Making sense of the Roaster/Retailer relationships: Caffe Nero

My mission at the moment is to investigate all these ideas of quality and waste in the next stage of coffee production – I’ve seen the farms, now I’m supposed to be visiting the roasters. Easier said than done. I need to know: can roasters improve the quality of coffee? what do they actually do that adds value? what skills are required? What, if anything, is wasted during roasting, and how? what happens to this waste? Finally, and perhaps most specifically, I need to follow up with the retailers of this coffee – why do they choose this style of roast? What do coffee shop owners look for when they find roasters and coffee suppliers? What do they believe is a good quality roast? Is this even important to them?

I wanted to start with Caffe Nero, because in some respects I think it would be a simpler process, but also with perhaps clearer ideas of ‘quality’. Caffe Nero are alone amongst the big chain coffee shops in that they are the only chain which does not roast it’s own coffee; instead, Coburg coffee roasters do it for them. Starbucks has its own roasters, Costa has coffee roasted for them by another branch of the Whitbread group which is essentially the same company. Caffe Nero, however, pride themselves on selling ‘the best espresso this side of Milan’, have apparently designed their own secret blend and roast, but pay an independent company to actually supply the goods. I want to know why.

Coburg, (like many roasting companies in my experience so far), remain elusive. Consequently, the following train of thought is based almost entirely on guess work until I can actually get to see them in person.

Something like this.

I am very intrigued by the relationship between Coburg and Caffe Nero. There is a guy who works for Caffe Nero head office who I have spoken to briefly about all this. He is apparently a ‘buyer’ for the company, and has been for nearly ten years. In all other circumstances, coffee buyers are the people who travel out to coffee producing regions, engage in cupping sessions,  and suggest a price based on their judgement of the coffee’s quality. But if Coburg are roasting for Nero (and as far as I am aware, Coburg also import all this coffee, for Nero, their own label, and for other companies- most notably, Mokarabica, which Gusto Italiano use for their independent shop in Sheffield) – and the roast has been designed specifically for Nero which is what they claim, then why do Nero need a buyer themselves? And why do they need to employ one continously for ten years? What does that guy actually do?

Unless of course, Nero change not only the farms from which they buy their coffee from, but also the roast profile they/Coburg use for the Secret Nero Blend, on a regular basis. This then gives the buyer something to do, but it throws up more questions – do they change it because the coffee harvest varies so much? Can people tell if they have changed the coffee? I’ve never noticed, but then I do notice if it has been made well or badly, or just differently to usual. Am I tasting a difference in the skill of the barista in making the espresso, or a difference in the roast and origin of the coffee itself?  Essentially, I still need to ascertain how important the roasting is to the taste of the final product. Does roasting well or badly, enhance or decrease the quality? And how exactly do you roast badly anyway?

As I said, so far, I haven’t heard a squeak out of Coburg, despite repeated attempts to go visit them. So, I turned my attention to figuring out what Caffe Nero managers actually know of the roasted coffee they serve every day. When I worked at Durham’s Caffe Nero branch, I askedthe manager where the coffee came from. He told me a company called Rizzi roasted it, and he reckoned it came from the Isle of Wight. This worried me a great deal when I first started this project – how on earth was I going to research on the Isle of Wight? Could I commute from Darlington?? I also found virtually nothing during google searches for “Rizzi”, and especially not when looking for links between coffee, Rizzi and Isle of Wight. In fact, it is very nearly a googlewhack. The only reference is to a Mr Mike Rizzi, who is a member of the Isle of Wight fencing club. And even more bizarrely, judging by the dates, I may even have met the guy when I used to fence at competition level. Utterly surreal. But aaaanyway….

By the time I worked at Darlington’s branch of Caffe Nero, I’d been promoted to Shift Leader. I asked the Darlington manager if she knew where the coffee came from, and she told me to just have a look when I had to open up the shop and take deliveries the next morning. Coffee arrived: in unmarked silver sealed bags, in an unmarked box with only the Use By date stamped on it. Not helpful. Further digging eventually led me to discover that Rizzi IS actually a coffee roaster, but it hasn’t existed as a company for many years. It is now owned entirely by Coburg. And they are not in fact based on the Isle of Wight, but on the Isle of Dogs – ie: Woolwich. Much easier to get to. The manager of Durham’s Caffe Nero is a Geordie, and I guess anything that far south is indistinguishable and Foreign. But it does not suggest a particularly close relationship between Nero’s retail staff and the roasters.

I have been contacted by someone who works at Caffe Nero, and has managed the seemingly impossible – visited the Coburg roasters. Given her current position, I will keep her anonymous. But interestingly, she was not very impressed. I quote:

“The guy that showed us… round, really didn’t know his stuff about coffee, he knew about prices, and what they were doing, but not about taste,seasonality, blends etc. I thought as a roaster, who stocked and roasted … he would be more knowledgeable on it. … I do know that Nero make up at least 75% of their [Coburg's] business though. … their own brand coffee is pretty poor, and I don’t think they sell that much as only a small part of the warehouse is dedicated to its storage.”

She went on to say that the Nero coffee is roasted very quickly at extremely high temperatures (“blast roasted”) and can then be stored for up to a year before arriving at the Nero stores. Neither of these two facts suggest excellent quality to my knowledge. Sure, Nero prides itself on its ‘Italianess’ which usually means roasting the coffee to espresso strength, which is very dark, but it shouldn’t mean burning it. I was also taught (during the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe’s roasting workshop) that master roasters identify flavours within different batches of coffee – based on the altitude and year and geographical location – which can then be brought out and highlighted by roasting in a specific way. Even if Nero’s coffee is not blast roasted exactly, surely it should not be all roasted in the same manner, given that each batch from each harvest would be subtly different?

I cannot verify any of this yet until I actually visit Coburg for myself. Until then, I can only learn through comparisons. I know for certain that the independent roasters, Pumphreys in Newcastle, consider coffee roasting to be a highly skilled art. I’d love to know what they think of large scale roasting for a large chain, as with Coburg and Caffe Nero. What do they do differently, and why? For further comparison, there is of course, Starbucks, who do have their own roasting company within their vast empire. If Coburg are being so elusive, I imagine I would have major problems trying to visit Starbucks; instead, I can quote from Joseph Michelli’s exceedingly unctious book “The Starbucks Experience – 5 Principles of turning Ordinary into Extrordinary”:

There is no hidden inferior material at Starbucks. On the contrary, Starbucks epitomizes a company that has acheived amazing success by not compromising on quality. … The mission statement asserts that Starbucks partners will “apply the highest stardards of excellence to the purchasing, roasting and fresh delivery of our coffee.” To that end, Starbucks do what is necessart to meet or exceed their quality standards… The leaders are constantly researching and developing technologies and systems to improve the consistency of the company’s roasting process and the freshness of their coffee.

But that is it. That is the only reference to roasting in the whole book (and yes, I did actually endure reading the entire, excrutiating lot of it.). Roasting at Starbucks is performed, somehow, to high quality standards. Apparantly. But what those standards are, and how you actually go about acheiving them is not mentioned. Maybe roasting is such a skilled art, that to preserve its magic, it has to remain mysterious? We shall see!

The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in Central America

(And the prize for best title goes to…sadly not me.)

