flyingthud

(long post)

You might be wondering why I haven’t posted about the UK comp,
especially considering that two posts ago I said I would. The reasons for my dropping the ball on this is a) Jim and Steve have already said most of what can be said, and b) I’m busy with college work. I did however post up pics on flickr once I got home. Before I talk more, I just wanna put this pic in of my morning coffee. Brought over to me very kindly by Robert Csar, I’ve been drinking this every day recently and although faded a little (age and travel), it still has this complexity that makes me want to travel to Denver and taste it fresh.

You all know by now that Jim won and that the competition standard was way higher than ever before across the board. So I’ll avoid reiterating what you already know. Something that was interesting though was helping out with practice and preparation the day before the comp with Jim, Jen and Anette. It was really interesting to see how they went out about preparing in comparison to what I’ve known before. My eyes were opened to many details I hadn’t considered before but similarly I felt there were areas I was sensitive to they hadn’t considered. As Jim put it, a fresh perspective, and its something I think all competition baristas should try expose themselves to if possible. Perhaps not the day before as in Jim’s case, but a week or two definitely. I think every judge has little things they look for or perhaps appreciate more than others; things like eye contact, how they serve their drinks, layout of equipment, delivery, or I know for me, I can’t stand people putting their fingers anywhere near the rims of cups or jugs.

I think Jim’s performance on the day was strong but definitely not his best. His drinks tasted great, especially his sig drink, and I suspect it was this superiority in the cup that won it for him on the day. On a day when every competitor made big effort on presentation however, it was interesting that Jim didn’t stand out more, and yet still won comfortably. To avoid any misunderstanding, he was far from poor, and had many tricks that separated him from the others; -though most of these only noticeable to those familiar with the comp, and maybe not to the onlookers.

I’ve said this before, these new score sheets really do expose the skill levels of the barista and the quality of their coffee way more than before. The taste is now paramount, which is just such an good development. I’m very proud of Jim for retaining his title and feel confident he is definitely one to beat in Tokyo. (not with the back of a pf now, I of course mean in a competition sense)

I had a great weekend in London though. Spent a lot of time hanging out with Klaus Thomsen and Deaton Pigot. They first met at Ramacafe in Nicaragua last year and London was a chance for them, and myself to say bye to Deaton before he set off on his Great Coffee Journey through the cafes of North America and the farms of Guatemala and Mexico before heading home to Oz. Those who want to keep up with his travels by the way should check out his new blog, although he’s yet to post any info yet. He’s currently in New York, so if any NY heads wanna meet up with him, e mail me for his contact details.

Got on well with Klaus, (I think…did we?) and am looking forward to doing a cafe tour of Copenhagen with him in April. It was really interesting to watch some of the competition with him and hear what he liked and disliked about people’s performances. We talked about things like technique, clean up at end, and scripting,..I’d elaborate put this post is too long already.

I have lots more I could talk about, but it’ll have to wait. In the meantime, you can watch this little video of Sammy Piccolo pouring at a consumer coffee event held last year in Vancouver.

will post more soon

Now I don’t normally post non coffee things on this, so don’t be pissed at me. But I was rambling around on youtube a bit this morning and found this ad I hadn’t seen in a while. As just stated, it has nothing to do with coffee, a fact which some of you might take offense at. However, if you didn’t take offense to it, perhaps something in the clip might push your patience.

the next post will be only about coffee, I assure you.

Its Monday morning, and I’m browsing through photos of my trip to London over the weekend. I was over for a family thing but found time to hang out with Jim a good bit, play around in the lab at London School of Coffee/Mercanta and do the mandatory trips to Flat White and Monmouth, both of which, held up to their reputation. This is post no. 1 as next week I’ll be flying over to help Jim with the UK finals, and will provide you with post 2. Nice of me no?

I flew in just silly early on Friday morning, and treated myself to a trip on the Heathrow Express, which had me in Paddington 15 minutes later, waiting at coffee kiosk for Jim to meet me. Sadly Jim’s choice on commuter train proved not as efficient as mine so it took him a little longer to turn up than planned. I didn’t mind too much though as one could do a lot worse for people watching than an hour in London’s Paddington Station. Knowing we were going to be drinking a fair bit of coffee that day, I held back on ordering a coffee at the Ritazza stand, and ordered a juice instead.

