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I’m Board

Time for a moan blog post, its been a while.

I decided this year I wanted to stand for the SCA (Specialty Coffee Association) board. I wanted to join the board to represent the interests of the groups of people I work with – producers, baristas, and small coffee businesses.

Some decisions have been made in the past years that I don’t think have been in the best interests of members – missteps and mistakes that could have been avoided. I think we should have more voices on the board that are listening and close to the existing membership, and not allow a group of people who are currently on the board select people they think are closest to their beliefs and values.

The way that the nominations for the board work is anyone can apply, and then the nominating committee decide who goes forward to the voting slate. I don’t think this is a democratic way for an organisation to behave, and can breed a system that only selects the people who want the same things as the current committee. I think the board has become a narrow group of people who have similar goals and beliefs and this is unhealthy for a large organisation with a large amount of different members involved in it, all with very different needs.

As it works out I didn’t get accepted on to that voting slate.

I believe members should be able to select from whoever fits our desires and needs regardless of how large that makes the voting options.

I feel my experience as being the past UK chapter Chair taking over at a very difficult time, and the amount of time I have given the organisation as a volunteer should of at least allow me to be considered for the vote, along with my experience. Let the members decide.

I work not just within the UK, but my partnerships in Drop Coffee in Sweden and in 3FE in Ireland give me perspectives on different markets. I also have an involvement in other markets, including New Zealand following the merger of my company with Ozone there and my travel to producing countries and links with coffee producers gives me a perspective of members thats wide and broad. Sweden, UK and New Zealand, all without a voice at board level.

I have vast experience of running meetings as a chair and participant (outside and inside of coffee), I had the time and desire to dedicate to the many unpaid hours of a board member, and felt that I could have really give something to the organisation and help repair some of the recent damage thats been done, and be a voice of the entire membership.

I’ll keep my free time and energy for another project. But when I give out about the actions of the SCA in the future, please don’t throw at me that then you should stand, the gatekeepers wouldn’t let me in.

Top 10 of 2017

Its a yearly event, me and Roland sit down and go through our favourite coffees of 2017. This years its no different, we ramble we talk, we decide. Hope you enjoy

Child labour and coffee harvesting

I’ve really been enjoying writing recently, and its been great starting to publish things on the blog again. I’ve also started write a book (have I told you about my book http://coffeeography.co.uk ). I never realised writing a book could be so time consuming, so it means the flow of things here is not as prolific as I might hope.

Step in guest bloggers, I’ve asked some of my coffee friends if they want to write something on the blog for everyone to enjoy.
The first door I knocked on was that of Alejandro Martinez from Finca Argentina in El Salvador. I gave him a blank piece of paper to share thoughts he has.
Little did I realise that he was going to scribble all over that paper and draw two fingers to the world. Well maybe not that bad, but I think the piece he has written is quite controversial, and make rattle some cages and make people have opinions, but what else is a blog for than to make people have opinions.
So sit back enjoy, and read the disclaimer the thoughts and opinions shared in this blog may not be that of the blog owner 🙂 But I must admit its made me challenge many of my thoughts, and brought clearer into focus how import it is that we don’t impose our values on society’s and cultures that have different ones.

 

Child labour and coffee harvesting
By Alejandro Martinez
 

The other day I went with my family to pick coffee at the farm. A few days later, my sister-in-law and I got into an argument about the topic of kids picking coffee. Apparently, she saw a picture that my wife posted of Lucas, my son, with a basket of coffee. It seems he did not look too happy, despite my counter claims that he had a blast. You can judge for yourself, since I am attaching the picture to this post.

I feel that not everyone understands the complexity of the issue, and I thought about writing a little bit about it in order to shed some perspective from the field.

First, I do want to emphasize that it is preferable for children not to do any work. I do believe that kids should have fun and play as much as they can in their childhood. I empathize given that at my age and many years of hard work and pent-up bitterness, those days when you are young and without a worry were the best ones.

However, here is the hard reality of the rural farm worker and his family. Most workers get paid a low wage, which tends to be not sufficient to cover all basic needs. Furthermore, consider that work is often intermittent and there are times that a worker is unable to find work, sometimes for up to two or three months.