I bought a wonderful book in  Rare and Racy, my most favourite book shop of all time, last summer in a fit of Must-Spend-Money-On-Something-Other-Than-Giant-Boots consumption-frenzy. It is: 
The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America by Michael Taussig

Not only am I extremely keen on that title, but the content is pretty good too. Today I finally got round to reading it, while sitting in Caffe Nero, supping espressos to refuel after a gym session. Along comes Grem. “Buy us a coffee??” he says. “Fat chance!” I reply. Pretty much the same opening lines that we use every time we meet. Greetings (!) dealt with, he then picks up my book. I have to explain that commodity fetishism does not mean what he thinks it means. It is not, or at least, very rarely is it “kinky.”. Grem looks disappointed. Next question: “What the fook’s “Cosmogenesis”? I mentally calculate whether the length of time it would take me to explain that would be longer than his attention span. Very probably. Sigh… this was not going to be a productive afternoon.

***

Three weeks ago, I was sitting in another cafe, drinking espressos as well. Only that place was Cafe Central in San Jose, Costa Rica. It is still very strange to think of it like that. In some ways I feel like I’ve been back for ages, but then, I don’t feel I’ve been away from Central America long enough yet to miss it too much. It both amazes and scares me how easily I seem to have just slotted back in to life in the UK – university work, home life reunited with Long-Suffering Husband, the smell of Ferret, mad, over-ambitious plans and my usual impatience – no place for Tiempo Nica here. And the more mundane stuff: gym sessions, entertaining teenagers, coffee in Nero.

A few weeks ago, I was at the cooperative that supplies some of Caffe Nero’s coffee, specifically, CooproNaranjo, who sell Nero the Costa Rican Peaberry coffee that they sell in bags in the stores, rather than the stuff that goes into their cappuccinos.See the bottom of the Caffè Nero Buy Online page. I’ve bought bags of those beans from Nero before, and it was pretty good. But on the farm, it was EXCEPTIONAL. Completely different tasting, and soooo much better. It could be due to the fact that the coffee hadn’t been transported halfway round the globe, and was very fresh indeed; but then, Nero buys it in green, and it is all roasted in the UK. Green coffee shouldn’t go stale during transportation – that is the point of shipping it green. So, it should be at least partly due to the roasting. In which case, I hope to be able to grill people (pun fully intended – sorry) at Coburg (the roasters) about it when I visit them this summer.

But the same applies to Starbucks too. I tried the coffee on a few of the farms that supply Starbucks, and it was Infinitely Better. Caffe Nero’s coffee isn’t great, but it’s not that bad either. Starbucks, in my opinion, is truly terrible. But it is not that they are buying in low quality coffee. Some of that stuff is world class. So, it all begs the question, What The Hell Do They Do To It To Make It Taste That Bad???

Methinks, they just burn the hell out of it. I have heard several coffee professionals refer to the place as “Charbucks” for that reason. My knowledge of coffee roasting is limited, but I do know that to mask the flavour of low quality coffee, you can just bake it – roast it at a lower temperature but for a longer time, which effectively flattens it all out. It gets rid of the bitter flavours of bad coffee, but it also kills off all the complex variations of good flavour in high quality arabicas. This is also why Costa Coffee’s ad campaign promoting their “slow roasted coffee” amuses my cynical little mind….

The people I met in both Nicaragua and Costa Rica moved me by their obvious passion for their coffee, and the pride they took in their work. But this was not the same thing as my own passion for coffee – they were talking about growing the absolute best coffee plants they could; about organic practices that protected and nurtured the plant and the soil, about harvesting techniques that boosted their crop yield, about working with cooperatives to provide for their families, or about branding their coffee so people would associate their name with high quality. Essentially, it is fetishised. But it was never about a passion for drinking the stuff. Coffee consumption was another world away. And that is exactly what I feel like right now. I am having real difficulty bringing my experiences in Central America together with sitting in Caffe Nero judging Stacey’s barista skills. “Coffee” means something so different depending on where you are, that it is hard to believe I am talking about the same little brown beans.

I do wonder if some of the farmers I met have any idea where their precious crop ends up, or any concept of barista championships or chain coffee shops or a decaf-one-shot-grande-white-choc-mocha-with-cream-and-no-syrup. In his book, Michael Taussig tells of Colombian sugar plantation workers who make a pact with the Devil so they can produce more sugar cane to make more money. This arises because sugar cane is a cash crop – the workers do not own the land they work, instead they are making money for someone else. They cannot subsist off their labour, because you cannot survive off sugar alone, and you cannot eat money. These farmers would prefer to grow food crops for themselves rather than farm sugar to make money to buy food from other people. It is far more logical, if you think about it. Capitalism is Satan’s banking!! Ahem. But having found themselves in this difficult situation, they makes deals with the Devil to try and improve their lot. Taussig’s accounts of this are literal – they visit sourcerers to help make these pacts and summon up demons and so on. Fascinating stuff.

Of course I am going to argue that some of the coffee farmers do the same. I never found any diabolical dealings in Nicaragua (sadly), but metaphorically, coffee farmers share the same plight. Coffee is still a cash crop, you can’t eat it. When coffee growing is fetishised to such an extent, when the farmers are so proud of what they do, do they worry that their precious crop ends up in Nescafe Instant or in an over-roasted blend in Charbucks? Or do they just want to sell it to the people who pay the most? (Probably not Starbucks either…) Is selling wonderful coffee to people who will burn it, like making a pact with Lucifer himself?

Incidently, when I started working at Caffe Nero, someone – probably Grem – pointed out that if working at Starbucks was akin to selling your soul to the Devil, then what does that make working for Nero?;

Caffeinated Musings from the Teenage Fanclub

I have spent a significant amount of time in the last year trying to avoid Customers. For me, coffee shop customers are not really relevant. One of the main concerns and trains of thought within the Waste of the World programme is waste as part of the production process – often integral to production, and not just the end result of consumption. Therefore, I am interested in what, if anything, gets wasted as coffee beans are processed into the branded caffeinated-beverage-of-choice in UK coffee shops. Customers consume; they are not part of the production process, although, admittedly, they are the reason for the production process.

However, with some not so subtle persuasion from my supervisors, I have been convinced to do a few focus groups with customers in the cafes I am studying. Customers can create waste in their own way. The most obvious way being, if for whatever reason they do not like the coffee they are served, they complain, and the coffee drink is wasted. There are also more indirect ways in which the customer is responsible for waste. I am trying to argue within this project that very high quality coffees are more wasteful to produce. Therefore, if the customers demand high quality coffee, then more has to be wasted in order to supply that demand. In some cases, I would also suggest that the level of skill involved – not just by the barista, but by the farmers and roasters as well, is wasted on the customers who just want the caffeine content for instance. Then there are other even more subjective things like wasting time in coffee shops, and wasting money on overpriced fashionable coffee brands. And so on and so forth. Eventually, they wore me down, and I agreed to interview some customers to find out, essentially, how fussy they are.

My first ‘focus group’ – and I use the term very loosely in this sense, was with the self-defined ‘Teenage Fanclub’ – that is, a bunch of teenagers who I knew from when they used to take up space and not spend anything in the Voodoo Cafe, but who very kindly followed me to Caffe Nero when I started working there instead. They all do still go out to coffee shops of varying sorts, they all knew each other even if they didn’t know me, and they will talk for hours and hours with little prompting. So I thought they would be a good group to start with.

Having co-ordinated with “the first official layabout of the cafe” and told him to meet me in Nero and “bring friends”, we took over the back of the cafe, ordered eight different drinks at once which annoyed the barista until she realised how much it all came to, and then proceeded to ramble on about anything that came in to their heads about coffee in the full knowledge that I was recording this for vaguely sensible purposes. The one thing I’d forgotten in all of this is how tiring controlling the conversation of a bunch of over-confident, raucous adolescents is. I used to do this on a daily basis, whilst simultaneously cooking and making coffee for them, six days a week. That part of my life seems an incredibly long time ago now. I can’t decide if I actually miss it.

