Original subtitles

This is our first competitor

in the 2013 United States Barista Competition.

Ladies and gentlemen, Charles Babinski, G&B Coffee.

All right.

Um are all of y'all ready? All right. Let's do this.

Customers would ask me, and what you gonna do next?

And I'd go, what do you mean?

I'm maybe like, you know? What do you mean, I'm a barista.

I mean like this is what I do. Welcome to my profession.

Or that's just a joke. I'd opting like...

I give 'em some couple coffee and they said this is really good

and I would just go, yeah, chosen profession, you know?

Like I... I do this.

And I remember because I was allowed to adopt a guinea pig

that day, at the pet store next door.

So I had my guinea pig and I had to sneak it into Friendly's

because obviously you couldn't bring a rodent in

but I had it in one of those like carry it home boxes

and like had to sneak it in as a little kid

while my parents had dinner or whatever.

And I remember whining and complaining

about wanting to drink coffee and my parents were like well this is

weird, like it's gross, you're not gonna like it

and I tried it and it was gross and I didn't like it.

And that was like my first memory as a child of like,

that's disgusting, why would you do that?

My parents would be like that though. They'd be like drinking a beer.

I'd be like well I want to have it and you'd try it

and you'd be like ugh, that was horrible.

But this magical moment happened somewhere in life

where you're like, oh this is great.

If it ever... if it ever rolls.

People are probably just liking it too hard

on Instagram right now.

There's the Death Star. There's some Ghostbusters shit.

Ding... Bunch of likes.

If I sketched a Ghostbuster for one of those judges,

it would be like the silliest thing.

I might sketch a Ghostbuster next year.

Coffee is, um, coffee is what I do,

which is really exciting because for me what that means is, um,

what that means is that ah I do what I do

to the best of my ability to the glory of God and that,

that gives me the opportunity to... to make coffee

with all of my might.

I think that coffee is one of the most wonderful things

on the planet and it's endlessly fascinating

and it's also extremely difficult,

so difficult that chefs like won't even touch it.

You're working with something

that is more chemically complex than almost anything else

that we imbibe as a human being by far and away.

Like wine through its fermentation process,

nothing compared to the roasting process

and the caramelization that takes place there.

But really the greatness of coffee is why I do it.

Coffee, it's an unregulated drug.

Everybody loves it.

Like what's not... What's not to like about it?

I was hooked because I was exhilarated, um,

and then I stayed because it was more important to me

than anything else I had done in my life.

Before we go on,

I need to talk to you about perfection.

Perfection may seem to be a tough thing to attain

and in the coffee world maybe damn near impossible,

but that doesn't mean we can't try.

It started with the first wave of coffee culture,

where coffee pots and instant freeze-dry were everywhere.

With top tasting notes like rubber, smoke, stick,

still we kept cans of the stuff in our cupboards to remind us

that we fought for something.

In the 1960's,

massive Seattle based corporations

stepped into the game,

ushering in a second wave of American coffee culture.

It gave rise to the skinny, two-pump,

write your name on the side of a white paper cup latte.

There were green aprons everywhere.

People couldn't get enough and that brings us here

to the third wave of coffee and the idea that coffee can be more

than a commodity, something artisanal

like wine or sexy scotches.

People started asking questions, like,

where's my coffee coming from and where's it headed next?

At the forefront of this movement are the baristas.

We're leading the charge towards perfection.

You might think you know the type... quirky, off the wall,

brilliantly manicured facial hair,

an unapologetic sense of style,

bodies adorned with tattoos and a shared love of dance.

Make no mistake.

This is what a craftsperson looks like.

These are the boys and girls that take coffee to that next step.

They care about things like you being able to taste

baker's chocolate or fresh citrus in your cup,

making sure that the immaculately filtered water

they use is heated with razor precision,

so as not to scald every square inch of your pretty mouth

as you take that first sip.

And nowhere is this push for perfection more personified

than at a barista competition,

where the best baristas on the planet square off in an attempt

to make the greatest cups of coffee one has ever tasted.

That's right. You heard me, a barista competition.

When I was first found out about coffee competitions,

I was definitely like, what the heck?

That's crazy man.

Um but every genre has its own sub genre of more passionate,

more driven people.

I'd heard about the barista competition.

I didn't understand it at all.

You're in an arena preparing twelve drinks in fifteen minutes

where everybody is hanging on every word that you say.

Within those fifteen minutes, you can say anything you want.

Within those fifteen minutes,

you can uh grind your coffee however you want.

You can serve it in whatever you want.

You can put them down in whatever order that you want.

You can play whatever music you want.

You can wear anything you want

as long as you also wear an apron.

This is insane. It was like best in show but for coffee.

I couldn't even believe that that was like...

that that was real and that I could be a part of it

and then once I was part of it, I was like

how... how deep does this go?

Like how, like how into it can I get?

Man, you don't know what you're getting into

until you step in there.

Before a competition,

I just try to get focused and get centered, so my diet changes

I cut out a lot of like carbs and weird stuff

and I try to just focus on my routine and my competition.

Unfortunately that,

doesn't leave much time for social activities.

Barista competition is a highly choreographed service routine.

So it's fifteen minutes before for prep and for practice

to set up your station, fifteen minutes of competition routine.

Each performance is evaluated by four sensory judges,

two technical judges and one head judge.

In their fifteen minutes of competition time,

a barista must prepare three rounds of drinks

so that's twelve drinks in total serving the four judges.

Round one, espresso.

Espresso is judged on taste, tactile, appearance.

Up next is Cappucino round's.

Your sensory judges are looking at the consistency of the foam,

making sure there's a nice sheen.

They're looking at your art on top,

making sure it's symmetrical.

And then for taste,

we want a harmonious balance between milk and espresso.

That's difficult to make sure that

the espresso is at the forefront of the cappuccino.

Finally is the signature drink round.

And this is where the competitor has to take it to the next level.

They use their imagination and they're taking the espresso

to new heights by combining it with new ingredients

and they're serving it in any method they can dream up

but absolutely everything has to have a purpose.

In this round, competitors are judged on

synergy of their ingredients in the espresso.

They're judged on the explanation of the drink

and the execution of making that drink.

That's pretty much it but before I forget,

you have to worry about all these other rules too.

My brother is too, when he was

like five or six, he learned how to play chess.

And then I was born and he would take me as like

a tiny little baby as soon as I learned how to sit up

and he would put me on the other side of the chessboard

and he would play chess with me and he would make me move

the pieces and at first my family was appalled.

Like oh my God, what is... What is he doing with this little kid?

Um but then they realized that, I was

like before I could speak, I at least learned like how

to move pieces and I learned what to do.

So he would show me what to do and I would mimic it.

So we were a five-year-old and a baby learning how to play chess

on their own and that's when my family realized

we were creepy and smart.

I figure out how you get something done

and I'll get there.

I study everything non-stop.

I kind of reference a myriad of books like culinary books,

psychology books, just like the science of tasting.

There are actual books just on flavour complements,

which are handy.

Public speaking books, which are also super helpful.

I try to do a lot of research in my life.

That's something that never stops,

whether it's competition season or not.

I have huge ideas.

The hard part with competition, for me,

is you come up with these like grandiose ideas

but in the long run you only have fifteen minutes.

Months before competition

we're just like the most intense fucking focus.

Border Collie like focus where you're walking down the street

and it's like you're almost not seeing other things.

So this is me?

Yes.

So this particular cup of coffee,

you can go ahead and try it and taste it.

I'll try it with you.

The first one's characterized by its sweetness.

This one you haven't characterized yet.

Yes.

But if you said mouth feel I would accept.

If you said acidity, I would accept because...

It's acidity.

Okay.

Everything else was like above average but this one is like...

Outstanding.

Outstanding, yeah exactly.

Let's do it. Is this it?

This is it.

- That's it? - Yeah.

- A little more. - Nice.

That's how we pull our shots here.

It's espresso.

Drink this one coffee until you want to puke, you know?

But have this amazing exercise of having learned a coffee

really well so that you really know just by watching it fall

if that one's going to be good or not.

I tried to not be a coffee person all the time

but nobody lets me.

