Coffee Education

The SCAE Coffee Diploma is a qualification, with a syllabus of modules, each module earning credits, and when the student achieves 100 credits they are awarded the Diploma.  It sounds fantastic to me.

Here's my problem. It's a bit of a rant really, and it is something I've been ranting about for several months now. Here in the UK it is almost impossible to actually take a course to achieve this qualification. They do exist, in Chelmsford (Essex) and there is a programme run by Marco in Ireland, but they are few and far between.  What bloody good is Chelmsford or Ireland to someone 600miles away from them? I've contacted the SCAE. I've even contacted approved coffee trainers to ask if I can do the course with them on a 1-2-1 basis. The costs are prohibitive, unfortunately. To me this training programme and qualification are a complete and utter notional concept existing almost solely on the SCAE's website.

Compare that with the huge array of training events, webinars, books, seminars etc that the SCAA has available.  It's shocking in comparison, and makes me quite furious that if you want to learn, you have to fight tooth and nail to do so... and pay a lot of money.

I did a three years Masters Degree at Liverpool University and the first time I went there was for my graduation! It is not difficult and not expensive to conduct lectures using the internet these days.

Recently I kind of hijacked a short twitter conversation, which John Gordon, Gwylim Davies and Paul Stack were taking part in. I'm not criticising anyone here, but I was frustrated to be told by John and Gwylim that it is acceptable that any barista wishing to learn should have to claw their way to an education in coffee, because that's how they did it.  They supported the approach that self-education and learning directly from industry leaders such as James Hoffman should be the primary means of barista education. Now it's fair to say that every barista out there has learned something from James, but is that a sustainable way to train batistas? We can't all work for Square Mile.  Reading blogs, scouring www.home-barista.com to read a discussion that took place in 2007, and hoping you get some quick tips whilst chatting to the barista next to you at a competition?  I'm doing all that anyway, but it is harder work than it needs to be.

So, I'd like to get a programme set up, here in Scotland. With the SCAE's help or without it. It could be the Diploma programme (preferably, and hopefully identical to the one run by the SCAE.IE), or it could be another. I don't know. I just think that if there's a demand to learn more about coffee, we should do more than pay lip service to it. We should offer the damn thing to students, and at the moment the SCAE aren't doing that well enough.

I'm probably only getting about 20 readers here anyway, so it's not a very good poll, but I'd be interested in any thoughts. Is there demand for better coffee training?

Apologies if this post offends anyone. That's not my aim. And I'm sure some will disagree with some of my points.  That's fine. I just want to find a way forward.
**Edit** Please see my next post