Most of the 'focus group' in Darlington's Caffe Nero

In amongst the idiocies (and there were plenty), this bunch did actually say some useful things -especially about why they went to specific places:

Grem:

Well you know I tend to go to In Arcadia but if you’re gonna go to one the old high street chains in Darlo then I tend to go to Coffee @ Elliots cos they don’t pretend to be Italian and you can go in there and say “I’ll have a large black coffee please and you’ll get a Large Black Coffee. No bloody Frenchy americano or whatever it is.

Although they did appreciate that customer service was important, they did not appreciate conspicuously being sold a brand:

Bel: Has anyone ever been to Starbucks in Darlington?
Grem: (very quickly) NO.
Timmus: Yeah…
Vince: Yeah, it’s terrible
Rose: Really overpriced
Sadie: I wouldn’t have but other people dragged me in.
Grem: That one (pointing at Meg) dragged me in to a Stabucks in Newcastle
Meg: I’ve not been to our Starbucks, not when the cappuccinos are nearly twice as much
Grem: Yeah but once when we were out in Newcastle -
Meg: Yeah but there were other people there telling us to come in…
Grem: Yeah I suppose
Bel: So would you see Neros are being better quality than Starbucks?
Grem: Yes.
Vince: And better value for money as well actually
Bel: Really?
Grem: Yeah, Starbucks in really expensive and you get a tiny little cup
Vince: I used to order Frappuccinos quite a lot and Starbucks give you like, ice cream! It’s just a milkshake, and you’re like, “I could’ve gone to McDonalds for that!””

They also admitted that often, it was not just the coffee they went in for:

Sadie: I think I’m just lazy. By the time I’ve walked all the way in to town, I just want to sit down somewhere. Coffee just comes with it!

Surprisingly, (for skint teenagers) they all said that they would pay more for high quality coffee, and good service:

Rose: Well you see them do more here.
Grem: Again, it’s all about selling the brand. If you see them do more here, you think, well, you tend to think you’re getting your money’s worth, it must be good! Maybe it is worth paying £2.90 for a big coffee!
Bel: So if you see them doing things you’re more likely to pay more?
Grem: If there’s more effort then you pay more money
Bel: Ok
Vince: You get a better quality too
Grem: yeah. If it looks classy and presentable then..
Vince: And if they look presentable as well…
Grem: Would you really go into a coffee shop where it’s being manned by a bunch of fat ugly sweaty slobs?

However, having said that, they didn’t really seem to realise what skills the barista actually has to possess:

Timmus: erm, make coffee?
Vince: Blend the beans correctly, erm, make sure it’s the right temperature and all of that, quite a lot really.
Bel: So, you mean using the machine…?
Timmus: Know how to make milk froth!
Vince: Put all the extra bits on make sure it looks right
Nelson: Know how to make coffee stylish!
Vince: Yeah, know how to make coffee in style for the customer

They were also all perfectly prepared to complain when their coffee wasn’t made right:

Vince: Serg.
Nelson: Serg made terrible coffee
Bel: Oh Serg! oh I see
Grem: He managed to burn filter coffee.
(laughter)
Grem: I don’t get how! It’s impossible! That is fool-proof! Vince could do it!
Sadie: Aawww. Poor Vincey.

Most were very politically aware of Fairtrade issues, and agreed that they would probably pay more if they knew the farmers were getting a fair price for their crops. They were also convinced that FairTrade is fashionable, and that most brands could sell Fairtrade coffee if they wanted to:

Vince: Most places now say they do fairtrade
Grem: - but really they don’t
Vince: Yeah
Grem: (cough) Starbucks!
Sadie: They can’t justify not having fairtrade cos it’s not that much more expensive compared to the amount they add on to the price of the coffee in the first place!

When I explained that Caffe Nero claims to pay ‘better than fair trade prices’ for its coffee, but doesn’t have the official FairTrade mark, they were not impressed: “I feel scummy now!”
They also had some endearingly naiive views on Fairtrade coffee plantations:

Grem: I think so, cos fairtrade farmers are getting more money so they can put more back in to it, to improve the quality of the beans, improve the quality of the harvesting machines, prevent against losses and bad weather and floods and stuff.
Vince: The extra money’s like an investment, isn’t it? The more money you put in, the more you get out of your investment
Grem: Yeah, with that little, whatever it is, -when they sign up to Fairtrade that first little bit of money that you get, they can maybe get a new harvesting machine or hire a few more members of staff, then they get a larger crop next year, and then they can sell more, and get more, and it expands at an exponential rate!

- I didn’t have the heart to explain that it doesn’t quite work like that.

I came away from this group very grateful to them for being unusually helpful. It was only when I listened to the recording over, and over, and over, and over, and over again in order to transcribe it, that I noticed how utterly silly they can be at times:

Bel: Ok! Great! Well, again, is there anything else anyone wants to tell me at all?
Nelson: erm.. Noooo.

Bel: Alright then! Well in that case, thank you very much-
Grem: Oh yes!
Bel: Go on then
Grem: Scientists might be creating a Black Hole with some particle accelerator or something.
Bel: Thank you for sharing that.
Grem: Well you said anything else!!
Bel: Groan.
Grem: They probably all drink loads of coffee, it’s probably why, they’re all trying to find the Tiny Little Coffee Particle!
Bel: Do you think they could make espresso through a particle accelerator?
Grem: What happens if you fire a tangerine, and a Malteaser through a particle accelerator?
Vince: It’d just go whiizzut!!!
Grem: You end up with a Terry’s chocolate orange!
[General groaning]
Grem: You see these are the kind of things you think of when you’re fuelled up on caffeine!
I am not on ANY kind of drugs today, thank you very much!
Oh! And that’s being recorded!

In all honesty, I think this material is actually more valuable for market research for when I open my own cafe than it is for my PhD research. When I open Dr Coffees, I must remember to sell Big Black Coffees, not grande americanos, I must provide “big slouchy squashy sofas that you can sleep on!”, I mustn’t upsell cakes at the end of every order, coffee must be strong but not burnt, I mustn’t make teenagers feel uncomfy if they sit for four hours in the shop having only bought one coffee, hot chocolates and mochas must be topped with as much cream as can be physically fitted in to the cup, and the whole place must be staffed by “fit” waitresses. And dying the coffee pink always helps too.

I have several more of these focus groups left to do, and I have a feeling that other, older, less caffeine-sensitive customers may have very different views.

One more quote from the Fanclub:

Vince: You should put it up as a podcast, it’d be hilarious!

In the relatively safe knowledge that no-one is going to bother downloading all 20MB of this file other than Grem himself, here is the podcast:

Teenage Fanclub Podacast 5th Sept 08

Baristas, Quality and Waste

Most of the following waffle is heavily influenced by Eric Laurier’s Cappuccino Community papers, available, here:

Monday 14th July saw the official new opening of the Darlington Caffe Nero. Our nearest branch of Nero closed down

The new Darlington store

in March when the bookshop that housed it, also closed. Now we have a brand new one that is a shop in its own right, not hiding within another business. It’s right on the market square, a great location allowing it to have a pavement cafe as well, and it looks all new and shiny and inviting. The Official Launch involved hundreds of Nero-blue balloons all over the tables, and anxious looking new staff in trainee t-shirts nervously getting everyone to fill in customer comments cards. I was feeling mean and awkward so I got the new baristas to make me double espressos: the simplest drink in terms of content, but the hardest to make successfully. One was a pretty good attempt. The other wasn’t.

