was a great practice and allowed everyone competing to work out any remaining kinks before the real thing begins a week from today at CoffeeFest in DC.

The signature drinks were awesome - we expect to provide more details a day or two before the competitions, but for now, they remain a secret between us and Amy's crew and the judges. 

Thanks again to Amy, Rachel and their extremely competent barista crew for allowing us to come in and work on the GB5.  Braden was awesome - great mouthfeel on the spro and nice sig drink!  Wish we could've seen Emily, but if Braden performance is any indication, she should do great as well.  And thanks for the pizza, beer and wine!

We don't want to put pressure on anyone, but we think Pittsburgh should show very well when the final MARBC scores are tallied a week from this Sunday.

February 08, 2008 |

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Comments

Amy

Rich, Melanie, Belle, John and Sonja- We had an awesome time and thanks for coming to Tazza D'Oro. You guys are great. See you in DC

Posted by: Amy | February 08, 2008 at 05:26 PM

Luke

Good luck everyone and don't forget to take a broom :)

Posted by: Luke | February 09, 2008 at 10:06 AM

Rich

Luke - thanks for the encouragement. Neither shop is assuming anything... competition will be stiffer this year based on the little bit we know so far on who else is coming (incl. 4 from murky...)

Btw, if you haven't had the Blue at TdO recently, the mouthfeel is almost like a 1oz triple BC. Pretty darned good stuff. Braden might have pulled the best set of shots of the night with that stuff.

Posted by: Rich | February 09, 2008 at 01:13 PM

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