#7 Barista Competition 2018

#7. Competition 2018

Late in September 2018 the northern region of ASCA put on the regional heat of the Australian Barista Comp, this comprised Queensland. It is the regional competition that secures a competitors right to compete in the national competition that will invariably take place at Melbourne Coffee expo early the year thereafter. I came out of the regional heats without a trophy, but, I believed, a sufficient score to secure placing in the top 12 for Australia.

I did indeed get in.

It was my third year at the national level and I knew it to be a notoriously hard competition dominated by ferocious Barista Elite. However ask any pro sportsman and they will tell you to compete is not about beating others but rather pushing yourself to be better. I enter a competition not only to improve technically, but to share my most passionately held beliefs with an audience of my industry peers. This often makes creation of a routine hard for me as I strive to create unique concepts. Not formulaic box ticking presentations.

This time round I wanted to create a routine that worked back from a very balanced and tasty espresso. I wanted the end drink to be super yummy. I also wanted it to be indifferent to any origin/ terrior flavours. I decided to go with a blend.

Most blends live in a difficult position in the eyes of a specialty coffee roaster. Often being a vehicle to provide the masses with strong milk beverages they typically contain a high % of cheaper coffees. Naturally this makes them affordable to produce but typically the maker sacrifices any chance the blend had to be amazing because it is then rather predictable. Cheap coffees isn’t usually very distinctive.

Therefore House Blends are perceived by baristas as boring. They provide high levels of the total sales of the business and are tolerated more than exonerated.

Budget and uniformity the key virtues of the blend.

I promptly got to work with a budget that was generous enough to give me a free hand in coffee selections for the blend. This turned every conventional restriction typically involved in blendmaking on its head, providing me with a perfect way of creating a blend with only end cup in mind, I liked that, flavour is king in my book.

A blend that exhibited lots of everything but not too much of anything, no origin bias. Not enough citrus for a judge to think Africa, not enough malic acidity to be Colombian not enough body to be a bourbon varietal etc. In competition the routine and the coffee evolve and grow together. The idea of the blend was much bigger than making a statement. As competitions wore closer and closer another exciting factor became apparent. It naturally made sense that to avoid blend bias and focus only on celebrating the coffee as a whole I would also hold back all origin information until the final set of drinks(1). The blend and lack of corresponding origin information early in the 15 minutes onstage would force judges to look inwards and consider the taste elements themselves as they were presented, in the cup.

As a barista and a roaster you cannot get every judge to love your coffee and that’s why its important the drinks are balanced and of a high quality. Because while it may not be a judges favourite coffee a good judge will award higher points in a balanced drink that is made well. Being a blend took a lot of the onus out of finding a super balanced single Origin, typically a problem of competitions were the drink has three courses. I had a lot of fun with this because there are a lot of great coffees that aren’t balanced at all but that are still inspiring. They always miss out on getting a shot at being presented at a WBC competition.  

Consider a guest single origin at your favourite café, lets say the coffee has a super clean, white sugar and lemon acidity, its pretty tasty but one dimensional in that it nails that lemon acidity and nothing else. Naturally it will fall short through the milk course because that acidity is too fragile for milk and conversely if you counted on it scoring high in an espresso round it may not if that acidity comes out too sour, or a judge finds high acid coffee unpleasant. This does not make it a bad coffee though, just unsuitable for a competition format, abandon it right.

But,

by adding a second coffee up alongside it that lacked any acidity we can create taste sensations with no one origin characteristic but celebrating a beautiful cup profile independent from one place, harvest or process.   

This was indeed where my headspace was as I cupped La Candeleria Natural Geisha from Costa Rica. Costa Rica has a long history of Honey process, in fact it’s the country the processing method was invented in! So a Natural processed coffee? Unusual… I was hooked. Blackstar purchased a bag, I cupped it. Immediately I identified a super creamy mouthfeel, a delicious taste sensation. This was matched by a generic suggestion of red fruit notes across the palette. But it had no interplay, little to no acidity and was relatively flat, now you see the position I was in. Was this coffee crap? Absolutely not, It was a beautiful and interesting cup but it was completely unworkable for competition. Unless it could be given a boost of acidity and clarity alongside the creamy mouthfeel, blend!

So if we are thinking acidity at a barista completion it needs to be a high quality acidity, obviously this is partly the roast itself but also any poorly sorted coffee that has high acid that morphs into a sour mouthfeel will ruin the taste experience for my judges.