Four new staff were obviously undergoing their “week of intensive training” that they have to complete before being allowed to serve customers unsupervised. For a new store, this is quite an epic task in that all the staff need training at the same time. Stacey, the original assistant manager, was back, frantically trying to help her new flock. They had also roped in John, the manager at the Durham branch to over see things. The area manager, Kirsten, also put in an appearance although she was less concerned with the staff training. These few were in charge of getting four new staff up to speed within the first few days of opening.

Laurier’s Cappuccino Community project talks about his experiences training as a Barista in Caffe Nero back in 2002. I am intrigued to see if anything has changed much in the last five years. I also did this Nero training in June 2007, and the Shift Leader training last September as well. Unlike Laurier, I stayed at Nero for six months so I probably have a different perspective; I’ve also done similar barista training at other companies, and know that there are considerable differences in how you are trained to make the perfect coffee, depending on the company.

Laurier rightly points out that ‘barista’ is usually a low-status job, or at least that is how it is perceived by the general public. Before getting coffee-obsessed and actually trying it, I regarded Nero/Starbucks/Costa employment as “McJobs” – that is, working for a huge corporation, in a relatively unskilled, minimum wage job, few careers prospects and very quick staff turnover. As it turns out, I was right. Nero pay their baristas minimum wage, get round legal break regulations by saying you can have as many ‘refreshments’ as you want during your shift (eg: you can make yourself coffee whenever) and therefore you can be left on a ten hour shift with only a 20 minute lunch break. It is possible to progress within the company quite quickly if you’re keen and work hard, but given that shift leaders get a mere 20p extra per hour above minimum wage, most employees do not see it as an incentive. It is not a job you an ever actually live off comfortably, even if you work 40 hours a week as I was doing at first. However, when faced with very little alternative, I was relieved to find that I actually really enjoyed it.

In contrast to the social perception, the company itself tries to give the job high status. Caffe Nero prides itself on the quality of its coffee, and therefore, also on the quality of the barista’s skills. All coffee shops need to compete with each other – especially the big chains, and so in the lack of many other differences, they all promote the quality of the coffee and of the staff. Staff training is crucial for this. But, as already pointed out, as the staff turnover is very high (the average job-span of a barista in Nero is around 6 months. Apparently I am typical!) and as a result, there is a constant need for staff training.

Well trained, skilled baristas supposedly make better quality coffee. This is a fairly obvious point, but somehow it gets lost in translation. If most of the public consider barista work as a ‘McJob’ or similar, they cannot fully appreciate the skills of the barista. I’d like to know whether this affects the consumer’s perception of the quality of the actual coffee.

Not too many customers to deal with yet...

In actual fact, being a barista is a very skilled job. The Gaggia machines in Caffe Nero stores are all hand operated: baristas have to set the grind of the coffee, pull out the right amount of it, tamp it correctly, and time the pour of the espresso. They have to have a good knowledge of the appearance of the espresso as well, in order to recognise bad ones. For most drinks they then have to froth milk to the correct consistency and present the drink attractively and perfectly. Add to this, basic, friendly customer service skills (including the six service steps which have to be repeated for every customer, and remembering regular customer’s names and favourite orders), food preparation and service, operating the (often infuriating) EPOS til systems, completing all the daily quality checks on coffee, health and safety checks on food prep areas, storage and fridges, and sort out the cleaning rota.If you are a shift leader, you also have to cash up, reorder stock and handle deliveries, and organise and motivate your team. Speed is also a skill which has to be learned and perfected. Caffe Nero need staff who can make high quality coffees quickly and consistently. Espresso is after all, supposed to be ‘express’. The job is both physically and mentally demanding, and I would argue that the main skill utilised is the ability to work quickly under pressure and remain cheerful!

In Caffe Nero, I found that the baristas require an intense knowledge of the Gaggia machine; there seems to be more emphasis on this than on the actual coffee going in to it. This is because Caffe Nero only serve its own blend of coffee, and only offer espresso-based coffee drinks. There is no variety of coffee beans to contend with and only one method of preparation. The machine has to be correctly calibrated; checked and tweaked twice a day. After a while, you begin to learn to intricacies of it, and the machine’s “personality”. The second group head on the right at the Durham branch always poured slightly faster than it should. The grinder at the original Darlington store wobbled its way out of line if it got busy and over-used and the grind had to be reset half way through the day as a result. One of the handles got loose and baristas had to avoid losing it into the bin when tapping out the used coffee. When you spend eight or nine hours a day, bashing out several hundred drinks from this thing, you do get finely attuned it its mood swings. The machine requires far more gentle encouragement and friendly treatment than the customers ever did.

That is not to say, however, that Nero baristas do not engage with the coffee at all. In fact, there is a constant need to check the espressos being made. Each one is checked visually – if it looks right, it can be served. It has to be about 30ml, with a thick ‘hazelnut’ coloured crema on top that shouldn’t disappear too quickly. After a while, (ie: with practice) you just know that it’s right. You acquire the skill and the knowledge of the required quality. Visual quality checks are the only pragmatic form of checks – baristas cannot obviously taste each one, and probably wouldn’t want to. Caffe Nero ask on employee application forms whether or not the applicant drinks coffee. In my experience, a lot of the employees there did not like the stuff at all and refused to drink it. However, Nero do encourage you to sample. I still believe that knowing what the coffee you are making actually tastes like goes a long way to improving the quality of the coffee in the long run.

Unfortunately, the only way to really learn barista skills is through practice. This is obviously problematic because you cannot ‘practice’ on paying customers. If you spoil a customers drink, they simply won’t pay, and it will get wasted. Alternatively, if you practice making coffees before the customers arrive, or during quiet periods, unless the barista drinks all her attempts herself, all her practice will inevitably lead to waste. The saving grace is often the trainee t-shirt. Trainee baristas are given maroon coloured t-shirts with “TRAINEE” in big letters. This acts as a warning to the customer, and can be used as a multi-purpose excuse for mistakes, a conspicuous sign meaning “Don’t blame me, I’ve only just started!”. I, like many others, tried to retain my red t-shirt for as long as possible as a sort of safety net. Caffe Nero have a policy of ‘No crema, no serva!’ – meaning, if the espresso is made badly, with no crema on top, you have to chuck it away and start again. As Laurier pointed out, this tends to worry trainees, who think that redoing the espresso will annoy the customer and slow things up. Caffe Nero maintain that it actually impresses the customer, and shows that the barista really cares about the quality of the coffee. Again, I intend to find out from customers if this actually works.

There is a little wiggle-room in espresso service, even within Caffe Nero with all its rigorous checks. Baristas are encouraged to judge the customer depending on what they order. It is a fair assumption that people who order single espressos or even ristrettos probably care more about the coffee than people coming in asking for flavoured, single-shot lattes. As such, the barista can put more care and effort into making the espresso, possibly more so than for the latte drinkers. A labour saving device which quality-controls never usually admit to.

John explains that Yes, it is dead hard!

All this is a lot to take in. Laurier admits to feeling overwhelmed by his own barista training. I heard one of the new recruits at the Darlington Nero wailing

“It’s dead hard! Especially when everyone is new. There’s so little time to get it right!”

It is a highly skilled, difficult job, and one which has to be learned very quickly in a high pressure environment. However, the emphasis on training and skills adds value to the end product – high quality coffee inevitably requires knowledge and skills and also, unavoidably produces waste.

