Baristas do it better - the professional approach to making coffee

Baristas Charles Stewart and Vanessa Robertson at Bench Espresso in Perth

I sold coffee, of course. Caffe latte, mainly, but long blacks, the occasional shorty, and lots of “flat whites”, which I simply interpreted as more caffe latte, smiled, and took the cash. From people like you.

Wanna know something? I had no bloody idea.

At $2 per cup, coffee paid the wages. Is a man with paint and a canvas an artist? Doubtful, but ­apparently a man with an espresso machine and a grinder is a ­“barista”.

Frankly, I’m embarrassed by how little I knew: about beans, the machine, the grinder, dosage, tamping, water blah blah blah. It didn’t stop me selling lots of ­coffee, though.

And, obviously, I was not alone.

Some 17 years later, Australia’s collective addiction to coffee ­consumption has ballooned; sales of domestic machines have exploded; the specialty roasting industry has thrived; the so-called third wave of alternative (to ­espresso) brewing and extraction techniques has come and, if not gone, at least left a legacy of coffee ­appreciation that hitherto didn’t exist.

There are still a lot of ignorant vendors out there selling you, and me, coffee. But there are a hell of a lot more whose education, experience and professionalism has lifted the bar beyond all recognition. For coffee drinkers like us, Australia is still The Lucky Country.

As Perth-based barista Charles Stewart says: “Australia is undoubtedly a world leader in ­coffee.” And like our unhampered chefs, Stewart attributes the progressive nature of our ­coffee ­culture to a lack of ­ingrained tradition.

OK, let’s move on. My days as a “barista” were long ago, but an interest in coffee never wavered. I have a lovely small, semi-commercial rig at home and great beans that arrive from the Market Lane Coffee Club each fortnight.

Yet I still go out for coffee. I think most of us who really love the stuff do.

Whatever illusion the appliance and pod vendors try to flog, when it comes to espresso coffee, domestic will never be a substitute for well-made commercial. Never.

Spend some time talking to Stewart, a barista-turned-trainer with roasters and coffee machine gurus Five Senses, and you’ll begin to understand why.

It’s a combination of hardware (machines, grinders, water filtration systems), software (the skills of the operator) and consumables (beans, water and milk). Oh, and a little black art, too.

And I like that.

Stewart is what you’d call a truly professional barista. His immersion in coffee is total, from making coffee for a living to roasting, teaching, competing and judging coffee abroad. He now trains clients.

To watch, listen and talk to Stewart is to gain an insight into the nuance of the craft and the specialist vocabulary of the industry (texture, weight, acidity, sweetness, dose, yield, volumetric measurement, dissolved solids.) At Five Senses’ Northbridge training facility in Perth I asked Stewart if coffee made at home, even on a decent machine/ grinder setup, can ever match the highest ­standards aimed for by serious coffee ­houses?

“It depends on the coffee. ­Espresso or espresso-based ­coffees? No. Even with commercial quality equipment, a home barista will never get through enough volume to allow them to fine-tune their extractions the way a specialty cafe can. Good baristas in a cafe environment should be constantly monitoring and refining their extractions.”

Stewart says that a decent cafe will each day have 10kg or more beans “to get to know a coffee” and understand its potential.

“If someone tells you they can tap into and apply the same insight to 500g or 10 shots, tell him he’s dreaming.”

Filter coffee, he says, “is a ­different game”. It is possible to replicate the results you get in a cafe, he says, but a barista will ­definitely have brewed that coffee more than any individual and, he says, have more knowledge of its ­potential.

Underpinning the package any barista should bring to the table, says Stewart, is an understanding of the growing, processing and roasting processes.

“Just like any profession, the greater your knowledge of the different aspects of production of the product you’re selling, the better, and this is particularly true in ­coffee. Understanding details of the journey your coffee has taken provides you with expectations and explanations of why coffees taste a certain way.”

As a barista, he says, this means you’re better placed to know and extract the best from a particular coffee. “Beyond that, you’re also able to sell your customers coffees they will actually like by marrying their preferences to suitable coffees.”

There are obvious parallels with a sommelier. “Both have the task of ­understanding a customer’s preferences,” he says “and their ability to do this well creates intangible value in the transaction … [However] the sommelier has very little influence on how a particular wine will taste.”

A barista, says Stewart, then has the task of producing the flavours or profile he believes the coffee is capable of and that he has promised the customer.

“He’s more like a concierge or an old-school barman. He or she knows what you like and how to achieve it.”

Like chefs, not all baristas have the same skills and interpretative nous. Your favourite cafe can produce coffee that doesn’t work for you; an explanation, if it were needed, for why so many of us get hung up about needing to see our “favourite barista”.

An obvious part of the equation is hardware: sophisticated, highly adjustable grinders and espresso machines with individually tunable pressure and temperature “group heads”. In addition, water filtration has more often than not these days gone to add-on systems such as reverse osmosis and remineralisation.

There’s a lot of stuff under the bonnet that the coffee drinker never sees.

“One thing all good cafes identify as a necessity is consistency,” says Stewart, who reckons quantum gains have been made with equipment, particularly in the area of water temperature.

It’s a heady experience, talking to someone like Stewart. And Australia has plenty of similarly professional coffee folk.

For me, as a one-time “barista”, it highlights that old maxim: “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

And I just realised how little that bit of knowledge really was.

Source:  The Australian - 29th July 2014