- Is a Burr grinder really worth it? - Yes.

But what if you buy good beans and use a shitty grinder?

What's better? Shitty grinder with good beans

or good beans ground way long ago?

It's cool. I can like tell the difference between like Indonesian coffee

and Ethiopian coffee now 'cause I like both a lot.

French press? Good? Bad?

So this dude who was just questioning me

when we were all hanging out,

just rapid fire with the questions,

that's what happens.

Everybody has their own way like with the espresso machine.

They're always like...

Like lick your fingers before you turn the knob?

What's up with French presses tasting like shit, you know?

What's better?

Trader Joe's coffee or McDonald's coffee, you know?

As if there's like a definitive answer to all of it

and... and that's what they want.

This competition with coffee... What?

Yes. Yes.

That's crazy.

And is it kind of like sommelier culture?

It's like you just will like sip it and spit it out?

No. It's a service competition.

Competitions where they're like flipping the shit around?

Not at all.

I was hiring baristas for Intelligentsia,

which is a really competitive company.

There was all this shit that you had to make all the time

like on the clock, you know, and you had seconds

to make this thing and it had to be perfect.

We as a company are super into it.

We've been into it for a long time so we have full support.

And then competition season happened and then the

competition's on the computer in the office and everyone's

watching it and I'm like what, what the hell is this?

We have a training lab at our headquarters in Los Angeles

with like a fake set-up so like a machine and a judges' table

and that kind of thing.

I didn't know any of that stuff was out there

until I was working in it.

I remember, so first of all they call your name.

Eden-Marie Abramowicz,

Intelligentsia Coffee,

your 2013 Southwest Barista Regional Champion!

And I know I was hugging people and they handed me a microphone.

Um, and I said a bunch of things.

I have no idea what I said or who I thanked.

I think I thanked my family and coffee people, um,

and then they start shoving things at you like,

oh you got this and hold this and take a picture

and it gets really crazy.

Everyone's super sweet. I don't really remember it.

Like your adrenaline is so high that I kind of blacked out.

Yeah, I'm watching my

performance from regionals.

I'm like barely doing anything right now but you can just see

like if this was Super Mario

the points would just be going crazy.

They'd be like brrrrrrr. So look at this.

I had so many points, that's why.

I had so many points.

Ladies and gentlemen, your champion

from Intelligentsia Coffee,

Charlie Habegger.

You can't see

'cause it's pixilated but I'm crying so hard,

just shaking, weeping.

I'm just talking shit to all of them.

It doesn't matter who you work for.

When you're on the clock and you're presenting,

you're competing against yourself and... and that's it.

You have your own challenges to deal with.

It doesn't matter what anyone else has said because you,

you know, believe in what you're doing so much and it requires

so much focus that you're only competing against yourself.

These chickens don't even like being fed.

- I fed them already, I told you. - Yep.

We do have a baby on the way.

We're at twenty-one weeks, um, this week.

- Twenty-three. - Twenty-three weeks this week.

It used to be months so I don't know why

they changed that for me.

- Did that... was that for me only? - That was just for you.

There's the legs.

Got some legs there.

We have a whole lot of three-dimensional ultrasounds

that we can show you.

Lots of pictures.

We got lots of pictures of him already.

You got a penis right there. Boom.

I... I had a very strange relationship with my dad

and he passed away a few years ago and so I do have one tattoo,

that one that's on my palm.

The skull and cross bones and date. That's the date that he passed away

and I was pretty heartbroken about the regrets.

Yeah and, you know, I never got to make my dad coffee, sadly.

I think I always really wanted to be a parent.

I... of all the things that I didn't know I wanted to do,

um, being a good dad was one of 'em.

I did know I wanted to do that.

I'm not trying to let anybody down.

I pretty much run with a study follow up disappointment fear all the time.

Yep. A drink is being born.

This is in the Elida.

The Elida? So like a naturally processed...

Naturally processed, super fruity, super sweet.

I'm not happy with it.

That's a sad one.

The one that I really, really can't wait

for you to tell me about is the Chive French toast actually.

I'm looking in the compendium to see how many of these

you wrote in here and I'm not seeing actually any.

I don't actually think I wrote...

Oh interesting. Okay.

Sorry. I'm running out of, running out of steam.

Yeah baby. Okay.

Here we go. Cold cap.

Take the P train.

Anybody want a sip of this?

- You want to taste it? - I feel like it's success.

It's funny 'cause when people ask what does your husband do

and I say, he's a barista,

I always want to explain it more

'cause I always want to say but it's more than that.

He does this and there's all this to it.

When I want to marry this guy that is a barista,

it doesn't sound like a grown-up job.

Sometimes I joke around and tell people like

if you would have told me eight years ago

that I was going to be a competitive barista,

I would have laughed in your face.

But, um, I think if you would have told my wife,

you know, fifteen years ago, hey, you're gonna grow up

and fall in love with a dude who makes coffee

and it's gonna be really intense, um,

I can't imagine that she would, she would believe you,

ah let alone hope for that.

So basically once everything's said and done,

once I sort of get an idea for what I want to do

for competition or what I'm thinking about doing

or something along those lines,

I'll sort of narrow down ah the coffees that I want to use

and then just cup 'em all side by side.

Coming in with ah with a more simple coffee, um,

with fewer sort of more stand out tasting notes,

that to me ah is one of the things that makes the coffee

very easily communicateable and in a... in a competition

based so heavily on communication,

ah it seems like you might be kind of shooting yourself in the foot

to go on with a coffee that's... that's overly complex.

So when people are totally okay with mediocrity, um,

I'm not... I'm not particularly offended by that.

Um, I used to be. It used to really bother me.

It's like well don't you want the best? Um and then I realized

that um some people really are just okay

with something simple and not great

and, um, it's just a different mindset.

My parents were like it's a coffee shop.

Like you're... you're spending how many hundred dollars a month

on gasoline just to get to work?

Like you're spending three hours in the car

every single day to go make a coffee?

And it never really computed.

It was never... it was always like well why,

why are you driving so far?

Why are so spending so much time and so much energy to go make coffee?

And then I think, um, I think when I,

when I went to competition last year

and... and they... they saw that,

I think that's when it became like oh.

Oh I think I get it now.

Or I think I get it at least to a degree larger

than I did before, that it's not... it's not

green aprons and... and pushing buttons.

It's a... it's a craft.

It's um, it's a... it's an apprenticeship.

You know, it doesn't... it doesn't matter what shop you train at,

whether it's big or whether it's small

or whether it's your first time or you've been there a lot.

When you're down there you're all alone

and what you're capable of, even if you're the best,

there's somebody better than you.

Gosh, toughest competition in Boston?

Um... well like I said before,

Charles Babinski, uh, was my educator

when I was at Intelli ah Venice and, uh, he's a beast.

On Charles Babinski?

He's kind of golden, man. He's kind of golden.

Yeah, Charles is awesome, you know.

He's one of the guys who when you talk about the people

who feel like they sort of get compelled or called every year

to come back and keep competing, like that's Charles.

He's a soldier.

He's the coolest presenter ever. He's just so likeable.

He's a charmer, man, you know?

He's... I think anybody he talks to is, uh, just captivated.

I don't understand how anyone could not fall in love with him.

Few have challenged me the way he has in order to get better.

He came up to me and before he's, I think he was munching

on something and I was like, oh hey, and he saw I was nervous

and he came up to me and just both hands right up here,

slightly taller than me so he's kind of looking down on me

and I felt really small in his arms.

He has a very cool, confident way

of doing exactly what he wants to do.

Really great things are... are evident

to anybody who's paying attention.

There's a reason why Charles' companies get written about by,

you know, all the local pubs here in LA.

There's a reason why like we pretty much consider

anything those guys do news.

Hi. My name's Charles Babinski, champion barista.

I make coffee for a living.

I'm here to tell you about the Krups EA9000 fully automatic

espresso machine.

Inspired by professionals,

it's kind of like having a barista in your home.