“Reconceptualising” coffee?

I am not in a writing mood today, having just finished four pages of ‘Bureaucratese’ or “well-written bollocks” for this damn upgrade… so. A few pics for your entertainment:

A Cappucino from Nero - the liquid was found about 2 inches down!

Cappuccino from Gusto Italiano - shiny, pretty and perfect!

A few differences there, non?

Visual fieldwork maybe… a lot simpler than trying to describe these differences! And then of course, there is the far darker side the the little brown beans:

Black Gold is a very powerful film, I recommend it to anyone who has even a passing interest in coffee and world well-being! If that doesn’t affect you, this might:

Work out not only how much of the price of your branded coffee goes to the farmer, but also how much you personally spend on coffee a year. Quite frightening in my case!

My Dark Love Affair

I have a headache. I moan to Carl about this, but he is not impressed.”I don’t believe such a thing exists.” he says. This is because I have a caffeine headache, or rather, a lack of caffeine headache. I didn’t sleep particularly well last night, and this morning I had to get up unhealthily early for me, rush round trying to pack everything up for the weekend, and then leg it to the station to catch a (late) train at 8.14. I did not get time to make coffee. Further more, as a conscientious, perma-broke student and ex-Nero employee, I flatly refuse to spend £2.25 for coffee from Costa at the station. My body cannot cope with this.

My addiction may well be psychological, but the effects are very physical. My head hurts, there is some serious pressure on the top of my skull. I have little energy, I am pale (in fact, I am reliably informed that I look dead) and I am very irritable.
This never used to be the case. My parents drank tea by the bucketful and when I was a baby, they used to give me a luke warm bottle of milky tea every day. Possibly as a result of this, I have never touched the stuff since. But I never drank much coffee either. I spent most of my teenage years being healthy and guzzling herbal teas and water. I probably should have stuck to that! However, at age 17, I got the second most boring job in the universe -data entry. An entirely sedentary life style, parked in front of a black screen with green text, typing endless addresses in over and over again, eight hours a day. The most interesting thing to do all day was to get up and wander over to the monstrosity in he corner, press a series of buttons and receive a plastic cup full of brown powder with metallic tasting hot water poured on top.
Sometimes the powder still floated, or clumped at the bottom until poked by an enthusiastic plastic stick. And woe betide anyone who dared request ‘milk’ – more powder, onl sort of off-white in colour, and seemingly even less soluble than the brown stuff. This was, apparently, coffee. Nescafe instant vendor machine coffee to be precise. It was foul. But it was hot, it had caffeine in it, it required moving from my desk occasionally, and as such, it was the only thing that stopped me turning in to a brain dead corporate zombie, gradually losing form and melting into the chair, just becoming a giant pair of fingers welded to the keyboard….

I left that job after six months, having put on a lot of weight, got repetitive strain injury from the keyboard, and the beginnings of a caffeine addiction. However, I also had enough money to go to Peru for the rest of the year. Peru produces a small amount of truly excellent, high altitude arabica coffee, but such are the ironies of global capitalism, they export all of it, and getting hold of coffee in Peru is difficult and expensive. Nestle produce something called Ecco, which is ground, roasted wheat and chicory. When brewed, it is brown and looks like coffee. It has no actual coffee in it, no caffeine content, but if you ask for ‘cafe’ in Peru, this is generally what you get.In short, I went cold turkey.

On my return from Peru, I started university. I did a lot of different activities outside classes including various theatrical endeavours. ‘Show weeks’ were notoriously hectic and doing 16 hour days playing with lighting meant a lot of coffee was consumed. Meeting friends in coffee shops became almost ritualistic, and anyone who has ever endured lectures on cranio-facial morphology of early hominids and phylogeny of various primates, or even quantitative methods for social scientists will know that at some points, major caffeine boosts are a medical necessity.

After graduating with no other ideas about what to do with myself, I started working in cafes and coffee shops. It was from these that I started to really learn about coffee. I initially thought that working with the stuff, day in, day out would put me off, but this has never been the case! All the different strains and varieties, all the subtleties of flavour that can be produced, all the different methods of brewing, filtering or extracting, all is fascinating to me. I am by no means a world class barista, but I am at least relatively skilled in the art, and I intend to continue learning.

So I am now doing my Phd about coffee, about the links between quality and wastage about the political effects of such a globalised industry. I’ve learned so much about its ‘dark history’ that I am s self-confessed coffee geek.

Coffee increases blood pressure, can lead to hypertension and anxiety attacks, has been linked to colon cancer and now apparently doubles the chance of miscarriage. However, it also protects against cirrhosis and other liver diseases, is a good source of fibre,keeps you alert and stimulated and kick starts your metabolism. It is the second largest legally traded in the commodity in the world, and the industry as a whole, from farmers to baristas, employs a hundred million people all over the world. For me, its a welcome addiction, an obsession, a career and a wonderfully dark love affair.

Genuine Italian Quality?

(NB: This is a follow up for uni – I started a discussion on here a while ago asking why coffee is perceived to be Italian at least in the UK. These are just some thoughts and experiences on that topic)

Walking round Darlington town centre gives you a relatively large selection of places to get cups of coffee. There are numerous ‘traditional tea rooms’ where coffee is an afterthought, and greasy-spoon cafes who will do instant Nescafe in a polystyrene cup. And then there is two Costas, a Caffe Nero and the brand new Starbucks. So far, so uninteresting. Darlington does boast a few independent cafes, however: The Voodoo Cafe which I am still too biased to express an opinion about, Coffee Bamber – an expensive-looking place which, commendably, only sells FairTrade coffee, and “Coffee @ Elliotts.” This company actually has two branches now on either side of town, and I decided to try it out.
Coffee @ Elliotts is done out quite attractively, all art deco with huge chandeliers, ornate mirrors, heavy wooden furniture and the odd bust dotted around on shelves. There are also lots of sepia pictures of old style continental pavement cafes with titles in… French?
This is surprising. I had honestly expected the elusive Elliott to pretend to be Italian. Costa claims to serve Italian-style coffee, Caffe Nero are so Italian they’ve even added the extra ‘f’, Starbucks was apparently inspired by Italian espresso bars… Admittedly, I don’t know enough about Coffee Bamber to know if it claims Italianess or not, and I tried to make the Voodoo Cafe as Latino as possible, but otherwise it is a safe presumption that most coffee shops have some Italian connection. Elliotts does serve espresso, cappuccinos, lattes, and all the rest, but also apparently sell ‘coffee’ as well, without giving it an Italian identity. All drinks come in ‘regular’ or ‘large’ as opposed to ‘grande’ or even ‘venti’. Although the emphasis is on coffees, they also serve panninis and biscottis, but also plain sandwiches, cakes and jacket potatoes. None of which sound particularly continental.

The coffee at Elliott’s wasn’t bad at all, and was actually cheaper than the bigger chains. And then I found out why – they were using a Bean-to-Cup machine, which is about the same size as a Gaggia espresso maker and works on the same principle, but doesn’t require the same human input. This machine will make espresso-based coffee, but only requires that you fill it up with beans, water and fresh milk in different compartments, and press the right button depending on what you want. It presses the coffee and steams the milk all by itself, and the ‘barista’ just has to put a cup underneath.

This makes the coffee cheaper – not because it is cheaper to run, or cheaper on staff costs; the baristas are still there to bring your coffees to you and cash up etc. It is cheaper, I think, because it requires less skill to produce. And also, less showmanship. Making coffee like this, looks easier to anyone watching. Therefore, value cannot be added to it by making it look more skilled. The process does not look sufficiently complex to warrant charging more to compensate for the skilled labour involved. This sort of coffee is less of a luxury.

