Many coffee-related blogs were created by baristas and owner-baristas to speak to other authors of coffee-related blogs and share info on just what kind of crazy experiment they just tried, or what amazing coffee they just tasted. It's often fun reading and we typically learn something new every day.
The aldocoffee.com blog IS our only website. So we don't usually engage in that kind of discussion because we need this space to talk to customers and potential customers about what we're offering. Most local customers/readers would tune us out if all we talked about were brewing temps, Scace thermocouplers and retrofits to install pre-infusers.
However, today we're going to get into some of that detail. We want to give y'all a brief look inside what it is that true professional baristi do. Maybe you'll find it boring. After all, what can possibly go into a $1.60 cup of Panamanian coffee?
You'd be surprised.
We briefly met Jaime VanSchyndel at last year's Mid-Atlantic Regional Barista Championships. From our all-too-short encounter, we noted Jaime seems a quiet, intense type. (That's not Jaime above in the lab coat - he's to the left - but he looks like he'd be comfortable in a lab coat, ya think?)
But it's folks like Jaime who are trying to change the world of coffee. Jaime toils in a small shop called Simon's in Cambridge, Mass. In the couple of years he's been there, he's hammered away at his roaster for better support, started a guest espresso program, taken apart espresso machines for major modifications, introduced new grinders just to see if they make a difference, and questioned whether accepted norms for brewing temps are indeed correct. And that's just scratching the surface - a quick read of Jaime's blog... well, there's no such thing as a quick read of Jaime's blog, unless you've got an engineering degree and have the trained palate of a pro coffee cupper.
And that's what makes this industry different from virtually any other we can think of. More often than not it's the folks working the machines who are pushing the limits as to what can be done.
That Jaime isn't working his trade in the Pacific Northwest is no longer a surprise. While the PNW region (including Portland, Seattle and Vancouver/Victoria, BC) is still the nexus of "third-wave" coffee, there are pockets of overachieving coffeehouses and baristas all over - Boston, DC, Chicago, Raleigh-Durham, Kansas City... even Kearney-freaking-Nebraska... basically every city on this list (we're on page 2).
In the relatively short time we've been playing in this world, we've noted that the best baristi share the following characteristics:
1. curiosity - how would this coffee taste if I did this...
2. patience - is this taste/smell/feel repeatable? if not, how do I make it so?
3. skill - it's one thing to think it up, it's another thing to deliver the product consistently
4. jack-of-all-tradesmanship - engineering, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, process design, architecture, product design, physics, chemistry, biology, botany... and more. Many of the top barista blog. And many have photos on their blogs of extemely expensive machinery in various states of disassembly while they hook up probes, insulators, controls, heat exchangers, LEDs, chrome bumpers and underchassis neon lights among other things. And the real top-of-the-line baristas join roasters for trips to origin where they visit plantations in hot, humid jungles and deal with flies and mud. For most it is the best experience of their lives. They return excitedly telling stories of tasting coffee cherry pulp and witnessing actual wet-processing - things that "normal" folks might take pains to avoid.
And you find all these traits in people who perform a job that often pays well under $10/hour (not including tips). Which brings us to...
5. passion - love not just of the taste of coffee (and sometimes tea), but of everything that goes into it from origin through roasting through making the drinks to culinary experiments with coffee to coffeehouse culture and beyond.
Listening to baristas talk to each other is not like listening to most employees in service jobs. It's more like listening to journeyman tradespeople (it appears most great barista have degrees, but not in 'baristaneering' or anything related to coffee). There are technical terms in the coffee trade that are pure gibberish to the uninformed public. And beyond that, you'll find trade slang among the top baristas that is inpenetrable to coffeehouse employees content to be just a PBTC (person behind the counter).
What really makes this industry unique is that the top shops - owners and baristas - tend to share information with each other. You'll find many of the same people posting regularly on two, three or more forums like CoffeeGeek, Home-Barista, SpecialtyCoffee, SCAA, BaristaGuild, CoffeeForums and others. There's even a fledgling "Code of Conduct".
Imagine GM, Ford and Honda sharing inside info. Or Anheuser-Busch and Iron City... heh. But that's what folks do in this industry (well, not the Mermaid, but nobody cares).
A good example... It's one thing to know how to change the screens on our portafilters. It's a whole other thing to get into a discussion of how often - every other day, weekly, after X number of uses, when it starts to separate... etc. We've been following a discussion about this very topic and we hope it will come to some sort of agreed upon frequency - but it probably won't. Even among the best of the best there are levels of perfection-seeking - a handful of folks that make up sort of the A++ list, like David Schomer among others.
(Here, nobody gets to take apart any machine except Melanie. After all, she bought this stuff, she's earned the right to break things before anyone else. You'd be surprised at how fast she can disassemble and reassemble a $3200 Swift Grinder).
There are many other things to look at in determining espresso shot quality before a barista can go blaming the machinery. Nick Cho thoughtfully assembled a list of 50 of those things (to which others added). Our baristas are expected to know these 50 things. We don't know if anyone else in Pittsburgh (or Pennsylvania) does the same.
But we know Jaime VanSchyndel has Nick's list memorized. It's taped up for all to see behind the bar at Simon's. Most, if not all, of the nation's top baristas, are familiar with the list.
That's just some of what goes into what a professional barista does. All (usually) for less wages than your standard checkout clerk at the LCB store. (That's a whole other argument for another day, another blog, another gubernatorial campaign...).
We're still relatively new to all this. And truthfully, we're not sure if anyone behind our counter will ever take things to the limits that Jaime does (and we're not letting anyone near the La Marzocco with a drill anyway). Granted, we have it sort of easy - since we use Intelligentsia coffees, instead of having to experiment ourselves through trial and error, most times we can just pick up the phone and ask, "What if we do this..." and someone at Intelligentsia will usually reply that they've already tried whatever we were thinking of weeks ago themselves. Still, some of our baristas want to know "why" - and that's what we want to encourage. Not just with our staff, but with our customers.
It's good to know that with all the information that other baristas share about what they've done, what they're doing and what they're thinking, there's always somebody pushing the envelope, even if it's not us.
The end result of everything we learn is in the cup you get when you're here.
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