There's this technique, which is called sumi-e

which was popular in Japanese warfare and then also in art

and then possibly also in like sushi cheffing as well

where basically it's like the... the craftsperson

or the warrior spends time meditating next to their tools

or their weapons to sort of clear their mind so that

the moment they pick it up they're free of inhibitions

and that what comes out between them

and their tool is a sort of like unhindered,

unconscious expression.

Like when I'm roasting coffee I will do that.

Um one of the... One of the roasters in Chicago

that I most look up to was, he would be like never roast angry,

or you'll be able to taste it, you know?

And I was like shut the fuck up, you know?

But I think about that all the time.

I'm like ah I'm in a bad mood.

I gotta chill out or the roast is gonna be off, you know?

So there is a kind of like, there is, you know, there's...

you feel like there's a life in your work,

what you're doing and that you have to be...

you have to approach it gently, you know,

in order for it to be like pure.

Eight hours a day ah every hour on the hour,

Truman and I are running back to back sets at each other

trying to win.

That's pretty much it.

Truman and I just um um um back and forth, back and forth,

back and forth and ah truthfully it just really honed us

into a super sharp edge.

Generally our espresso machine sits right here.

Ah as of right now,

this is playing the role of the 2012 rules and regulations

prep table and we will normally for the last month or so

we've scaled down our six-seat reservations down to

four-seat reservations and we have sort of jimmy-rigged

our espresso machine over here on top of our

low boy refrigerator so that we can have an exact mockup

of our competition space so that we can block and compete

and practice as if we were with the real judges.

And so I would do this thing

where I would take a big whiteboard

and I would draw characters

and I'd do four of them for the sensory judges so that

I could plant the whiteboard behind my practice table

and I could roll up and I could, you know,

start my music and pick up my carafe of water

and start pouring waters for the judges there

and putting them in front of these like cartoon people

on the whiteboard and then

take the whiteboard away, put real people,

put your friends back there and then you just do it like

over and over again.

At least I would so that every single time I did this service

it came out differently.

Like my word choice was different,

the order that I went in was different because for me,

for service to feel authentic, it needs to have

some element of spontaneity.

And what we've been doing recently is, um,

is pulling in customers and ah using sort of a

modified score sheet for the sensory judges.

We allow them to play the role of a sensory judge

and so they sit in one of these four seats,

hang out for about an hour and both myself and Ryan will... will

spiel at them for fifteen minutes,

make them all... all of our drinks and we both run through

our exact competition sets, step for step, word for word

in front of real, uh, real customers playing the,

playing the part of... of judge.

We find ourselves

ving a lot of speeches ah out leaving ego at the door

and really focusing on the competitors

and documenting their experience

and giving everyone kind of the best,

most fair shake at becoming a barista champion.

Here's our first cappuccino.

It's gonna get sat down in front.

We're gonna look at it, visual assessment.

We're gonna grab a spoon.

I want you to go for it.

Cool?

I would go sideways with the spoon.

If you are confused...

Look at the head judge?

Look at the head judge.

Anybody know the thickness of this pencil?

One centimeter?

About a centimeter, yeah,

so you only need to have about this much foam.

So many times we get caught up in oh

I need to have this much foam.

A really great score is going to involve crema that,

like we said, sort of is tight,

tiny micro bubbles that expand and contract evenly,

no tapering on the edges, some structure but not,

not again that floating island sort of thing.

How was your CNB?

How's your stretch?

Yeah. When you're writing notes,

be an investigative reporter.

Write the facts.

Turn, sip, sip.

Both getting everybody

onto the same page and understanding what exactly

we're looking for and having those,

those rules and regulations memorized is... is vital.

Yeah.

You are in a position

where you need to be close to flawless.

Yeah. You gotta be perfect.

You gotta be perfect.

Good is not good enough.

In the first case, um, which is the technical abilities, um,

that's measuring gram waste, if your station is set up properly,

if your milk pitchers are wrong.

They're timing all of your espresso shots.

If there's a drop of water

on the grill you lose a point for that.

All four of my sensory judges once took off

a point each because I touched my face.

They're watching all of the stuff.

A lot of these competitions

come down to winning by just a couple of points, you know,

which come down to making like little mistakes.

Like oops, I tamped unevenly this time.

That's a point, you know?

There's an available 870 points and you don't get close to that.

The spectator,

the common spectator doesn't notice but the barista,

the technical judges, they're having like this congress

of like noticing.

Like everybody... everybody is there to notice.

When that timer hits

fifteen minutes and they're not done yet,

all of the judges are also tense and we're like finish, finish

and we don't ever want anyone to disqualify.

We want everybody to do amazingly well.

We want to have a really difficult time picking the best

because everybody was so good.

I watched somebody dump their entire set

of signature beverages onto the ground and all of their glasses

shattered and they didn't have any backups.

That did happen.

Holy cow!

You have to be really, really good at what you're doing.

It's kinda... it's kinda

breaking yourself down to what you are at your core.

Like taking something you think you're good at

and then being told you're not good enough

and being able to hear that and say okay,

what can I do to make it better?

'Cause otherwise the competition will break you.

It's two weeks till Boston

and I... I just won and now all of a sudden I have to go and do

this routine and I don't know if I should change my routine.

I don't know if should keep the same exact routine

'cause I did well.

One mistake is absolutely the difference

between winning and losing last minute.

I'm a girl. I stress about what I'm gonna wear.

That's silly but like you need an outfit for your routine.

Everyone is... their eyes are on you.

I don't know. I...

these competitions are a lot of sort of

beating your head against a wall trying to come up with

what is the thing you want to say.

There can be a lot of value to be reaped from fifteen minutes

of silence that you have to fill with your ideas

and I don't think that can be underestimated.

You practice and you practice and you practice

until you're doing the same thing every time

but you're never doing it the same way more than once

and that's when I feel like I really know it.

Um hello judges.

Uh this may sound a little bit crazy

but I've had this experience a number of times in my life

where I pick up some thing that is organic.

This could be like a leaf, it could be a bug.

I've had it happen with the palm of my own hand where

you look at this thing and it's really simple

and you understand it very well and then you decide to look

a little bit and a little bit closer and you realize...

Anything that is biological...

Anything that is biological...

Or anything biological is really just a series of complex systems

that work together to create something that's more than

the sum of its parts.

I have this experience with coffee all the time.

I have that exact same experience

with coffee all the time.

And I have this experience with coffee all the time.

Coffee is supposed to be the simplest of things,

which is why it is among the most complicated.

That's what I'm trying to say.

Whenever you're choosing music for a competition,

these things are incredibly important so we're gonna try

to create ten experiences over the course of fifteen minutes

with like three songs, um, and that's incredibly difficult.

Um you could potentially lose points, um, for professionalism

if say you were doing like Rick Ross only.

Like if you did some non-parental guidance Rick Ross

on your set list you might get docked for professionalism

because he is choicey with the words,

if you know what I'm saying. Ross.

Sorry. I don't know if that's appropriate at all.

Ruff. Ross. No? Okay.

Make some noise, ladies and gentlemen.

Five hundred dollars on the line.

Make some noise.

Belgium!

One! Two! Three!

I think everybody sees the second thing as being

a little bit ah awkward but, ah whatever.

Many people like to say that it doesn't matter but it matters.

You want to be the best, um, obviously

and we want our company to be the best

and that's just who we are.

It's in our DNA. It's how we think.

Gosh. To finish second three years in a row, you know?

And moments in which where it's only been by points, you know?

It's like I've... I... I have felt for him, you know?

But I mean hey, at least you didn't come in third, right?

There happened to be a jar of tarragon and plum jam

in the refrigerator that was like really, really old,

like partially crystallized and so I just took a spoon

and put it in the bottom of a Gibraltar glass,

pulled the shot on top

and whisked it together and then I tried it

and it was exactly...

well it wasn't exactly what I wanted 'cause what I wanted

was something totally different but it was delicious.

So then I decided that I would sort of like I would

customize a jam that would complement the coffee.

That's how I came up with blackberry.

So far I've tried tarragon, basil, rosemary, sassafras,

all for bitterness, right?

'Cause bitterness is good. That's why things are complex.

I've never made jam before in my life so what I'm,

what I'm going to do is I'm going to make something

from scratch for the first time that's gonna taste exactly

the way that I have it tasting in my head.