 

Now, consider the following factors:
School year is in sync with the coffee harvest: the school year usually ends about the time that the coffee harvest begins. Public schools are on vacation for the three or four months of the coffee harvest. It is not by coincidence but probably by design given how important coffee used to be in El Salvador. So, during the harvest, parents usually have no one to leave their children with given that both parents go out to pick coffee.

Children are usually not registered as workers. Kids normally are around, accompanying their parents. Heck, once I even saw an 8-month-old baby inside a basket next to her mom in the estate. I remember it vividly since he was the same age as my kid at the time. Thus, some kids will help their parents by combining their pickings with their parents. It is a way to contribute to the family income.

Picking coffee is not hazardous. No one is exposed to pesticides or toxic chemicals. The climate is mild and shade trees provide cover from the sun. There is one issue though, the weight of the coffee bag. Now, kids usually carry the amount that they can lift. In the case of my son, no more than twenty pounds…he is really skinny.

 

Finally, no one is forced to pick a minimum amount of coffee. At harvest, the coffee is paid by weight, so the more a worker picks the more he gets paid. Children are not able to pick the same amount as an adult, but it does not matter, since payment is done by weight.

So, I had a hard time explaining all this to my sister-in-law. It is easy to judge from the outside, but each family has their own unique situation. It is not popular to talk about this and I know it is a touchy subject, but I feel that we may do more harm than good if we preclude children from helping their parents around harvest time. We may even impact a child’s health if the kid goes hungry because his parents have no money to sustain him. So, why not allow them to contribute and make a better future for themselves?

More Barista Competition ramblings and Dale Harris

So I did a blog post a few weeks ago about how much I hate barista competition and why it sucks (mainly because I didn’t win).

For the sake of balance I thought it was important to share why as a company Has Bean still continues to be involved with enthusiasm in barista competition.

Dale Harris has been with Has Bean now for 7 years (your average manslaughter kind of sentence). When I first met Dale he was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar (that much is true). But it was at a barista competition I really got to speak with him and I realised that I had to have him as part of my team.

Dale since that time has become one of my closest friends and confidents at Has Bean and instrumental in the success we have had. Think all the good things are down to him and most of the mistakes down to me.

Also since that day both me and Dale have been on many barista competition adventures, most of them ending in us also not winning (some very close scrapes though and bullets dodged). But it has given us some focus and some great times along the way.

Most importantly it has pushed us both to think about coffee in different ways, year on year. Before going to Central America this January, Dale charged me with finding him a coffee for this years UKBC competition. Sounds easy right ? But with Dale there has always had to be an element of learning or understanding about the coffee industry and sourcing in a different way. This makes the task harder, delicious and tasty coffee with a twist.

Towards the end of the trip I had found many tasty coffees that were good, but nothing that really fitted his complicated brief. Then in a cupping room in Nicaragua I was presented with something special, that blew my mind and made me challenge a lot of preconceptions of coffee sorting and separation.

The coffee was from Finca Limoncillo and was the amazing Yellow Pacamara. Nothing new here I hear you cry, its a coffee we have worked with for nearly 4 years now. The yields of this coffee are low, and the demand is high. We jump to the front of the queue for this coffee because we bought it in the first auction of it, and have been big cheerleaders, but still theres not enough for how much of it you all demand.

So when cupping with Eleane, (part of the Miresch family who own the farm) she suggested I tried the petits. Petits are whats left over after the coffee has gone through screen sorting sieves to find just the biggest beans. Screen sorting is something thats left over from commodity days, mainly to ensure some kind of consistency in times where picking and processing details had no resemblance to the highly skilled and attention to detail coffee farming of today. The larger beans stay in the top of the screens, and the smaller ones fall through to their death. The industry has have found new ways to maintain consistency, but still we sieve them through the screens and normally throw these petits into commodity coffee to be sold on the C market or to fill lower quality blends.