This does not mean, however, that anyone could do it. It is still highly unlikely for many people to have a bean-to-cup machine at home, and so the luxury of having someone make it for you is still there. Even with a machine like that, there still has to be some product knowledge involved. An example is that the coffee from Interval bar at Sheffield university also comes from a bean-to-cup machine, just like at Elliotts. Elliotts coffee is infinitely better tasting however. Baristas still need to know how to maintain the machine, set it to the right temperatures and pressure, and what coffee to put in it. Elliotts coffee tasted as good, if not better, than Caffe Nero’s equivalent, whereas the coffee at Interval is somewhere between burnt and stale and possibly flavoured with ground up car tyres. This, to me, implies that there is more to making coffee than just which machine you choose.

As shown by the Barista Championships, there is a lot of skill, art and showmanship that goes in to making espresso based coffees, and the fact that these competitions, and this style of coffee-making are still so popular implies that it is still what consumers want – there must be a specific selling point to make the coffee shops invest in Gaggia machines and in training their staff. If the bean-to-cup machines were as good – and they are quicker, more efficient and dare I say it, convenient, then Starbucks and Nero would use them and the art of the barista wouldn’t be so called for. Something has to make the ‘real’ espresso coffees of higher quality.

I would argue that it is the Italianess that is that selling point. Italianess is part of the ‘experience’ which the big brands are so keen to promote. Caffe Nero, for instance, want to offer the experience of a old fashioned Italian espresso bar and continental cafe. It gives the coffee, and this ‘experience’ an identity, which is very important to the brand, Being ‘Italian’ not only makes the place sound sophisticated and if not exotic, then certainly different to the quaint English tea rooms, it also adds an element of performance. Espresso was invented and perfected in Italy, the first espresso machines were designed and patented by Italians. This style also happens to require more skilled human input, more visual techniques and as such, more labour. Increasing the labour involved increases the value of the end-product, the customer perceives it to be of better quality entirely because of the added labour-value, and so espresso coffees become more expensive. This could be the main reason why coffee shops, like Coffee @ Elliotts become Italian, when they are on Darlington high street, run by Americans and get their coffee beans from Brazil.

Suenos de Arroz y Frijoles

Mi vida esta confusanda.

Life is bloody complicated at the minute. I’ve been doing some real proper research in the real world, involving talking to real actual alive people, (as opposed to reading and regurgitating, or emailing). It’s HARD. And the more I learn, the more complicated it seems to get.
One real, actual alive person was helpful – Paul/Pablo from Caffe Nero head quarters. Unfortunately, what he told me has totally and utterly confused things even more. Maybe I was naiive to think it wasn’t that complicated. Tracing the origins of coffee is an immense task at the best of times, but when the only source of information I can get hold of at the moment is trying hard to protect the positive image adopted by their brand marketing, what I get is not exactly deep – or even that accurate.

It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Nero’s coffee does not come
rom the award winning co-operative in Brazil that they promoted on their website. Well, some of it does, but not the stuff they make into cappuccinos behind the bar every day. Instead, 600 tons of the stuff, comprised of seven different strains of coffee, is imported for Nero every year, coming from “Central and South America”. By the time it reaches Nero, it has been through the hands of the farmers, the co-operatives, the commercial exporters, the roasters and the distributors, not to mention all the regulatory bodies, and anyone in charge of overseas import tariffs and customs….. Far from buying “direct from the producers”, at least six different companies are involved in the industry from beans to mug.

And I’ve got to go through the whole bloody lot, looking for any opportunity in this vast network for coffee to be wasted. This may take a while. Not only is this a lot of work to get my head round, it also ladders my proverbial fishnets (instead of being a linear commodity chain, I’ve decided it’s now a complex mesh of a network – hence, commodity fishnets). There is a big hole in the proceedings now, and its quite embarrassing.

I had a plan… up until last week. That was, to go to Fazenda Cachoeira (Waterfall Farm) in Brazil, to find out the extent of wastage from a plantation that directly supplies Caffe Nero. This gave me something to concentrate on, prepare for; I would need to learn Portuguese for instance. It also gave me a time frame – I’d go in the harvest season, which is between March and September, 2009.

Now, it doesn’t matter if I go to Brazil, or any other coffee-producing country in Latin America. Going to a Spanish speaking country would be far more sensible… but then, when to go? And indeed, where? I need to find out the different harvest seasons…

For anyone who knows anything of my non-university plans at present, the timing of this is highly important. I don’t know which Plan should take priority, whether I should just let Que Sera, Sera, and rethink depending on what happens, or whether I should take assertive action, decide for definite that I am going to, say, Costa Rica in May 2009, and fit everything else around that. That might be the easy option.

Basically, I HATE planning when everything is a variable. I hate making important decisions that I might regret. I would far rather have life Just Happen to me, as it usually does. Or, I bury myself in trivialities, or wild fantasies which even I know are totally impractical – because even hampered with a short attention span and over-ambitious nature, those plans are always far more fun than the ones I actually need to focus on.

Jo is filling my fragile, wanton little mind with ideas of the RASC cafe – that is, my dream of my own coffee shop called Doctor Coffee’s, only promoted as an arts venture, so that we don’t have to worry about it actually making any money. It would be a social enterprise project, providing a space for the RASC writers to go create in. She was even on about hosting it in a caravan at one point so we don’t have to pay lease rates…. And all the while, I am sitting in Caffe Nero for days on end, studying coffee shops, when actually all I want to do is run one myself! This does not a productive Bel make.

fAnd then, there are other dreams… Latin America. Again. It is no longer really a case of wanting to go back there, it’s almost a sense of inevitability – I know I will someday, for whatever reason. I am sorely tempted to just say ’screw Nero’, go visit Donna in Nicaragua or El Porvenir in El Salvador, and just pretend they supply a big chain… but that would not constitute good research practice, would it? I would love to catch up with Donna and Diego and all the chavalos and payasos again out there, I still feel like I have ‘unfinished business’ in Nicaragua somehow, I was rushed away all too quick last time. Or I could go next door to Costa Rica or Honduras and see bits I am less familiar with… For that matter, I would love to catch up with mi familia en Peru…

Siempre yo siento como estoy malgasto mi vida, mi tiempo en este paid, cuando yo podría alli viviendo la vida en vez de lo estudiando. Soy demasiado impaciente. Tengo suenos de arroz y frijoles, y de aventuritas en climas lejos, quiero mas, siempre mas que este. Quiero una cambia.Yo me confundo con relaciones diferentes, los amores diferentes y entonces yo siempre siento que la necesidad de escaparse cuando todo falla. Yo no puedo ver lo que tiene razón bajo la nariz, que lo que quiero es ya aquí. Mi marido, mi niño, y todo que yo ya he creado aquí.

What the hell I think I’m doing

Even the words terrify me now. “Upgrade Proposal”. I have to write exactly what I want to do with this project, 4000 words, and then a panel interview to defend The Plan. I’ve still got a couple of months, but it is now becoming obvious that before I can convince other people that this is a good, plausible idea, I need to figure out once and for all what that idea actually is.

I’ve been faffing. Farting around with vaguely academic concepts and seeing how they could possibly be applied to my main obsession of the moment: coffee. I am employed to work on the Waste of the World project, which incorporates a lot of different themes, but focuses on reexamining what we think of as ‘waste’ in social terms. Our “team” – that is, Joby, Anna and I, are charged with research the concept of Food Waste. To me, this meant Coffee Waste.

