coffee.: USBC 2018. The Barista Who Brings a Trophy to Home Plate Among Beloved Out-Of-Towners.

here comes our daily barista

coffee x milk.

Coffees from Colombia, Ecuador and Ethiopia took space in the hands of six competing baristas from around the nation of the United States in Seattle, Washington for the 2018 United States Barista Competition. These competitors showed up and showed out through craft, device, story, technique and words. Their commitment to the craft of science applied to coffee was full of heart tugging emotion, the kind that lingers with us when a separation of any kind must occur between one and a beloved. What follows is a roundup of their memorable quotes, notes of character, points of interest and their musical set list.

A barista shows up to the coffee table with his coffee as the main subject. However, ever  main subject has adjectives and verbs to help its completion along. Here’s how our finalists played it.

As much as a barista as an on stage scientist, using carbon paper filters to extract sediment from his coffee including his espresso champagne with yuzu zest there was, our Champ (Cole); a feline touched with coffee sipped with cat spoons by (Fischer), milk that was freeze distilled, fancy for frozen and concentrated by  (Cheon), roses in a vintage Pepsi bottle preceding a cherry Pepsi signature beverage  by (Castillo), whiskey rocks and water – mineral, distilled and creek  – were a double threat times a triple sourced by (Allen) and the historic Sidra, a dual varietal first grown in Ecuador for (Neely).

Proving with language that coffee can taste as wild as our palate can perceive it, the story notes characterized coffee in such a way the culture will remember as a sensory feeling, a concrete association they could find in their everyday lives.

Some notes of character from our six finalist baristas were the two-coffee milk course – a coffee from Burundi with brandy and mixed berries notes and an Ethiopian heirloom variety yielding blueberry and milk chocolate – (Cole); buttery caramel, banana ice cream and malted chocolate (Fischer), black tea and butterscotch (Cheon), yellow plum, buttery shortbread, shaved almonds (Castillo), buttery, raw dark honey, almond milk and hot cocoa note (Allen) and cream soda and candied orange peel (Neely).  

Now, here’s how they played it.

Introducing the mixtape.