In these times of speciality coffee becoming more scarce, lowering yields and environmental challenges. this seems crazy. Why remove good coffee to become commodity when there can be eqaually (or maybe even better) coffee there. Its something we tried last year with Finca Argentina in El Salvador with great success, so when someone like Eleane suggested I try them I jumped at the chance.

It cupped amazingly and I had found my special coffee with a unique and interesting twist on it for Dales Competition.

Dale competed with this coffee the weekend just gone, and made me incredibly proud of what he presented, you can watch his performance at the video window below, and we’ll be watching things closely at the London heat, crossing fingers that Dale will be able to take this forward to the finals.

So why is competition important for Has Bean? Mainly to keep Dale off the streets between January and the summer months, but also for us to push the boundaries of what we do as a coffee roastery and give us things to get excited about. It gives us focus, and to see how we can improve not just barista skills but to keep coffee buyers like me on my toes, making sure we do the best job we can.

We should have some of this coffee later in the year for you to try, but for now Dale has some areas to improve on and practice with for what is a much more technically demanding competition to the brewers cup, and I expect to sit through many more run throughs of his perforce in coming weeks.

Do expect another blog post about rules and how the competition sucks and how it isn’t a coffee sourcing competition (I understand fully the contradictory tone of these two posts) later in the year. But for now this isn’t my performance and isn’t my message, Dale is his own man, with his own ideas and interpretation of the competition scene.

I think this is a great example on how competitions can be used to push yourself to get better not just as a barista, but as a company and industry. Its an excellent way to showcase your thinking and present to the world whats on your mind.

I’m incredibly proud (as I always am) of Dales performance and what an amazing job he did, and look forwards to where he takes his competition this year, and sometimes (like the brewers cup competition this year) theres more than just winning to be gained. But come on, wouldn’t it be nice for once !

Why does the ‘C’ price matter

I’ve always gone along with the idea that the C price in coffee is nothing to do with me. But I’ve started to change that opinion of late

So what is the C price ? The C price is the price paid for traded commodity coffees at the New York financial exchange. This is a two-fold market of current prices and also a futures market for purchase of contracts for coffee for a later date.

The prices are dictated by a few things, but in a stable market these main things are weather conditions at origin which will have an effect on yield for that year. There is a saying if Brazil sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold, and this stems from this kind of thing. Markets are heavily influenced by statements from coffee-producing countries’ organisations, regarding dropping yields or a lack of supply of coffee in the market. Like anything supply and demand are very important factors.

Coffee that we buy have no resemblance to this price and I’ve worked hard over the years to make producers ignore the “c” and focus on things like cost of production and then the rewards they deserve for the coffee. Cost of production can vary from varietal to varietal and reward can fluctuate depending on rarity and demand.

Its been a clean easy mechanism to work out what price we should pay for a coffee, well so I thought.

So why the change of heart and the focus on watching the “c” price? Every farm that produces specialty coffee will have some commodity coffee, the stuff that doesn’t taste so good, the smaller beans, and broken / black beans. These beans have to find a home, and its often on the commodity market that they are sold.

I’m not even going to touch differentials if you want to learn about them go here http://www.hasblog.co.uk/coffee-prices-differentials-and-premium-quality-coffee-relationships. But for now lets keep the numbers simple

The fluctuation in the market means that the profits of a farm can fluctuate with them. These numbers are very complicated unless your talking about a real farm, and I’ve yet to have this conversation. So I’m going to use some very basic numbers to prove the point.

So say a farm that produces 450 bags. 60% of the coffee sells at $4.50 a lb FOB to the speciality market. The remaining 40% is subject to the commodity prices at the time. The fixed income is the relatively good at $184824.59 for the 270 bags of specialty. But what does the market do to the other prices

Well lets look at some dates in April. If the commodity coffee was sold on the 1st of April 2011 then the producer would have received $82,144.26 for their 180 commodity bags, giving them a total turnover of $266,968.85. Fast forward to the 1st of April 2014 and that same commodity coffee would have sold for $55,584.28 giving them a total of $240408.87 a drop of $26,559.98. Fast forward further to the 1st of April 2017 and that same coffee would have sold for $37997.20 a total of £222821.79 a drop from 2011 of $44,147.06.

