The burnout ratio amongst baristas is high. Picture this, you wake up at 5:00 am to get to the coffee shop by 6:00AM, you’re open by 7:00AM. Before the doors open you need to get pastries together, count a register, get batch brew ready and get your espresso dialed in. Sometimes you’re drinking coffee before water, and before you can even fully address the flavor of your espresso your first customer is at the door and it’s go time for the next 6-8 hours.
That schedule four to five times a week is a daunting task. So by the time I made it full time into the catering world my passion for coffee had taken a significant dip. For five years coffee has been my life – coffee is how I pay rent, buy groceries, socialize with the community. But making coffee is also how I stay in touch with my artistic nature through the creation of latte art (I am a swan queen). Barristing embeds my life with mindfulness because I get to work with my hands. And the ritual of coffee shared with friends and by myself is sacred to me.
So you can imagine my horror when coffee mornings spent with a french press and the stirring of birds became a 64oz jar of instant coffee burn out. We live in a coffee driven society, and I wasn’t feeling particularly coffee driven.
I wanted the spark of joy coffee brought me back in my life.
The timing of an international trip to London and Norway couldn’t have been more serendipitous. If you know anything about my coffee journey, you know Norway is where I first fell in love with specialty coffee, and from that trip in 2019 the seed was planted that I would become an excellent barista. For those of you who don’t know, Norway has one of the richest independent roasting scenes in the world. Oslo and Bergen are home to some world famous coffee experts like Langøra, Tim Wendelboe, Bergen Kaffebrenneri, KOKKO, Jacu and Supreme Roastworks. Not only does this allow Norway to have excellently roasted coffee, these cities also have some of the most aesthetically pleasing coffee shops you can imagine. I wasn’t expecting it, but it would be in Bergen that I came back to my coffee loving roots.
Every morning on my trip I would place my faith in the hands of the barista, trusting their opinion on the coffee profiles, roast of the day, and which brewing technique would be best for the beans. I found myself having delightful conversations on what makes the cafe’s coffee so special. Then, I would enjoy my cup of coffee with a piece of cake and watch the city come alive. In the coffee world, there is nothing more empowering than being a specialty coffee expert and walking into a cute cafe and being able to trust that you are about to have a delicious cup of coffee.
What might be a Norwegian's regular experience became my daily indulgence. Bringing myself back to the reasons I love coffee – the culture created around the experience of having a cup of coffee. For me I don’t want coffee to be something that just gives me some fuel to get my day started. I want coffee to be sipped, to be tasted, to be digested and conversed around. As a barista, I am working for coffee to be admired, complimented, and also conversed around. From personal experience, I know baristas work hard to create a special moment. So when I take that first sip of slow poured V60 coffee, I think, “mmm, now that’s good.”
Without engaging over coffee it’s far too easy for both barista and coffee drinker to lose the richness of coffee in a business transaction. The craft of coffee is an intricate dance the barista will go on through all their senses. You are using your sense of taste to discern the right notes in your espresso, you are using your hands to temp the perfect milk, you are using your ears to dose the right amount of air to get velvety milk, you are using your eyes to engage the customer and you are using the motions of your body to pull latte art. Excellent coffee requires human experience to make a delicious cup of coffee.
What brought me back to the spark that gives this profession life – was being able to slow down and admire the art of coffee once again. Acknowledge each step that goes into making an excellent cup of coffee and then pausing long enough to enjoy the end product. Paying my respects to the drink-maker, and acknowledging the work it took so I can smile and say, “mmm, now that’s good.” 