There are a lot of different forms of ‘waste’ in the coffee industry. Physical waste on the plantations – what happens to coffee that doesn’t sell? What happens if the crops are diseased? What happens if the roaster screws up somehow? And then at the retailers – what about all the crap espressos trainee baristas make that cannot be served? Then there is all the branded packaging – most of it can be recycled, but generally isn’t.And even if you throw away your branded cup, is it somehow worth it if you have become slightly more aware of that brand? Storage packaging: if you don’t store it right, the coffee goes stale and you have to throw it. If you do store it well, you can’t recycle the foil bags…

And then there is the idea of waste of knowledge. An infinite and complex array of skills go in to this industry, everything from grading green beans, roasting to perfection, to baristas drawing rosettas as latte art on the top of our drink.. Does all the effort that’s gone in to making the coffee get wasted if the bored barista screws it up in the shop? And even if she gets it perfect, is all that expertise wasted on customers who come in for their venti, 1-shot decaf syruped-to-hell soy crappyfrappemockacino and then go home and drink instant?

Most significantly though, is trying to find whether or not all this waste, physical and conceptual, is actually necessary. If there is a demonstrable demand for high quality, speciality coffees in the UK, and if these specialty coffees inevitably create more waste to produce, then the waste is justified. However, if in the UK we are still clinging to our teapots and drinking Nescafe instant, or perhaps, going to Caffe Nero or Starbucks for the ‘lifestyle’ – buying in to the brand, for instance rather than the coffee itself, then the waste involved in this industry becomes meaningless.

How do I go about answering all these questions? The anthropologist in me is bouncing up and down going “Participant Observation!” “Multi-site ethnography!” I don’t know if human-geographers have other methods, but good ol’ PO sounds appealing to me. With emphasis on the PARTICPANT bit. I WANT to see what it’s like to pick coffee: I am going to a tiny co-op farm in Nicaragua, and a big commercial farm in Costa Rica. I would love to learn how to roast coffee professionally, so I am going to try and find an independent roaster and the one that supplies a big chain like Caffe Nero. Finally, I want to see if my own barista experience is ‘typical’ of the industry, and so I intend to compare the goings on in an independent cafe (hopefully, Gusto Italiano in Sheffield) and at a branch of Caffe Nero. Constantly comparing big and small, independent and commercial will, I hope, give a better all-round view of the industry…

So, I’ve got a lot of Ideas, and when I get really into this, I buzz… it’s exciting, I want to get on with it!! But, first, I’ve just got to translate all of the above into formal academic speak, then add in references and inteliigent sounding theory, and then timescales and costings and … aaaaaaaargh. Bureaucracy and academic prostitution!! aaaargh indeed! Sometimes, the fact that I have a certain responsibility to the uni to produce intensive, innovative, accessible and practical research is enough to crush any creativity and enthusiasm. I am Lost in Caffienation, again.

Not Spilling the Beans – Barista Championships 2008

When I got my first job in a coffee shop I thought, “I like coffee, that machine looks fun – how hard can it be?”. I was more worried about burning the food in the café or how I was going to amuse the scary looking emo teenagers in the corner than what sort of coffee was going to go into that strange noisy hopper on the worktop. I’d used the coffee machine when I worked in the pub; it involved sticking a cup underneath and pressing a button. I could cope with that. All would be well.
That was 2006, and in the last eighteen months my views on these things have changed a great deal, especially after my experiences over the last few days.

Caffe Nero, according to their website, pride themselves on their coffee, referring to ‘the art of the barista’. All employees – baristas – ‘undergo days of intensive training before being allowed to serve an espresso.’ When I started working there, I can’t say I much noticed the intensity of the training; I had already done some barista training at Pumphreys Coffee House for my previous job, and as such, assumed I knew what I was doing. All I had to learn now was how to make coffees ‘The Nero Way.’ It is fair to say that everything in Caffe Nero is branded somehow, even down to the exact proportions of foam, milk and espresso that go in to the cappuccino. You can’t just serve ‘any’ cappuccino, it has to be a Nero Cappuccino, and as petty as it sounds, there are some glaring differences.

These differences become very apparent when it came to Barista Championship competitions. The Speciality Coffee Association of Europe hold regional and national competitions for baristas to show their skills and compete for a place in the World Barista Championship. Last year’s World Champion barista was James Hoffman from the UK, who luckily for me, happened to turn up at Pumphreys Coffee House when I trained there. I met a coffee celebrity! He was also one of the main judges for the UK regional finals this year. The competitors in these Barista championships took the event very very seriously, and not just because of the cash prize and prestige on offer for the World Champion. This competition is a culmination of a lot of practice, a lot of skill and a lot of hard work perfecting what is essentially an art form.

Meanwhile, Caffe Nero also hold their own Barista of the Year competition. The northern heat was held in Newcastle on 22nd January, and I tagged along to support some friends and former colleagues. Although the area manager described the event as ‘a bit of fun’ and the sheer quantity of free beer, the cheerleading efforts and the ‘Prize for Best Team Song’ seemed to demonstrate this, the specially made t-shirts saying “Barista of the Year 2008 Finalist” on them, and the prizes – a trip to New York and a chance to meet Nero CEO Gerry Ford – suggested that the competition did have a serious side.

In the northern region, there were thirteen competitors, representing the Nero stores in Durham, Darlington, Ripon, Gosforth, Newcastle, South Shields, Berwick and Hexham. Each store manager had put forward one or two baristas judged to be the best in the team. Their efforts were judged by regional managers and Nero ‘Coffee Maestros’ from other parts of the country. The Newcastle Caffe was not exactly a huge venue, and so only two baristas could compete at once, using different sides of the same Gaggia machine. Each side had two double handles, a grinder and a milk wand, and so technically speaking each barista could have potentially made four drinks at once. But as the area manager, Kirsten, announced beer bottle in hand: “Please don’t use the second handle on the left for espresso, its a bit dodgy…” Since espressos are the basis for all the drinks made in the competition, this should have been a bit of a hindrance, but it didn’t seem to make any difference at all!

The first two rounds were timed; the first challenge was to make a cappuccino, a latte and a single espresso shot in three minutes. The second was three medium cappuccinos in four minutes. After judging each, competitors with the least points, or those who ran out of time, were eliminated. Eventually, it was down to four baristas, Michael from Ripon, Frost from Gosforth, Becky from Hexham, and Steve from Durham. These four then had to make another series of drinks, this time without being timed. They just had to make the best drinks they could. From these, the judges picked the final two, Michael and Frost. The final round was to make a hot chocolate, a mocha, a latte and an espresso. After four attempts at his espresso, Frost eventually won the competition, and crowned the Northern region’s Barista of the Year. Celebrations were very noisy, but only Steve from Durham seemed remotely gutted about losing the chance to meet his hero, the enigmatic Gerry.

More significant from the point of view of a trainee barista, was why Frost won. The judges were looking for various aspects of Nero coffee making, but not all of them immediately obvious. The emphasis of the competition was very much on Nero-ness – a bit of fun to get all the teams socialising together, but also more subtly, to reiterate the brand. One of the qualities of a good barista at Caffe Nero is the possession of good customer service skills, and a happy barista who is having fun is generally better at serving customers. More specifically, a happy barista who can make good coffees consistently, repetitively and very quickly is even better for the company. The point of testing competitors’ ability to make three cappuccinos in four minutes was to see if they could actually keep it up – anyone can make one decent cappuccino once, but it takes some skill to do it over and over again during an eight or nine hour shift, while maintaining a sense of humour.