Now say this imaginary farm has outgoing costs including a wage for the producer of $240,000.00 In 2011 they made an amazing profit of $26,968.85, winner winner chicken dinner. But in 2014 that profit would be $408.87. 2017 was even worse where they made an imaginary loss of $17178.21 nearly wiping out all the profit of 2011 (not to mention costs will have all gone up by then).

Now these figures are probably way off, but they do demonstrate how much effect a swing in the New York ‘c’ can have on the life of a producer in an imaginary world.

 

Potential Solutions

The ‘c’ in 2011 was a freak occurrence that doesn’t happen very often. Stock markets were down, currencies unstable and commodities were really targeted by the rich as a place to put their money. The market was being manipulated by very wealthy banks and hedge funds to keep making money in the tough times. Prices at the moment are low, and in many cases lower than production (this is where differentials come in places like Kenya compared to say Brazil have very different harvesting costs).

So lets set a mid price of $1.60 for the C to be a healthy market. This would mean that a good profit for the imaginary farm being set at $228634.86. My proposal would be to set a sliding scale of payment on that $4.50 a lb coffee and when the market rises, that price would drop to the producer and when it drop the “specialty” coffee rise. For instance the coffee on the 1st of April 2017 would be $37997.20. So if you set the price at $4.64 in stead of the static $4.50 you cover the loses of the producer in the specialty price.

But if April 2011 ever happened again then then that “speciality” price would drop for instance $3.57 meaning the producer still got the $228634.86 which involves profit and wages but the roaster is protected against what would be a rising market. You see when the market rises and spot purchases from importers and negotiations with new suppliers are always much higher than when the market is down even if we pretend to ignore it. I kind of see it as hedging the market both ways for producer and roaster.

 

DATE C PRICE

1/4/2011 299.38 $82144.26 for 27381.42 lb

1/4/2014 203.05 $55584.28 for 27381.42 lb

1/4/2017 138.77 $37997.20 for 27381.42 lb

450.00 184824.59 for 41072.13 lb

Now these sums are very basic, and I’d love to sit down with a coffee producer and give them some real meaning but there has to be some milage in this idea, so a farmer can plan for the year knowing exactly what they will bring in, and roasters can plan and not be adversely hurt by a changing market. Its also easier to put raises in costs of production again, sitting down year on year and working out the best price to pay depending on the market.

 

Potential Problems

How do you continue to motivate the farmer to produce quality. I don’t think this model would fit every producer and very country (and I don’t know if it would even work. But I think the majority of producers we work with are not motivated by money, but by producing great coffee and having some stability in pricing. I’ve had some of our farmers approached by other roasters wanting the coffee and offering more money, but our team tend to know that I’ll be back every year, and thats a motivator in itself.

But I think some guidelines like

– we’ll buy XX lbs of coffee of coffee next year provided they are available and cup at 85+
– We will guarantee a premium on this quantity of coffee,
– we will raise/lower this premium to factor any financial impact incurred by changes in the C-market on any coffee produced that cups below 85 to ensure stable profits
– we will invest x% of profit from this years coffee into future innovation on your farm

These are just muses, and stuff I’ve been thinking about, but I will approach someone and get the real figures and see if we can do something on one farm see if its even possible and if it is just to trial this out. I’m sure theres another blog post in the future about this too.

Bad loser and sour grapes

Ok so first off, a huge congratulations to the amazing David Cullen of Clifton coffee who won this weekends UK Brewers cup competition, and an even bigger shout to Mat North who runs the competitions like a don, an organisational god.

Theres no way to dress this up, I’m a super bad loser, you may be surprised at this as I’m a Sunderland fan and should be accustomed to it, but I really am the worst. I know this post can only sound like sour grapes, and moaning and whining.

But I have to get this out my system before it eats me up inside. See it as spewing of thoughts and ideas to make myself feel better again, as since 6:30pm Saturday night I’ve been waiting to explode.

This weekend I competed in the Semi finals of the UK Brewers cup competition. Only the semi finals as I didn’t make it through to the finals (for the second year running). Last year I had a killer coffee (I know it was killer as Jeremy Challender went on to win it after I forgot to turn my kettles on).

