By: Wiggles

"from the world to you"

After spending two killer days at TampCamp Bar Ready, I learned a great deal of information, both audibly, and hands on: about milk taste, texture, and chemistry- about cupping for beginning cuppers, and how to get beautifully textured milk, consistently.

But mostly I learned one cold hard fact: I’ve been a voodoo barista. I’ve been a barista who made drinks inconsistently, and with lots of wasted steps. If you’ve spent any time in coffeeshops, you’ve probably seen barista voodo: excessive and inconsistent dosing by repeatedly knocking the portafilter on the grinder fork. Lots of un-repeateble grooming moves, unnecessary tamping methods, and the portafilter flip, which looks kinda cool, until you lose your puck and try to pull an espresso shot with no coffee. Not so cool then.

Tamp Camp is really fun!

The worst, though, was my voodoo latte art. Up until TampCamp, I’ve never taken a hands-on latte art class- I’ve tried to learn by watching and practicing. Without the formalized, hands-on training, I wasn’t able to pour the same way every time, I’d been practicing more voodoo: lots of unnecessary steps, that aren’t repeatable- a little ring around the rosy here, a little wiggle there, and then ‘oh hey, that looks kinda cool’- but I hadn’t been able to pour the same looking rosettes and hearts time after time.

One thing I’ve learned about baristas – we love to touch stuff. If you put a group of baristas in a room, especially a room where there’s coffee, and coffee making equipment, five minutes later you’ll hear grinders thawking. The problem is, we don’t always touch stuff cleanly and consistently, with minimal voodoo. Trust me, you don’t want your pipe-fitter to be doing voodoo welding, you want that welding as consistent as possible. If being a barista is to become a respectable craft, than we have to learn cleanliness and repeatability, and the best way to do that is through formalized training.

Ben, keeping the voodoo out of his shots