Coffee men
Chris Baca trains a new employee how to steam milk properly at Verve in Santa Cruz; Tristan Walach, also known as Ant, teaches people how to make coffee in San Francisco at Sightglass.
The essence of good espresso, of good coffee in general, revolves around three numbers: the amount of quality dry coffee used, the amount of time water flows through it and the amount of coffee that comes out the other end. When the ratio is right, the process extracts the best flavor. If it is wrong, the good flavor never surfaces or is watered down. A mistake in seconds or grams, I am coming to learn, is the difference between something wonderful and awful.¶ Mr. Baca explains that you have to experiment to find just the right balance of these three elements for each coffee machine and coffee grind, and then replicate them. He has tested the machinery at Sightglass and determined that we want to use 17 grams of high-end coffee and run water for 25 seconds to yield about 30 grams of coffee.
"How hard can coffee be? It's an attitude we're constantly encountering," noted Ellie Matuszak, director of professional development for the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a trade group with thousands of company members and 1,200 people in its growing Barista Guild.
Ant explains how to steam the milk. In brief: position the steam wand just below the milk's surface until the milk swirls in a circular motion and puffs up as it absorbs the steam, then drop the wand lower until the milk reaches 135 degrees, as verified by a thermometer. There's a sweet spot between milk and temperature, the point at which the sugars cook and the milk becomes sweeter, but before the sugars burn.
MR. BACA, 32, planned to be a high school history teacher. But he dropped out of college and took a job at a cafe in Modesto. He developed a love affair with coffee, moved to San Francisco to work for a trendy cafe called Ritual, then started competing in 2006. In 2010, he finished second out of 50 competitors in the United States Barista Championship. In the freestyle competition, he made a crème anglaise espresso drink, cherry infused with a citrus garnish.
¶ "I know, this all seems like 'Best in Show,' " says Ryan O'Donovan, an owner of Verve, referring to the faux documentary about dog shows. "It seems ridiculous. We're trying to make it less ridiculous."
¶ Verve, where Mr. Baca is director of education, devotes 1,500 square feet to training. It's part of what the cafe considers the "third wave" of the coffee movement -- the first being campfire and drip coffee, the second the Starbucks revolution and the next understanding and evoking the complexity of coffee. Training, Mr. O'Donovan says, "is the nucleus of what we do."