A rookie mistake after getting a drop out place a few days before and not preparing. I kind of accepted that result. No lets be honest I didn’t but I understood the methodology a little. You see I had three minutes to make coffee, by the time the kettles were warmed up. I was messy in my workflow, but I knew I got all my descriptors and information out there (I did have 7 minutes to do so with nothing else to do), but my coffee tasted freaking amazing from those three minutes, like the best brews I’d ever made of them (I thought about using this technique this year they were so good). But placing just outside the qualifying group was easier to swallow (I did nearly scald a judge such was my enthusiasm to get the coffee out of the Chemex in the 1 second I had remaining before disqualification).

But this year left me more frustrated than ever. Lets rewind to Leeds a few weeks before and the heats. I hadn’t practiced, I chose the coffee the day before from a pre shipment cupping sample, and was badly prepared (I didn’t even have all my things for the presentation with me on my table). My work flow made me embarrassed, and I was clunky and stumbling, I didn’t deserve to go through if I was honest, but I had an amazing natural from Ethiopia that was just mind blowingly different in the cup. It didn’t taste of parma violets, it was parma violets (for non UK people parma violets are a floral and glucose and violet petals candy sweet and  here). The coffee dragged me through. I placed 4th in that heat, and 6th overall, which was crazy considering how badly I performed and worked, after all its a brewing competition.

I left Leeds sad and disappointed in myself, and didn’t feel I deserved my semi final place seeing the other baristas who had put the work in and were so smooth and organised. So for them (and of course myself) I decided if I was doing it then I was going to be prepared organised, practiced and focussed.

I’ve thought of nothing else apart from this brewers cup competition since, and have competed many many more run throughs than I ever have before. Whilst driving from Leeds to Sunderland (to watch Sunderland loose again) I had a brain wave. You see I had a message I needed to share with the world.  I love coffee and I love barista competition, but I regret the way that the competition has become a Geisha show, using caricature coffees that have no resemblance to the coffees that our customers drink at home. Coffee is multi faceted and has so many things it can give us. Focusing on this one area in high acidity or huge naturals makes us so elite and exclusive from the general public. Now I hear you saying competition isn’t for the public, its for the industry, and that we should be elite at the very top of our professional pyramid. But this was a show that was aimed at the public, aimed at a public that have no idea what we are talking about when we use blackcurrant, jasmine and black tea as taste descriptors.

So I decided that I was not going to use the Ethiopian (I didn’t have enough for the 2kg rule to use at the end anyway). So decided to make a presentation about this and used what I described in my presentation as an unexciting Brazil, a pulp natural thats grown at 1100 to 1250 masl and is a yellow bourbon varietal from Fazenda Cacheoria in Sao Paolo state on the border of Minas Gerias.

Quite a risk to bring this coffee to a Brewers cup competition, but after a lot of thought I decided actually not. There’s a clue in the name, Brewers cup. Its about brewing coffee, not airfreighting in micro lots from around the world that show off, I know, I’ve done that in the past, but it should be about making three drinks and ensuring predictable, intended, outcomes. Brazils are perfect for this, with a huge window of brewing opportunity. It is much easier to work with than Geisha or a Kenyan, so it would be actually easier for me to hit my brewing parameters and give the judges a delicious cup of coffee. It’s extractable and predictable.

I’ve worked with his farm for 14 years, slowly and surely increasing our volumes. I did some quick sums and and I’ve bought over 150 tonnes of this coffee in my time at Hasbean. I’ve brewed this coffee more than any other, and drink buckets of the stuff while I’m banging out emails. Its my go to coffee,I know it inside out. I’ve  also worked out that in the last 14 years my customers have probably brewed around 10 million cups of this coffee. There has to be something in it right ? It has to be a good brewed coffee if we have sold so much of it and have such customer demand. They love it for the same reasons, easy to brew extractable, predicable outcomes and simple descriptors that anyone can get.