Its just gonna be fine, right?

The signature drink is sort of like the thesis, right?

It's like okay now to tie it all together,

like all that stuff, you know?

The jam is the basis because

it adds just like straightforward decadence.

So it's technically a jelly but like judges don't necessarily

want to hear you say jelly on stage.

Because I was... I would do a run-through or something

and... and whenever I would call it jelly,

all of my friends on the like mock sensory panel

would just start giggling.

Fuck. Um I went through like this much tarragon,

which is a lot,

just like trying to make like a little bit of jam.

There was nothing left over in the end.

The bottom line is that what you're serving

should not work with any other coffee.

What you're serving ought to taste great

because it was done to this one particular coffee.

And most of the time with good signature drinks,

that's the case. Unless it's just like Nutella,

you know, peanut butter and raspberry or something.

Then it's like, fuck, you know?

Serve me anything.

You... you run through an incredible amount of bad ideas

when you do these.

Oh gosh. All the... all the time.

I've done bacon fat mochas and stupid stuff like that

where you're like this is gross.

This is gross.

I have bacon fat in my mustache right now.

I barely taste chocolate. You're out of your mind.

I've had those days.

I've made those drinks and ah you have to.

You have to.

All I remember was that I called it...

by the end I was referring to it somewhat snidely as

symphony in brown 'cause that's what it was.

It was just an array of brown things that tasted brown.

You have to be able to come up with an idea,

try to execute it the best way possible,

realize that it's a disaster and be like forget that idea.

I was gonna make this massive infusion and I was

gonna pour it into the bowl and it was gonna waft up

like a big old-fashioned cold remedy or something

and the judges were gonna sit down and be like, pfff ah,

and of course their minds were gonna be blown and then I was

gonna put this little drink right in the middle

and have them pull it out and it was gonna be

highly culinary and very high reaching

and of course none of it worked.

All of the mixtures I tried just smelled like sweat.

And that's what we do all the time.

Effectively oh gosh probably,

probably four months or so ago I had this idea to distill coffee.

It's not for everyone and we're... we're so

one hundred percent okay with that, you know?

Oops. This got put in the wrong spot.

Gosh darn it.

Got my tube ah backward.

People are like, oh are you excited?

And while I am incredibly excited, um, it's like man,

today I spent three hours researching the best kind

of ah insulation tubes for my condenser

so that it didn't condense onto the table because, you know,

if it condenses on the table you lose points.

So it's so funny that it's no longer...

there's...

the coffee part is on lock so now you just have to make sure

everything else gets on lock.

Gosh. It's so awesome.

I just want to stick my nose in it and see what was going on,

you know?

So now once this starts to come up to a boil,

all of the things that are most volatile,

all of the things that give us flavour and aroma will,

will evaporate first and then effectively

what's happening here is all of those volatile compounds

are being now turned into steam.

All of that steam that's comprised of all of the most

volatile characteristics as you can see it just started

will then be reconverted back into its liquid state.

So cool.

Different things evaporate at different times

so the first drops taste totally different than the last drops

and it really at this, like with this whole process

it's a matter of knowing when to stop it 'cause eventually

you'll take all of the things that you like

and leave all the things that you don't like

and if you let it go too far then you get too much.

This is the product from the distillers.

It's distilled coffee, perfectly clear, um,

crazy aromatic, tastes totally different than it smells.

Truly just everything that... that evaporates off of coffee first.

Ah really fun.

Are you sure you don't want any of this ice cream?

Even if I make it with like

a negative three hundred degree liquid?

That drink has been around way before me and in fact

liquid nitrogen to make the ice cream part of it,

part is way before me too.

Um the only difference is that in fifteen minutes

to make ice cream and serve twelve drinks is super hard

and so with my hands I had to figure out if I could even do it

and then start to put the words and the coffee parts

together later and fantastically again because of Truman

and the hard work that we put in there together,

I learned how to do that.

Ah, thanks Mino.

- Is this messing up your work at all? - No.

Are you able to continue Facebooking

while I'm making ice cream?

I don't Facebook.

I'm gonna need some spoons.

- You guys want some ice cream? - Yes please.

- Sam, you want some ice cream? - Yeah.

All right.

- You want some ice creams, buddy? - Give it to me off the whisk.

Didn't see that coming, did ya?

Not at all. It's good though.

You, you can't have any. No sugar.

You liked it a lot. You're my favourite.

She liked it the most out of everybody, I can tell.

Yeah. Thank you.

It's so visually stimulating with the clouds of smoke

and the roaring boil at room temperature.

Gotta do it.

I mean my mom was totally worried about it.

She was just like you're gonna have a baby and you guys don't earn very much money.

Dee, I have a decaffeinated latte for you up on the bar.

That's what you're doing all the time

at the highest possible standard that you can hold yourself

and then yeah you walk away with the same paycheque

as if you were slinging a McDouble at somebody's face

through... through a drive-thru.

Always talking about that magical day when baristas

will make six figures and be thought of in the same breath

as sommelier and things like that and working for years

and not feeling any closer to that day.

He's just worth more than what he's getting paid

and it's getting very obvious I think.

Like look around, you know what I mean?

Like we haven't done anything yet, you know?

Like every day is a struggle.

If you think with the American dream of presenting,

you walk into a bank after building a business plan

and it's so good that they approve your business plan

and give you a loan.

No, that's not the way it happens at all.

That American dream is mmm...

that's not exactly what's... what's going on out there.

In some ways these competitions are almost like the, um,

you know, like a... like a... like a scouting report or like the

minor leagues for like for major league baseball.

You know, you come here and you do really well and you can get

all kinds of investment opportunities from it,

all kinds of like open your own shop opportunities from it and stuff.

There's quite a few people who I know who, you know,

were able to kind of make a name for themselves professionally

through barista competitions first and then have like had all

these other career opportunities kind of come from that.

Yeah, winning changes. Winning changes your life as a barista.

Your life changes because you go down in history

and no one is allowed to forget that you did this thing

so you will always have that mark, which is... which is

really big because people will always fill the pedestal

with somebody.

The idea of a national champion, like there always has to be

somebody there and if that's you then like of course

that changes everything.

Remember the scene from "Gangs of New York"

where he's like teaching him how to shave and he cuts his face

and he's like no, son, you never wipe the blood off

because it was the pre-battle shave.

Sometimes you just need coffee,

no matter where it's from, a little caffeine.

Fucking great.

Judges, I'd like to present my new signature drink.

Well I... I miss you like terrible and, uh, you know, I'm just,

you know, I'm a little nervous.

There's a lot of... a lot of friends I'm gonna see and

compete against and I don't know.

I just wish you were here with me.

Now that it's the morning of competition, um, oh massive.

Massive nerves. Yeah.

When I saw Truman compete at regionals on the computer,

I remember thinking like when it got to his signature drink

and he busts out this apparatus and he starts explaining it

and I'm like what the fuck is going on?

Because it was so different from the way that we all

thought about competition.

Truman's, Truman's setup is fucking crazy.

It's like the mad scientist coming in and at regionals

I didn't get to quite catch his routine.

I just caught like a glimpse of these crazy, you know, devices.

I didn't understand what was happening and then he was

explaining to me what he was doing to coffee

and he gave me this clear liquid.

I was like what the fuck? What am I about to drink?

Um and it was beautiful and... and super great.

But that's like, I was like what, what is up with this guy?

You know? Like what's up with Portola?

And people are like oh yeah, that's Portola's thing,

you know?

They're like, they're the crazy scientists.

And I'm like, no shit.

Same with Ryan. What did Ryan have at regionals?

- He had like the crazy... - Affogato?

Yeah. He was making ice cream on stage.

How ter... like those are the things which

those two have the balls to do that blows my mind.

Like making ice cream on stage can go epically wrong.

I mean I am totally worried about the ice cream part of it.

How... how... how is that part going to go over on Monday?

Ahhh! I'm sorry, I was doing a quick Mountain Dew commercial.

There's a lot of pressure.

