Barista in the Making

Coral Living, February 1st, 2008

Many of us greet the morning with a cup of coffee. Some coffee drinkers swear they just can’t start, or end, their day without it. Personally, my day is shot if I don’t have my morning café con leche. As for my husband, don’t even say hello to him until he’s consumed two cups of regular coffee.  So naturally I consider Starbucks one of the happiest places on earth, which is why I decided to join their barista team for one day and learn what it takes to do justice to coffee.
After this one-day intense affair with coffee, I ended up the wiser with newfound mental agility, flavor discernment, and even a sense of romance. Indeed, the beverage of the gods.
I arrived at the Starbucks in Coral Gables, Fla.,  with a clean palate and open mind. The first item on the agenda was making coffee in a French press. The coffee grounds steep in hot water for four minutes and then you press down on a plunger to push the grounds to the bottom. The result is a strong, thick and rich drink. “It’s a great way to taste the nuances,” said Chris Musser, Starbucks marketing specialist, adding that the lack of a paper filter assures oils from the paper won’t seep into the coffee, altering the taste.
While taste cups were passed around, I got a Beverage 101 on the different types of coffee and where it is grown. Heard of the Bible Belt? The Rust Belt? The Sun Belt? Well, there also is a Coffee Belt — a swath of the earth between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn that includes three regions where coffee is grown: Latin America, Africa/Arabia and Asia/Pacific. Coffees from each area have a distinctive taste due to growing conditions.
Much like wine aficionados, coffee connoisseurs can differentiate flavors. Latin American varieties have undertones of nuts and cocoa, are crisp and have a bright acidity. (Acidity is  that cleansing tingle you feel on your tongue when the beverage hits your taste buds.) Latin American varieties also are well balanced, which means that no characteristic of the coffee will dominate the others, but rather all its flavors and components, including acidity, will work harmoniously over your tongue.
The Africa/Arabia region, from which coffee is said to originate, produces coffees with diverse flavors, from berries and citrus fruits to exotic spices. Discerning noses can pick up hints of lemon, grapefruit and chocolate. Coffees from Asia/Pacific are full flavored, which is to say rich, and tend to have earthy flavors and herbal undertones.
The next thing I would learn is the four-step coffee tasting process. First, smell the drink by raising the cup to your face and cupping your hand over it. Kim Broyl, a store manager, advises not to wear perfume or lotions because they interfere with the aroma. Indeed, my juniper lotion brought out certain citrus scents in one of the coffees.
The second step: slurp – but do so professionally, blow slightly into the steaming cup and then sip. That cools the coffee before spraying it throughout your mouth, coating your taste buds.

The louder the slurp, the better the coffee spreads. This leads to the third step of locating the experience, or finish. Ask yourself, what’s the sensation on your tongue, where does it linger – front, back? The bolder the coffee, the longer the taste sits in the back of your mouth.
The final step is description, which simply involves describing the aroma and flavor and the sensations the coffee produces in your mouth. Is it nutty? Is it thick? How does it feel in your mouth? It’s up to you to find the best description of what coffee does to your taste buds. This step is best done socially. “Coffee allows us to connect on a higher level,” Musser says.
A most valuable part of my training was gaining insight about pairing coffee with sweets. Do not drink coffee to accompany sweets. Rather, you should pair sweets with the coffee in order to enhance certain flavors in the coffee. Coffee is the main act, while the sweet is just the opening. I noticed this dynamic when combining coffee with iced lemon cake. After a bite, I sipped the bold Kenya brand, and the citrus flavors in the coffee sprung to life. Africa/Arabia coffees go well with foods that have lemons, herbs, grapefruit, oranges, raisins, berries, spices, currants and chocolate. Asia/Pacific varieties combine well with cinnamon, oatmeal, maple, toffee, butter, cheeses, caramel, apples and pears. And Latin American versions pair well with apples, blueberries, lemons, oranges, walnuts, pecans, cocoa and caramel.
Alas, it’s not all fun and tastings for baristas. The ever-growing coffee options – low fat, sweetened with Splenda, soy milk, foam, tall, short and other permutations – are called out  in a specific order to the barista, who has to know endless codes and memorize ingredients  for each concoction. White chocolate  mocha? That’s three pumps of syrup.  “If you can make a latte, you can make any standard drink,” Broyl assured me.
Now if I could just master Starbuck’s goal of getting the drink to the customer in three minutes! Speed, or rather pace and time, seems to be a central theme among both the baristas and the customers.  
Among the regular customers here is Elvis Sjostrom, an equity lender who visits every day, sometimes twice a day. “I don’t smoke, but I drink coffee,” he says, noting that he conducts business over a cup and that time spent here with his two daughters qualifies as quality time.
For others, it’s a routine that helps jumpstart the day. Ana Sierra, a homemaker from Colombia, says she drinks four cups of coffee a day. “The taste and aroma of the coffee give me energy.”
Bill Knbloe, a CPA, drinks half a dozen cups a day. “I like good, old black coffee.  It gets me going in the morning.”
He claims he’d be fine without it, just a little slower