So I’m going to break down my frustration into some category’s

Judging

You see it’s okay for judges not to love the coffee. I went through and in fact it doesn’t even mention in the rules that they even NEED to like it. Whether they think its tasty or not is not one of their many criteria. Their job is not to find their favourite coffee, it’s not a talent show for coffee sourcing, it is a brewers cup competition. I thought that with this coffee it could be good on the score sheet as well as the message.

Unfortunately Brewers cup has become a sourcing competition though, there are some coffees that are guaranteed to do well. This is what happens when you use what is basically a cupping sheet to access a competition. Coffee professionals fall into treating it like a pre shipment sample/ am I going to buy this coffee operation. I don’t believe on purpose but it is just the way we are conditioned as people when we look at a cupping sheet.

There is also another problem with the cupping sheet approach to coffee scoring. I’ve sat in so many cuppings, and judged at the cup of excellence program. I’ve seen with my own eyes, how important to some it becomes to correlate with their peers and have consistency in their scoring. The easiest way to do this is shorten the range you work with. So what starts as a score out of 100 (as in a traditional cupping sheet) changes and becomes a  range no lower than 83 and no higher than 90. So working on a range that starts out with 100 points becomes 7.

Even worse the mean becomes 85-87 so those 100 points are then down to 3 points. Now I’m not saying all the judges are at that extreme, but I’ve seen people give these kind of scores all day until there is one thats so obviously different. The same happens in barista competition where judges are is so scared to give a 10 (or a 6 in WBC) that they don’t for fear of getting it wrong back in the judges room. The feedback (that I’ll come to later)  from my judge was my performance was awesome on the day, one of the most engaging and interesting they had experienced. Worth 8 points out of 10 from every judge? I’m not saying I was better than an 8 but how did they all get to the very tip of awesome (8-10 is classified as awesome on the score sheet). Was not even one them tempted to go 8.25.

Going back to the cupping scenario when I have judged cup of excellence competitions  I rarely correlate with my peers but often but often am consistent in my own scoring. Getting behind a coffee that I love and killing a coffee I don’t. I have confidence in my own ability (god this blog post is so arrogant) to taste, and I’ll live and die by my scores. I remember in Bolivia in 2007 scoring Machacamarca 93 both times with it only coming 25th overall in the competition. I backed it up by buying it and if I could get that coffee today I’d sell it a million times over such is the demand, 4 years after its last production harvest.

UBBrC3

I don’t think the judging experience (looking from outside in and after a million conversations about judges rooms) encourages you to get behind a barista, because of the culture of head judge toning down your scores if you get overly excited. So we put more and more pressure on our judges to correlate (after years of complaining that the scores make no sense and why don’t they correlate I can see the contradictions here). But I’d be more for a judge constantly scores badly then they are no longer a judge, than the production line of 7 and 8’s that role off the brewers cup line.

I think the judges are good people, doing the best job they can, but I don’t feel that they are being given the tools to do the best job, be it score sheets, be it not being allowed to have confidence in their own ability, and the relentless encouragement for correlation.

Feedback

This is the part that frustrated me the most (and drove me to drink on the night after results). I went in to get my feedback and it was delivered by two of the judges who I personally really like and know are good people. They asked me where I felt I could have done better and I knew I could have done better on giving them a little bit more on body and acidity levels, I kind of brushed on it very gently (I said it has a huge body in a throw away comment that only one judge wrote down), but I missed the acidity. Mainly because this coffee doesn’t have any acidity until it cools, and I gave that in a descriptor (but still I get it, its the rules). I asked them what I could have done better, and it was silence for a while, and then “A more complex coffee”. I don’t see anywhere in the rules that I need complex coffee. More attention to the pours of my brew ( I was a little out on my amounts but I was on stage with people watching me and a camera crew in my face). But this was no worse than in Leeds, in fact a lot lot better. I’m not sure if I’m alone on this but I get within a few ml but rarely on the button. Now either I’m a bad brewer or others suffer from this, but I can’t imagine this is the only reason I didn’t make those elusive finals.

