UK Barista Championships - Epilogue (Part Three)

Continued from UK Barista Championships - Epilogue (Part Two)

Espresso and our individual perceptions
If you're a barista... yes, you, reading this... how do you know whether your espresso is good or bad?  Maybe it's bad.  Now stop and look inside yourself.  Did reading that remark give you slight feelings of annoyance or defensiveness?  Did your ego poke its head out for a split second?  If so, I think you're quite normal.  Baristas take their espresso very personally. The ability to make good espresso is fundamental to a barista - particulary a '3rd wave' one (I'm sorry for using that term!).  But the question is valid and relevant. Good or bad?  There are several possible ways you might have reached the conclusion that it is, in your opinion, good. Common ways include:

• You may have worked with experienced professional baristas who have trained you to tell the difference between how good and bad espresso tastes
• You may be an avid drinker of espresso who simply knows what they like
• You may be a self-taught barista, perhaps a home-barista, beavering away with YouTube videos, books, forums, and gleaning information from every available source, then putting what you've learned into practise in your espresso
• Your grandfather was Italian
• A customer may have told you once that your espresso tastes good

Here's another way. This one is less common:

• You entered a barista competition and the panel of sensory judges gave your espresso high scores

In an ideal world you'd take all that confidence you have in your own espresso, enter a competition, and have all your confidence validated by the judges.

Having looked at my own scoresheets as well as the early sheets of some highly acclaimed baristas, I can say with a reasonable degree of certainly that we do not live in an ideal world!

Photo by Rob Sharp www.rsharpphoto.com

For me, my sensory scoresheets were a wake up call. I may have learned to do things right (technical), but I haven't learned to do the right things (sensory). To put my management consultant hat back on for a moment, I've learned to be an efficient barista, but not how to be effective one.
Now to be fair to myself, I'm also my own worst critic. I'll take any opportunity to beat myself up, because it encourages me to try harder to be better. I've been told that my sensory scores actually aren't that bad for a year 1 competitor. Whatever. The point is, on competition day my espresso wasn't as good as I thought it was, and that means I need to put aside ego and make some serious changes.







Sensory Judges' Scoresheets
On competition day I served my drinks in the following order:
- Cappuccino
- Signature Drink
- Espresso
The scoresheets are organised differently. I'm going to look at the sections of the scoresheets in the order in which I served them on the day.


Cappuccino
Below is a composite of all four judges' cappuccino comments. (Click to enlarge)

Key Learning Points

Picture by Robert Sharp www.rsharpphoto.com

1. Visually I'm not doing too badly. Two judges commented on a loss/lack of definition, which I would like to understand more but I think relates to the latte art. I think I poured well on the day considering how much my hands were shaking (see picture), but I also agree that I'm not yet consistently pouring sharp-edged milk art with high contrast and I will work on that.
2. My microfoam consistency scores ranged from 1.5 to 3. I find it quite tough to achieve crisp milk art with thick microfoam, and during practise I tried to find a compromise between the two, and was generally getting foam thicker than the 1cm minimum. But ultimately there's no compromise, of course, and I just need to be able to do both to a very high standard, so I just need to keep working on it.  Another challenge with this, though, is keeping milk waste to a minimum (by not overfilling the milk pitcher) whilst still having enough in there to be able to stretch and texture it correctly.  Practise. Practise. Practise!
3. Taste Balance is where it's all at. Its a "x4" score, so every lost point is actually four points down the sink. I averaged a score of just under 3. Not terrible but this is where I can do much better next year. I intentionally focused on providing sweetness, but I went a little too far. Not enough espresso taste for some of the judges. That's fixable. Interesting conflicting comments from the judges... although they agree that the milk needs to be hotter, some say the low temperature exaggerates the sweetness, yet one says that it needs to be hotter in order to be sweeter.  I think also that I didn't necessary understeam the milk (although that is of course possible), but may just have suffered from my cups not being hot enough. I saw other competitors using techniques to keep their cups hotter, and I think I should do something similar next year.  I will also start using a temperature probe more often in practise, which is something I've got out of the habit of doing recently.

Continued in UK Barista Championships - Epilogue (Part Four)