I attended the first round of the Southeast Regional Barista Championship this friday past (2/19) in Atlanta at the King Plow Arts Center and had a blast. It was great to meet all the people I constantly troll and argue with on Barista Exchange, as well as some new faces in the southeastern coffee community. While I wasn't able to attend saturday or sunday (I do have a shop to run), I did watch the finals streaming on the web. Two-time SERBC winner Lem Butler from Counter Culture tore it up, placing first again with a final score of 617.5. For those of you not familiar with barista competition, you have fifteen minutes to make four espressos, four cappuccinos, and four signature drinks. For his signature drink, Lem layered a combination of espresso and honey in flute glasses and topped it with a whipped foam made of egg whites, espresso, ginger, and cucumber. i didn't get to taste this crazy concoction but the judges obviously enjoyed it. At the end of the day I had a few thoughts swirling around my caffeine overloaded brain, which I'll relate here in bullet point form:

1) It's strange to me that there is a tendency towards serving ristrettos at the moment. Competition rules (and most Italian standards) say an espresso should be between 25ml and 35ml in volume, so 50-70ml for a double. Yet more than a couple baristi on the fourth machine (there to make drinks for competition voyeurs) were pulling 30-40ml doubles standard. The spro was good - both Batdorf and Bronson's Rwanda Buremera and the aforementioned Counter Culture's Espresso Toscano - but the ristrettos were just too syrupy sweet and intense. To my palate, they felt a bit too much like port when I wanted wine. I try to pull 60ml doubles here at Waking Life, and I think it strikes a nice balance between sweetness, volume, and body. Plus you can always get a ristretto if you ask for one.

2) I think you can take everything done within the allotted fifteen minutes of competition and apply it to the daily rhythm of a café, but I don't think the reverse applies. Being a great barista during every shift at a café is a far more complex affair, but competition sharpens certain skills that are of immense importance - technique, coffee knowledge, a discerning palate, and professionalism. I'm tempted to compete at some point but I'd like to do it to further my barista skills, not to become a rockstar barista celebrity, and I'm not sure my motives are that pure.

3) If you haven't watched James Hoffman's great vblog on great steak and milk foam, do so. I think he's dead on when he says it's intimidating to constantly talk about coffee in terms of flavor notes, when most consumers think in terms of texture. Now, as I write this, I'm drinking a great Kenya that definitely has hints of peach and clove in it. But when I say a coffee has peach notes, what I mean is that about 10% of the total time I'm nursing the coffee I get a reasonably discernible taste of peach. The rest of the time it's hard to pick out. Perhaps my palate is vague and untrained. But if that's the case, then most people's palates are untrained and taste only vaguely. It would be much more appropriate to talk about this Kenya in terms of juiciness, wetness, medium body, etc. That would allow consumers to focus on the easily discernible bits of the coffee, and if peachy flavor notes revealed themselves, so be it. I think we'd do well to start with texture and wetness or dryness and move on from there, instead of letting flavor notes be our predominant method of explaining coffee.

At any rate, more barista competitions will be streaming in the next month, keep an eye on the twitter feed to the left and watch them. Even if you're a total stranger to the world of coffee, you can marvel at our geekiness in pursuit of that perfect cup.