I was also told my work flow could have been smoother. But from the same judge who a few weeks before had given me a 6 for workflow in Leeds. As I’ve already said Leeds was a car crash. I was told I lost points for reading notes in Leeds (again couldn’t find this in the rules) and  spilling coffee on the judges table. Fast forward to Glasgow and the Semi finals the same judge gave me a 5.75. I was so much happy with my workflow here, I didn’t make any moves that were not needed, I was clean (ish) and brewed much much better.

I was also pulled up on my choice of serving vessel, a chemex shaped cup, because they could not get their spoon in towards the end, again not in the rules.

Apparently I didn’t give enough reason why I used chemex too. I went through the video and I said.

“I’m using Chemex as this is how I brew at work and at home. I love chemex for the unique cup profile and the aesthetically pleasing design. Its also according to Ian Fleming the choice of brewer of James Bond, and who can argue with 007. It also gives a clean sweater lighter cup removing lots of suspended solids with its thick paper filters which is perfect for a normally thick gloomy pulped natural Brazil, making it lighter and cleaner while retaining its inherent sweetness and tasting notes. “

UBBrC2

I’m not sure what else I could have said here, left confused and not helped to do better in the future.

it just sounds like I’m bitching because I lost (and trust me I know I am), but all I left with was that all I could have improved by pouring better, more complexity and work smoother.

Potential Solutions

I want to look at this in a more broader sense. If barista competition is about innovation and pushing us forward then why don’t we reward that in any of our barista competitions. When Matt Perger competed in Melbourne WBC 2013, I saw the most truly innovative barista performances and on of the key reasons we have better grinders today,  he came second.

When Colin Harmon talked about water in a barista competition in 2010 I was nearly sick I’d not even thought about it, he came 4th. When Ben Putt placed espresso in a vacuum packer, why do ou even do that, 3rd.

Maxwell Colonna Dashwood when he went up on stage and talked about water and its importance in coffee, changed the direction of our industry and made us all buy his book, 5th.

When Agnieszka Rojewska didn’t use a steam wand to steam her milk and was amazing 34th. One of my favourite performances.

Now I’m not saying I did anything innovative (nothing innovative has ever come from the brewers cup, but thats another blog post), but I tried something different, and said something we have all been saying for a while behind closed doors, that the brewers cup has become a geisha show. We don’t reward innovation, so lets not hide behind barista competitions are the pinnacle of the pyramid, it’s a side show that makes us coffee celebrities, and some of them don’t even win.

We have to decide if its a coffee sourcing competition (WBrC and WBC) or we want brewing competitions that pushes the industry forwards.

I believe that something on the score sheet for something truly innovative would be amazing. Now I know that this is something more to set to personal preference and would lead to arguments and disagreements, but were having those arguments and disagreements already. I think we can agree on some of the moments we have all had at barista comps where we just stop and go wow. Competitions should be about creativity, originality and innovation and not button pushing. Who isn’t thinking about one of the above performances above right now.

I want our competitions to serve a purpose, to help us improve, push and innovate within our community, but until we find a way to reward creativity, originality and innovation then I see the road ahead a bumpy one.

I’d also like to see us encourage judges to really get behind something they love. I know this is subjective, but coffee is subjective. Giving judges freedom to really score will move us away from the super close scores that we see time and again in competitions where the very slightest thing can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Thats my competition time over, I’m hanging up my Chemex for good. Thats why I feel I can write this now. If you see me near a competition your allowed to come hit me on my forehead and tell me I’m stupid (people do that anyway).

I never expected to win, I’m a roaster not a barista, I’m playing a world I have no right to be. But I really hoped that it would have made the finals, and I could have made a bigger point. It didn’t, I know the rules and I understand them, I knew them when I entered. But it all just left me feeling a little bit angry, and now more sad. Am I proud of what I did and yes even knowing my score sheets and the final result I don’t think I’d change anything and thats what so frustrating about the competition. I’m proud of what I did on stage and I’m sad that it didn’t correlate into scores.

Again congratulations to David Cullen of Clifton coffee, I’ll be the one at the front cheerleading you on in Budapest, but please please don’t use a Geisha.

Yours sincerely

Bad looser

I’ve stolen the video of my performance from the UK SCA without permission, so better to ask forgiveness than permission, “I’m sorry !!”