I know this because I did indeed serve a sour coffee previously in 2017 competition. The coffee was a natural Ethiopian Tchemebe, it presented a high and very clear singing note of orange giving way to an earl grey body while on the palatte. But, as you swallowed and were left with the aftertaste it had the ability to become very sour and woody. Of course I hear you all ask “if you knew that why did you present that coffee”, a fair comment. The reality is the coffee would inconsistently present the sour aftertaste. Therein lies another serious consideration about competitions and one I cannot overstate to any budding comp baristas out there reading this. Not only does your coffee have to be good, it needs to perform predictably.

 I had Tchembe on my GS3, at home, every day leading up to that 2017 regional heat and when it was on, it was on. I selected it because its taste experience was delicious. But I learnt the hard way from that competition you need drinks that are going to deliver every time every day. Many competition baristas have a similar story to this, were they just simply couldn’t get it nailed on the day.

This of course was another positive about using a blend, it took the pressure off a single coffee to perform and stretched the onus over a defined and rounded whole experience provided by a defined and rounded cup profile.

So I started looking for an African, but a quality one. Few green bean suppliers had the sourcing to give me the kind of information I needed on their African lots, the countries of Africa that produce coffee are restricted by an arcaic combination of export laws, farm ownership restrictions and lack of transport and infrastructure. Anyone who has bought African coffee will tell you it often just comes down to seasonal variation and luck to acquire delicious Africans.

But I also knew that the darlings of the Australian Green bean market: Project Origin had done some wonderful projects in Africa. Despite the inability to purchase Ethiopian farms as a foriener PO had still invested a lot of time into providing access to growing and production methods that had helped their own farms over the years in Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador. I obviously don’t work for PO so can only go so far in endorsing this but from my point of view it had created a lot of regional onus, as a big part of PO African mission was breaking up massive ‘batch harvests’ from entire regions and creating smaller more accountable lots that could be traced back to singular hills/townships etc.

What does this mean for the taste profile? Instead of a whole valleys coffee being picked en masse and a homogenised flavour coming through that is effectively an ‘average value’ for the quality of the whole region. Project Origin were able to split it up and work out exactly what microclimates of these areas were producing to the best of their ability, and also what areas were producing distinctive taste profiles.

Funny how these things work out, by making the coffee less of a massive regional blend, I was able to use a particular African in a blend. 

Any of you that have read my #5 blog creating blends will know that for me a blend needs to have an objective from the onset, it cannot be created haphazardly by throwing coffees together and expecting a good result.

Intention in the creation translates to intention within the cup. So I had a very clear picture of what space this African needed to fulfil within the greater spectrum of the end cup profile. I had to move fast though, already I could feel the weeks slipping away, 12 weeks before comps would quickly evaporate into 8. Suffice to say I was stressing.

I cupped several I liked, firstly a non descript ‘yirgacheffe white’ this was as vague as this brief would allow. It was a coffee that was very delicous Blackstar had run this as a single origin before. As outlined above this coffee was described as white to make up for the lack of detailed regional information on it. White was the description because the PO team felt the coffees tastings were best summed up in a singular colour: white. As you can imagine it was high, bright and acidic. Think lemon or White Grapefruit. Butdespite its undisputed quality I mixed a small brewed sample with the costa and immediately knew it wasn’t going to do.

My blend was shaping up to being the taste equivalent of the Rolling stones and each member of the team was going to have to fit into the whole, but also be a feisty and gun toting individual. To meet the Costa Rican Giesha eye to eye the African was going to have to be a little more assertive. I also knew that a coffee this acidic could easily betray me and harken back to that faithful day of the ol sour Tchembe Ethiopian.  

This thought process moved me into natural processed lots, as many of you will know a natural coffee generally has less acidity, more sweetness and a higher body. Could this yield a killer African? I tried out Ethiopia, Yirgacheffe, Aricha ‘pink’, as its colour coding suggests this coffee had some lavender, plum and red candy.

Unfortunately despite being an African the lavender was the highest acid component this coffee seemed to stretch too. It just didn’t interlock with the creaminess of the Costa, at all.

Another natural coffee was then tried, Kochere Blue Copper, it was dominant enough, sure. But again I felt the Kochere was a little too structured to provide brightness in the finished cup. At this point I moved back into washed Ethiopians and tried an Hieloom(2) despite being non descript in varietal information it did have a fixed area, Wush Wush. Located in the Keffa region of southern Ethiopia this small town/municipality is most famous for a varietal of coffee that also shares the name, Wush Wush discovered in this area. This was an heirloom varietal, meaning it wasn’t a single distinct varietal but a selection of the variable coffees grown within the Wush Wush area. Upon cupping it the coffee had Lemon, morphing into Ruby Grapefruit, it was very dominant but also very uniform both in size and taste profile of the entire lot. I tried it with the Costa Rica La Candeleria Natural Geisha and found wih its Ruby Grapefruit it was well suited to compliment the creaminess and red fruits of the geisha.