I went up to Chicago for like a couple days ago

just for like a day which was kind of a whirlwind

and, um, worked with Charlie and we kind of went through

my routine and just decided to keep it mostly the same

and we amped up a little bit so I'm hoping

that those changes bring it to the next level, um,

but we'll see.

Everything that we do has to be perfect, um,

and we work so hard on these routines and we work so hard on

how our coffee's gonna taste that day and we're exhausted

because we've been traveling and training constantly, um,

and then you have to look good.

Everything needs to be in place, from with you're wearing to how,

how you're gonna present yourself in front of these

judges and in front of the industry.

In the... in the end you want like, you know,

a hundred and five percent version of yourself.

This one, this one is the most comfortable.

Ah Babinski is great.

Um, you know, all the Intelligentsia baristas

are coming to win.

It's a... it's a great crowd of people that seriously know

what they're doing in coffee and so it's anybody's ballgame.

There's no amount of...

there is no amount of reading and practicing that's gonna,

that's gonna change the amount of competition

that I'm gonna be facing today.

So you love coffee so much

and you spend all this time with it

and you, uh, you... you give it these years

that you could be spending doing other things,

uh making more money or, you know,

spending more time on your education or all of these

other things whose careers exist ah only to realize

that it's difficult to make a living at it.

So what do you do?

You become the world's best barista.

♪ Or anywhere

♪ Something that you needed?

♪ That you needed.

Good afternoon.

We need the element of surprise.

In order to open our customers' eyes

to everything that coffee can be.

We need to subvert their expectations of what coffee is.

So instead of a spice aroma, I'm gonna give you a citrus aroma.

Instead of apple, an orange acidity.

Instead of fruit, caramel flavours

and instead of a sweet finish, a spicy finish.

For that spicy aftertaste, I'm just gonna mist each glass

with a ginger syrup so you taste that ginger just at the very end

of the drink.

For that caramel flavour, I'm gonna use a date syrup,

which is made from fruit.

And for that orange acidity, I'm gonna use

a five percent solution of citric acid,

which is the organic acid that gives oranges

their distinctive tartness.

So melon juice is, um, is a more sweeter, more vi...

uh sweeter and milder grapefruit and it's gonna help

bring acidity to this drink but also not overwhelm that acidity

we had in the espresso.

It's gonna help it spread across the palate in a...

This is uh brown sugar simple syrup,

which is perfect for what we want to use it for.

It's light and sweet and it's gonna also resemble

that caramelization process, caramelization of the roast.

Cooled in an ice bath, it's gonna add some body

to this drink but also serve as the main star of the show.

So I've taken two shots of the older harvest

and I mix them with egg white and grade B maple syrup

and we're creating a foam that's gonna be the top layer

of the beverage.

This bottom layer, this is the December harvest

combined with a little bit of reduced grapefruit juice.

The combination of these elements together

create a really balanced drink that continue to tell us the

story of how coffee changes.

I'll try not to burn Scott's hair off.

All right so and hopefully you can smell ah catch a whiff.

I won't blow it at you, that would be weird

but of the burnt sugars.

So that when you drink it I ask that your first sip,

please ah suck that grapefruit garnish down and enjoy

the unique texture that the burnt sugar offers on top.

It's almost like a candy-coated shell.

In coffee obviously we have a small amount of bitterness

to create complexity and interest in the drink

and balance it out.

Because I added the sugar, I have to add a bitters.

You're going to taste the grape-like acidity

now being accentuated by those citrus notes in the bitters.

You're gonna taste that deep, heavy sweetness

now with the body from the dilution

turning into almost a chocolate.

Now this is a very simple drink and I'll tell you that

I don't think a drink needs to be incredibly difficult

or complicated to be incredibly delicious.

Now that far left flavour is a liquefied coffee cheesecake

that I made from mascarpone, an eighteen-hour cold extraction

of the Naranjos, a little bit of ground cacao nibs

and a little bit of raw sugar.

This drink is comprised of six shots of Naranjos,

thirty grams of that caramelized tangerine juice,

twenty-five grams of that red apple reduction

and twenty grams of that liquefied cheesecake.

This drink is gonna be warm and you can go ahead

and take your first drink now.

And how long have you been with Dallis Brothers?

Three years now.

So previous to that?

Working back home in Australia.

Was there anyone back home supporting you...?

And ever if I told you hey, I don't want to win,

that was me lying to you so that I could beat you, okay?

'Cause I'm competitive. There's no doubt about it.

Are you the runner?

All right guys. We're gonna keep moving,

bump over here to station number three,

Mr. Ryan Redden,

representing Portola Coffee Labs out of Costa Mesa, California.

Big round of applause.

Ryan, are you all miked up?

I am, I think. Can you hear me?

- I can hear you. - I can hear you.

Sweet. I'm excited for this one.

All right Ryan.

Take a deep breath as they settle in.

There you are.

All right. Hello. My name's Ryan.

I am very, very excited to prepare some coffee for you

this afternoon.

The coffee that I'll be preparing for you today,

porphyrio arera yamulca is a wet processed coffee

that was sun dried, grown at 1700 meters above sea level

and comes to us from Ecuador by way of "Café Imports",

and at ten bags in total, truly this is a micro lot of coffee.

What I have in front of you are a couple of scent indicators

for the flavours that we are going to be tasting

in this wonderful espresso,

one of which is rose water and rose petal.

The other is orange and orange syrup.

Now those things happened to come out of this coffee

on the cupping table.

Once it arrived to us,

we cupped it several different roast levels

over several different times and this one, 406,

at just under ten minutes was the one that we decided upon

because of this wonderful floral ah bouquet that comes to you

and translates deliciously into the flavours in the cup.

Please smell from both of those vessels so that

you can get ready for the flavours that I expect.

Everybody got a chance to smell from all of these vessels right?

Wonderful.

Now what I'm gonna do is combine these together as you go ahead

and enjoy your espressos.

As I've combined these flavours into the scent indicator

in front of you, we're gonna go ahead and combine the flavours

of this wonderful espresso with milk.

That is... that is going to involve two very complex elements

that come together to produce almost yet another

wonderful flavour element, one of malted grain,

of sweet cereal that comes out

and lets the acidities of that wonderful orange

and the rose petal take a back seat.

Without further ado,

I'm gonna go ahead and start these cappuccinos.

I'll be... whoops.

So now as I explain to you this, this signature beverage,

I know that you've been sitting here looking at this thing boil

and you've been thinking to yourself why.

It's liquid nitrogen.

I intend to make an affogato for you as your signature beverage.

What I'm going to do is I'm going take some of these

lovely things that we used as a scent indicator,

as a flavour indicator in these espressos.

I'm gonna then infuse them with fifty percent cream.

The total of this is eighty grams.

I'm gonna go 50/50 with cream, negative 321 degree

cryogenic liquid to then freeze it into ice cream.

I'm gonna pre-cool these cups just a little bit

for your ice cream.

So now as I prepare your... your ice cream for this,

I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about

how I'll have you ah consume this.

You're gonna go ahead and have a bite of ice cream,

combine them together, swirl around,

have it as a beverage.

What that's gonna do is allow the ice cream

to become a flavour indicator and an ingredient

in your signature beverage.

And that's what's gonna allow that infusion to work its way

into our cream

and that's what's gonna give us this really delicious

flavour profile that we extracted from that espresso

and use it again in our signature beverage.

To get people excited about what I do is my favourite part

so hopefully I've done that for you

with my visually distracting liquid nitrogen.

Thank you.

It has been an honour and my pleasure

and I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Mr. Ryan Redden

from Portola Coffee Labs, Costa Mesa, California.

- Thank you. - What's up?

Going into it,

very excited about my amazing revelation

and my changing coffee.

Coming out of it I was like, holy crap.

Why'd I do that?

After his competition everyone rushed his,

everyone rushed his booth to go get his ice cream.

There was just like...

I almost clotheslined that cat...

like a fifteen person long line at his station

just trying to get some of his ice cream,

which was damn good. It taste like Christmas.

