Quality
QUALITY IN BARISTA CARE
Why is it so important to care about making coffee, it’s just a drink, right?
Think back to the complex process of how coffee is grown, processed, shipped and roasted. There is so much hard work that goes into the beans that arrived packaged and ready to be placed in your hopper. Coffee is a masterpiece that has involved numerous people and hundreds of hours of work. We want to respect the hard work that has gone before us and represent the supply chain well.
Imagine I made you a birthday cake and spent hours perfecting it.
I turn up at your house singing Happy Birthday, and we celebrate together by cutting a slice and enjoying my delicious baking. You say it’s one of the best cakes you’ve ever had! Later that night, instead of putting my cake in a storage container, you leave it on the side.
The following weekend, a group of your friends come over to celebrate & you remember my cake and tell everyone ‘Oooh Esther made a cake for me last week, who wants a slice?!’
Everyone does, so you cut up the cake and give it out.
People start to bite into it politely, but they realise the cake is dry and flavourless and almost inedible. They say ‘You said, Esther made this, right?’.
You confirm that I did make the cake.
That night all of your friends return home and tell their families ‘I had the most disgusting cake earlier, Esther made it. Remind me never to eat one of her cakes, ever again!’
Was my cake the problem? Or was it what you did with the cake? Whose reputation was ruined that night?
In the same way, the farmers spent years growing coffee and learning to process it better, the roaster spent weeks perfecting the profile and has quality control sessions each week to ensure they are roasting to a high standard and consistent level.
If the barista throws the coffee into the machine with no care or consistency, leaves the coffee out to stale, doesn’t keep their machine clean, or burns the milk or reuses spoilt milk, it is not the barista whose reputation will be damaged.
They will ask ‘which coffee did you say this was?!’, and the barista will say ‘X Roasters, Brazilian Coffee’. The customer will think ‘All coffee from Brazil is disgusting… or X Roasters have bad coffee’… and completely write off all of the hard work gone into those coffee beans.
As baristas, we have a responsibility to show case everyone’s hard work, and make the customers say, wow! Those farmers and X Roasters did an awesome job! I can really appreciate all of the expertise and effort gone into this cup of coffee!