As mentioned before, a Nero Cappuccino is a very specific thing as well. In a 15oz cup, there is supposed to be double shot of espresso (1/3 of the mug) one third hot milk, and one third dry milk foam. And chocolate on the top. In this case, Caffe Nero HQ tends to be fiddling while the cappuccinos burn. What shocked me, even though I know the company pretty well now, was that the judges did not even bother to taste the coffees made. The cappuccinos were poked to test the depth of froth, lattes were stirred to check consistency, and the espressos were timed to see if they poured for the correct 15 seconds (which would be woefully underextracted in any other circumstances). But no one actually tried them, there was no test of flavour. They just had to look right. However, it is very possible to make coffees that look great but taste foul, so I asked why they weren’t tasted and was told there was no need; the judges could see how well it was made anyway. “It’s not the Barista’s fault if the coffee isn’t good.” This worried me a great deal. If the coffee itself ‘isn’t good’ then this doesn’t say much about Nero as a company: area managers do not even believe their own marketing. More to the point, the very people in charge of judging the standards of drinks for the whole company are seemingly unaware that even if the coffee itself is high quality, it can still be ruined by being prepared badly by the barista. Coffee is NOT “just coffee”, cappuccinos should not be made just to look pretty, and it is very disappointing to think that the brand that got voted the UK consumer’s favourite for the past seven years still thinks like this.

To make sure, I went round sneaking mouthfuls of everyone’s attempts whenever I could. Some were very much better than others. However, none had anything like complexity that I was to experience the next day. The very next morning I eventually got myself to Edinburgh to see the Scottish heat of the official UK Barista championship. This was a much more serious affair. Fourteen competitors throughout the day, four ‘coffee’ judges including last year’s World Champion, and two technical judges, testing the way the baristas used the machines. Anyone could put themselves forward for the competition as long as they had two years experience in the industry, and you competed as an individual not as a representative of a particular company. Apart from the fact the whole event was sponsored by La Spaziale who make the espresso machines, it was relatively devoid of commercial propaganda. More interestingly, not one of the entrants in this heat came from a big chain coffee shop – no Nero, Costa or Starbucks baristas here.

Every competitor had the same task – to make four espresso shots, four cappuccinos and four of their own speciality drinks inside 15 minutes. They could use whatever blend of coffee they liked, and most took the time to explain to the judges what they were using and why, showing that they really actually knew the blend. Interestingly, one entrant, Andrew Mundy, used a single estate coffee from Cachoeira Fazenda, or Waterfall Farm in northern Brazil. Cachoeira Fazenda has won a great many awards, and is apparently one of the ingredients in Caffe Nero’s house blend, implying that Caffe Nero coffee really shouldn’t be dismissed so easily.

The four judges probably suffered severe sensory overload by the end of the day, having to taste three drinks from all fourteen competitors. They gave marks out of six for the taste and balance of the espresso, and the ‘tactile balance’ of it, how full bodied it was for instance. The cappuccinos were again graded on balance and consistency, but also temperature so as they were not too hot to drink like at Nero. Finally, the signature drinks were graded on flavour and also quality of the espresso base. Baristas also got points for technique and use of the machine. They were penalised for wastage – grinding too much coffee, or frothing too much milk, or even pouring away spoilt drinks, not that anyone needed to. They also lost points if they went over the fifteen minutes performance time.

Personally, I loved the signature drinks. By far the best part of the day from the audience’s point of view was the fact that after the judges finished their analysis, the drinks were passed round for the rest of us to try. The signature drinks could be anything that involved espresso, that could be made inside the allotted time, and did not involve alcohol. My personal favourites were the truly bizarre ones: ‘Sun, sea and sand’, by Paulo Tanzillo involved risotto rice in the bottom of a glass, with espresso poured on the top, and finished off by topping it with a bright yellow cream made of whipped egg whites and lemon juice. It tasted a bit like bitter lemon meringue pie! Others included Leo Ventisei’s ‘Agua Dulce’ which was espresso with a slice of crushed lemon in the bottom and the glass crusted with sugar, it tasted stupendously good in my humble opinion. Kirsten Olsen made a drink inspired by the coffee’s origins – Brazilian, and mixed her espresso with avocado and lime. David Fraser served his drinks in tiny biscuit barrels, and used blended up ginger biscuits in his coffee.

I admit, I was a little disappointed with some of the winners, not because I thought they shouldn’t win, but because they were not the most interesting! Third place went to Agnes from Kilimanjaro Coffee in Glasgow, who made a signature drink infused with orange blossom and vanilla. First place went to Gillian Campbell with her iced drink with orange and chocolate. These were very, very good, if not the most original! However, it was the espressos and cappuccinos that won it – complete with latte art rosettas. Signature drinks are wonderful, but in most coffee shops, standard coffees are the most important thing, and this is recognised even at national competition level.

In a totally non-biased fashion, I was very pleased when Stuart Archer from Pumphreys Coffee House in Newcastle came second. Whereas I just got mouthfuls of the other competitors’ drinks to test, I’ve been lucky enough to sample Stuart’s coffee properly outside of competition circumstances, and it is very good indeed. Although he claims he spoilt his cappuccinos, the judges obviously didn’t think so. His signature drink sounded not only bizarre, but pretty disgusting too – espresso infused with garlic, and laced with chocolate. Debating whether to hold my nose first, I tried it, and contrary to expectations, it really worked. The garlic didn’t actually kill the coffee, and somehow brought out its natural sweet smoky taste. Not something I think many coffee shops will be offering on the menus very soon, but certainly an interesting treat.

Stuart and the other two winners will go through to the national final, held in London next month, and the winner of that event will represent the UK at the World Barista Championship in Copenhagen in May, and of course, whichever coffee shop this person works for will be able to advertise the fact to their own advantage. The Nero Barista of the Year will get a special t-shirt and the store he represents will be able to use the fact they have the best Barista in the company in their own marketing. But what other purpose is there to the competitions? Barista championships are like
any other industry awards: recognising talent and skill in the particular field, and to reward hard work, or act as an incentive to excel. But essentially, coffee is a beverage, designed for human consumption. The displays of coffee making prowess at the SCAE competitions are artistically and creatively excellent, but these are not the sort of drinks you will get served at an average coffee shop. In short, they are not actually designed for regular consumption – at most, they are a luxury afforded only to those who bother to seek out the independent coffee shops that serve speciality coffees and employ world class baristas (which are few and far between in this country). At worst, they are art for art’s sake, and remain relatively unconnected with the regular coffee shop industry as a whole. As former UK Barista champion, pointed out: “The British are at the ‘Blue Nun’ stage of coffee drinking.” Put more simply, we are not yet coffee gourmets, and in this country there is little place in the market for such luxury, and elitist, drinks.

Caffe Nero, in comparison, may not take the idea of barista awards so seriously, and may not be judged by the same standards, but the coffees made in the competition are exactly what the customer will receive when they visit a Caffe Nero store. This cannot be said of the SCAE competition. The Nero awards are designed to uphold their own standards throughout the company, and to reward talented employees, which it can be argued, is a much more practical reason for holding the competition. There is no doubt that the coffees at the SCAE competition were of much higher quality, but there is also no denying that it is Caffe Nero and similar chain stores that are the most successful and profitable, and not the independent cafés. In the current climate, it is the chain stores that are actually supplying what the average consumer really wants.