My grandma is like a huge coffee drinker and like she's like

whenever like when I told her I was,

I was gonna compete the first time ah,

she like ran to her bedroom and pulled out pictures ah

of me with coffee in my bottle, um, which is, you know,

now that I look back on it like probably not like

the best parenting decision that somebody could have made

but ah it was almost ah, it was almost a manifest destiny

at that point in time.

Whoa! Come over here.

It's like a science lab, man. Wow!

The mad scientist is waiting to be ready.

I salute you and I wish you well.

Everybody, Truman Severson from Portola Coffee Labs,

Costa Mesa, California.

How are we doing?

I, I started working in coffee at Starbucks about six years ago

and there was a point in time when we had just gotten

new espresso machines and my boss came in one morning

and she pulled herself an espresso,

which effectively meant hitting a button,

and then as she was drinking it out of her paper cup

she exclaimed, oh this is the best thing I've ever had.

I can't believe we ever served our customers anything else,

to which I verbally responded espresso cannot taste good

and that... that sort of caught me off-guard 'cause I was like,

wait, hold on now, Truman,

espresso's been around for a little bit longer than

sugar-free hazelnut syrup has

so maybe there's something to this whole coffee thing.

My work as a barista intrinsically hangs on the work

of an agronomist and a farmer and a harvester and a processor

and a mill worker and an importer and a roaster

all before me.

A few months back I had the idea.

My thought was I wonder if we could distill coffee

and then have a hyper concentrated,

much like when you're distilling a spirit,

which got me thinking,

okay I wonder if I can distill off everything that makes coffee

taste like coffee.

So what that looks like for you is a coffee

with a really articulate orange peel acidity

and then a sweetness that is reminiscent

of stewed strawberries and cascara.

The Truman Severson work ethic, ah a beautiful example of

somebody going, you know, as far as he needed to in order to get

the education he was looking for to be a coffee professional,

to stay in coffee.

I think it's a Picasso quote.

He says uh, good artists borrow, great artists steal.

And the thing is is we're not the only people doing it

and everybody's like oh how did you come up with this

and it's always so frustrating to me because, you know,

there's this... there's an Einstein quote that says ah,

true creativity is knowing how to hide your resources well.

I definitely find that ah a lot of the things that I do

are total theft.

Really we're just, we're just thieves where we're ah

we're just thieves stealing, stealing the best ideas

from other people in the coffee industry,

other people in every other industry

that we can pretend to make relate to ours.

We'll do it.

We'll do it in a heartbeat.

Some people who are

perfectionists will just lose their minds working in coffee

because no two espressos will be the same or... or whatever.

They just can't control everything.

Like all of that amount of effort,

I mean impressive that that's what they were going through

but it just, I was like damn, you know what I mean?

It's impressive but man,

don't you want to go out and see a movie instead?

Or don't you want to go and like, um, you know,

go out to eat or some.

Just it, for me, it... it... it spoke to the... the obsessed

sort of nature to-of it.

If 1.25% of the beverage is made up of dissolved coffee solids,

then the other 98.75% of the beverage is made up of water.

When you're talking about Truman's idiosyncrasies

I think it, his attention to detail in coffee translates

into other parts of his life because when you have a craft

that you're perfecting and you get every detail down

and pick apart every single detail,

you start to do that in other aspects of you life.

You can't relax.

This is that zone that I was talking about.

18 to 22 and 1.5 to 1 or 1.15 to 1.35.

I'm gonna go over and do a refraction of this

and then we'll see exactly where this particular coffee

we just brewed lines up.

To me, success would be

being a good husband,

one day being a good dad, being a good person,

making more positive impacts than negative impacts.

I think if I were to be an incredibly successful

coffee person to the detriment of my family,

I wouldn't... I wouldn't count that as success.

If I owned a coffee shop that, you know,

made millions and... and was the coolest, hippest,

most progressive ah storefront on the face of planet earth

and... and I had a bad relationship with my wife or my kids, um,

I would not count that as successful.

All right guys.

Making our way over to station number one.

It looks like our judges are coming out.

It's my privilege to introduce to you

from Intelligentsia Coffee, out of Chicago, Illinois,

Mr. Charlie Habegger.

Microphone? Oh.

And we're good.

Um, are you guys set?

Okay.

Okay. Hi everyone.

Um so at the risk of sounding uh a little bit juvenile, um,

I want to... I want to talk about some experiences that I've had.

It's happened to me a few times in my life where I pick up some

living thing and this could be like a raspberry or a bug

or a leaf or it's even happened to me with the palm

of my own hand and every time this happens to me,

I find that the closer I look there's always this moment

where I realize that it's actually not just

a single thing, that there's all this complexity

and variety underneath that I never noticed before

because no biological thing is monolithic.

Anything that's biological is really a complex series

of systems that are separate but they work together to make

something that makes sense, right?

So I also work with coffee a lot

and I have this experience a lot with coffee

because coffee to me is a lot like a living thing.

Where the closer I look at a particular coffee,

the more I really see.

I want you guys to imagine that all of the different items

you see in this bowl represent flavours

that you might encounter if you were to cup multiple lots

of coffee from within a very small production region.

There are buyers, roasters, importers, exporters, whomever,

can do this and literally build a coffee lot for lot

using just the items that are of the highest quality.

So the coffee that I'm gonna serve was created

exactly this way and it tastes a lot like

what you see in the glass, blackberry aromatics.

I've used some lemon and some white chocolate

to evoke a kind of citrus curd.

Vanilla bean and then a really clean crisp finish

that reminds me a lot of basil.

So make yourselves comfortable. I'll be right back.

I found myself having a craft for,

like a real craft for the first time

and I didn't realize how much I needed one in my life

until I had one.

And I would have customers come up to me

and say things like we just,

we love watching your hands, you know?

Or something, something really creepy like that and

but then you realize it's like well you're really working

with this machine and it's like you can get to a point

where it really does feel like an extension of you

and it's kind of beautiful.

If you can pull a particular coffee differently

to get it to express well in different drinks,

that to me is a really successful coffee.

Um, these cappuccinos are a lot simpler than the espresso,

ah mostly vanilla custard and also lemon cookie.

And Michelle, I'm just going to clean yours up quickly.

There you are. You're welcome, guys.

Same vessels for your spoons.

I sort of uncovered these bowls in front of each

of the sensory judges and in the bowls was this massive bouquet

of both delicious and repulsive looking ingredients.

So some of them were dried mushrooms.

Some of them were, you know,

fresh like hunks of white chocolate.

I had lime wedges, vanilla beans,

but also some green coffee.

I had rocks.

Other like dried peppers.

I had peanuts still in their shell,

things like that you just look at and it's like

there's nothing appetizing about them, you know?

They just evoke salt or astringency or like funk

or anything like that but spliced with all these good ones

it, attempting to be just a really simple visual metaphor

for the fact that coffee sourcing is difficult.

Okay. This is my favourite part.

Final course, ah so what you have in front of you is I think

a pretty ah intimidating variety of flavours.

Some of them look immediately delicious.

Others, maybe not so much.

So I'm gonna start by taking a vanilla bean.

Thanks Scott.

And I'm gonna add it to some water

that I've had simmering behind me.

Next, what I did was I took a few blackberries

and a little bit of basil and I combined them

and I made a jam because I wanted a little more viscosity

in the espresso than there was before and what I'm gonna do

is add ten grams of the jam to each of your glasses.

That part took probably thirty different tries for me

to get the jam just right.

On top of these, I'm gonna pull shots of the San Augustine and I'll be right back.

So the final ingredient here is going to be...

oh you also have the lime. The lime.

Ah this is a difficult ingredient 'cause

it can overwhelm but I find that in the right amount

it adds exactly the clarity that I want.

So that's gonna be the final ingredient.

So each glass gets a whisk.

There's always gonna be some jam at the bottom of these

so they will get sweeter as you drink them

um, and to each glass I'm going to add ten grams

of the vanilla infusion.

And then each glass gets three drops of lime.

So when you get this, stir it like an espresso

and then just kick it back.

I wanted the signature drink to be simple because

coffee is a complex thing but we should allow it to be simple.

So thanks very much, guys. Time.

Charlie Habegger,

Intelligentsia Coffee, Chicago, Illinois.

Competition is it's... it's a sport.