They were bookends of the same profile. They made each other better.    

This was going to be my coffee to present to the Australian National Judging elite. I was then ready to proceed to roasting, post blending after I had individual profiles locked down for both coffees.

Me being me, and curiosity getting my better half I went abit off course though.

Luis Calderon is a well respected Colombian farmer, I have great respect for his work with varietals. Indeed he has over 25 different cultivars on his farm spanning from tried and tested favorites such as geisha to the werid and wonderful like Catturon. So why did I feel, with so much pressure, and with an already well thought out battle plan the need to add another coffee?

I guess you could say the coffee decided for me.

As I cupped the initial roasts for the Wush and the Candeleria this bag of Luis floated around the roastery, it was scheduled for release as a single origin for the stores in a few weeks and its roasting needed workshopping. I did 2 roasts of this coffee alongside a regional competition winner Sergio Montenengro, Antigua.

I cupped all the roast batches together to save time. As I got the filtery swill from the cupping bowl on my spoon and combined the Costa Candeleria Geisha and the Wush Wush together this cheeky little Caturra from Luis Anibal in Colombia managed to get added to my brew.

To my surprise the Caturra had a pleasant and distinct affect on the blend. Caturra is of course descended from typical and is clean, bright profile is well liked and easily workable. Its popularity too is based on the trees themselves, they are resistant to the disease leaf rust. I wouldn’t describe the Luis as adding to the acidity as such more in that it had a brightness and space to it that occupied the space just under the tonality of the Wush Wush and just above the base notes of the Candeleria. I tried to take it out again. Because I knew it would make the whole roasting process more laborious.

But it just worked and once it was tasted it couldn’t be untasted.

Guess some things just happen.

So I had my blend finally locked down, Ethiopia, Colombia and Costa Rica. An unlikely trio, the routine came together quite fast, the hardest part for me was presenting the blend without giving away too much information early in the fifteen minutes on stage. I wanted them to enjoy the drink based on the cup and how well the flavour profile appealed as a whole before I told them it was blended. An aggressive session of rewriting took place, giving out information without giving away  all the key points at the start was essential.

Anyone who has been part of a barista comp will tell you there is a phenomenal amount of crucial information to include and there is no guarantee the judges will take it all in if you decide to splurge it all out early. I would liken it to serving a group of people at a café, you need to introduce them to the experience piece by piece. The trick of course is not dallying or it will come back at you in the end when they may feel like you wrapped it up to fast. Pacing is key, tempo is key.

The rountine was a statement, I have not competed since then and in many ways it was my final strong opinion on the state of the industry, as you will know by now. I have many strong opinions. My appreciation of the competition format has moved on and I have since the start of writing this Blog performed the role of Sensory Judge at the Queensland Barista Competitions. A role I hope to continue at Nationals in Melbourne early next year.

Blending is awesome, it will come back to the forefront, in many ways it’s already making a comeback with the likes of Ona coffees flavors series of high end blends showcasing exciting innovation within the processing spectrum.  

Was my routine received well? Relatively. Obviously I didn’t win but I learnt a phenomenal amount about creating blends by roasting separate components and this led into the 2 full time blends I promote now at my own place: Blue Sky. Both blends use coffees that are roasted as single components and then blended afterwards. Ensuring the roast profiles hit the sweet spots for the individual coffees before truly becoming the sum of its parts with the correct percentages of their respective partner coffees.

To me as long as the competition awakens a new path down an unexplored road it was worth the effort. To be able to revisit an idea as commonly ‘assumed’ as the good old fashioned coffee blend and see it again, as if for the first time, was a wonderful outcome.

Of course as a final note I hope this blog provides an interesting first hand perspective of how one can develop an idea into a full-fledged competition theme.

Remember no theme is too simple, but a simple theme can be badly executed and come off as easy.

Keep Brewing, Cal.

1)A barista comp comprises three courses of drinks served across fifteen minutes: an espresso, a cappacino (milk drink) and a signature drink. the highest score typically goes to the barista that can accuraley nail the taste of his coffee as assessed by the judges on the day.

2) Hierloom coffee, a coffee that has been harvested from trees that are indistinct in origin. Africa being the home of wild coffee is full of heirlooms, simply put it means a DNA test hasn’t been provided for these coffee and we don’t know what the varietal/cultivar is precisely. Its an heirloom.