It was funny seeing what concepts of cleaning they chose to employ and those they didn’t see fit to bother with. The steam wand was cleaned but only every few minutes, not after each use. Apart from that though, they never flushed between shots, and never cleaned out the pf’s. I know these sins aren’t uncommon, but I can’t help but be amazed when you see it. It’s so clearly filthy, and yet the queue was huge.

After a nice breakfast on Marleybone st, we set to Carnaby Street where we checked out a new cafe called Sacred.

I suppose the most interesting aspect of this place was the way they had their two group linea perched high almost on a pedastool. It was almost like the barista alter. The espresso we had weren’t great, but they seemed to making an effort and I’m sure will improve in time. I’ll probably go back next weekend.

Next up was Flat White in SoHo. I love this place, you’re always made welcome and I love the way the bar is designed in such a way that you can easily walk around and see them prepare your drink. Their latte art is so consistent and they show an attention to detail with their espresso rarely seen in these isles. I’m yet to have a bad experience here and am already looking forward to going back there next weekend. I’ll have pics in the next post but you can check here if you’re desperate.

Next up was Monmouth which was packed as usual and so we decided to take our drinks outside. I ordered a cup of the El Salvador Le fany, and Jim had a Rwandan that I forget the name of. They were brewed in their standard melitta on cups although sadly the coffees weren’t as good as previous Monmouth visits, still an utterly charming place.

So Tuesday saw Ireland’s 5th National Barista Championship take place. Ten finalists showed their goods over the whole day with one of the best attendances I’ve seen yet. The venue for the comp was Ireland’s biggest catering show called Catex which interestingly, had way more coffee exhibitors than ever before. I spent a lot of the show working on the Bewley’s stand and so I didn’t get a chance to watch the whole show. I did get a chance to see a few of our competitors from the cafe compete though but sadly, for you guys, I wasn’t my usual snap happy myself, and so I’ve feck all pics for you.

We had four competitors in the finals and I’m quite chuffed to tell you that we grabbed 1st, 3rd and 4th. Andrius Valiagua took 1st place, Niamh Harrington of Cafe Krem a close second followed by Bela Bartok in third, 2 points ahead of Rachael Coss who came 4th. Andrius is an incredibly good bar barista and his biggest challenge in all this was learning how to slow down and pace himself for competition. His technical consistency was impressive but not as much as the four cappuccino he served each with a double rosetta.

Sadly, it was felt by the judges that the baristas were not given the chance to truly shine due to their lack of familiarity with the Iberital machines used for the competition. The low dispersion block meant that people needed to pay particular attention to their dose, to ensure getting the portafilter into the group head. Sadly, this additional stress proved too much for competitors with nearly all of them having to remake numerous espresso. Bela apparently made 6 attempts before he could get the pf into the machine, though somehow still managed to go on and place third.  Iberital were the only machine company that stepped up to sponsor the event but hopefully future years will see National competitions baring closer resemblance to wbc procedures and choices of machine.

The machine killed our espresso blend. I’m not sure of the science behind it, but at 5 days old, our coffee just seemed to die pretty quickly with higher temp of the machine. The same coffee was just lovely off the gb5 marzocco on the Bewley’s stand. Despite this annoyance though, it seemed to affect everyone’s espresso and with everyone using the same machines, no one really had an advantage.

The following weeks will be interesting for me as I battle with myself to devote the necessary time to my last two months in college when the coffee world offers more experiences than ever. My next port of call will be London next weekend, and then the weekend again after that for the UKBC. I’m also looking at a weekend trip up to Copenhagen to catch up with Troels and Bjorg Brend in Kontra.

Thats all for now, but I’d like to express, once again my sincerest apologies to those who feel I do not post enough. It is indeed true that I’m fierce lazy but sleep safe in the knowledge that intend posting a lot more over the coming weeks as there be many interesting things in the pipe line.

pics of comp and some practice days before are on flickr