I mean, your performance is a sport and if you,

you have a good day and you perform well then... then you,

you score well, you know?

And if you have a bad day and you don't perform well

or if you miss a certain box, you know,

or if you miss the clock or something,

then that changes everything.

And I was fortunate enough to,

to be the emcee for the southwest regional

barista competition and I was able and fortunate enough

to see my friend, Eden-Marie, win.

This is our southwest regional champion

and I'm a California boy so this makes me really proud.

Yeah.

All right so the start button is the same start button

it was yesterday, girl.

You're fifteen minutes away.

Choose your, choose your timing and I wish you luck.

I'll see you soon.

All right. Let's do it.

All right.

I wish I could remember more about the first time

I ever tried coffee.

Looking back, I know I was pretty young.

I know it was a very intense experience

and probably not the most pleasurable of experiences,

which is funny because now look what I do every day.

I drink coffee all the time and when I first try a new coffee

I brew it up and I immediately start identifying

all these intricate and intense flavours that I'm tasting.

So when I take that coffee that I just tried

and I go to dial it in as espresso

do I get to choose one or two of those flavours that I tasted

and dial in for that and get rid of all the rest?

No.

I believe a coffee's innate characteristics are always

going to be present no matter how you brew it.

The levels of intensity of those flavours,

that's what's gonna change.

The flavour profiles that you're gonna be getting are ripe peach,

brown sugar and a grapefruit acidity.

While you guys enjoy a sip or two of this coffee,

I'm gonna go ahead and pull some espresso

so we can see what gets turned up and what gets turned down.

Part of my um maniacal thing as a competitor is

I love breaking down their judge façade because I was a judge

and I know what it's like to like sit there and smile

and be ready to served things and you, you are caught unaware

when a competitor asks you a question

or genuinely looks at you and says how are you,

how are you doing today?

Um and you have to respond as a judge.

So they can say little things in return.

Um same thing, I could be up there making a cappuccino

and I'm ranting about varietals of coffee plants

and roast profiles but then as I serve it

you make a little eye contact and you say enjoy.

Have a good one.

Um and those little things are tools to actually enrich

the experience for the judge and make it real

so that you're not just yelling facts at them.

Here you go, Marcus.

So as we all know, espresso is not a homogenous mixture.

It's a suspension. There's different layers.

So we're gonna take advantage of that and we're not gonna stir.

The first sip we're getting that lighter, airier oils

and gasses at the top.

That's where we're gonna see our grapefruit note coming out.

So go ahead and take a sip of just the top of your espresso.

The second sip we're gonna stir thoroughly before we go.

Take your spoons and stir, stir, stir.

It's gonna be a heavier, syrupy body and that's where

we're gonna be noticing our ripe peach notes.

So go ahead and take your second sip.

Our last sip is always my favourite for espresso

'cause that's where it gets really, really sweet.

I'd like you to enjoy that really nice brown sugar finish.

These cappuccinos, we're gonna see some really nice

ah baked peach cobbler notes,

little bit of lemon zest.

But what I wanted to do is I wanted to play with

the three concepts that we did illustrate,

using only the innate characteristics that we've had.

I'm not gonna add anything else

that I didn't see already in the coffee.

So our coffee was peaches, brown sugar, grapefruit.

Our concepts that we've seen?

Articulation of flavours from that brewed coffee,

approachability of flavours from our cappuccinos

and intensity from that espresso, so start with intense.

What I want to do is level the playing field with the flavours,

bring them all on up to the top.

The brown sugar was probably the lowest out of the bunch

when we tasting our espresso.

So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna add a little bit of a nice

turbinado simple syrup that I made,

just five grams to the bottom of our glass to sweeten it up.

Instead of adding any grapefruit juice,

I'm just gonna be using the outside of the grapefruit

to get some of those oils.

Grapefruit juice is a little bitter.

We don't need that astringency in there.

So just a little bit of the citrus.

So please take in the nose and enjoy some of the oils

and the strength and then hold off

and wait for some further instructions for your drink.

So how do I make it approachable

without adding more flavours to it?

Water.

I'm gonna be serving you guys fifteen grams

of pre-weighed out water that I have on these silver pitchers.

Please add the pitchers in its entirety to your drink

and then enjoy several more sips,

all of a sudden seeing approachable flavours,

intense flavours and articulation.

Thank you guys so much. Time.

All right.

Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Eden-Marie

of Intelligentsia Coffee, Los Angeles, California.

You know, you look like you're dancing.

You're having a good mood.

You know, you're... it's... it's a pixie flying around here

dropping little, little fairy dusts of espresso

on the judges' foreheads.

Espresso for you. Espresso for you.

What do you think of this?

- Was it fun for you today? - It was so much fun, yeah.

I've competed in enough top sixes

and I've... I've competed enough in general that

I don't get too carried away with it, you know?

And I've... I've... I've gone out the night before

and got like totally plastered

and competed the next day hungover and I've, um, you know,

tried to get ten hours of sleep and it doesn't really matter.

I ended up that night having ah a really nice sort of

laid back night with ah Percy and another friend in Boston

and just sat around, had a drink, talked, you know,

took a bath.

He gets like super tightly wound leading into these things.

This is, uh, he gets really stressed out

and he does a lot of run-throughs.

He has a totally different, uh, sort of approach

than I do or I did, you know?

I'm... I was like once my routine was set

and I got like a few run-throughs,

I would not do it for a few days before competing and, you know,

he's been like up till the wee hours

like just doing run-throughs and stressing out.

I had nothing ready on the cart.

We were running back and forth.

We ran to the fridge.

We left stuff in the back so we had to run backstage and, um,

and then on the way out we literally uh the cart hit a bump

and the milk fell over and the milk fell on top of all the cups

and towards the end like five minutes left in the dial-in,

the grinder just decided to... I don't know what happened.

It just started grinding very coarse and we went to like

the finest setting and it wasn't doing anything.

So the shots were just running really fast

and we literally had the last three minutes just frantically

trying to figure out what was gonna happen

and we ran out of time.

You know, like once they say like your practice time is done,

you're done.

All right ladies and gentlemen, Charles Babinski, G&B Coffee.

All right.

Um are all of y'all ready?

All right. Let's do this.

Hi. So the definition of espresso is thirty millimeters

of rich concentrated coffee extracted at high pressure.

Now I personally prefer ah

a different definition of espresso,

that espresso is anything lovely

that comes out of that machine over there.

Now with the first definition,

there's very specific expectations about preparation

and specific expectations of flavour.

But when you expand the idea of what espresso is,

you expand the possibilities of what you can do

with great coffee, how you can serve it,

who you can serve it to.

Now this is espresso as I've always known it.

It's big, intense flavours bursting out.

Are the acidity and sweetness balanced?

No, not at all.

But that's what the milk's for

and in milk that blackberry becomes raisin, brown sugar

and today salted caramel.

But here, let me show ya.

I want you to look for raisin, brown sugar and salted caramel.

All right, as always,

the cup on your right is for your spoons

and how are you doing today, Marcus?

Good? Awesome.

I opened up ah a shop in Los Angeles

and the experience has put it into ah, you know,

made it very much ah very clear how much a coffee shop runs

on selling people milk drinks, like lattes, cappuccinos.

Now this isn't a bad thing.

If anything, it's a sign of the fact that

this is what we do well as an industry.

Coffee and milk is, is what we're great at.

But how do you promote balance between acidity and sweetness

in a coffee that's this clean and bright?

Well for starters, we can let it cool down.

That's why we're in no rush to drink these.

As they cool, flavours will reveal themselves.

Secondly, we can space out the flavours in the Descanso

by pulling a longer shot.

A perfect complement to that blackberry,

sugar cane and honey.

Stir it up guys and enjoy.

Our idea of what espresso is changes to suit the drink

so for my signature beverage I want to look at two dramatically

different approaches to what espresso is

and what espresso flavour is

We're gonna take that idea

of spacing out the flavours in the Descanso,

and we're gonna push it to the extreme.

When you go that long with a Descanso,

some interesting things happen.

That blackberry acidity gets a little bit milder

and the honey and the sugar cane kind of mellow.

