Brisbane's Hot Shot Barista

Just doing some shameless, self promotion. This is a video I made for JOUR1112. It's on the Australian Latte Art Champion, Scott Luengen. 

I realise it's a terrible piece of journalistic work BUT it explains what the competition entails and also contains some nice latte art. While Scott was not in the right place to do his award winning patterns (I may have bothered him at work!) you can check out his routine from the Australian Latte Art Championships.

The Best Coffee?

I was walking towards a café in The Valley when I say one with mass branding showing that they’ve been voted the best coffee in Brisbane; naturally I was intrigued. I walked in and saw banners across the wall of the store showing consecutive years of awards from an institution I’d never even heard of (and that’s saying a lot since I’m a regular at far too many coffee shops and state and nation competitions). So I tried a coffee. While it wasn’t bad, it certainly wasn’t the best coffee I’d tasted in Brisbane.

This situation got me thinking about competitions and awards for coffee. There are so many things that cafés get judged on that it’s just difficult which ones to take seriously. For example, I remember last year an online poll for the best Brisbane coffee. All you had to do was put your vote into the webpage (no grading system) and the results were constantly shown for the best voted coffee shop. At the start, when the only people who knew about the page were coffee shops owners and some of the big coffee bloggers (I had my in with one of the coffee champions and heard about it), the results actually indicated pretty well how I would have ranked the cafés of Brisbane. Then some of the coffee shops started promoting it to their customers to vote, even to the point they were handing out flyers for the website. All this really meant was that the masses would win the award and not the best coffee. The end result was that the big “chain” cafés got more votes leaving the independent and actually better coffee shops in the background.

 

This is the same with the awards that Michele’s patisserie for best coffee shop of the year, and McCafe the best coffee chain for customer satisfaction. These awards come down to the specific criteria of these institutions, however this just gives customers a false sense of what constitutes a good coffee. It just perpetuates the idea that substandard coffee is good, not opening customers up to what good coffee actually is.

Of course I understand that taste is a subjective thing, and we all value different aspects of coffee shops in different ways. For me I value the taste above all – if it’s good I’ll come back, if not there’s no real point. It can be a whole in the wall coffee shop for all I care, as long as the coffee is good! However, we often group coffee and the coffee shops in the same thing, judging the food, service, décor and other criteria into what makes the best “coffee”.  

I find the amount of awards that now roam the market as somewhat ridiculous; they just devalue the proper awards!

How Do You Drink Your Coffee?

We all order our favourite coffees, but do we actually know what they are comprised of?

Of course these are just 12 variants of coffee – we can progress all the way into wet and dry cappuccinos, ristretto, piccolo latte, half-caf and on and on; the list really is impressive!  

I’m always asked by my non-coffee friends what they should drink if they are just getting into coffee. While the drawing above does not entirely show it, the best one to drink would be a flat white (if you’re ordering in an Australian coffee shop). The reason being that milk to coffee ratio is the higher, as one shot of espresso in the cup is topped off with milk and very little foam, making it a milkier coffee. As such the coffee taste (with the usual brunt and bitter taste that is so common in poorly mad coffees today) is less prominent.

Traditionally I was always a long black drinker (i.e. an Americano), but coffee shops today seem to butcher the flavour. Even the really good and high end cafes with the best machines, baristas and beans can often produce coffees with undesirable flavours. While all coffees will experience these tasting notes, at least the sweetness (from properly textured milk that hasn’t been burnt!) can cover them, whereas a long black just seems to highlight them.

Flavour Profile Wheel

Funnily enough though, some coffee shops have taken to advertising what flavour profiles you’ll experience in your coffee. Honestly I think it’s a great idea; you’re educating the customer about what they’re going to taste and what’s good and bad. I just can’t stand it when someone mindlessly words off flavour profiles without knowing what they’re talking about, nor do I appreciate it when someone rhymes of statements such as “the back of pallet acidity will mellow out and the front pallet sweetness will conjure up flavours of chocolate covered strawberries with rough saltiness”… yes, believe it or not, a shop owner has said something very similar to me!

Amiss are the days when you could just drink a coffee and describe it as tasting like coffee. But is it really that bad that we are becoming more discerning with our taste? On the whole, I think not.

Overall it comes down to the individual. Most of use can’t taste the difference between a really good coffee and simply an average one, let alone the individual taste profiles… however, it’s always good to informed when it comes to making your choices. Why keep drinking that burnt coffee when there are so many cafes trying to produce the best coffee for their customers at the same price?