Jan 13-14th 2009: Barista Training

After we are back from Bali and also doing our first roasting, the interest of coffee in us extremely getting stronger and stronger. After turning from coffee house to coffee house, from Starbuck to Gloria Jeans, from Highlander to TCC, we decided to get know more about the coffee and how to make a good coffee. The only source for this idea will be the training. We hooked on 1 Barista training centre in Singapore, and decided to register.

We are glad that we took this Barista course, because as a amateur about coffee, we did learn alot from this training. It was 2 days training which 4hrs each day. We done this training on weekday after work hour.
First day, we were taught about the basic knowledge about coffee and also the history about the coffee around the world. After all the theory, we bump to the espresso making with its history.

It is a complete step by step of making a good espresso. And we learn that making espresso is not just making a good coffee. It include art, precission and passion which will determined the taste of your coffee.

The espresso making starts as learning how to precisely grind your espresso. Best espresso should take around 25-30 sec to brew 1 shot of espresso (30ml). To make this happen, the coffee grinding part is very important, because if the grind is too fine, then it will take longer to brew 30ml and it will taste awfully bitter. In the other hand if to coarse, then the brewwing will way too fast and makes the result tasteless. So grinding part also take a good part on making a good espresso.








On this training we have to trial and error to get familiar with the espresso machine and learn how to texture the milk in the way t create a good espresso, capucino or cafe latte.
It was not easy to make a good espresso, but all we have to do is learn, try and re-try. Practise make perfect.





























At the end of the practice, there is a test/exam for us to get the good Espresso, Cafe Latte and Cappucino, which is official our very first piece of coffee. The point that they counted not only the result, but it also included the cleanliness, the sequence, and the correct way to make a great coffee.


After the exam, we have another agenda on the training, which teach us how to do the coffee tasting. We are prepared using 3 different single origin coffee which will help us to differentiate on each characteristic of the each single origin coffee. The single origin coffee bean we are using are Brazil Santos, Ethiopia, and Sumatra Mandheling.
Based on our taste, 3 of us at the end likes Ethiopia and 1 of us likes Brazil.

Do you need to know on our tasting result?