This is espresso as a canvas and we need ingredients

that suit that canvas.

We have an extraction... extraction of gesho and honey

and whereas we sweetened it with some orange blossom honey

and this drink, it's mellow, tea-like, aromatic.

So we want a cup that suits those qualities.

With these bowls, the wide mouth is great for taking in

the aromatics and the soft ceramic is a complement

to the mellower flavours and then take one sip

just to start getting acquainted to the flavours.

All right. Here.

For the second part of my signature beverage,

the exact opposite.

This is using espresso flavour as an intense bulldozer

and we're really gonna embrace that blackberry acidity

by pulling a shot similar to the one that we used

for the cappuccino.

So I have pomegranate juice.

Now pomegranate's perfect because the acidity

of a pomegranate is very intense so it's gonna help us

emphasize that intensity of a more concentrated shot.

Now I also have some sparkling water...

and I'm serving them in these tall narrow glasses

to give the drink a focused intensity

to how the flavours hit the palate.

Now they're two distinct approaches

and they're two very different approaches

but they're both the same coffee and they're both still espresso

and that's the point.

It's the fact that anybody who has an expansive view

of what great coffee is capable of,

they're probably right.

Thank you so much, guys, and please enjoy.

Time.

Time. Charles Babinski,

G&B Coffee. I'm coming, brother.

Yes.

How's it going?

Hi. I almost want to give you

the mic and just let you

ask me questions or something now, you know?

I'm really trying to stay clear of this.

I'm not gonna make as much of the chattering noise as I have

the whole time because you deserve the most respect

that any of us could possibly offer you for your commitment.

You know, I was just sitting there uh just baffled and, um,

but, you know, he was very composed.

Like it was almost like uh he was in the back

and it reminded me of like the Muppets where, you know,

the cook is throwing stuff in the air and then he'd just...

he would show up and he's all composed and serving everything.

He hit all the lines.

At the USBC in the finals I felt like my finals performance

was my best performance.

It's gonna be my great pleasure to announce

the United States champion for the barista competition

but I gotta get them all up here first and there's at least,

you know, there's only six.

Can I have all the people that competed in the finals today

come on up, starting with Charles Babinski, G&B Coffee.

Stand right there, brother.

Pete Licata, Parisi Coffee. Kansas City, Missouri.

Trevor Corlett, MadCap Coffee, Washington, D.C.

Charlie Habegger, Intelligentsia Coffee,

Chicago, Illinois.

Sam Lewontin, Everyman Espresso, New York, New York

and Nick Purvis of The French Press

in Santa Barbara, California.

I think because I was so sing-songy and over the top

that I lost some of my sharpness with the technical things

that I needed to be on so like my OCD clean, no drips,

wiping the drip tray, locking in your portafilter.

I was a little bit looser than I normally am even in real life

so that's definitely what I, I lost points on there.

Whoops. I make one mistake and, um, the one, the one mistake

wasn't anything that anyone would notice

is the problem with my one mistake except I noticed.

I noticed what I did and it stumped me.

I stopped cold and I said to myself

and a little bit out loud, oh shit.

As soon as I turn off my steam wand, um,

the head of foam that I had built immediately went from

being really, really tiny bubbles to gigantic bubbles

to popping and I looked down at my pitcher

and there was literally no foam in my pitchers, um,

which is... which is detrimental,

ah and it was at that moment that I realized I was done.

The foam popped.

There was zero foam on any of my cups.

So it was... and so the... hey guys.

One of my water pump tubes on my distiller popped off

and started spraying water all over stage, um,

so it was just this like... this fiasco.

It was awful sitting there watching it

and like watching this puddle be built and like you so badly

just want to like go and nudge the pitcher over but you can't.

It's all... I just go through, I... I go through ups and downs.

Um I'll definitely compete again.

In life I think you need to hold on tightly and let go lightly.

When it's appropriate you uh you hold on with everything you can

and whenever it isn't, it isn't.

His name's Huckleberry James Reddin after uh

the fantastic novel, "Huckleberry Finn".

I used to care about hot rods and having fun

and world crazy travel like dirt poor world travel,

like that was my jam.

Now I want to cuddle Huckleberry and watch "Game of Thrones"

on Sunday night.

Like a typical Sunday night is that.

Gentlemen, it's been an honour.

Thank you very much for letting me wag my tongue around

while you guys, you know,

perform at the level you perform at.

Well done.

Well, well done and I'm gonna start right now with bringing

our sixth competitor, number six,

Charlie Habegger of Intelligentsia Coffee.

I knew I was going over time in the finals.

I knew right before I started my final course

that I was gonna go over time.

Um I thought I went a few seconds over time.

I went like twenty-three seconds over time,

which is not a few seconds and cost me...

it cost me a few places in the overall ranking

after the finals.

Um and I knew it was happening so but it wasn't an 'oh shit.'

It was simply, you know, oh it's not a perfect run, you know?

It's not a perfect day.

Nick Purvis, The French Press.

In fourth place, Sam Lewontin of Everyman Espresso.

In third place, Trevor Corlett, MadCap Coffee.

All right ladies and gentlemen.

Ink that that's probably tly how Charles is with it.

I think he just wants to win. Again, I sort of have this...

just 'cause I've been really obsessed with watching, uh,

with watching the Olympics and watching especially

all the snowboarding stuff in the Olympics.

There was this guy named ah Sage Kotsenburg that, um,

for... for a really long time his nickname for forever,

his whole life was second place Sage or silver medal Sage

'cause like he hadn't won ah like a U.S. Juniors

or a U.S. Nationals or anything.

He always came in second place, like year after year after year

and then he won a gold medal this year in Sochi

and I was just watching this last night I think

on Conan O'Brien or something where he was getting interviewed

and talking about like how cool it was to like

kind of get the monkey off his back.

God. Geez. You know.

It's tough because

I was really nervous for not only because Charles was there,

which was a huge part of it, but also because, you know,

I'd kind of put a lot on the line.

I'd competed at the world, I got second place and now

you feel the pressure of you have to do as good or better

to really make it worth your while and, uh, so it's like,

did I pull it off or did I not?

In second place for the 2013 United States

Barista Championship,

it's my pleasure to announce Charlie Babinski.

Charles Babinski of G&B Coffee in second place.

The winner of the 2013 USPC, for the second time,

Mr. Pete Licata of Parisi Coffee.

Allow me to shake your hand, sir.

I mean it was uh we were obviously disappointed,

you know, that, you know, we, we...

more than anything it was just getting, getting second again.

I was happy.

I think... I think Charles was just, you know,

he had... he had heard that once before.

You know, I always tell him like you don't really have to win

for people to know who you are.

Like people already respect him for,

for what he does and... and who he is.

Yeah and so, you know, the possibilities are end...

endless for me in my opinion.

You always have that title.

You always are...

I will always be the 2013 World Barista Champion.

And make some noise

for the six finalists and the champion

of the 2013 United States Barista Competition.

I was on a date once in Chicago and I had been a barista

for four months and it was our first date.

Um I picked her up on shift so she met me at the coffee bar

uh like a week later or something.

We went down the street and, um, we were at another coffee shop

and I was trying to explain to her

why I was so fascinated by coffee

and I didn't have the words to do a very good job at this,

at the time because I didn't quite know

what I was trying to say and as I'm sort of stumbling over this

she finally goes it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. I get it.

And I said oh really? You do?

And she said yeah, I get it.

She said, because you take coffee and you look at coffee

closely enough and you start to unpack it

and you start to realize how much complexity there is

to the sheer fact that this thing can even exist.

You realize that it goes all over the world.

You realize that there are all these people

that are involved in making it.

You realize that it's so difficult to do it well

at every single stage and she said you've done this

with coffee and so once you've done that with coffee

you've just proven that you could do that with anything else

in the world and... and doesn't that make life interesting?

I missed that.

I missed that this year but in no way would I trade it for, uh,

for being there for, for my brand new little,

little soft burrito of a son.

I'm gonna ask that you take three sips.

It's my honour to announce

the southwest regional barista champion

from Los Angeles, California,

Mr. Charles Babinski.