training & muscle memory

I only had three hours, but I did my best at training this group of relative newcomers to the coffee industry. I started it all out with saying how much coffee means to me and how passionate you can become about coffee. I tried to describe all the things I have talked about in my previous blog posts: technique, questions, reaching for something more than just a cup of joe... I hope they bought it.

Courtney and Brett have been prepping more and more for the upcoming Great Lakes Barista Championship. Its not a bad thing but they keep asking me questions, great questions, and talking to me about coffee, and posing questions without question marks. I have loved it. Watching these two prepare for battle has made me feel like I finally have something to offer the coffee industry and these two bright stars are going to shine I tell ya!

I had a long conversation with Tif and Miro on the way out to Chicago a couple weekends ago. It consisted of many subjects revolving around coffee. Before I realized, it was time to drive home by myself, we had been talking about nothing but coffee for nearly two hours if you count the pre-drive prep time. How is it that as children we could all grow up with dreams of being astronauts and cowboys and find ourselves as adults thrilled and empowered by the roasted pit of a cherry?

So training as it was, consisted of me, two dudes and two ladies. One dude said he liked the idea of coffee and the atmosphere in coffee shops, the other said he knew nothing about coffee, one of the ladies had previously worked at some form of "barista"(and I use that term loosely) job where she worked on a super-automatic machine and had no idea about technical coffee, and the last lady had a pretty good understanding of the amount of work needed for good coffee. So, what do I do? My first goal is to get very technical so they understand the importance of coffee and that they are going to be, whether or not they wanted to be, involved in something that wasn't just another job at a chain retail coffee shop. I gave them the run over of all the good and bad things to do or not do with espresso and milk. I spent about 2 hours on very technical espresso (more than I learned in the first year or two in the industry) and about an hour on milk steaming. In the end I looked at them and they all seemed to have this "oh man, I need to practice" look on their faces. It made me happy to the point that I smiled about the whole way home.

What I realize now, is that the majority of what I was trying to teach or impart on these few people is that developing muscle memory with your technique can control some of the most important factors in preparing and serving good espresso. As baristas know, how you make espresso has a huge impact on the final results in the cup... emphasized HUGE! I am very confident even today that although I am not often on an espresso machine that I could (with my muscle memory learned technique) pull some great espresso, so to say I dont think I would be ashamed to serve it... if you get what I mean?

Watching Courtney and Brett is a lot of fun. I can see their muscle memory in action, tapping tamping, dosing, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning and boy it is entertaining. We are trying to get coffees for blends down and trying different roast profiles and combos.

So, what about me? I am currently studying about the history of the industry, and the actual coffee plant. I think its good to have goals. So, I think my current goal is to ultimately source coffee and potentially work on a farm... possibly maybe a speck of hope to have a farm... oh, the dreams...